#because twitter is a TERRIBLE site to archive anything

[snickerdoodlles]

“the incalculable loss of twitter” hey

hey

remember when MySpace used to be a thing?

:)

it’s shitty that Elon Musk is single-handedly killing a site. it’s shitty how quickly he’s doing it.

but social media media sites falling in and out of favor isn’t new. it happened to MySpace, to Facebook, to tumblr, and now twitter. Twitter wasn’t even a good platform, it was just what was popular. but any following creatives built on twitter doesnt directly correspond to sales (like. under 15%) or even their actual audience. it sucks rebuilding a following on a new site, but anyone active and sticking with social media will follow a creative. this isn’t a new process, it happens every few years, twitters collapse is just happening faster than typical. but that’s just part of being online, sites go in and out of favor or just die.

yeah, it’s shit it’s happening because of one man’s tantrum as he tries to avoid responsibilities. but it’s seriously not that big of a deal

[ms-demeanor]

since twitter has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, and reddit has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, what do we do now that tumblr is becoming (more) actively hostile to its users? i’ve been here for over a decade so i know tumblr users are the type to cling on despite everything and revel in undoing every change, but i’m so tired of the way this website breaks the way it fundamentally works in order to appeal to new users. the twitterfication of the site seems so much worse than when people jumped ship after the porn ban, and even then, only small communities (and twitter) cropped up as solutions. you might not be the person to ask for a definitive answer, but i figured a tech blog might be interested in considering - what do we do when there’s nowhere left to go?

Okay so, I mean this very seriously: how has tumblr meaningfully become like twitter?

I don't personally find the sidebar view obnoxious and it seems to me like just another layout change that's pretty typical to tumblr. New users are getting signed up with a bit more emphasis on algorithmic feeds, but that is still very easy to change (MUCH easier than on any other social platform) and the algorithm has been there for everyone for quite a while, we just typically don't notice it because a lot of long-term tumblr users don't go into the "for you" feed.

I don't think that tumblr *has* fundamentally broken the way that it works to appeal to new users. My dash now is still very much like my dash in 2019, and still very much like my dash in 2018 (though much less pornographic). Reblogs are still reblogs, likes are still likes. Replies, for all that they seem like they've been around forever, are new and good and I think they work well. I'm irritated that the notes menu doesn't have a "view all" option but I think that's a worthwhile tradeoff for an easy way to see tags.

I *do not* understand why tumblr has broken linking back to previous reblogs but I don't think that's out of an effort to act like twitter; it is a bizarre choice that I dislike and don't understand but I also don't think that it has fundamentally changed the way the site works and i mean you've been around long enough that I'm sure you've had the same experience I have of going into the notes of a post and randomly clicking until you found a version that you wanted to reblog without a bunch of bullshit at the bottom. Tumblr has always kind of sucked, this change DOES suck but it doesn't suck in a way that is particularly novel or insurmountable. (For instance, I think this change sucks MUCH LESS than when they made posts with links invisible to the search, that is something that is genuinely bad that has been long lasting but doesn't get brought up much in lists of the ways that tumblr has gone wrong)

Tumblr *is* changing, but I think it is changing more incrementally and less terribly than other parts of the internet. I also hate the floating clown, the login walls, the dash-only view for blogs (you can't archive it and I HATE that), and - to an extent - the new lightbox on mobile. And I dislike that less than I thought I would but I don't think it's a fundamental change that necessarily impacts my interactions with the site - it *adds* a feature that I don't care for but it doesn't *break* anything that I require to have a good time on tumblr - in that way I think of it very much like Live. People hate Live so much and I find that perplexing because it is so easy to simply ignore it.

But that's not really your question; that's just some stuff I want people to think about because as much as tumblr has changed in the last two years it is nowhere near as fucked up as the recent things that twitter and reddit have pulled.

So, as to your question: where do we go?

Well. Not to be an extremely old person on the internet, but damned if I don't miss email lists. And forums. God I miss forums. Neither of those things has all the bonuses of platforms like twitter or reddit or tumblr or facebook, but they were great ways to hang out with people you liked on the internet.

The internet is changing. I can feel it, you can feel it, I'm pretty sure we're all like cattle in a field lifting our noses and hearing some distant rumbling and becoming slowly aware that it's almost time to run. There's a coming stampede and it isn't here yet but you know it's on its way. You're not imagining that, that's how things feel right now and there are a shitload of things contributing to it.

Things like SESTA/FOSTA and KOSA (which has not passed yet but is a big red flag waving on the horizon) have been eroding away the way that users on various platforms can function. Some platforms have consolidated in ways that harm users; some new platforms have popped up and shaken up the map of the internet; some platforms are being torn apart brick by brick by owners who don't care about the users. It kind of seems like people are actually looking up and realizing that advertising is A) bad and B) doesn't actually work and I think we're running straight toward another advertising-based crash like we saw in 2017. It feels like all the desperate things that tumblr is doing is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic as the internet as a whole starts to sink into the ocean.

Honestly, I don't think it's that bad. I think it *feels* bad, but I think we're looking at a slow whimpering death of the platforms, not a bang. I think tumblr is going to hang on at least for a few years and I think it's going to end up like livejournal and myspace, which both still exist as websites that are recognizable as updated versions of the sites they were in 2004-2010. The thing that I think would really, honestly hurt tumblr in a fundamental way is if it moved to a more algorithmic and data-sales based model of advertising, and I think that's still pretty distant. I think Automattic is aware that killing the chronological feed would be the one unforgivable sin that would cause a mass exodus and a final crash, and I think when we see that, when we can't just scroll through the feed and see what our friends did that day in order of when they did it, that's when the party is over here.

But that's still not answering your question.

So, where do we go? What do we do? Well, for now, I'd say it's a good time to get contact info for your friends across various platforms. Get email addresses, get phone numbers.

Now is also the time for you to set up a personal website. NeoCities is currently the best place to do this, though it takes a lot more effort than just starting a blog on tumblr. I think that various oldschool blogging sites like Wordpress and Blogger/Blogspot/whatever the hell the google one is are a better place to have your emergency backup than a more platform-y platform if you aren't up to doing something with NeoCities.

If you've got the ability to do so and a group of people who are interested in the same core subject, set up a forum. There's a decent amount of off-the-shelf forum software out there and a text-and-small-images forum isn't prohibitively expensive, but it's never going to be huge and you're never going to have the kind of spread and virality and random connections that you would on a platform with millions or billions of users.

If you can't set up a forum, setting up or joining a discord server for your friends is a decent enough option at the moment, and may be a very good option for people who are looking to keep their interactions more private.

But yeah i think right now is a great time for people to start setting up their own personal websites, to start visiting actual webpages again, to start bookmarking their friends' websites, and to start collecting contact info that isn't tied to platforms.

