#Authentication and Authorization

[merchantservices444]

 Importance of the Credit Card Voice Authorization Phone Number

[mcromwell]

What if the art you want to make is TOO weird? I explore this conundrum in my newest blog post about wrangling my muse, being authentic, and being just a little too preoccupied with my imaginary friends.

[yakobssonarthall]

Woman with a Parasol by Claude Monet (1875), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

This iconic painting presents a moment both fleeting and timeless, where the figure of the mother hovers above the child, bathed in soft light, yet simultaneously elusive. The image evokes profound emotional and symbolic tensions, rooted in psychoanalytic concepts of separation, authority, and maternal distance. The green umbrella shields her from the sky—a potentially symbolic paternal or authoritarian presence—while the child, exposed to the elements below, looks up in awe, perhaps overwhelmed by both the nurturing and distant forces of the maternal figure.

Core Emotional and Symbolic Insights:

Separation Anxiety and Maternal Longing: The child’s position beneath the mother suggests a yearning for closeness, but also the beginning of independence. In psychoanalytic terms, this image speaks to the fear of separation and the desire for maternal protection. The maternal object is not necessarily emotionally distant but appears unreachable, symbolizing the child's unconscious anxiety of individuation—the process of emotional separation from the mother to develop a unique identity. The viewer, who may resonate with this painting, might feel a deep emotional tug toward this early tension: wanting the safety and nurturing of the mother while confronting the realities of separation and growing autonomy.

The Sky and the Paternal Authority: The sky in the painting can be seen as a looming authoritarian presence, representing paternal authority or societal expectations. This external force could be the Oedipal father, whose presence is both protective and restrictive. The child, exposed to the elements, feels the full weight of this authoritarian system—the sun symbolizing both the father’s expectations and the blessings of inherited talents. This creates a push-pull dynamic, where the child is forced to grapple with the overwhelming weight of paternal authority, longing for maternal protection (represented by the umbrella) that feels distant.

Emotional Development and Maternal Presence: While the mother does not appear emotionally absent, her position above the child suggests a kind of emotional distance or separation, which may evoke feelings of yearning or fantasy. The child gazes upward in admiration and awe but remains somewhat disconnected from the protective force of the umbrella. This underscores the emotional tension of growing up—seeking safety and closeness from the maternal figure while slowly navigating the complexities of emotional independence. The viewer drawn to this painting may resonate with these themes, perhaps struggling with feelings of vulnerability in the face of authority and social expectations.

A Nuanced Mother-Child Dynamic: The painting captures the fantasy of maternal distance, where the mother may be fully present emotionally, but the child perceives a separation. This reflects the viewer’s potential experience of struggling with closeness and autonomy. The child’s connection to the grass—the id or raw instinct—contrasts with the mother's ethereal presence, caught between the sky (representing super-ego or authority) and the nurturing earth. This viewer may harbor deep fantasies of maternal care, while feeling uncertain or anxious about stepping into emotional independence.

Projection of the Viewer’s Own Parental Relationships: Viewers may unconsciously project their own unresolved feelings with their parents—specifically around paternal authority and maternal protection—onto the painting. The sense of inadequacy experienced by the viewer stems from the perceived dominance of the paternal figure (the sky, sun) and the struggle to achieve independence or self-assertion. Art provides a unique medium for exploring these unconscious conflicts, where the mother-child dynamic represents a larger struggle with societal expectations and emotional vulnerability.

Emotional Journey and Relationships:

Unattainable Maternal Closeness: The maternal figure in this painting, while seemingly nurturing, is also symbolic of an idealized form of care—something the viewer may feel they can never fully attain. The umbrella, while protecting her, creates a barrier between her and the child, symbolizing the unconscious fantasy of the mother as distant or untouchable. The viewer, resonating with this, may long for a sense of emotional security but also feel frustrated by the perception that they can never fully receive it.

Paternal Approval and Societal Pressure: The paternal authority present in the sky or the authoritarian system pushes the viewer into a space of self-reflection. They may feel inadequate, struggling to measure up to societal or paternal expectations, which leaves them feeling exposed or vulnerable. The child’s exposure to the elements symbolizes their inner tension between being overwhelmed by societal forces while trying to assert their individuality.

