#i'll also be posting this to my cohost probably

[steakout-05]

ok so um. i found this really cool brush on ibispaint and decided to do a couple of paintovers of Data and i think they turned out pretty neat :)

this one was done a couple days ago with a limited colour palette of around 6-7 colours (minus the highlighting on his eyes) and was the first one i did. it's painted over this image:

and this is the one i finished today:

this is the image i painted over:

now i absolutely hate doing traditional painting most of the time (it's mostly running out of materials, varying quality of materials, the expenses, stupid thin paints i hate thin paints grrrr) but digital painting? that shit goes hard and i love painting my little monochromatic datas :)

[perinkling]

so since tumblr is starting to sink (for lack of a better term), here's my other social media:

discord: @/perinkling

https://twitter.com/perinkling (i only use this to keep up with splatoonNA)

https://instagram.com/periinkling (i don't post super often but i check it daily)

https://cohost.org/fourleafclover (main) and https://cohost.org/perinkling (art) and https://cohost.org/cloverafterdark (18+)

https://www.pillowfort.social/peridot (i made this back when the porn ban was new and never used it and am too stubborn to change the username)

https://www.deviantart.com/perinkling (yes i still occasionally use this, only for a niche arpg at this point)

https://toyhou.se/perinkling (fuck it, toyhouse is going on this list)

https://www.furaffinity.net/user/sleepydot (fuck it x2, furaffinity, i also rarely use this)

[caffichai]

Food Bank Fundraiser

Hi everyone!

First of all, I want to say thanks to everyone who's been leaving such nice tags/comments on stuff I've posted! It's been really encouraging (o^▽^o)

Anyway, I think we all know it's very dark days on the economic front for many of us. So as such, I'd like to help raise some funds for Food Banks Canada! In exchange for you making a donation to the food bank, I will draw a character suggestion!

I know this is not really the sort of thing I normally do or post here but... many folks are struggling to put food on the table right now, and the food bank is a source of support for many and provides an absolute necessity. I've seen many people struggling in my own city, and food security has become an even bigger issue than it already was in the last couple of years with the food bank struggling to keep up with demand. Of course, food security is an issue across the whole country that's putting a huge strain on food banks, with nearly 5% of the entire population making use of food banks monthly, and 23% of the population reporting food insecurity (CBC, 2024; Global News, 2024). Unsurprisingly, those who are already most disadvantaged suffer the effects of food scarcity even more (Statistics Canada, 2023). To make matters more desperate, Canada's food bank system is on the brink of collapse (CTV News, 2024).

I know this isn't going to something big enough to change the world or anything, but being able to make even a small impact for individual people is important too!

✨Incentives✨

Of course, I'm sure people aren't just in it for a reward, but rewards make things all the sweeter, right?

For those who want to contribute, I'll take a character suggestion and add it to a poll (depending on the number of contributors, it may be split up into multiple polls), and then I'll draw as many as I can from top to bottom ranking! If you contribute, please send me a DM with your donation receipt and your character idea! They won't necessarily all be drawn in the same style, and they'll be done according to how much time I've got. (I know that commissions are probably the biggest incentive, but realistically, I struggle to get them done quickly and they're probably not that affordable to everyone)

If you prefer SFW or NSFW, you can let me know (But NSFW will be posted to Cohost). If you make a bigger contribution, I'll reach out to you and ask if you wanna see more specifics/details in your piece. How's that for sweetening the pie? :3

For those who can't make a donation (which is completely understandable), simply spreading the post is also helpful, and I appreciate that greatly as well!

Don't forget that giving a donation allows you to get a tax break based on the amount donated as well!

Alternatives?

If you'd rather donate to your own local food bank, that's great too! You can DM me and send me a pic of your receipt and I'll still add your suggestion to the poll.

If you REALLY want a commission, you can also DM me and I'll do my best to fulfil it! I won't be taking commissions for this till/if there's at least a couple of items on the poll though. The proceeds will go to my own local food bank. The commission will be done later though, and may take some time to fulfil. I take payment only after starting.

When do we start??

I guess once there's a good number of poll options? I have no idea how long that will be, but rest assured I'll keep you updated!

Where do we contribute?

You can make your donation to Food Banks Canada! They really need it!

