#to help me and it did help. it was a life changing experience

[thefrogman]

Back in the olden days, if you used the "keep reading" function on a Tumblr-dot-com post, it would

not get very many notes.

At all.

I am not sure exactly why.

I think people hated pressing an extra thing.

But maybe it was also a psychological phenomenon where, given the choice, they were unwilling to trust me with their time.

But if I sucked them in with a good story or a compelling image, they would get serious FOMO.

When I created a super high effort post-of-length I would get comments like, "This was way too long but before I realized it I was reading the last sentence."

That was a really good feeling.

I used to do tests to figure out the best posting strategies and I think I figured out you'd lose about 90% of your notes if you did a "keep reading" post.

So that notion was ingrained in my brain again and again from when I was very note-obsessed and I have since avoided the "keep reading" option almost like a conditioned response.

Just seeing that squiggly line appear still induces a Pavlovian fear.

But that was probably a decade ago and I did a new experiment. My story about replacing my mailbox did reasonably well with a strategically clickbaity "keep reading."

This was a promising result due to the fact that some people like to send me hate for writing a lengthy post.

I recently got a death threat for writing too much, which was a fun reminder of my M&M days (I melted men's rights activists' brains with a poorly worded analogy and they launched a years long harassment campaign).

It seems in present-era-Tumblr-dot-com many more people prefer pressing an extra thing rather than scrolling a bunch on their smartphone. The collective behavior has changed. And maybe I don't need to use tricks and running gags in order to get folks to "keep reading".

Unfortunately I started writing that ring light post a few months ago so I wasn't able to include that in the experiment. But I am going to try using the keep reading function in the future and as long as the average number of folks that usually read my longer posts continue to read my posts, that will be the standard approach.

I also tag these posts with "long post" so you can flag that if you wish.

While I am no longer in the audience-building phase of my Tumblr career, these essays and stories and educational posts take a considerable amount of time and effort to create, so I do want to make sure everyone who wants to read them is able to. But posts without hearts and reblogs can quickly die a gruesome algorithmic death. Even my most ardent followers would tell me things were not showing up on their dash. (I think replies help mitigate that, so if you like a long post, you can help with engagement.)

The collective noun is a "business" of ferrets.

Do you want to see a business of ferrets ready to do some business?

KEEP READING

I love writing and it is a huge catharsis for me. And I love sharing any knowledge I feel like I have the earned expertise to speak on with authority (technology, photography, light, fun ferret facts, etc). I wish I had the energy to be a photography teacher, but long posts on Tumblr are probably the best I can do for now.

I know my posts are super long, but I try to make them as fun and informationally dense as I possibly can. I don't like wasting people's time if I can avoid it. Though maybe I should trust my follower's attention span a bit more. I have this fear that if I am not constantly entertaining, people will click away or unfollow.

I think a good business for a business of ferrets would be selling pool noodles that look like ferrets.

So as long as I get roughly the same amount of notes I will do the keep reading. And then maybe people can lay off on the mean comments and occasional requests to end my own life because I bloviated about soft light.

100% true ferret fact..

If you ask a ferret what their business is, they will crawl on your shoulder and whisper in your ear...

[inbabylontheywept]

I love your writing. It’s the type of writing that I love bc other than being easy to read, I admire it bc it accomplishes what I struggle with. It uses few words yet conveys across the idea efficiently, vagueness to its benefit.

Have you heard the phrase “I want to distill myself like poets do”? It comes from a tumblr post of someone trying to express the same thing as me rn.

Anyway the other part of what I wanted to say is that I’m autistic, and when I try to write, I always succumb to the urge to add as many details and overexplanations as possible to avoid being misunderstood. You’re autistic too, but your writing shines in doing the opposite, so I was wondering if you struggled with this too, and how you got better, or if your flavor of autism simply doesn’t manifest in this way and this isn’t a problem to you

Unfortunately, I do naturally tend towards condensed formats. So some part of this is just natural for me. If it makes you feel better, I tried several times to make serials while doing HFY and I never succeeded. I've also tried several times to write books, and I always just get kind of stuck. It's one of my big regrets, so if you have any experience in those, I'd love to hear it. Same from anyone else reading this, actually - if you've made the jump from short stories to long form, I'd like to know how you managed.

Still, despite it being a natural thing for me, I can give you three activities that I've done that improved my short story work very much.

