#idk. there's just so many unnecessary barriers and assumptions

[senadimell]

I'm normally a huge fan of USPS, and I still am, but it is very unfriendly to people without stable addresses. You can't forward your mail to a house you don't permanently live in (and have proof of residence in, like your name on a lease). If you want to forward your mail somewhere, your billing address has to either be the place you are sending it to or the place you just came from.

You can't get a P.O. box without proof of residence.

that said, however, I did learn that if you do not have an address, you can have mail sent to Your Name, General Mail, Town/Zipcode and pick it up at the post office.

[impassiveesper]

What was your first impression of the roleplay community on Tumblr? And what’s your impression of it now?

Mun’s Asks: RP Edition

1.) What was your first impression of the roleplay community on Tumblr? And what’s your impression of it now?

[OOF STRAP IN INTREPID]

I’ve been on this hellsite since the beginning but I really only started RPing here after a few years.  Probably in 2012 or 2013? I can’t remember exactly when but I remember being very intimidated by the idea of RP on this platform in particular. There is a bit of a steep learning curve in terms of etiquette here that is even steeper when you factor in the near requirement for tumblr-literacy.  Like you basically need xkit to RP and you need to understand what kinds of asks get eaten and when/how cuts work and what behaviors do and don’t cause notifications and how ask posts work and how the block/blacklist features do and dont work and what tags tumblr will and wont index etc etc.  When you’re a tumblr old head it’s easy to forget newcomers don’t immediately know things like that. It’s part of the reason why I tend to be very basic in my approach compared to what is popular at the moment. I was one of those fabled newcomers at one point.

I don’t really think that tumblr RPC is any better or worse now than it was back then, just different. A lot of what’s popular now was a thing back then, but now it’s more commonplace in a much smaller population of RPers. I wouldn’t say that the RPC has many new problems as much as I would say the old problems have intensified.

When I started out I was in a fandom that was very cliquey and made me feel like shit a lot and those spaces probably still exist on tumblr but the difference is I know what my boundaries are and what behaviors I will and wont tolerate on my dash.  Overall the RPC is much better at talking about things like that than it used to be imo. That same fandom I just shit on was also a lot of fun and taught me that it was okay to not take RP too seriously and not be too worried about if it looks pretty enough or was fancy enough. I’m really grateful for people who would RP with me back then even though I unknowingly broke a lot of tumblr RPC’s unwritten rules.  

That’s why it’s very important to me as a seasoned RPer to be as approachable a blog as I can possibly be. In this the lords year of 2020 I still feel myself being set in my ways and avoiding trends that are ultimately harmless, but there is an extent to which I have to participate in order to be courteous to others so I do my best to be open minded about Neo RPC Trends. I end up being of two minds just about everything that’s popular right now. 

Take for example reblog karma / I AM NOT A MEME SOURCE type rules. I think that’s shits dumb, you guys can reblog anything you want from me, in fact reblogging it from me heightens the chances of me sending you one whether you sent me one or not. I’m not gonna get mad at you for using the website as it is intended by the devs to be used, but also if somebody else’s rules say it bugs them to have memes rbed from them, then I think their feelings are more important than my opinion on the matter. People are more important to me than policies in cases like these, so of course I’ll reblog the meme from the source instead of you or w/e.  

But at the same time, that idea about feelings also includes the feelings of people who are new to RP and maybe don’t even know the etiquette well enough to know they’re messing up.  There’s a lot to get mad about in the current state of tumblr RP but even when I agree that I want this particular tedium done, I don’t really agree with the idea that I should make it a rule that forces other people to stay away from me. Yes I dont want to be ponging an ask post back and forth. Yes I want our posts cut.  But also, I wont get mad if you rb an ask instead of putting it in a new post. I’ll just put in a new post myself. I wont get mad if you dont cut a post, I’ll just cut it myself. It’s not hard to do.

Take also graphics, banners, and all manner of fancy formatting. RPC has really really leaned into that a lot more than back in 2013. On the one hand, I think that’s great. People are so creative. Their stuff looks so pretty, and I really like the work people put in. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily, but on the other hand it does heighten that already steep barrier for entry imo, especially in circles that require it and judge based upon it. For me it’s more important to avoid looking like that’s an expectation of mine. Like, I can do that stuff. I do sometimes, actually. I make icons in batches of hundreds, I take commissions for RP graphics, don’t tell anybody. I’m a freelance illustrator and I know my way around the adobe creative suite-- I CAN make these things and I do for other people, but I can’t be called to do it for myself in most cases. When I see a blog with very nice graphics I immediately assume they don’t care to interact with me. In fact I still tend to unfairly think this even when they’ve shown me otherwise. If we don’t have a long term rapport and you’re a blog with nice graphics and I reply to your posts, what you’re seeing is a neurotic prey animal that is afraid of you signaling alarm.  For whatever reason I tend to interpret very fancy looking blogs as confident and happy in their own existing bubbles with no particular interest in newcomers. I know that’s not always a fair assumption to make--it’s a problem with me that I need to work on--but also I know other people deal with similar feelings. That’s why I don’t feel particularly called to make much beyond the most basic of graphics most of the time and I’m highly avoidant of anybody who seems like graphics are a requirement for interactions with them. Not everybody has photoshop. Not everybody is skilled at that sort of thing. I don’t want people to think that I will judge their style based on what my own style looks like, so I don’t invest much in it. Again, there’s nothing wrong with graphics, but it’s more important to me than anything else that I am approachable and I make other people on the dash as comfortable as I can. I’m glad that it seems like a requirement for cohesive graphics has waned over the last few years.