Alternatively, you can make a donation to your local food bank or equivalent charity.

Other Questions?

Feel free to send me a message or an ask! I'll get back to you ASAP. If I need to include more details or clarify something, let me know! It's my first time doing this!

TL;DR

I want to help raise money for food banks! Anyone who contributes to Food Banks Canada (or donates to their own local food bank or equivalent charity) can DM me with their receipt and give a character to add to the poll. Poll characters will be drawn in order of their ranking, as many as I can manage, over as long a period of time as I can manage!

No pressure to donate of course, I just figured this would be a fun way of raising a bit of money to help out, and allow us to donate more than what I personally can

Current Contributor Count: 13

Suggested Characters:

Imagine your beloved, obscure or popular character here on this poll list! Oooooooh, how lucrative :3

Total funds raised:

780.36$!!!

[euniexenoblade]

I know your dying wish is to be baptized in my spit

I'm roxy Mordred. I'll also accept Mio.

I use she/her pronouns and if you they/them me I will stab you. If we're friends, you're allowed to use it/it's pronouns. We're beta testing this.

Married + Polyamorous + Pansexual + t4t

I used to be trans-mom/mioxenoblade. If you see any of my old posts in the wild please send me them I'm looking for a few specific posts.

Genderless void creature. Or, girl. Girl's alright.

Biological dysphoric female

Despite my url, I promise you that I am Mio Xenoblade in real life. Which means I'm a real life catgirl. Don't psps me that's degrading.

transandrodorks plz go away

I write smut. Most of it was wiped when staff nuked my blog but more shit's coming, I'm just busy.

I won't sub for you unless you can beat me in a fight.

I don't care if you follow me, but as previously said I post smut, and I also post lots of kink or sex talk. So I'll probably soft block anyone under 20 I see interacting with my blog.

My gender is maid. Everyone belongs in a maid uniform. Everyone.

I've seen more anime than you. I read a lot of manga and I collect records and pins. I'm getting back into video games if you care.

No I won't reblog your call out.

I don't care about cishet sensibilities.

Death to Walmart.

twitter -- cohost -- blue sky -- lastfm

[godbirdart]

You don’t have to answer this question as it’s probably dumb to ask…but do you know what platform(s) would be a good starting point? Particularly for original content rather then fanart? I heard deviantart is a good place where alot of ppl got there start on but there’s lots of art thrives and such.

don't even worry, it's not dumb at all! it's hard to gauge where to Begin in the vast hellscape that is the online world. i do get this question [and some adjacent questions] often so please allow me to use your ask as an excuse to post a few of my site rankings for various art things!!

for reference, these are the sites I'll be addressing because i have used them at some point within the last year. please note: my information on Cohost and Itaku specifically may be out of date as I haven't used them in a long while. naturally, this is all solely my perspective. i run both a furry/original content account and an anime/fanart account on most of these sites and run them reasonably independently from one another. these rankings are based on how well each account fares on each site.

I will be talking about Patreon and Ko-Fi as if people will only be posting paywalled content there. you Can publicly post on both sites, but for the sake of this post i'm only going to treat them as paywalled sites since well, that's kind of their purpose.

POSTING ART IN GENERAL

the A-tier list sites here are the ones that are most practical, with a decent member presence and little to no algorithms impairing your reach. the only sites here with any sort of algorithm are tumblr and deviantart, but i feel they don't ruin your reach that much.

B-tier list is mostly centered around popularity. there are massive audiences on both masto and twitter. twitter can be really good if you're posting certain content. mastodon has countless instances [read: servers / subdomains, however you want to call them] that can help narrow down an audience and like-minded people. for example, i use mastodon.art whereas many furries may use meow.social. you Can be discovered by people on other servers than yours.

C-tier has been sorted in accordance to audience. this is solely in my experience, but not a lot of new people are flocking to cohost and itaku. we also just hate facebook in this house and i will never give a facebook products a high rating.

F-tier: if you are a new or growing artist, putting your art behind a paywall or making it a chat platform exclusive thing can really hinder your growth. you can still do this of course, but you won't get as many eyes on your work as you would on a public gallery. threads is there solely due to privacy issues that Cannot be overlooked. i will not recommend it.