[fractalkiss]

i'm curious how does one actually get into f1, particularly the fandom side of it. it all seems so interesting but i don't know how to take the plunge, is there a good beginner's guide re: rules/basic team lore or anything you'd recommend outside of race watching?

hi anon! for learning the rules, i think one of the easiest ways is to look up technical stuff and learn the sporting terms when watching the races. it sounds daunting but i only properly got into the sport by doing this (alongside my sibling who got invested first lol) and being tuned into a community to keep up through season happenings, which then kind of folded into the fandom experience. f1blr is where i hang out for fandom, but it's definitely not what makes the entire experience!

i think the best place to start would be to look at any team or drivers that you're intrigued about and start diving deeper from there. you'll find that a lot of the lore inter-connects through the years and by learning about one thing, you can pick up more about another driver/team/event etc. to help follow the sport i recommend:

the f1 official website and f1tv: everything from news, article writeups, interviews and race content is on their site, and you can keep up with the live race sessions through f1tv and even watch older races on the f1tv archive, though it is a paid subscription. the f1 website even has a glossary to refer to sporting terms and if you're interested in more, f1tv has analysis videos where they review key moments after the race sessions. if you're reluctant to pay for anything, there are sites that stream the live races for free lol and even more free and accessible media too below.

youtube channels: for actual motorsport lore and history, the only channel i recommend is CYMotorsport, who does highly digestible deep dive videos that run through past seasons, championships, rivalries, scandals etc in a way that isn't oversensationalized. this channel was literally my friend lol, i have spent many hours just watching their stuff and they even have a new to f1? playlist you can start with! chainbear was what i used to check out back then to get to know more about the technical stuff, useful for beginners!

news/communities: i usually check my news on the r/formula1 subreddit. like any other highly active sports community across platforms it's rife with discourse if you want to keep a pulse on all that. it's much easier to get my news from there in an efficient way (tumblr can be impossible for me to do this quickly) since the source under a reddit topic is usually linked in the post or in comments so you can see for yourself if something is coming from a credible and non-contentious source or not. because integrity in f1 journalism has always been terrible, just take most things with a grain of salt. the main publications like motorsport.com and autosport are okay. i also check twitter to see what journalists are saying although there's a lot of drivel and questionable he-said-she-said stuff that tends to get spread lol so honestly i really only check Chris Medland's tweets... the one guy i trust. i also subscribe to r/F1Technical, much less discourse since it's very sport and technical-focused for people who want genuine answers about anything asked.

documentaries: nflix's dts is fine for learning names and faces on a pretty surface level, and it was my introduction to the sport as a New Fan but not a necessary watch since it's more sensationalized. instead, you can watch documentaries centered around a driver; i watched one (1) season of fernando alonso's docu series for fun lol and schumacher's docu film. my little sibling and i like history a lot so we watched a life of speed: the juan manuel fangio story, an interesting watch about old motorsport - i haven't checked out other driver-focused docus besides these but you can pick up anything that interests you! but if i have to recommend one docu miniseries, it's "brawn: the impossible formula 1 story." don't be fooled and put off by keanu reeves being narrator skfskf the miniseries is an excellent mix imo of technical stuff explained coupled with really good storytelling featuring some of the most well-known names in the sport behind the teams.

i think once you start building grounds over time to get a basic grasp of how the sport works, everything else that comes with entering a fandom like meeting people will follow after pretty naturally :) it took me a while to do this and garner slow investment in a fave guy/team. i hope this is helpful, anon! i'd be happy to chat and answer more questions if you have them!

[olderthannetfic]

How do you like tumblr in comparison to other fandom gathering spaces?

--

Excellent question.

When I first came here from LJ, I wasn't impressed. As you can tell from my own tumblr, I'm very text-oriented when it comes to fandom platforms, and tumblr isn't really tailored to that. I'm a highly visual person, so I've ended up enjoying that aspect of tumblr over time, but it's not really what I'm looking for in terms of fandom.

For years, conventional wisdom among people nostalgic for LJ was that Tumblr denizens didn't care about meta and that meta as a fandom activity was dead—or at least, you couldn't make a name for yourself writing it.

As of these last few years, I've been more popular than I've ever been in fandom before, my fiction writing has been going better than ever before, and I've made some friends via Tumblr.

At the same time, I'm enjoying the move to Discord. It reminds me of the height of Yahoo Groups, when people posted to archives for longevity but did a lot of their socializing in private, both on locked lists and in realtime chat.

I very much disliked the LJ model of having the fic right in with the blog posts. I'm glad we've gone back to the older model of separation, at least for the polished final versions of fics. (Serialization on mailing lists was common, but people generally compiled the whole thing and posted it to sites afterwards.)

I like threaded comments and pagination, but tumblr's general lack of comment thread features has clearly not held me back.

Overall, I find tumblr very similar to other fandom platforms.

Fandom's major homes have routinely had terrible and broken features, LJ most definitely included. It's the community and how people adapt sites to something far from their intended purposes that give that continuity of feeling.

Anything that allows longform content is good. Anything that requires soundbites rather than just encouraging them culturally is hot garbage. Tiktok is obviously a cesspit, though for a thousand reasons in addition to this one. Twitter will always suck because its structure makes it easy for randos to find one, and its post length encourages a lack of nuance. People will forever be forced to rub shoulders with people they don't like and don't understand.

Tumblr lacks privacy features, but it's so hard to find fucking anything that there's less of that danger. Also, the only celebrities who actually maintain much of a presence here are weird tumblr gremlins themselves. Any space as full of starfuckers as twitter or instagram is poison.

So in the end, I've turned out to like tumblr quite a lot. The tumblr era is equaling the LJ era and the mailing list era for me. And now we pair it with AO3 instead of my past loves like MediaMiner that now look pretty crappy in comparison.

[marinersubmariner]

The twitter mess has got me thinking about livejournal and fandom platforms in general, so here’s a lot of words that mostly amount to me being old and sad!!

The past couple years I’ve really struggled with the pull to start using twitter because so much fandom activity moved over there, while at the same time being held back by knowing that it would not be a satisfying experience for me. I lurk there a little, and it’s alright in small doses, but it just doesn’t work for the types of fandom posts that I can contribute or that I want to see. And it has increasingly frustrated me how much people post fanart exclusively over there when its formatting is awful for fanart (no archives! no organized tagging system! completely unbrowseable by subject matter or time period! everything disappears in .02 seconds if it even crosses your view at all! WOW SO GREAT. I get that it lets you post porn but that isn’t a big draw for me :/ yeah, I know, what am I even doing on the internet)

My preferred form of fandom is images and graphics and art and long-form commentary and twitter just isn’t made for those things. You can kind of jury-rig it for them I guess (weirdly cropped 2-to-4-image photosets, hmm. great. threaded tweets??? you know there was a time when you could put all your related thoughts into a single post!) but it’s obviously designed for brief little texts and I’m too self-conscious about writing things for that to ever work for me. The way I see it is you can absolutely tweet on tumblr but you cannot make a tumblr post on twitter, and that’s the fundamental disconnect that has prevented me from leaving. I’m not compelled to go to a platform with fewer and worse features. (well, that plus the fact that I no longer have any friends to follow in the way that I followed the crowd from livejournal to tumblr. why bother!!! NOBODY’S LISTENING! —Cassian Andor about posting on social media)

I totally understand people mourning what could be the loss of years of fandom activity on that site, but at the same time its immediacy has always made it appear more fleeting to me anyway. Obviously you can scrounge up old posts if you really dig around, but without archives or functional tags it has never seemed to be a platform that encourages a long lifespan for anything posted there. Which is of course the trade-off for it being so current and of-the-moment, but I also think it’s detrimental to the fandom ecosystem as a whole, and on a personal level I’m too much of a hoarder for that kind of disposability to work for me. I like to keep things in my little treasure trove and continually pore over it with fondness. :(

I also just have too much anxiety, uh, in general, but especially with instantaneous forms of communication, so I get extremely avoidant about anything fast-paced. Chats always made me nervous, I don’t like texting, it all makes me a little too frazzled to do for fun. I was okay with message boards and lj comments because there wasn’t as much expectation of a quick response (and of course there was way more separation of Internet Time when you didn’t have a smartphone on you 24/7. boundaries!!!! never heard of them). A lot of this is purely mental hangups because I’m perfectly capable of communication, but it’s stressful and exhausting and the internet is filled with increasing pressure to never say the wrong thing (which is already a pressure in my head!!) so to add forced brevity and urgency on top of that... it makes me so uncomfortable and it’s such an enormous barrier when the foundation for literally everything is communication. Words are hard!!! I’m not terrible at it but there’s always an excessive amount of deliberation involved and it’s such a difficult thing to grapple with all the time. Constantly, forever. The mortifying ordeal of SELECTING WORDS to make yourself known!!!!!!!