Nurturing and Independence in Relationships: For the viewer, this image may speak to a feeling of emotional distance in relationships. They may long for nurturing connection but feel as though the protective maternal object is always slightly out of reach, creating an ongoing tension between closeness and the fear of losing themselves in the process. This may mirror their emotional struggles in romantic relationships, where they oscillate between seeking security and feeling dominated by external expectations or the demands of independence.

Projection of Societal and Parental Dynamics: This viewer may find themselves frequently engaging in power dynamics with authority figures or within their own personal relationships. The sky's symbolism of authoritarian systems or the paternal figure may manifest in the viewer's behavior as a need to navigate societal pressures or expectations imposed by parents, particularly the father. The fantasy of paternal approval remains dominant, with the viewer subconsciously working to balance their own desires for self-assertion with the need for external validation.

[tutyayilmazz]

The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere, and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking — not literally everyone, of course, but statistically, as if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures and car horns known as “Italian.” To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.

There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Måneskin’s age. The guitarist Thomas Raggi played the riff to “Don’t Wanna Sleep,” the lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David — the band’s singer and, at age 24, its oldest member — charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, wore a minidress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raggi wore nonporous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Ethan Torchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise, they sounded as if Motley Crüe had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals.

That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Måneskin “only manage to confirm how hard rock & roll has to work these days to be noticed,” and a viral Pitchfork review called their most recent album “absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.” But this kind of thumbs up/thumbs down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin — the name is Danish and pronounced MOAN-eh-skin — you can fire up the internet and add to the more than nine billion streams Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. As for whether Måneskin is good, de gustibus non est disputandum, as previous Italians once said: In matters of taste, there can be no arguments.

You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience: the culturally-if-not-personally-familiar commodity of a stadium rock show, delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro — 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine — kicked in on “Gasoline,” a song Måneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus: “Standing alone on that hill/using your fuel to kill/we won’t take it standing still/watch us dance.”

The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock ’n’ roll, which has established certain conventions over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn’t have to be real — you probably don’t even want it to be — but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it.

The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation (I’m 46) experienced jazz. The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Måneskin will take this business on a multivenue tour of the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.

“I think the genre thing is like ... ” Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. “We can do a metaphor: If you eat fish, meat and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you’ll be like: ‘Wow, potatoes! I like potatoes; potatoes are great.’ But potatoes have been there the whole time.” Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy: The implication was that rock, like the potato, is here to stay; but what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone’s favorite?

Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is “Rocket 88,” recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythym band in 1951. It’s about a car and, in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock ’n’ roll emerged: a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously.

Although and possibly because rock started as Black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who), which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium/progressive era (Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner) that now constitutes the bulk of classic-rock radio gave way, eventually, to punk (the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat) and then glam metal: Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans.

It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock’s cultural hegemony began to wane. As the ’90s progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as “rock” to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the ’00s — the Strokes, the Killers, Kings of Leon — constituted rock’s last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than No. 4. Let us say, then, that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That’s a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock’s advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry; Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing Guitar Hero.

The members of Måneskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school; David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ad seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle-call audition for the Italian version of “The X Factor.” They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum.

In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song “Zitti e Buoni” (whose title roughly translates to “shut up and behave”) in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe, and Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and “I Wanna Be Your Slave” broke the British Top 10. A European tour followed, as well as U.S. appearances at festivals and historic venues.

This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovison live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage, and members of the media accused him of snorting cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It’s exactly this kind of incongruous detail — this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine — that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin’s presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States.

“They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much, and then it’s not pure rock ’n’ roll, because you’re not in a garage, looking ugly,” De Angelis says. “The more conservative side, they’re shocked because of how we dress or move onstage, or the boys wear makeup.”

She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics: the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous and the more tolerant if not downright desensitized American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because — like many rock stars before them — most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raggi told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university, “Just to try to understand, ‘What is that?’”

One question that emerged early in my discussions with Måneskin’s friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor Jeremy Larson wrote that their new album, “RUSH!” sounds “like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150” and “seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom” en route to a score of 2.0 (out of 10). While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.

Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” (score: 10.0) and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop/commercial elements of “RUSH!” (e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression) left him unable to do.

This perspective reflects the post-’90s rock consensus (PNRC) that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that rock is not just a structure of song but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock’s earliest days as Black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal; this adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the ’60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called “alternative.” Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.

In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian minitour, I had lunch with the band, as well as two of their managers, Marica Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on “The X Factor,” and Ferraguzzo was its musical director; around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moysa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue and “creative playground” that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for Moysa, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity — basically describing the concept of vertical integration.

Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of “RUSH!” along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moysa, Ferraguzzo played for me Måneskin’s then-unreleased new single, “Honey (Are U Coming?)” which features many of the band’s signature moves — guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style — but also has David singing in a higher register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo’s phone, and it sounded clean and well produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it.

The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

“There’s hundreds of people working and talking about you and giving opinions,” De Angelis said at lunch. “So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything.” Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band — resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves — and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an M.B.A. make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass.

The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge of certain eras in American rock history but were only dimly aware of others. Raggi, for instance, loves Motley Crüe and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair-metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Måneskin’s timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock most respected by Anglophone critics was produced by independent labels that did not have strong overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the “emo” era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie/punk/D.I.Y. period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC.

The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That’s the whole point of being a snob. And snobbery is obsolete anyway; digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them. The longevity of rock ’n’ roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80, rendering the fan-versus-society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe. And the economics of the industry — in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music, and the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour — have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life.

Yet rock as a cluster of signifiers retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives, rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, et cetera. Also like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe.

In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin’s show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000 — was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted: Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60½ and said she had skipped a reservation to see da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in order to stay in line. “When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want,” she said.

The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black T-shirts on the pitch became a field of multicolored ponchos, and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” briefly rolling to his back, while De Angelis — who is very good at making lips-parted-in-ecstasy-type rock faces — played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr.

The rain stopped in time for “Kool Kids,” a punk-inspired song in which David affects a Cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock ’n’ roll: “Cool kids, they do not like rock/they only listen to trap and pop.” These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like “I like doin’ things I love, yeah” and “Cool kids, they do not vomit.”

“Kool Kids” was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance and then, as the band walked off, to make we’re-not-worthy bows around Raggi’s abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semichoreographed, but management assured me that the Kool Kids were not professional dancers — just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these Kool Kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.

The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sara, two young members of a Måneskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sara put it, “they allow you to be yourself.” When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorca — who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn’t — said: “Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself. But you don’t know that at first. You feel like you can’t.”

Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics, the part that is maybe independent from time itself: the continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned — when the response to your demand to rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day is, “Great, exactly, thank you.” In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century, to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that.

[theshadowworker]

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

- Charles Bukowski

[anodetomnemosyne]

August

August kissed my limbs

And disappeared

A lingering ghost watching me

Eyes set wide, hands stroking my arms

Holding me, caressing me

Always hurting me

A knife plunged into my stomach

Twisting it deep, blood spurting everywhere

My guts churning under the weight of it

Whispering the words of a lover in my ear

A mockery of me

Of the person I am

August

The month of broken promises

[hunxi-after-hours]

ok Asunder was so good that I feel like the universe had to cosmically balance that out by handing me a book for one of my work book clubs that caused me so much psychic damage that I downed a bottle of soju in self-defense to finish it

[crownspeaksblog]

You know for a story made by someone whose fans claim that he cares so much about authenticity, i have yet to see the effects of incest in this incest riddled story..

[dragonomatopoeia]

who let this man near a typewriter.

If I were an animal i would be attacking you with my teeth

[libraryleopard]

Young adult dystopian/horror novel

A trans boy on the run from an eco-fascist Christian cult that decimated the population by releasing a deadly virus is rescued by group of teens from a local LGBTQ+ center and agrees to help them take down the cult–but he's hiding the secret that he's slowly being transformed into a monster via the bioweapon the cult infect him with

Compelling, intense, and gorey

Explores religious trauma & trans/queer rage

Gay, trans main character; gay, autistic love interest; various queer side characters

[connectingwithsoul]

No running, no chasing. Just being. You are you. I am me. We just meet. Sit, walk, talk, and we don't effort. EVER. Don't think. Don't plan. Don't care. We just exist together. @connectingwithsoul

[moonypears-blog]

I just ran and flew myself at the floor with a headband on top of my head about 6 times to test the physics of a tiara falling off. This is what I do for fanfiction.