POSTING ORIGINAL CONTENT / CHARACTERS / NON-FANWORKS

here's how i'd grade these sites for posting Original content, characters, stories, etc. your best sites will likely be furaffinity, deviantart, and tumblr. i've put these three here for their tag use, discoverability, and audience presence. tumblr can be a little glitchy with its tags, but they DO function.

A-tier is entirely centered around audience presence. these sites are great for showing off your work, but they don't have the same population as the S-tier. mastodon can be good as the quieter instances give you more discoverability. bluesky has been THRIVING when it comes to the furry community as of late [i'm personally on there daily] - the only reason i don't put it as S-tier is because it's invite-only AND you need to rely on your work being found through the Feeds feature if you aren't an already established artist.

B-tier: useful, but population may hinder your growth. toyhouse is GREAT for posting your original characters and stories, but it is invite-only and not necessarily gallery-focused [it can be USED for a gallery, but it's not the main purpose]. you can also post stories and lore to toyhouse. discord and telegram are Good, but again it can be hard to gain an audience through sites that require invites.

C-tier: it is DIFFICULT to grow on paywalled sites with original content. cohost [to my knowledge] has been stagnating with the release of bluesky.

F-tier: threads sucks, the end.

POSTING FANWORK, FANFIC, FANDOM CONTENT IN GENERAL

S-tier here is sorted because of audience presence. while twitter does suck, i'm finding a LOT of success there with fanart. tumblr is The fandom site of course. furaffinity is great for a surprising range of fanart that isn't exclusive to furry, and deviantart's Groups feature is still going strong which can give you that extra exposure.

A-tier is: fans Go here, but the population or algorithm can make things tricky. instagram is good for fanwork but the algorithm and the speed that things are posted there can make discoverability an uphill battle. patreon; if you make comics or art with fan characters [especially 18+ content lmao] you can grow pretty rapidly there. patreon, like any other paywalled site, should be a secondary site and not your Primary posting location. artfol and pillowfort are still growing. pillowfort has a Communities feature - sort of like deviantart groups - that you can submit your art to which gives you that extra exposure. artfol is just a nice gallery site and the tagging system is,, decent enough. a little confusing because the tag system looks up keywords in posts and titles First, you have to tab over to hashtag searching specifically.

B-tier: invite only and audience reach. again, bluesky relies on your art to be picked up in Feeds, as there's currently no tag search. inkblot is growing but has a decent audience. ko-fi isn't as known as patreon for exclusive content but it's still a good site. mastodon has tagging that makes discoverability easier, but mastodon and its many servers can make things confusing for some people. itaku's not as commonly used so it may be harder to gain new eyes there once you establish yourself.

C-tier: posting fanart to these sites Can Work. toyhouse focuses on posting and sorting original characters, so treating it as a gallery site won't get your far fast. it isn't impossible to grow as an artist there, but the site isn't intended for fanart posting. i cannot say much on cohost here. telegram and discord, again, it's harder for people to discover you out of the blue unless you mention your server / channel on another site.

F-tier: fuck threads.

lastly, to address thieves,

thieves are gonna be everywhere. i'm sorry to say, but there will always be shitty people. i recommend the following:

watermark your art. not in the corner, don't just sign in one spot, place a Huge translucent watermark over the WHOLE art. i recommend making it a colour gradient too instead of one solid colour or greyscale.

also: sign your goddamned art! put your username on there!

post a low resolution when sharing online. less than 1200px wide or tall. 72dpi. JPEG format. keep the high res privately for yourself.

add a subtle noise filter over your art. it doesn't have to be high opacity, and it'll make your art a little grainy, but it's good for fucking with AI bots and ruining any print quality potential.

i hope this offers some insight! if you have a different experience on these sites, please feel free to add your testimonial in the replies or reblogs! not every artist is going to have the same experience and growth rate.