I guess also nothing has ever been as conducive to discussion and replies as lj. Tumblr replies are so limited and reblogging to add your own commentary is a totally different thing. Private messages are there, but there’s no decent mechanism for open back-and-forth conversation. So even while part of me is glad that people might come back here, more activity on my preferred platform doesn’t change the fact that I still feel dissatisfied with the way all of this operates in general. Tumblr is better than twitter, but even tumblr isn’t that great.

To be honest I’ve become so fuckin weird about this stuff that I now essentially use google docs like a private secret livejournal. I type out my thoughts constantly as though I were writing an actual post to share and then I never share it. Which is probably. insane. But in the era of social media all fandom stuff either seems like way too public a forum full of jerks or it’s seen by nobody anyway so why bother. There don’t seem to be comfortable niche spaces anymore, or if there are I never found them, and besides that I’m too shy and too tired to seek them out and work up the energy to interact. So I just talk to myself like a lunatic. It’s super healthy I’m sure!!!!

I also just really miss how I felt on the internet and in fandom spaces when I was younger, making pointless little websites and graphics and posting photographs just because I wanted to. And obviously I still make things because I WANT to, but the act of actually posting to the internet now and the way that others engage with it seems so much more transactional than it used to. I got into making graphics when it was only like a handful of people on a message board sharing things with each other, and it’s wild how much more fulfilling and encouraging it was to have just a few familiar people make comments than it is to get likes and reblogs. A little number ticker on a post is like... that’s it? That’s all there is? It’s so hollow and mechanical.

Sort of the best way I can think of to describe how it feels to me is that it used to be more like being the proprietor of a quaint storefront where you peddled your wares and people could come and go and chat as they please, and now it’s more like tossing one of your wares onto a highway where it gets driven over at 80mph. And certainly that perception is skewed by rose-colored nostalgia about ~the way things used to be~, I’m much older now so I’m sure my temperament has changed a lot too, I slowed down while everything else sped up, time makes fools of us all, etc. But I’ve seen enough people express similar things about the modern internet that I do think maybe it’s not just me.

I don’t know, unless you’ve been following me since livejournal this probably all sounds like nonsense coming from a silent lurker who barely even posts. I’ve always been much more reticent on tumblr because it feels so exposed—the potential for things to spiral way outside of your orbit is both scary and annoying. But I guess I just don’t really know how to participate in fandom anymore in the way it exists now. I don’t have a community and it feels impossible to break back in amongst The Youths. I don’t have the energy to contribute as much as I want to, and then when I do expend the energy it seems like a waste of time because it’s stuff that either goes entirely unseen or it gets silently viewed and disposed of in an infinitesimal fraction of the time it took to put together. So there are these two warring impulses of: this is making you unhappy and you should stop vs. it doesn’t matter if you’re entirely alone when you’re still having fun by yourself with your special interest that you enjoy. And I don’t know how to reconcile the two.

[awesomeface349]

Yeah nah, I tried to give twitter a chance, but as much as Elon ruins it even more, it just went into a shitshow site. Especially, people can roast and show people terrible tweets on YouTube. Which is basically yeah, exactly, toxic website 100% with no moderation, no anything whatsoever. I mean, I don't care losing followers on Twitter because, let that website shutdown already. Like, it has to be closed or something so that millions of people wouldn't get access to twitter and move to a different social sites like-twitter

So what does this mean for me?

Well, obviously I stay on Tumblr/Mastodon (wetdry.world)/Cohost since three of these are my option, I might also post on YouTube's community tab too. But, not going to try to deactivate twitter. I know, Elon might also ban my Twitter account when I am inactive. However, I would let myself be a bit active on that site just because I do not want to get banned, so that we wouldn't lose archives of twitter... Well, maybe I don't know... The old memes of mine are still on a hard drive but once again guys. I'm done with "Mao Mao" memes stuff as I've said this several times, and I'm a changed man. Yeah, and those 2 users still blocked me from Mao Mao fandom on Twitter, they might think I'm an asshole, but it's their own things. I just really don't care ether I get unblocked or not, since my shit past was really shitty. And now I have changed, now I am a multi-fandom man that can absolutely make anything I want, and especially, making YTP's is fun but takes long...

That's all I have to say. And I have one thing to say.

Fuck this website Twitter, fuck this new CEO ruining Twitter, and fuck that Twitter that wouldn't let me see memes. Because thanks to that, it's ruined by limits. Servers my ass...

Anyway, rant is done...

[daughter-of-sapph0]

please stop reblogging this my notification tab is dying

this post has been edited. here's the original text:

apple completely censoring tumblr to the point where you can't even say words that aren't even sexual like soap or pipe is the beginning of the end for tumblr’s usability and user experience. the process already started with the Dec 17 ban and recently with the overexposure of ads. but pretty soon, apple is gonna make tumblr unusable. it's not like virizon cared about making the site functional when they owned it, and automatic/wordpress (current owners) definitely don't give a shit about tumblr now.

everywhere else on the internet, content is heavily monitored and censored. you'll get banned if you say anything that's against tos. sometimes that's good, as it gets rid of all the nazis. other times it's terrible, when people abuse the reporting ai to ban normal people. the whole banning system is unpredictable, so to be safe, people need to censor themselves on twitter and tiktok and facebook and ig and youtube. they can't say "kill", they have to say "unalive". they can't talk about violence, so they have to sugarcoat real world events. they can't swear, talk about racism or sex or history, or even acknowledge that the world is a fucked up place, because "kids use this app". tumblr was one of the last safe places on the internet where you could threaten to kill the president without having the fbi show up to your house.

but with this new apple shit, tumblr is becoming more like every other site online. any post that contains a word on a constantly expanding list is hidden from ios users. any blogs marked as "explicit" (which is also a huge issue btw) are unaccessible by apple users. not straight up banning people, but still preventing access to the real tumblr for those users. now over a third of tumblr’s userbase is either stuck on a completely sanitized version of tumblr, has to use the web browser version on their phone, or just cut off from tumblr entirely.

the internet used to be a place of togetherness and inclusiveness and content sharing and entertainment and fun. now it's mostly corporate garbage and ads. companies love ads. and to run ads effectively, they need as many people as possible to see them. and to do that, the places they advertise have to be family friendly so everyone can use them. that's what all of these sites are doing. banning creativity and expressiveness so they can force you to watch more ads. I understand that there's server costs. I understand that the employees need to eat. but there are so many bugs that haven't been fixed in years that it seems like @staff is getting paid to do fuck all, and instead wasting their time making stupid design decisions to distract us from them selling out.

what does this current situation say about the future of tumblr and the internet as a whole? I don't really know. if things continue as they are, more people will leave tumblr for newer sites, or twitter once tumblr becomes just as unusable as it (might as well use the more popular shitty site if they're both equally shit). eventually, within 5 or 6 years, tumblr will shut down after server costs are too high, and unless users take the time to archive everything, nearly two decades of internet history will be erased forever. I'd give it until 2035 before the internet (and by extention the vr world / metaverse / matrix) becomes so riddled with ads that it becomes completely unusable. unless, of course, something changes with how advertisements work. whether that be a new law that makes it so ads have to be less distracting or optional, or even just some sites refusing to run advertisements at the cost of user membership fees. one of those seems extremely unlikely, and the other sounds equally shit.

the internet sucks ass. I just want to return to 2010 playing club penguin and browsing early tumblr and early watching minecraft youtube videos and playing flash games on newgrounds.

the world would be a better place if literally every single ceo and billionaire immediately died right now.