But, yea. I’d say this duality--the “this is cool but also I have reasons I feel I shouldn’t participate”--is how I feel about pretty much everything that’s big right now.  And like don’t even get me started on the anxiety RPC has around things like soft blocking and mutuals and multiples and “quality”. These things in particular aren’t that new, but a lot of Neo RPC etiquette and trends surrounding those types of anxieties represent a whole quagmire that I try to avoid as much as I can, often to a fault, and lately I’ve realized that in my blanket avoidance I am actually missing out on some things I really should consider doing. My icons could do with some light color retouching. I do want to get my tags together eventually. Permanent starter calls, interests checkers, banners to make asks more easily rebloggable-- these things are functional and can be fun and make RP easier and help people feel emboldened to approach. Like, there are a lot of newish things that are actually cool and I should maybe consider trying them out, but being an oldster has really made me slow to adapt.

So yeah, idk if that was clear at all lol. Take these many, many unnecessary words to say that again, I don’t necessarily think that the current RPC is better or worse in an objective sense, but I do think a lot of the anxieties and trends that were starting in the old RPC have really caught fire now in a way that makes them hard to abstain from even if you want to. Since the RPC is so much smaller now than it was in 2013, you really do have to play ball on these things more than you used to have to in order to find partners. There is a lot of etiquette and anxiety that goes unspoken in the RPC and so I often avoid fairly harmless RPC trends as a means of mitigating that anxiety and clarifying the unspoken as much as I can. Tumblr already has a barrier for entry by being a broken website that hates its rp users, I don’t need to pile on any extra factors to make that barrier to entry look any taller.

[sanguinesprout]

The sky is a beautiful blue today~ (Some updates, nicer things, random snippets of memories and why I write about weather so much lol)

I was thinking maybe I should write about something lighter, like the things I did recently, in particular the good things, my small triumphs and such c: 

I’ve spent a lot more time out with my sister (and sometimes her bf and my mum) recently, especially in the case of going shopping~! I bought quite a lot of nice tops with interesting and motivating text based designs on them (maybe I’ll photograph them sometime), and some of them were on sale too yay! :3 Usually I try and avoid going out too many times in a row or when I don’t feel mentally prepared beforehand but I went and it was alright! Though some of the times I had no choice as I had a doctors appointment, but instead of just going home I went to the shops or the supermarket afterwards and had a nice long browse around~ 

I used to remember a long long time ago when I was younger I really did not enjoy shopping and would always constantly be asking when we could go home lol but now it’s pretty fun (apart from the fact I’m actually really poor). Also a long time ago I would trail around after my sis or whoever, but now I go off on my own and look at whatever I feel but sometimes my sis trails after me instead lol and likes to moan about me looking at things too slowly quite a lot. It makes me anxious but I told her about it so she does it less or I’ll tell her to go look at something else, cause I like taking my sweet time yo >3< I don’t mean like I only started doing this recently haha, but it did take quite a few years before I felt confident enough to go around on my own and actually enjoy it. I would go shopping completely on my own and take public transport after college and uni sometimes and such, I feel I’ve kind of taken a step back since then but I’m not back at square one at least I guess, it’s something!

I still feel awkward and anxious when people are blocking the way of an aisle or when they’re looking at the same rack of stuff, but I’m gonna try and push these feelings aside, be more assertive and so and so. There were also times where certain unusual situations were kind of traumatic for me and maybe I’ll write or draw about them sometime, but they’re not important and I shouldn’t keep thinking back on them and feeling hurt. I still sometimes get that ‘lost kid that has to look down every aisle and worries everyone already paid and left’ feeling after wandering around when I go to the supermarket with my parents lol, because they are all about being quick so they can go home and get ready for work and stuff, but having a phone now unlike when I was a kid and didn’t have one makes everything suck much less hah take that!