[nakanotamu]

Okay this is my I'm back update post I guess

I'm definitely going to change how I was using tumblr a little bit. Cohost was a great vibe and kind of opened my eyes to what was stressing me out on here outside of the like. Corporate stuff. I'm following too many people and have to cut back on accounts. I'm more interested in making longer posts and I don't really care any more that that's not tumblr's ~vibe~. What's new with me:

idr if I was on prog yet when I left but I was on prog and also stopped taking prog. I absolutely hated it it made me gain weight and grow hair in ways that were bad for my dysphoria and my anxiety got super bad. Did not remotely get the experience from it everybody else who posts about it seems to, 0/10 will never recommend

Stardom is maybe better than ever. Rossy leaving was a breath of fresh air and then after The Conversion a steady upward trend became a company that actually feels incredibly fresh and exciting and has been putting out banger after banger. I'm still only in March in my backlog but I follow what's current and haven't been this excited about wrestling in years.

I started following OZ Academy and in the next week or two I'm gonna start watching SenJo. SenJo has Mika Iwata and has been working closely with Stardom lately so with them becoming more accessible on Wrestle Universe I'm happy to give them a try. OZ seemed for a long time like the closest to my tastes after Stardom so I arbitrarily decided to actually start watching this year once I saw Unagi had shown up there. I've got a post in me about how OZ is actually the closest thing to "joshi DDT" out there.

I never actually started following Marigold. I think they have a fantastic roster but I hate Rossy so much and the stories - or lack thereof - they're doing there just make it wildly disinteresting to me. If Utami & Kouki ever start making out in the ring or even if they ever start doing an ounce of god damn drama I might still begrudgingly check them out one day but I'm not holding my breath right now.

I started playing Fallen London again & finally got back into Final Fantasy XIV in a big way. I found out about plugins! I think people should openly talk about plugins more. I was totally sick of tab targetting rotation based combat, to the point I couldn't play the game any more, but I found combat plugins to help with that and it turns out that was literally the only problem I had with it so I'm having a fantastic time again, more into the game than I've been since Heavensward.

So, yeah, hi. I might make a Bluesky at some point or something idk but for now I'm here again. Tumblr is draconian so ig I'll use my nsfw for that content again when it's relevant. I will probably be even weirder about wrestling on main bc I truly don't care any more but other than that これからもよろしくお願いします

[natalieironside]

hello ms. comrade Ironside, longtime reader, first time caller.

as a fellow writer of queer erotica, I was wondering if you had any thoughts/spoons to share those thoughts on wordpress being swept into the AI debacle under automattic? (I think that’s what you use to host your cool website, forgive me if I am mistaken.) I’m trying to figure out where to set up an author website of my own so I don’t have to host my stuff on tumblr anymore, but I’m a bit gun-shy in the current moment. I know AI trawling is inevitable in today’s internet, but as someone who’s been doing the indie author thing for some time (and admirably!), is there something you would recommend, best practices or otherwise, to someone just trying to get their metaphorical kite off the ground? or anything you wish you knew when you set up your own author-type socials? any thought at all would be genuinely appreciated.

thanks for your time, and I hope you and yours are as well as can be expected 🖤

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but afaik nothing approaching best practices has been figured out yet; it's all already happening and there's precious little as can be done to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Of course I uncheck all the little boxes in settings and deny them my consent or whatever, but I don't think a gaggle of unimaginative piss-bellied technocrats who decided it was a sensible use of vast amounts of water and power to teach a computer how to write very badly are what I'd call trustworthy. I'm still gonna move all my website shit off of Wordpress because they won't let me get rid of the stupid AI assistant thing, but that's more a case of their UI being ugly and dumb than me thinking it'll actually do any good.

Best I can tell you on that front is to try to find yourself a niche and develop yourself as an artist from there; "Write the kinds of books you wish other people were writing" is good general advice, and a human operator is always going to be capable of things a predictive network just isn't. Other ppl are gonna disagree with that, but they're wrong. Their understanding of resource allocation and scarcity is just childishly naive and you shouldn't waste your time listening to people who think we're gonna solve climate change with apps or whatever.

Far as social media goes, this is still the best one for hocking books as far as I can tell. I'm hearing a lot of good things about Cohost and Pillowfort, but their user bases are still quite small, and I haven't found the indie author community on Bluesky yet. If Tumblr goes belly up I'll probably end up migrating to one of those first two primarily b/c I think longform blogging is the secret stuff for ppl like me who are just too crabby and agoraphobic to be Twitter influencers; I may not be any good at videos or regular quick posts or documenting the writing process (which is too bad, b/c a lot of my friends who do that stuff seem to be having fun with it), but I sure can Lay Out Some Thoughts in A Few Paragraphs and I like to think that's something ppl expect from a novelist.