[chacusha]

Hi all, just a note that (despite posting a lot today) I am actually going to step away from Tumblr for a bit. I have been considering this for a while because I've been noticing that browsing Tumblr has been stressing me out lately and I have a kind of unhealthy relationship to it. I will probably continue to crosspost things I make/write here (especially art, since my Tumblr art blog is probably the most comprehensive, organized, and easy to browse/search archive of my fanart), but I'm going to experiment with blocking the site 24/7 as a normal state of being and deleting the app from my phone. I won't be monitoring my dash, basically. If you want to contact me, the best place is Dreamwidth (or you can check out other options in this surprisingly-still-not-outdated "where to find me" post from 2018). More thoughts on why both using Tumblr and not using Tumblr is very hard for me under the cut.

One thing I will say: the reason why it is always hard for me to leave Tumblr fully (despite how much I complain about it!) is that it is such a good platform for finding and sharing content. Just the number of interesting people producing amazing stuff (and only putting it on Tumblr!) is just so wild. The whole site is so easily searchable. It's so easy to find and follow great accounts.

Part of what makes the content on Tumblr so great is the flexibility of the post creator: it has the ability to easily share large filesize visual media (gifs and video) while also allowing the free interleaving of text, images, headings, links, videos, etc. (i.e. truly multimedia posts). It also has a long upper limit on text posts, including cut functionality... All of this makes Tumblr extremely flexible in terms of what exactly can be posted and shared on the website. It works well for both short-form and long-form content. It is just a very powerful website. (I... really do not know how people, especially artists, use sites like Twitter. I would go insane at the terrible image cropping that forces people to click in order to view your actual art piece and the complete lack of tools for searching/filtering/gallery view.)

What that means is that you can encounter some of the weirdest, most creative stuff on this site. All sorts of people -- artists, writers, musicians, knitters, programmers, cosplayers, conlangers, whatever -- can make this place their home and that is truly a delight. You just never know what you'll get.

Also, Tumblr's usability has been steadily improving over time. For example, one of the things that used to be the case that really held Tumblr back from being a good platform for sharing content was that it would exclude posts with links from tag searches. This made it really hard to have fannish discussions where you're referencing a post or an interview or a fic or something that you want people to look at before reading your discussion, or you're making some points and you want to support them with actual references, or you just want to link to a creator's site rather than reposting their content on Tumblr (which is a dickish thing to do without permission). It used to be the case that trying to be helpful and responsible by providing external links like this would punish your content and hide it from people who would be interested in seeing it. Since Tumblr lifted this softban on external links, though, the site has really jumped up in usefulness for me, especially since my main form of fannish engagement (as you might have noticed) is meta, which heavily benefits from leaving people breadcrumbs to other material which they can follow up on as they choose.

That said, there are two ways in which Tumblr has not and likely will continue to not work well with me:

First, the lack of circles/privacy settings (on an individual post level, especially, but I mean, Tumblr doesn't even have that at a user level...). For various reasons, I do not like to talk about anything in public that could easily be found by someone who knows me in real life and is identifying enough for them to be like, "Ah I see, chacusha is [person I know] then." So there's a lot about me that I'm willing to frankly talk about under the privacy of friendslock (e.g. on Dreamwidth) but will never ever post on Tumblr. This includes: pictures/videos of me, my job (where I work and what my line of work is), my family, friends, or partner (outside of the barest references), art I've done that I share with people under my real name, my thoughts on places I've lived, detailed personal anecdotes that involve other people, etc. Not related to being recognized, but I also at some point decided I wanted my Tumblr to be my dedicated fannish engagement space, and so I just don't post/reblog political content or even contentious opinions on the Fandom Discourse (since I know that if I started opining on this, I would not Stop and it would utterly swamp my normal positive fannish content). This doesn't mean I am an apolitical person or that I don't have strong opinions on the Fandom Discourse. I just don't really have an outlet for that on Tumblr. Anyway, for various reasons, there's just a lot of stuff I don't feel comfortable talking about on Tumblr and I feel like this makes it hard to make friends on this site because I'm just this big mystery box and I want to keep it that way.

Second, Tumblr, like most social media sites, does tend to be geared toward (1) the "short attention span" infinite-scroll form of media consumption (easy to pick up and set down, easy to kill time in small breaks) and (2) largely amusing viral content (jokes, shitposts, cute animal videos, memes, content reposted from Twitter, Tiktok, etc.) that is now the default form of almost all social media. I find this as entertaining and amusing as everyone else, but sometimes I get tired of it or cranky or just feel out of step with what people consider funny. Like, for the first thing ("tired of it"), if you know me, I tend to post very tl;dr quite serious, almost academic, analyses of things. These things get very little engagement on Tumblr which is fine because I too also struggle with reading long-form content in general and also especially on this site when I'm mainly browsing things in infinite scroll mode. Just... no one's got time for that! I post it mainly to organize my thoughts and share them with people who might be interested (if my thoughts were so simple I could dash them off in an off-the-cuff bite-sized post, it would be of no use to me to write a post sharing them, to be honest), so I don't mind that. But I do find that when the ratio between "interesting thoughtful content" and "lol shitpost that went viral"/"off-the-cuff lapslock keysmash yelling about fictional characters to vaguely convey enthusiasm" is too low, I just don't actually have fun on a site and I am trying to be more self-aware about when that is happening.

Regarding the third thing ("out of step"), I've had this problem with Star Trek fandom in particular where you'll see posts that just, like, make stuff up about the show. They'll have a very exaggerated account of something that happened in an episode, or some misleadingly-juxtaposed screencaps that remove context and say "this literally happened." I understand exaggeration for comedic effect, and also possibly I am just missing tone on the internet where "literally" means the opposite of "literally" etc. IDK, maybe I am just being cranky and dense, to be honest. But yeah, Star Trek is a deeply silly show. You don't really have to make things up for things to be ridiculous or outlandish?

But yeah, for obvious reasons, bite-sized shitposts and frequent funny posting tends to not only go more viral but also get people more followers and reach. This is something I've noticed over the years, which is that the #1 thing that contributes to popularity on the internet is just consistent prolificness. This is a very bad fit for how I like to engage with fandom. Honestly, a lot of my negative emotional reaction is 100% on me where I am getting demoralized by how popular shitposting is, but the internet isn't some kind of popularity contest? That super-viral content over there doesn't have any bearing on what people think of the content I'm posting over here? Popularity, following, and engagement isn't actually a marker of social approval?? And yet my brain is like "mm yeah I'm apparently Doing It Wrong / people secretly hate me / maybe if I shitposted more I would Fit In" which is not a healthy way to feel about social interactions on a website! I hate all of this!

Anyway, the takeaway is, while I love the content I stumble across on Tumblr, I don't think browsing Tumblr actually makes me happy overall. I also don't think I can make friends here even though everyone here seems like a cool person with a cool life. And I think both of these things will continue to be the case as long as Tumblr does not have the concept of a friendslock and as long as Tumblr's audience is mainly browsing content for amusing easily-consumed stuff (or I somehow manage to retrain my brain to Not Care about the popularity dynamics that naturally follow from that fact). The combination of not being able to share personal things about myself plus interpreting innocuous things as social rejection has made the whole experience of being on Tumblr quite socially isolating, despite people being personally very nice and kind to me -- through no one's fault but my own, really. Unfortunately, socially isolating social media is something I actually can't handle right now, coming out of a long lockdown where I'm already struggling with the effects of long-term social isolation.