Anyways, back to the present! The weather has been pretty flip floppy lately, on some few random days the weather was real hot and some super rainy and cold and some calm and neutral, like today. I really love when it spontaneously rains so hard and immediately after the sky is such a wonderful clear blue, I feel it’s analogous to when you have are suddenly overcome with negative emotions and once they pass you feel at ease and can think with clarity again aka. the calm after the storm. I really like the weather and making weird metaphors about it as you could probably tell already lolol. The weather is just something that’s always there, something that affects mood but is also so moody itself, something everyone experiences and uses for small talk and something so mundane but also wonderful and unpredictable (unless you look at the forecast everyday, I mean it’s real easy to check on the phone widget but I don’t haha, as much as I talk about it I don’t worship the weather channel or anything lol) ^^ 

Oh also in relation to this, when I said I was going to write this blog a bit more like a diary, it made me think of a time when I was little and my mum bought me a diary book. It was a simple Winnie the Pooh diary with a gold lock and guess what I wrote in it hahahaha I wrote in huge writing on each page a 3-4 word sentence of how the weather was that day LOL It was super wasteful and my sis and mum were like what even?! XD I’ve had lots of diaries since then and lots of attempts at writing about actual things but I’ve never been able to keep it up past a few days. I just hope this blog doesn’t die out like my past diaries or become a brief weather description collection either hahaha. Today’s post title is kinda like a tribute or slightly more advanced version of my kiddie diary x3

Okay enough about that lol! One of the days recently I went to the park~! I did say I wanted to go and my sister suggested it. It was some time in the afternoon on a weekday so it wasn’t to busy. It was pleasant and refreshing to go walkies sine I hadn’t gone there for a while, even though I really really hate all kinds of bugs (and things that have bugs in them, like trees) and shriek and flail at their presence lol. I saw some pretty flowers, sat on the see saw with my sis briefly (which I was nervous about cuz there were kids around and well I’m not a kid anymore *sob* but I will always be a kid at heart and so will my sis, so I did it anyways! Yolo, gotta sit my but on all the things next time XD). I also saw the duckies! Or well I think they were actually geese but they were so pretty and derpy and their little floofy babies omg! ;w; Soooo cute!! I definitely want to go see them again sometime :D I’ve come to kind of dislike zoos (and aquariums too) because I feel so bad seeing some of them so distressed looking and it feels unfair that they have to live in such a contained and artificial space without choice, but when there’s wildlife living free like the duckies in the lake, it’s just such a pleasant thing to witness.

Oh also some good today was I cooked my own breakfast...kinda... It was just a fried egg with tuna in it pretty much and there was rice too (made in a rice cooker not by me lol) but I cooked the egg part! It takes so much convincing for me to be able to do just this. My mum and dad don’t like me hanging around the kitchen because ‘you’re too slow’ and ‘you’ll make a mess’ etc. I know they keep babying me and want things to go smoothly their way... but it needs to change! I don’t want to be dependant forever :c I was persistent this time and I’m glad! :D And I also suggested that maybe everyday I could maybe learn something new from them, whether it be just some small technique or a recipe or whatever. I am lacking in well... life skills because I was never taught or allowed to do certain things, like cooking for example. I can make something easy like instant ramen or pasta, but they usually handle all meals and don’t let me experiment or cook for reals. The only thing they really trust me with is making tea and sandwiches and the only time I cooked something from a recipe was cooking class at school a long time ago lol. Sometimes I help my sister bake stuff, but they get annoyed at her too for being in the way and stuff, but she isn’t a weak spirited person like me so she just carries on haha.

I can watch video tutorials all I want but it’ll never be useful without actual execution and practice, you know! >< My dad is a chef and is particularly prideful of his cooking, and also quick to insult and get annoyed for small mistakes, so it’s gonna be tough but I’m gonna try anyways! Lately I’ve been trying harder to just chat and bond with my dad more, we watch drama/animation series together at supper which is nice~! (Even though he feigns reluctance to watch and that he’s interested sometimes lol). Conversation is particularly hard because of the language barrier, but if I make the conversation about learning language like I did the other day and maybe now even about learning cooking stuff, then maybe things will go at a much better pace :D 

I also drew some things I was kind of happy about lately, and didn’t give up on trying to interact online even though I really wanted to! I need to get my stuff organised and start posting stuff! I feel like the longer I leave it, the less it’s making me wanna do it, stop it perfection, you’re unnecessary! x^x I really hate having an empty account, it makes me feel like a creep (like on youtube it’s okay but on other places it’s unusual, right?) ;^; Something I keep forgetting is that there is no rules and no obligations for me (or anyone else) to do anything or feel anything. There’s no right or wrong, silly self! I need to stop worrying so much and just go for it! Yolo the hell out of everything (maybe that’s not quite the right phrase lol) and just stop falling into the paralysis by analysis trap! X3 Imma try harder! ò^ó

Uh uhhh before I end this, I have some update-y stuff on my therapy situation... I have my first appointment tomorrow! I’m so nervous!! xAx The funny thing though (or well, not really), is that when my doctor was giving me options on who to see, I could either go for the general therapist who works in the same facility or to go for the referral service for a more specific recommendation. I opted for the second in hope that I could see someone with a specialism in idk... AVPD or personality disorders (if there is a such thing), but it seems I’ve ended up going full circle and ending up getting recommended to the general therapist back here >< I mean, at least it’s convenient and better than nothing I suppose... Anyways, I don’t know how it’ll go so I shouldn’t make any assumptions or have any wild expectations. I can do this! It’ll be okay! I’m glad I got a female therapist, because I get even more nervous around guys and the one I had in the past was ahhh idk... maybe I’ll write about it with whatever I write about after the app tomorrow. I just hope it goes well! 

Don’t give up! You can do it! Have a nice day~! :3