First, improv classes. Attending them will help your writing in ways you will not believe, and also, as an autist, that shit's better than OT. My parents signed me up for some in the summer of my fifth grade year, and they were legit life changing. Way less social anxiety, better writing, I could sing their praises all day. If you do one thing on this list, do this.

Second, write poetry. I do not consider myself a poet, but I attend a weekly poetry writing club, and it has noticeably improved my prose. Find one and go. As you get better, try and constrain the poetry you write to things like rhyme and meter. Writing with artificial constraints is amazing for teaching people to be focused and direct.

And if you have room for a third thing, maybe try finding a way to do extemporaneous public speaking besides the improv. I grew up Mormon, which involves absolutely insane amounts of public speaking from an early age, but I also did stuff like that in middle school NAL and high school speech and debate. Those all helped. They were stressful, and not terribly fun, but they did help, and it's a good skill to have.

I love talking shop, so thanks for asking! And just to reiterate my request from before, anyone that's jumped from short stories to novel length works, please, tell me your secrets. Plz.

[tirfpikachu]

you are not "detrans" you are cis

i'm definitely what you'd call cis too! though cis/bio womanhood is not at all what most tras assume it's like. especially detrans cis/bio womanhood. and for me, the label detrans helped me find others like me. it kept me from hating my own guts. it helped me find a community of ppl who actually understand what i've been through and don't think i'm a freak.

living as trans for 13 years changed what mainstream tras would call my gender identity forever. it also is a way for me to find people who also went thru what i went thru. i get a lot of DMs from other detrans women and detrans men who lived as trans or even transitioned partially/fully like me (i was on testosterone for a bit and have an awkward bit of annoying af stubble T_T gotta get expensive laser for that... it can be isolating!). to me, i will never again be a fully cis woman. i will forever be affected with having struggled with intense dysphoria for 13+ years. i also feel like my cis womanhood in general has forever been changed with me having rejected it and then finding it again - it does NOT feel the same way as my girlhood did. in girlhood, i didn't give a shit what people thought girls or boys needed to do. doubly so because i was autistic. then puberty came, and the usual teenage girl and/or afab experience of needing to conform to cispatriarchal expectations came, and i freaked the fuck out about my boobs, about how boys were suddenly treating me and the things my shitty female relatives told me were "becoming a woman" (all very conservative notions of womanhood) and it grossed me out so badly, on top of grappling with being into other afab people, and i just totally distanced myself from girlhood at all. i gave up on making my own scrungly, gender nonconforming version of girlhood. girlhood felt like it had no room for people like me.

and so i kicked it out of my mind. i obsessed over becoming a boy. some trans boys, ofc, become happily trans men. for me, though, it personally was an escape. i was trans-identified for all the wrong reasons and it really fucked me up. it made my internalized lesbophobia so much worse, to the point where i even started identifying as pansexual/bisexual (PREPOSTEROUS thing for me since i had never ever in my entire life been attracted to a man or someone living as male in society... but i was into non-transitioned transmasc people, so i thought i couldn't possibly be lesbian!). for me, the trans identity was a bandaid, it was a crutch in the worst possible way. detrans people aren't trying to make trans people look bad. we're not trying to convert y'all, we don't give a shit. we're too busy grappling with our newfound connection to cis womanhood/cis manhood and dealing with transition-related issues.

we NEED to find fellow detrans folks or we'll go batshit crazy with shame at having made a mistake, guilt at being weaponized without our consent against the trans community, and just fucking hating how hrt/surgeries affected our bodies and trying to come to terms with that and learning to love our bodies as they are despite it all.

detrans cis womanhood will never be normie cis womanhood.

detrans cis manhood will never be normie detrans manhood.

living as trans for years affects you DEEPLY. trans people should know this first-hand. detrans folks, simply by starting to live as cis / bio men/women again, cannot suddenly erase all those years as if they never existed. we just can't. i'm sorry. i tried. dear goddess i really fucking tried harder than you'll ever know. and so did so many of my detrans friends and my darling detrans girlfriend.

but detrans people need other detrans people.

mainstream tras don't understand us.

cis/bio radfems who aren't detrans often misrepresent us.

we need eachother.

and our voices NEED to be heard too.

both radfems AND mainstream tras don't get it.

detrans & desisted folks NEED sisterhood & siblinghood.

only detrans women understand other detrans women.

only detrans men understand other detrans men.