Also, never get in a public argument, don't go posting Your Thoughts On The Issues unless someone asked or you feel like you've got something interesting to say, and be very selective with how much and what personal information you give out to the hoi polloi. Those are my 3 rules for how to do social media good.

[ungrateful-cyborg-moved]

Social media comparison

Alright. I've tried different new/alternative platforms lately in hope to find something I really liked, and there are very promising ones. I didn't try everything, of course, but this is a kind of overview of my journey so far? Or just my thoughts on the matter.

I've tried Pillowfort, Bluesky, Mastodon (didn't last long enough to have much of an opinion, it simply didn't click), Dreamwidth and Cohost (as of today, can't post there yet).

My comparison under the cut:

► I appreciate that they're algorithm free, whether it's because they truly believe in an Internet rid of the most invasive of them or because it's too expensive to implement on a brand new platform or some other reason. Only the future can tell, but for now it's nice.

► Pillowfort: beside the post formatting that I find extremely comfortable, my favourite thing is probably communities. I feel like this is the strongest "pro" in favor of Pillowfort because this is where they truly distinguish themselves from other social media.

Communities, in a way, remind me of forums. They're however easier to take in hand since you don't have to deal with as many options and choices. In my opinion, communities on Pillowfort are a bit lacking in functionalities though. I think more tools to easily organize them would help, like a widget or something to link stuff so you can create and animate events within said communities.

(I also feel like Pillowfort would gain from not being dark blue. We have more than enough dark blue websites, and it doesn't go well with the warmth invoked by its name in my opinion, but that's a minor detail and just a matter of taste.)

► Bluesky: basically Twitter but better. No algorithm, for a start. The curated feeds are nice. They're a bit like communities on Pillowfort since they can be moderated but from a non-mod user, it's even easier to post in them: you just have to use the right keyword for your post to appear there. Well, if the mod left it open to all rather than chose to vet who can or cannot post in it. Lots of flexibility and control over your timeline overall.

I don't like the 300 characters limit, however. Never liked it with Twitter either. It's not really conductive to conversations, and the general design tends to make the website feel rather impersonal. It's really more like parallel talking than community building.

Overall I think it's a good tool to promote your (visual) art or website, etc. but not great for hosting conversations past commenting briefly what others are doing. I mean, you can make threads but it'll never be as good as Pillowfort or Tumblr for this.

► Dreamwidth: I'll start with saying that Dreamwidth isn't a social media, it's a journaling platform and I haven't used it much yet. Had in plan to post my headcanons about my muses there and stuff like that so I did spend some time trying to figure out how it works.

First, there is a lot of options to let you have complete control over who can see what. Like, a lot.

You can entirely personalize what your journal will look like. It's a bit easier than having your own website—since I reblogged a post about that yesterday—because you don't start from 0, so it might be a good option if you don't feel comfortable jumping into Notepad++ to start coding. You can just change a thing here and there, or nothing at all, or almost everything. It's pretty old school though, so for those completely unfamiliar with early/pre-web 2.0, it might not look very appealing at first. However, I'd say don't let that stop you! If anything, it's a good opportunity to learn a bit of code without pressure.

You can also create communities, which as you might have guessed is very important to me. When creating one, you can set up whether everyone can join, everyone can ask to join but has to be approved by a community admin or to limit the access to those you have personally invited. Like for your own journal, communities are completely customizable, and Dreamwidth allows adult content.

I'm not sure you can top DW communities in terms of functionalities—aside from making a forum—but it's not as intuitive as Pillowfort (though in exchange you get more customization). You're also more limited regarding image hosting (see here). That said, hosting services exist, many are free, and that's without mentioning that you can post on Twitter and the like and use the picture link in your DW posts. I don't think many will only use Dreamwidth anyway.

► Cohost: I was expecting nothing when I registered earlier today, but this is an overall good surprise: it's Tumblr, but better.

More control of what you see. More user-friendly UI. It's not fucking blue. Adult content allowed. You can change your main blog page and make it private.