[queer-ragnelle]

Getting so tired of reading queer books that are basic as hell. It’s like everyone is so preoccupied with writing something inoffensive they’ve committed the worst crime of all: it’s boring.

[lesliepoet]

Positively Fictitious

Explore the balance between meaningful content and the pressures of going viral. Discover how small actions can lead to personal growth, while embracing authenticity over fleeting fame. Join a community that values depth and connection,

I could say nothing happened in the last week, but it would be a lie. More accurately nothing happened that I can use for a blog post. If I were looking for fame on the Reddit r/linkedinlunatics then possibly I could ask an Ai to write me something, butcher it about a bit and voila; perhaps the internet gods would smile upon me for my 15 nanoseconds of fame. Thing is, I am not trying to go…

[swampstew]

So…AI and AO3 bullshit is on the horizon again. Cool cool cool super fucking cool. Today will be the last day my stories will be free to read for public consumption on AO3 specifically, only registered users will be able to read/comment☠️ time to lock ‘er down boys.

Yes I’m aware this might kill my reach but I’d rather post the full chapters to Wattpad and Tumblr if it means AI can’t lift it.

[castlebyersafterdark]

Do you think the byler fandom being majority female was a part of the reason why there is such a large backlash to spicy bylerism? I feel like if there were more gay and bi dudes, there'd be more tolerance and understanding of male sexuality beyond the cute romantic side of things. Also, I don't know the makeup of straight girls vs. lesbians vs. bi girls on here, but I'd imagine some lesbians might be a bit uncomfy with explicit sexual topics related to byler

Hmmmm I wouldn't necessarily go with that as the reasoning. We have to acknowledge statistics and traditional fandom demographics - fandom spaces where things like fanart and fanfic are the focus have kind of always skewed female? Am I incorrect? But those are the things I sought out in fandom, the art and the writing, creative outlets (alongside fighting with people on reddit and twitter haha which I don't do anymore!!)

Look at Steddie for example. There are currently 28k fics out of 94k Stranger Things fics. Around 29% of the fics in the fandom are that pairing. And almost a third of those fics are rated E. Wow!! Compare Byler. 11.5k fics. Only a mere 6% of the fics are rated E. I'm going to assume that the Steddie fandom is predominantly female as well as the Byler fandom????

I think it's an age/generation thing to be honest. I could be very well wrong. Unsure why the Byler fandom does skew lower, and that's totally fine, but from my observations, the people I've seen the most vocally anti-sex in media and in fandom tend to be teens/early 20s. Even if I know a bunch of Byler fans are older, but the vocal ones have skewed younger. Could be just what I've personally witnessed, but anyone let me know if I'm off base here?

And also the silly mindset that also coincides with the age trending possibility - with Byler being younger characters and the current backlash against all of that which was never present in the past. Not to bring up a fandom we all probably want to forget, but the HP fandom was huuuge for years, right? Those were high school age characters, infamously with tons of E rated content, to excess. A personal note, I got into fandom stuff through my older sister, and HP and anime were her big things. I know some of the fandom lore haha.

I do think if there were more bi and gay dudes who were vocal and into fanart and fic (we are out here though!! we just may not announce it! I sometimes played neutral over the years!), that strong personal convictions might combat the anti-sex and spicy or E rated content contentious people. That's why I'm glad to have started over and started fresh and honest here. Because I'm gained a backbone in this fandom now? I'd love for some silly anti person to try to tell me about myself, using my own sexuality against me when they're supposedly propping up a gay couple as a hobby interest through a fandom, but judging those who are interested in authenticity and the full spectrum of what relationships and 'shipping' means in fandom. Like. How dare. Hahaha.

To be honest, I'd just delete the comment or ask and they wouldn't get a chance at attention.