i will always be seeking out lost detrans sisters. and i will always want to hear out my detrans brothers. i love my detrans/desisted community. we've been through really hard shit, we're more likely to be gay, more likely to be traumatized, more likely to be autistic. we're not what you think. and now you need to sit down and hear our stories. sorry. it has to happen. or feel free to block all detrans voices and plug your ears and go lalala! and now i'm not talking to you specifically anon, i don't want to put assumptions in your little mouth. but i'm talking to ALL mainstream trans activists, anti-radfems especially, who assume the very worst of us from the get-go. those who want detrans & desisted people to pretend we were always cis and normies who should pretend to not be deeply affected by our real lived detrans/desisted experiences. we will not shut up. we refuse to. both radblr and normie leftblr misrepresent us.

our voices matter. or, at the very least, we deserve to put detrans/desisted in our bios so we can find one another. shoutout to my detrans & desisted siblings!!! i love you!!!! <33

[afterthedreamer]

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[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Collection of edits from this comic with Disco Elysium dialogue.

[aroaceleovaldez]

Every description about Nico (especially the canon ones) describing him as “cold” can personally fight me. Nico is jaded, yes, and often closed-off and sometimes stand-offish and defensive but he is not "cold”. He cares SO SO SO MUCH about EVERYONE. He loves and cares with his entire heart constantly and that is a core part of his character. He doesn’t often make public shows of his affection but he takes care to be kind when it matters and doesn’t hide that he does care (usually, the only exception really being him being in the closet, but even then he only hid his crush specifically and not the fact that Percy is important to him). He fine with hugging his friends in front of a crowd and will sit with strangers at a campfire just so they’re not alone. I mean, heck, he’s an extrovert! We know this! He actively seeks out people and gets lonely very quickly and easily! If he can’t talk to living people he will chat with the dead! That’s how much he thrives on being social!

The only time Nico has ever been actively “cold” was the couple of months between TTC and BoTL when he was actively mourning Bianca. Nico is not “cold.” He loves so much and he does show it, just in his own way.

[sapphosboy]

Was talking today with a friend about how monumental it was for me as a trans person and a lesbian who was uncomfortably presenting feminine, to meet my butch best friend in college, and how just being friends with them, and hearing about their experience as a butch really allowed me the space to feel comfortable exploring my own gender expression and identity, and how I feel like I’m a more complete person for having known them because they made me feel so incredibly safe in the journey and I now feel so much more comfortable presenting the way I want to and not the way I expect people to want me to, and the friend I was talking to said that I was that for them. So dress as faggy as you fucking want to and be as loud as you want to about it. It’s your god-given right to be DRIPPING with dykery and transgenderism because you never know if you’re going to be that lightbulb moment or safe queer space for someone!

[futurewife]

I should be giving out selfship agony aunt advice sometimes I feel a little too unserious and unbothered by it all and am very secure in and quite internally validated by my own selfships. however I am thankful for my biggest fans xxx like you do not have to follow my goofy silly fictional boy chronicles. But you do and hopefully part of this is you enjoy my vibe and personality even without the selfshipping. I'm just here to broadcast my massive crushes on guys and fantasise and virtually scrapbook in my e-shrine. me and my fictional boyfriend who loves me forever and ever cause I dreamt us up perfectly :)

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

Yesterday I got the chance to go on the zip line, and I'm desperately afraid of heights but I still want to do things at heights, like the climbing wall or a high ropes course. And I've tried both of those things but quit very soon or before even starting, because I can't fucking do heights. But last night I got the chance to do zip line and I really wanted to, but was incredibly terrified.

So one of my dearest friends, a woman I deeply like and love, first reassured me (I was afraid I was too heavy for the zip line) and then said "Would it help if I went with you?" And yeah, she's one of the sweetest people I've ever met and she's an incredibly comforting presence, of course I said yes.

So we walked up to the zip line platform, and this is her job so she's very good at reassuring people (usually little children, but it worked for me too) who are scared to go on the climbing wall or zip line. So as I was trying to comfort myself, she told me how it would work, and that I could just sit and the harness would hold me, so I tried that and it helped, and she told me I could just lift my legs and I'd go. So I did, and she went at the same time as me, and

My god, the anxiety and the thrill, flying through the air with her next to me, seeing her wave at me as we went, getting off at the end and her asking, "So do you want to do it again?" And wanting to do it again with her, it was one of the most amazing feelings I've ever felt. I truly felt like I could've done anything I wanted with her by my side.