I think if I come back to Tumblr, I will need to learn how to curate my feed better and possibly block some accounts? So far, I've only ever had to block a few tags, so I honestly do not know how to block people or what happens when you do this and how I should decide when to do this -- any tips appreciated. (I think I have been very spoiled by being in extremely tiny fandoms up until this point, like, "Huh? You guys block people??" I am not adjusting well, lol.)

[deunan403]

Just a heads up

SO, I've been considering this for a while, but I may move my main activity somewhere else like Instagram or Twitter (ugh). It's just been so incredibly difficult to try and catch a wave here when you're not already popular, and part of that is my fault. I'm really bad at producing for fandoms that are trending and instead bask in older burns that have been around a while but people don't hunt for much anymore. Also, people on this site are notoriously bad at liking posts rather than spreading them, lol.

ANYWAY, it seems like most artists have migrated to one of the two I mentioned above, for good reason. I would really like to be a more active creator for the things I love, and have been juggling the idea of commissions and selling merch and such to get my motivation up for years now, but I don't really feel seen here? And tho a big reason for that is admittedly my long hiatuses, I think maybe it's also partly because I'm proship and some people may be afraid to be seen supporting me lmao, idk. This whole puritan fan movement is pretty toxic and ruining creativity imo, but whatever. Still a firm believer of people not getting harassed for the things they like or being ashamed enough to hide said things (which is why I vehemently refuse to make a second blog for those kinds of interests and instead tag things as best I can so followers can blacklist). Just leaves a bad taste in my mouth to see all this baseless hostility over trivial shit. Sorry, I'm ranting about something completely different now.

But yeah, not saying this officially or anything. More of a heads up in case that were to happen since I'm just feeling it out rn. I do very much appreciate everyone who has ever supported me here and most everyone here has been incredibly kind. If you have ever reblogged my work (as well as any other struggling artist's), you are an MVP and doing god's work. And even if I moved, I would still absolutely post shit here, it would just be secondary to wherever I decide to move. It's unfortunate because I feel like tumblr's tagging system is by and large the most flexible/filterable archive for creator content and nothing else really compares. Just wish management hadn't made so many terrible decisions because the site as a whole really is a gift despite its buggy-ness.

If you've read this far, that warms my kokoro knowing you care enough lmao. Please don't hesitate to hmu just to chat. Or if you're interested in hearing more about commissions/merch that I really really wanna start doing for fandoms like SNK, OSMT, HS, and more such as Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss and Persona 5. I got a lot of interests that I just never get around to contributing to lolrip, and would like to start working on my HS fic again. Anywho, no matter what happens, you guys are great and I hope the world starts sucking a little less for you because recent years have been... hahahahaha. They were sure a thing, I guess.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with MustangSally

MustangSally has 33 stories at Gossamer. Even if you haven’t read it, you’ve probably heard of at least one of them, Iolokus, since it’s an X-Files fanfic classic. All her fics hit big and are well worth your time. I’ve recced some of my favorites here before, including And Dance by the Light of the Moon, All the Children are Insane, and Iolokus. Big thanks to MustangSally for doing this interview.

What's the story behind your pen name?

I could tell you but then I would have to kill you.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

Yes and no. Yes, because life has moved on since the early nineties and the characters and the fans are in vastly different places now. Our current tech would make the premise of the X-Files impossible. No, because of the longevity of some of the Star Trek TOS work (there’s an archive of hard copy fanzines at the University of Iowa). Top-drawer authors started out in TOS fandom.

I’m just greatly saddened that my physical body is showing wear and tear while the fic doesn’t. Fic gets to stay smooth-skinned and muscular, captured at the peak of perfection.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

At the risk of sounding atrociously trite, I think of the friends I made.  I met some very remarkable women that I’ve been able to stay friends with online for over twenty-five years.  We may have moved to Facebook and post entirely too much about our pets and which of our body parts has sagged this week, but we’re friends.  It’s a furiously funny, feminist, and well-educated group of women with jobs in the highest levels of academia, finance, communications, and media.  I’m amused by the fact that if I have a question about how a virus replicates, I can ask a PhD I’ve been drunk with in Las Vegas.

Back in the day, I had a job that sent me traveling around major cities in the US and UK. I could post on a message board and within ten minutes there were people I could go out for dinner and drinks with. We already knew we had something we could talk about for at least a couple of hours. Additionally, most of these people were women so there was an added level of security. Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

Well, it was mostly atxc and the Yahoo! groups mailing lists that spiraled out into Geocities sites and, eventually, LiveJournal. The amusing thing is that getting in on the ground floor of social media and the Internet has helped me get jobs!  When I look at a new piece of software, I think, ‘this is hella easier than uploading to Geocities.’  We had to walk uphill both ways, in the snow, on dial-up, fighting off dinosaurs with our AOL CDs while writing HTML code. What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS.

The past four years in politics have basically been the ugliest online kerfuffle the world has ever seen. I survived the Shipper Wars of ’96 and I thought those were brutal, but that was NOTHING. The only way to win an argument online is to not have the argument at all. Arguing with a troll is like mudwrestling a pig: You both get filthy and only the pig is happy.

Also, READ THE FUCKING TERMS OF SERVICE.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

I had the most terrible straight-girl crush on Scully. I wanted to be her best friend, I wanted to BE her.  I wanted to order Chinese food and paint each other’s nails and talk about bones.  Scully and Princess Leia and I could all just hang out poolside with hot and cold running waiters and poolboys, drink margaritas, and bitch about how unfair it all was – if the stupid men would just get OUT OF THE WAY AND LET US DO OUR JOBS, the world would be so much better. What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

This question is really about Iolokus, isn’t it?  You can’t fool me. [Lilydale note: I can neither confirm nor deny the motivation for this question, but I cannot complain about the answer.]

Simply put, I was enraged. The moment it was revealed that Scully’s ova had been used in experimentation, I lost my feminist mind. It was the most obscene defilement imaginable.  Scully wasn’t nearly as angry as I was.  What I thought needed to happen was for Scully to become a fiery force of vengeance against the MEN who had done this to her.  Clearly, I was not going to get that level of satisfaction from the show, as I was imagining Kali-like carnage on a global scale. I emailed RivkaT (whom I did not know well at that point) with a proposition that we work together. Strangely enough, we didn’t meet face to face until we were well into the project, but we did talk on the phone quite a bit. The rules were simple – everyone had to be punished in truly horrific ways, and at some point, we had to see if we could write a car chase (only because that seemed impossible).  Then it basically turned into a very twisted game of chicken to see who could be the most outrageous in terms of killing people off or writing really horrific things that fit within the structure of the narrative.  I did, in the end, write the car chase, but RivkaT one-upped me by throwing in a helicopter (a FOX News helicopter, at that).  

Really, RivkaT?  A helicopter? What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom? I am terribly proud of what I wrote, pleased that it brought pain and pleasure in equal amount to people, and, again, thrilled by the people I became friends with. I admit that I stopped watching the show when Scully announced her pregnancy.  I could only see a long jump over a shark tank for the rest of the series. I haven’t watched the new episodes, either.  It is complete in my mind and doesn’t need to be continued.  I wouldn’t say no to having a reunion with some of my fic friends, although we’re still chatting online like everyone does.   Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

Rivka and I wrote in the Buffy fandom for a few years, but then we moved on to real adult jobs that left absolutely no time for me to write. I’m in education, and I regularly sweat blood for fear that someone is going to find my old fic. The Buffy people were fun; there was a certain *shininess* to them that I really enjoyed. The X-men authors were just batshit and delightful, and some amazing stuff came out of Marvel fandom, particularly in the Thor/Loki and Steve/Bucky subgenres. I’ve learned to appreciate a good coffee shop AU and one famous Erik/Charles fic where all the main characters are crabs. Seriously, crabs—it’s hysterical. [Lilydale note: Other Crabs Cannot Be Trusted by groovyphilia currently has almost 2,500 kudos at AO3.]