The only two downsides I'd mention here would be that you can't customize your blog page appearance and you have to wait for one or two days before being able to post. Although if it means less bots, I'd rather wait.

And this ends my rather non-exhaustive tour of the social media/blogging/journaling platforms. If you catch any mistakes let me know. I didn't dive deep, this was just me sharing my thoughts.

(As far as I know, they all allow adult content and give you tools to not see it if you don't want to.)

[ahcoffeebeans]

moving to cohost!

well everyone – I'll be doing most of my posting on cohost.org ! I suggest you make the move – its out of the invite-only phase and doesn't actively punish its transfem users

I'll still reblog and post stuff occassionally – just with a link to the cohost version 😔😔! I'm just tired of the endless deluge of transphobia on my feed.

anyway, if you make the move and you're a mutual, make sure to shoot me an ask (over there) so I can follow you back!

I'm also on Discord! if you're a mutual, we're probably already talking to each other or are in the same servers. catch you on the flipside! I'm also thinking of starting a patreon – we'll see!

[funwalker]

Rigging....

[Another crosspost from cohost. The original was posted on Feb. 17, 2024. I forget to post about them here, but I do make vtubers as my main source of income. I figured more people might like to see this.]

Complex mouth rigging + Added in some animation smears.

Since @Isa-ah asked how I did it, I'll just do a quick breakdown here. The mouth is made of three layers: the line for the top lip, the line for the bottom lip, and the mask for inside the mouth (which the tongue is clipped to). If you use the deform path tool to draw a path while multiple meshes are selected, it groups those meshes together so that they all move together. It's pretty difficult to get everything to behave the first go round, and your mesh needs to be set up in a particular way, which is why the mask for the mouth has very limited geometry in a sort of zigzag pattern so that any vertices in the middle wouldn't get left behind. This geometry can be further subdivided later, but it works best fairly low poly to start with.

I basically just drag the corners of the mouth in so that the geometry collapses in on itself to be really small. I use both the deform path and also the temporary deform tool to collapse the faces pretty tightly. So the widest mouth has the full geometry, the mid-sized one has the outer two lines collapsed in to the corners of the mouth, and the smallest one has the next two lines collapsed in.

Usually this can create a "tearing" effect on the exported model (where the smaller faces are collapsed, the more white bleeds into low opacity or anti-aliased faces), so sometimes I cover the collapsed geometry with another mask, but it can probably also be minimized using vtube studio's "get rid of white outlines" feature.

There's also still a bit of cleanup required since the deform path usually forgets about some vertices, but it really does feel like magic when you learn to do it properly. (Also sorry if some of this explanation was confusing... I did my best without just making a whole tutorial video. Haha)

[canmom]

looking again at bluesky - kind of weirdly slow load times, idk what's up with that? and the vibe feels way too much like twitter (inevitably). deeply normiecoded. i might post my stuff on there but i don't think I'll be comfy treating it as 'home'.

cohost might be worth a shot but it feels like a drama bomb waiting to explode. on some level i feel like you actually want the admins of a social media site to be distant and have minimal interference in the day to day affairs. cohost frontloads a lot of rhetoric about being a better leftist way of doing software, and that ironically makes me worry about its stability. at best they may soon exercise their own divine right to capriciously ban people based on the rumour mill. at worst i anticipate some falling out within the dev team that brings the whole thing down. also not sure how it handles spam, moderation at scale etc. fundamentally i don't see much reason to think it will be better than tumblr.

tbh i probably need to just stop using social media as much. it eats up a lot of time and to what end? hopefully i will be able to rebuild some kind of irl friend group once I'm set up in Glasgow. if not...

idk it would be a shame to sacrifice all my connections on here. I'm grateful to everyone who reads my stuff, i won't be deleting the archive. but it feels like a sinking ship. i just don't know an obvious better place to go.

[imptwins]

Why making any concessions to puritan rhetoric is a bad idea

(note for the uninitiated: 'anti' is short for 'anti-shipper', 'anti-ship', or 'anti-fan'; in this context it refers to people who get very vocally militant about opposing dark kinks/problematic ships in media, especially creative fandom spaces. Proship is simply the opposite, people who vocally believe people should be free to make/indulge in whatever as long as a line is drawn between fiction and reality.)