[bookwyrminspiration]

i wish I'd written this down sooner so I could remember more of the details, but I'll never forget one of my first queer moments of connection, even though I didn't realize that's what it was until much later

when I was about 14, I changed my name publicly, and I didn't think much of it once I'd told my family. they were my main focus--I was going to a new school the next year, so no one would know or have questions, I wasn't very online, and I didn't know hardly anything about the queer community or anyone immersed in it. my side of things was done, but my parents (with permission) had been using my new name and informing others, like their friends and adults in my life, of the change

not long after I came out, I was helping rehearse for a puppet show at my Baha'i center, and in my area the vast majority of our community was older people, and it'd been a while since I'd seen some of them myself. but the community is small and close, and they'd known me since I was little, and my parents were talking, so word had spread. and at this rehearsal one of the older ladies, I think in her sixties or seventies, came up to me and asked to talk for a moment

I had no idea what she wanted, but in the corner away from everyone else she asked me why I had changed my name. and I got nervous and prepared to defend myself, but she was curious and polite, so I told her. I didn't feel like I fit as a girl, but I didn't feel like a boy either. I was something else. but my birthname felt like it put me in a category I didn't want to be in, so I changed my name to reflect that

I didn't expect her to understand, I thought she'd have questions, but this look of relief crossed her face and she put her hand to her chest, and I can't remember the exact words but I remember their meaning as she leaned in close and her voice got quiet: "you feel like that too? it's not just me?"

her question caught me off guard, and I had no idea what to think as I told her no, she wasn't alone in the feeling. and she confessed to me she'd always felt different but didn't know what her husband would think, didn't know there was anyone else like her who didn't feel like they fit. but that she was so glad to finally know it wasn't just her; she hugged me so tightly, and i think there were tears in her eyes

it was such a brief conversation, and I didn't think much of it at the time, but I nearly cry every time I remember it. I haven't seen her since because she moved, but I can't help imagining what it was like for her, the relief after decades of feeling wrong learning there's someone else out there like you. I don't know if she ever did anything else, if she changed her name or her pronouns (I’m referring to her same as everyone always has because she never said to do differently) or went looking for others once she knew she wasn't alone. but I'll always be so glad I got to share that with her, that I got to tell her it wasn't just her

the connection and comfort we can find in one other knows no boundaries, and there is no time limit to finding each other

[wychelm]

if there were just ONE word or concept I could communicate to animals it would be gift. I usually refill the birdbath twice a day and when the blackbirds come to bathe they watch me so warily. but I did it for you... it's a gift. exhausted bee my dear friend that spoon of sugar water is a gift and you don't have to be afraid. snails stuck in the watering can because his shell was too big to fit through the nozzle I'm going to get you out of there brother even though I'm sure being pushed back the way you came seems like some deep callous evil on my part. but I promise it's a gift. I don't even mind if you eat all my plants. I don't even mind if a bird eats YOU. as long as the suffering is minimal and the death contributes to life instead of being wasted. what else is there

[juniestar]

Oh my god one last thing my ex took me to outside lands and when we tried to watch lana del rey he laid down on the grass and had a “panic attack” (this was after months of him talking about how he didn’t like her) so we went to see foo fighters after a bit and he was FINE

[thedreadvampy]

oh boy the depression hole is deep and it is muddy

hahaha I fell into the classic trap! overidentify with your job and considering leaving it will trigger an existential crisis!!!!

[the-trans-dragon]

Hehehe >:3 got a kissie and some headpats from a pretty girl >:3 muahahahahahaha >:3

[imagineitdearies]

idk if it's too soon to ask this after the chap 19 (dear fucking christ), but! if eventually your boys get the opportunity to have an enjoyable round of sex - is it top/bottom/vers for Tyrus? (and dom/sub/switch if they ever go for anything spicier).

yes, i know forgive me this very uncouth question but the the guy (me) can't not be curious.

Hi anon!!

Maybe a tiny bit spoilery, but I can confirm there will be consensual, enjoyable sex between these two! But the rest I’ll leave to your own interpretation since the characters never use such labels lolol.

Haha and I forgive you, this fic really is the slowest of slow burns despite how much explicit content is in it 😅

[mechawolfie]

i can not begin to explain how much it hurts knowing i am barred from so many things ppl consider "normal" because of my upbringing