Every few years, I’ll have a student try to explain to me what fandom is and I just smirk. Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully? No. Not really. Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom? I fell into an X-Men hole a few years back and had a great old time wallowing in the Cherik muck, and there was a flirtation with BBC Sherlock as well. Strangely enough, I became interested in A/B/O fics only because of what they were saying about the role of women in our society. The limitations on the male omegas seem absurd and then you realize those are the same limitations put on women all. the. time.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

RivkaT very nicely formatted everything and put it up on AO3. What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I will always be stupidly proud of how shocked and horrified people were by Iolokus. The truth of the matter is that Iolokus has Greek drama at its core. Scully is Medea, and the entire story is lousy with “blood on the threshing floor” and Dionysian rites. The everyday is subverted into horror, and wives and daughters will tear men limb from limb like the Maenads. Since I was ultimately disappointed with what Chris Carter did with the entire show, that approach seemed appropriate.

At a certain level, all fic is corrective fic.  Like critic Anne Jamison said, “Irritated fans produce fanfic like irritated oysters produce pearls.”  And because fic has fallen so much into women’s sphere, a pure form of correction is not just the death of the author but the MURDER, a new creation springing up from the spilled blood like Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth.

Okay, that’s a bit much. Maybe I should just take myself back to the isle of Goth Amazons or something. Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I had to write a self-evaluation and a reflection on pedagogy today. If that’s not fiction, I don’t know what the fuck is.

All my creativity is caught up in trying to pretend to be a normal middle-aged white woman so no one knows I am really a lizard.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Keep writing, keep reading, keep fighting the commercialization of narratives. As things grow more and more commodified, all our dreams and desires reduced to tchotchkes made in China, it’s a revolutionary act to separate your work from the marketplace. Be bold, take chances, turn the trope on its ear and kick it in the ass. Take everything the creators have done to make a work palatable to the unwashed masses and set it on fire.

Be subversive.

Be mean.

Have a great fucking time.

(Posted by Lilydale on March 2, 2021)

[bao3bei4]

kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire 

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right. 

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one. 

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked. 

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did. 

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction. 

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere. 

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015. 

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found. 

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you. 

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom. 

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people. 

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right. 

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.  

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age. 

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible. 

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses. 

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad! 

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare). 

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever. 

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about. 

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story. 

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.) 

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf. 

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes. 

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god. 

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair. 

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah. 

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010. 

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it. 

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu. 

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video. 

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories. 

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably. 

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious. 

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to. 

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended. 

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see. 

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down. 

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not. 

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place. 

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine! 

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them. 

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.) 

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad. 

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again. 

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies. 

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

[dee-the-red-witch]

OK, I’m gonna take a minute here while getting my brain re-set to sit back down and start in on the manuscript again. And I want to preface this all with a BIGASS disclaimer: I DO NOT THINK OR CONSIDER THAT THE POSTER WHO PUT THESE TAGS ON A REBLOG FROM ME WISHED ME ANY KIND OF ILL WHATSOEVER. IN FACT, I’M PRETTY SURE THEY WERE TRYING TO PAY ME A COMPLIMENT.

That said, I’ve been seeing this more and more. On here, on twitter, on Fb, everywhere. And it’s happening more and more as I post about more than just part of what I do as a dayjob, and as I’m trying to leverage back into doing more than just leather. ...y’all do get that my leatherwork and maskmaking is not the sum and total of me as a person, right? I mean, this is not meant as a humblebrag, or any kind of brag, just a resume list, because I’m all over the fucking map: In high school, it was debate and drama. Even ended up at State and Nationals for those to some degree.

After that, in between and during college, it was working haunted houses, studying english, history, and theatre, and then putting together a theatresports team that ran for two years (we were groaningly terrible, exactly the kind of humor geeky/nerdy theatre kids put together and it was awesome and these days I cringe at some of the jokes we used to do. I think our biggest audience was maybe thirty people.) Then it was moving here, going to Cornish for theatre, summarily dropping out of Cornish after a semester of realizing there was no way I could afford to stay in school and survive without being homeless on part time minimum wage, not to mention lots of disagreement with the whole program. Cue being a twentysomething in seattle in the early aughts- doing lots of small theatre, joining a Rocky Horror troupe, weird citylife adventures and a lot of shite underpaid jobs. Also figuring out I was queer in there. Leather didn’t happen until after I’d met my fiancee and we’d moved in together, when I got hit with a seven-month stint of unemployment, and with loads of boredom on my hands, decided I’d try and figure out how to make a leather mask or two from some spare hide she had lying around from making her own armor for the SCA. Which took a lot of attempts. Fast forward a couple of years, I was still working shit-paying jobs, we had a kid on the way, and couldn’t afford early daycare so we could both work. so I stayed home with the kids since I made less out of the two of us. Still don’t regret that. Also meant I launched a website and started slowly getting more and more professional and doing cons and stuff. Of course, doing a site means you have to do images, which meant learning photoshop, and, well, I also went ahead and learned how to draw, collage, etc in there. After a few years of photoshop, leather, and websites at home, and after going back to work at a bank doing image archival work on documents, I ended up working in a gallery as a dayjob, scanning and archiving paintings and photos for reproduction. which meant learning repro, art, art history, and putting it all together meant I was suddenly making digital art in my off time as well. And then kid number two and the ‘08 real estate crash happened almost simultaneously in reverse order. I was home with new kid again, because my job, and my entire department type, information services, pretty much ceased to exist from the corporate world. And since then it’s been working on self promoting and doing my own business since because fuck working for other people, its never worked well.

So yeah, I do leather, it’s a big part of my life,because anything is when you’ve done it for 15+ years. But that said, I’ve been fighting burnout with it for two years now, and been trying to leverage myself out of it the whole time. Which means fighting with the “but you’re the leather guy!” thing in my own head a LOT. I am not just a leatherworks guy. I write. A bunch. Next book’s almost done, and I skipped the history bit where I was freelancing for a few rpg designers- no, probably not anything you’ve seen. I DO VISUAL ART which you’ve all seen like mad if you’ve been following for any amount of time. I’d act if there were enough spoons, time and energy in the day. There isn’t, and I’m a cheesey fuckin’ actor anyways. I tattoo- that’s a new one picked up since quarantine, but I’v ebeen trying to make both of my hands less dumb, so picking up actual physical drawing and tattooing has been a thing. I still also craft all sorts of props and other bits when I want/get hired to. Because WHY NOT. But I’m a lot more than a leather guy, and I fight with myself every time I see stuff about me being just the leather guy. Jeebus, that was a wall of text. OK, I’m maybe also needing to vent a lot more, find time to get into therapy, and deal with issues on a healthy basis. Maybe find time and people irl who see me as a whole-ass person now that my vaccine’s almost finished marinating. Yeesh. Sorry for the screed, folks, but the ‘don’t fucking delete shit’ rule applies. It’s here, so I may as well share. But yes, your friend who does more than leather is trying to get seen as your friend who does more than just leather. Make sense?