(note 2: this was written for cohost, i cbf rewording it lol)

I very often see people - both websites and individuals - making a concession to the people who come up to them yelling about problematic kinks and guilt by association and 'why didn't you block this person' blah blah blah. It's happened with a few BNFs (big-name fans) in the UTDR scene lately, I've seen it from artists I respect, from friends, hell I used to be in this camp myself. And, of course, it happened to this website about a year back, and the conversation has come up again recently due yet another tumblr exodus.

It makes sense. The most common stuff that antis go after is stuff very few people are into: lolisho/cub, ferals, heavy gore, heavy noncon. It's niche, the real-world applications are unquestionably vile, it's very easy to just say 'I also find this icky regardless of whether I really believe that all people into it are secret criminals, so, I'll just block the people who they say are bad and move on.' I can't tell you the amount of times I've seen someone respond to proship/antiship discourse with "I'm an adult with a job." Going to bat for this content is high risk, low reward. You're not going to make friends, you're going to lose them. YOU WILL LOSE SUBSCRIBER, etc. As a result of all this it's very easy to assume that anyone defending it must be into it.

But I'm not. I'm a writer who often deals with darker subjects, but most of the first-on-the-list anti stuff, I'm not into at all. I'm not into ferals or gore period, noncon I like purely as character exploration, lolisho I can enjoy from the perspective of what I call 'trauma repair.' There's probably a proper term for it. But the tl;dr is I've never been actively aroused by any of these things, not in fantasy and especially not otherwise. Whenever I write them, it's just fascination or character analysis. Whenever I have a 'this character can be any age you want' fic, in my head, they're 18+. Writing noncon is a weird challenge for me because I'm constantly battling with the alternate ending in my head where the victim breaks free, beats the shit out of their captor, etc. This isn't me trying to claim virtue through this, just stating my position.

So… Why do I go to bat for these things? Why do I get annoyed when websites block lolisho, when artists have 'proship DNI' in their bio, etc? It's lost me a couple friends, it's certainly cost me followers and general reach, it's gotten me blocked by countless people I respected the work of. It's earned me a few callout posts, multiple with 1k+ followers, and one particular obsessed stalker who tells anyone who will listen that I actually groomed a child (despite all evidence otherwise). It's caused me a really significant amount of trouble. Why die on this hill?

The answer's kind of simple, when you boil it down: fictional fantasies either affect reality, or they don't. This is why I go to bat for things I'm not into, but it's also why whenever you see someone making concessions to antis, it's never enough. Cohost banned lolisho last year (I believe it's still banned?? Unclear), but the antis still make constant callout posts about this site and its owners. Some of the team have even gone out of their way to state very firmly that they're against these things, they've gone above and beyond just 'ban the bad thing' and broadcast their views about the morality of it. You'll frequently see artists write some huge apology or clarification when a callout post hits, usually involving some variation of 'I do not condone x y z and think it's disgusting.'

It's never enough.

But it makes sense, when you think about it. By drawing a line, you have essentially agreed with the core angle of the people screaming at you: that a fictional fantasy affects reality. That it's dangerous. You will, by necessity, now have people start to work down the list. Incest, ferals, gore, noncon, sure. Any relationship with any kind of skewed power dynamic. Sibling-coded, minor-coded, postminor nonsense. All of these things are less easily agreed to than lolisho, I've seen countless porn artists concede with the core idea that lolisho is immoral, then they act like it's unreasonable that people just keep going until they're being told that a knot on a furry is bestiality, or a 23 year old dating an autistic 21 year old is pedophilia. These are genuine examples of things I've seen people dogpiled for. Seriously look up "postminor" if you want to see how bad this can get, on top of being absurd it's one-for-one the kind of gross ableist shit that Autism Speaks gets into.

But YOU AGREED TO THEM. You agreed with the core concept, that the fantasy must reflect reality. Of course they're going to keep demanding more; by the logic you used to agree with them, you are doing immoral things. If fictional lolisho is immoral, so are the rest of them. It's way easier to look at your average pic on baraag or inkbunny and go 'oh, eugh, vile,' but at the end of the day the cutesy played-for-laughs sleeping kiss, the dubcon bondage that you don't call dubcon, or the meet-cute where they're a bit too drunk, they're all immoral fantasies.