[victoriousscarf]

Can I ask about the path you took toward working in public history? I'm in grad school at the moment. (I also have a complicated family situation and the world is kind of a mess so I'm not necessarily expecting an answer that gives some kind of set path I can follow, I'm just curious.)

Ok... So ...

Like I think it's always hard to be in the public history field and be like yeah! You're totally gonna get something! Because of my like cohort when I started grad school I think... 3...no 4 of us have stable employment in the field. One I know of is field adjacent. One left to become an artist, one has never held a job in the field at all, and a lot have either struggled with work or been underemployed. So it's rough and I think the pandemic has made library/museum/archives jobs way harder.

But.

I went to school specifically in a program for archives and records management. That program no longer exists, and most archives jobs want an MLIS anyway. (I've gotten some shady looks from hiring managers not in the field because they're like... It's not an MLIS and I'm like no? Because it was way more specialized?? Like I am super qualified okay I promise). This was... Not a great idea. The more specialized you are, the harder to switch tracks it is. I've been considering going back for a museum degree just for more flexibility because that's honestly the only way to survive in this field. Right now I'm seeing more museum jobs than archives, but my curator friend was insisting it was the other way when she was applying so it's also just luck of the draw.

So I have super specialized education. Pros and cons.

I then took an internship as an interpretive ranger at a national park site. And that was the best thing I ever did for myself. There are several programs that do internships with the NPS, but a lot of them are age specific. The one I did was for 26 and below, so it wouldn't be useful for older folks going back to school but! There's also federal jobs that are either for people still in school (I think it was called pathways back then?) Or some jobs are only open for recent grads. It was paid and they provided housing. A lot of internships don't do that and it's awful and there's been a slow but steady reckoning in the field that unpaid internships are bad and exclusionary to people who don't have any support sytem backing them.

Working for the NPS opened up a lot of doors for me. The federal government is very difficult to break into. It doesn't really matter what the job posting says, if you don't have experience, you probably aren't getting through the questionnaire. (And yes. There are questionnaires. So. Many. Questionnaires). But if you luck into an internship, you learn about the system and you get experience and no matter where you go after that, it's good to have in your pocket in case you need it again.

After that I also lucked out with a partnership program through my old grad program. It is definitely worth checking to see what sort of connections the program might have. Because I got something like 9 months of work that was paid for by my grad program to work in an entirely different state to finish a project for them. Look around, connections really matter in the public history field. If you have the chance to go to a conference, yeet yourself toward it. It's hard to like meet people, but the nice thing is most folks in the field are fucking nerds who are probably socially awkward too. Archives potlucks are hailrious because 89% of the folks have got social anxiety. They all wanna bring a book and sit and read quietly. But the more people you meet, the more connections you make, the better (also Archivists looooove twitter. Ugh. And there's a lot of really good archives/library/museum groups on facebook. I'd recommend them).

The more weird shit you can put on your resume, the better. Saying which parks I worked at (sometimes very famous ones) made me stand out. I also ran a day long academic conference in grad school and was president of a student chapter of a professional organization. It almost killed me, but it stood out in people's minds. One of my co workers did field work in Eygpt, and our supervisor mentions seeing that on her resume all the time. Like that was part of what drew him to it. Again, money is an issue for most people and this is hard to pull off, but weird shit helps you stand out. Emphasis anything cool you've ever done in your whole life. I also did national history day in high school. That meant I was our education specialists favorite person when it came time to help high schoolers on their project. Even if it's too late for you to do that in high school, see if you have a regional competition nearby. Or state even. Volunteer. That's also something that stands out (plus helping wee history nerds can be a treat... When you're not being reminded why high school was so terrible lol).

I also moved to 6 states in... 5 years. And I don't mean neighboring states either I mean I started on the west coast and flung myself all the way to the western side of the Mississippi River. And then North. And then South. And then West again. This is not possible for a lot of people because a) money and b) family. Even with all that moving I was unemployed for 6 or so months in the middle of it. It is hard to be looking for work so constantly and then packing up your life and yeeting yourself to another state /again./

I also have a chronic condition with regularly scheduled flare ups. Moving away from my family for work has sucked, being in pain and having to explain to a new boss I'll have to take some time off every year to like, lay on the floor in pain, sucks. So like. It can be done even WITH stuff like that too.

But I have been incredibly lucky. Because I got a few breaks when I needed one. Because I was in a position to go for what I could take. I also missed certain chances I should have been able to take. That's never a good feeling but it doesn't mean one missed chance or fuck up is the end of the road.

So yeah, as you said, every circumstance is different, every road is different, but I do think hearing a) it can be done and b) different approaches to how it can be done, can really help. Like even if you can't do the same stuff, maybe there's something in there that can help out. Some spark of an idea of something to try.

(I'm also making this public in case it helps anyone else ... I hope that's okay).

(this got long lol. But I was trying to think of like any advice that could help. There's a lot of pathways to get into the field, but volunteering, weird shit on that resume, being willing to go the extra bit, those are probably the most basic take aways anyone could try).

[bang-tan-bitches]

Hello~ first of all I'm sorry for not being able to follow up with your works and I'm too shy to come out rn 😌😌 I wanted to know if you guys know anything about qdeoks? Like is the owner safe after her site has been reported? And is there any possibility to see that website again in the future? Also I hope both of you are doing well, stay safe. Love you.

It's terrible what happened to her and her website because people were mad that she provided BTS content for free.

I find it hard to believe that Bighit weren't aware of her, especially since her following was so big. Her website was like an open secret in this fanbase. It was also a huge BTS archive that had everything including stuff that isn't even available to watch anywhere anymore.

The fact that she maintained her website on her own without donations or any kind of financial aid from her followers is incredible. Anyone could see how much effort she put into her site. She loves BTS and she wanted everyone to be able to see and love them too.

From the information I could find on this, it seems like this was a mass reporting and not something instigated by Bighit. Especially since BTS paid content can be found all over youtube and Twitter. Hopefully, her website will be back up soon.

We hope she's safe and we hope she knows that she has tons of support behind her.

Thank you for your ask nonnie. Please stay safe and take care.

[hqrarepairexchange]

Posting Guidelines

Hello, and welcome to the final stretch of the 2020 Haikyuu!! Rarepair Exchange! A lot of us have found new ships, new friends, and a lot of in between during this time, and the best part of the event - the gifting - is here!

Where do I post? You have your choice of where you post your work, as long as the hosting site does not require any kind of sign-ups to view the material. Examples: AO3, Twitter (art only), Tumblr, Instagram (art only), or even blogging sites like Dreamwidth or Livejournal, providing the post isn’t friend locked.

If you WANT to post art to AO3, no one will stop you, but if you’ve ever done it before, you realize that it doesn’t resize well and is terrible for mobile users. We recommend being judicious in which platform you use depending on what kind of work you’re posting.

Social Media Tag: #hqrarepairexchange2020 (both Tumblr and Twitter)

AO3 Collection: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/hqrarepairexchange2020

What do I post? We ask that all works be put into some kind of retweetable/rebloggable format for ease of sharing. On Twitter, you can post art directly there or a link to a fic. On Tumblr, you can post art and fic directly there, as well as create a link post. 

If you don’t have an account on either platform, or for whatever reason you don’t want to post your gift work there, you can SUBMIT the work (link, art, fic...whatever works) to the Tumblr blog <https://hqrarepairexchange.tumblr.com/submit>. You don’t need an account to do that, and the formatting is friendly to either type of work. If you can’t tag the post, don’t worry. Before the work goes live, a mod will tag the work with the appropriate ship and fandom tags so folks who track tags will still see it (and reblog it because -chefkiss-).

All social media posts must contain the following information:

Your recipient’s name + @ their socmed acct

Chosen Ship

Word count (optional, and if applicable)

Any archive warnings (Major Character Death, Graphic Violence, etc), as well as sensitive topics (illness/injury, phobias, animal injury). USE GOOD JUDGMENT.

A link to your created gift (if applicable)

A note for your recipient

When do I post? Posting runs from September 19th to October 4th. Don’t worry about time zones. If you’re in New Zealand and want to post at 12:01am on the 19th, even though it’s still yesterday morning on the other side of the world, go for it. 

Works may be submitted to the AO3 collection before the posting period begins, but they will be moderated (unposted) and not be approved until it’s the 19th in US Pacific Time. IF YOU DO POST TO THE AO3 COLLECTION EARLY, please bear in mind that your work will be timestamped for when you posted it, not when it goes live. When this is the case, your work will not show up in the most recents. We highly recommend you go back and edit the posting date to the current date when it does go live so people trawling the newest works have a better chance of finding yours.

How do I tag the account for the event? We have a Tumblr account (hqrarepairexchange) and a Twitter account (hqrpexchange). Feel free to @ either of our social media accounts, and post the work under the event tag. We’ll be tracking both.

Twitter: twitter.com/hqrpexchange

Tumblr: hqrarepairexchange.tumblr.com

Discord: https://discord.gg/C4KNwmJ

How do I let my giftee know their work is done? You have several options. The most common ways are tagging them in your social media post or AO3 work post, providing they have an account on that platform. In the assignment email you received back in June, We provided you with whatever social media accounts your giftee gave on their sign-up form. You can also find participants’ preferred social media accounts in the #roll-call channel of the event Discord, and most AO3 account handles are listed there, as well.

If you post a fic to AO3, if at all possible, we recommend you list your work as a gift for your recipient so they get an almost instant email letting them know something great is waiting for them. If you aren’t sure what their handle is, feel free to ask a mod either through our social media accounts, Discord, or our email <hqrarepairexchange2020@gmail.com>. We'd be happy to either ask or do some sleuthing for you.

We will have a channel in the Discord server specifically for posting exchange works, as well. Not only so you can find yours, but so your fellow participants can see what you’ve been working on. You can @ your giftee there if possible, as well.

Will the gift be anonymous? No. As soon as your post goes up, your giftee immediately knows who you are. The initial !!! phase of getting a gift is strong, and it’s only fair that it be directed at you in particular, the one who worked hard to make it.

I don’t see my gift. What do I do? If you don’t see your gift on Day 1, don’t worry. We know you’re excited, but your gifter assuredly wants to deliver the best work possible, so if they take a few extra days to perfect it, it’s worth it. However, you are always free to message a mod and we can check on the status of your gift or point it out if it was already posted.

I have a different question. If there is anything that is unclear or you’re not sure about, please contact a member of the mod team via social media, Discord, or email and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

[sciencefictionismyjam]

Warning for content creators.

Platforms: Their pros and cons.

I have been in a lot of places throughout my young adult life to now, tumblr. twitter, discord, DA, FA a small patreon you name it. I experienced the best and worst of all of them, and I want to make that clear for anyone who thinks about establishing themselves in an alternative environment especially if you are emotionally or mentally vulnerable.

I have deleted most of my outlets over the years for a variety of reasons, but now i’m settling down I feel obligated to share what I learned.

I have used all these places to find community, advice, explore interests, explore fandoms, cope with loneliness and depression, find friends, and mutuals... With equal success and failures, discovering also terrible things along the way...

TUMBLR.

Found friends and communities.

Fairly friendly, fairly easy to use and mostly harmless. Since the NSFW ban things have indeed changed here but to be honest it was probably for the best for reasons that may be obvious below. Though a word of warning, this place is home to a diverse population of people with mental and neurological disabilities like myself, and its very easy to get caught up in the negative behaviours or fall victim to the creative ways users can influence or take advantage of the site to hurt eachother when things go wrong and this happens whether you like it or not. At the end of the day, people form tribes and act selfishly just like in any other social setting, its no different from high school bullying.

Regardless, its a great place to meet people and share content with ease and visibility.

DEVIANTART.

First place I shared my artwork.

A pretty bog standard place to host your artwork. Home to plenty of professionals and a huge majority of students etc, not much to say about it.

I used it in the past, posted really bad artwork and tried to chat to other artists I enjoyed for advice and social with little success (story of my life thank you Aspergers!). If you go there dont expect an audience right away because unless your material is eye catching right out of the gate no one will really care that much.

DISCORD.

Communicate with friends and found/founded communities.

Discord servers represent in the purest sense what happens when you give people overriding powers to create their own social spaces or bubbles. Digital factionalism, Neo nazis and more grow at an alarming rate here... So much so that even the most inclusive or friendly settings are no stranger to exhibiting tribalistic behaviour.

Use it carefully and responsibly.

ARTSTATION.

Used it to share most of my artwork.

Favours the privileged, luckiest and the wealthiest in the art community. This is a home for people who have been lucky enough to enter expensive art schools, been supported well enough to find early career opportunities and have carefully constructed impossible internet personalities.

Its the industry’s hall of fame. This is evident simply upon opening the website in google. Dont expect much of an audience because its a platform that values prestige more than anything else, though dont let that stop you posting regardless.

PATREON.

Run an open donation art sharing outlet.

I would say without any hesitation that this website is now officially compromised as a content delivery system. I once run a small patreon for my old artwork though I intended to delete it and my content in short order since my situation had improved and it made no sense to keep it around, my content was completely free to all and the donations were small. But I had soon come to realise that this infamous “Archive” or glorified torrent site had stolen my material and hosted it on their servers without any ability to delete it just like many others. Unfortunately this is run by infamous crypto currency accepting individuals so no hope of removing it, as they are usually highly abusive and predatory (like most libertarians)... It also does not matter if you paywalled the content, since this is bypassed by a small amount of paying users which share that material to the website which stores the illegal copies on their servers against your will. If you have a dedicated pool of backers you will do just fine, though everything you make will be stolen and hosted there whether you like it or not.

It can be understandable for people wanting to not pay for these things, i’m no stranger to torrented software for example in the past when I had nothing. But its not acceptable when that material becomes extremely personal.

FURAFFINITY.

Where I posted my NSFW art for the first time and made commissions.

Contrary to an assumed popular belief, or expectations. FA is not just a place for furries given that obvious title... Infact art students both in school/self taught, freelance types, and even well known established BioWare concept artists may indeed hang out there. Its a very easy and accessible place to post your artwork or communicate with a diverse people... Unfortunately its been the subject of controversy and upsets for which I unfortunately witnessed and got sick of.

No different than tumblr in that respect...

Its frequently hacked by unsavoury people who dump gore and other illegal imagery on the site to scare people away ,or piss off the normal users. Also due to a lack of ability to curate their content delivery systems, or who gets in and sees the NSFW stuff. A overwhelming flood of underage people who unfortunately have access to SFM flood the site with very poorly made video game NSFW. (A direct result of digital content bloating)

This is not to say SFM creators as a whole are all bad (some are nice), its just that the vast majority now are not exactly people who should have the ability to create said material.

Tips for if you go there.

Keep the SFW switch on.

Be careful what you search.

Be careful who you interact with.

Expect fully to be asked by strangers and potential commission clients to make material you are not in anyway interested in, or find disturbing and do your best to ignore them all.

This place will really test your patience for NSFW paid artwork requests, so stay away if you dont want to deal with that.