That's not even to get into non-sexual stuff. If the lolisho fantasy is wrong, so is running down civilians in GTA. Suddenly your notifs are full of 16 year-old Jack Thompsons with rainbow flags in their bios.

This really is an all-or-nothing debate. If fictional fantasies affect reality, then even the immoral fantasies that you're personally comfortable with, the cutesy coy playful ones, must be immoral. If fictional fantasies don't affect reality, then even the ones that make you uncomfortable, the ones that have you scrambling to close your browser in case the feds are looking, must be fine.

It should have become very obvious over the last decade that you cannot fence-sit on this. There's a huge internal disagreement going on among progressive/queer/compassion-minded people, on whether these kind of things affect reality, or whether they don't. You can learn to apathetically dismiss stuff that squicks you, or you can learn to sanitize everything you ever make so there's not a trace of contentious theming left. Immoral fantasies are immoral, or only immoral actions are immoral.

You're going to have to pick one.

[rain-element]

Right, so it's about time I stopped slacking and made a pinned post

Hi, I'm Isolde, but I also go by Izzy or Rain. I'm a multi-instrumentalist and aspiring voice actor. My pronouns are She/they, I'm 26 years old, Transfemme, hesitantly poly, vaguely bisexual, and am currently dating my wonderful idiot gf @maniacallaughter

I'll post just about any old horseshit I feel like, including but not limited to: Warhammer, Music, memes, hornyposting, and so on.

There will be 18+ stuff here, and while I can't stop minors from liking, reblogging, etc. I kindly ask that you don't interact with me for both of our sakes.

I don't really like putting all of my personal information out in the open, so if you'd like to know more about my hobbies, kinks, musical tastes, or whatever suits your fancy, feel free to hop into my DMs/ask box for a chat.

I despise social media by and large, and will probably stay on Tumblr until they decide to kill me for it, but in light of recent events I've decided to make a cohost and a sharky account where you can find me.

I BLOCK BLANK BLOGS, PORN BLOGS, SISSY BLOGS, AND BIGOTS. MOVE ON OR BECOME A BETTER PERSON.

Cohost/@Rain-Element

Sharky/@RainElement@transfem.social

[miras-dogshet-pile25101]

Everybody in XFOHV is associated with Whitey

(Also, the person on the bottom left is basically my OC, because I couldn't figure out what person I can add with Two but also that she's also the cohost of TPOT and I'll probably post lore about her in my main blog)

[miss-wizard]

for those interested, im also @miss-wizard on cohost and @ kate__wizard on twitter. I'll probably move if avery doesn't get some peace soon. if it ends up coming to that, I'll change my pinned post to reflect it.

[shinesurge]

hey my mastodon is a nightmare hellscape i don't recommend you follow BUT if you missed it last time we were all panicking i do have a cohost! i love it there tbh. the only reason i fell out of using it is the dash was too quiet lmao. I'm shinesurge over there as usual, i'm not leaving tumblr until i have to but gonna make another go at keeping this other blog going alongside.

if tumblr DOES die i'll probably set up a kidd commander update blog on cohost, but other than that I'm sticking with what we got for now. There is already a Mastodon account that posts updates and an instagram too, although i do not maintain a presence on instagram so don't message me please. Additionally: the discord server pings everybody whenever a new page is posted, and the main site has a big ol rss button right at the top you can use if you'd REALLY like to play it safe and also stop making new social media accounts every six months

This is maybe a weird thing to bring up, but since a lot of artists have made it a huge pain in the ass for me to keep up with them and some of y'all are smarter than me I'm gonna throw it out there: If you ever migrate to another platform I'm not on and you feel strongly about it, I'm totally cool with y'all setting up bots or something that post whenever the comic updates. I'd just like to ask politely that you don't pretend to be me or speak on my behalf there, and please link to the site instead of rehosting the update itself. It should be evident since we're making this post at all, but I have good reasons for wanting to funnel my audience towards the hub i have control over rather than rely on other websites to hold my audience for me lol

Again, not leaving, but if YOU are there are some options for you. Thanks!