#bc that is super important and i can 100% understand being at that headspace when you lose your career overnight

[tittiedshrek]

God, as a person who HAS been hospitalized before for attempting suicide, just seeing James randomly traumadump on his fucking audience to gain sympathy pisses me off to no end. I am not doubting that he has attempted or insinuating that he is lying - that is fucking gross first of all and secondly, I can understand that being the weekly "internet villian of the week" can come with harassment. Perhaps even worse harassment because he is gay and a member of a historically marginalized community. At the same time, it is EQUALLY as gross to use your attempt as a way to garner sympathy when you get called out for problematic behavior. It's manipulative, cheapens the topic, and makes everyone else who has struggled like myself look like selfish attention seekers.

I can understand that someone can feel so guilty/sad about what they have done that they can resort to self-harm, but that is a personal problem that needs to be dealt with OUTSIDE of the internet in therapy. It's not the fault of your audience, Nick, Hbomberguy, Kat, etc. that you ended up in the hospital, and it is irresponsible as a creator to have that be the FIRST thing you talk about in your "apology" video and have that hang over their heads. You can't say that you're not trying to make this into a sob story, then take advantage of your audience's parasocial relationship with you to make them feel bad for being disappointed in you.

I don't want James to die, I really don't. No one deserves to find themselves in such a state of mind, and I wouldn't wish that upon my worst enemy. I do, however, want him to stay off the internet completely until he recognizes the harm he has caused to the LGBTQIA+ community and he gets in a better headspace so that he can actually make amends to everyone he has stolen from and hurt.

[glutaminase]

first of all, let me say I am in love with your writing!!! It is phenomenal and I am forever in awe. I want to get into writing Dani/Jamie fics but I’m having trouble Getting Started. I haven’t written for fun in so long, and I’m struggling with where/how to get in a creative headspace. Do you have any suggestions for me? oh also I’m afraid of failure and being unsatisfied with my work so :>)

Wow thank u! I’m honored that you think i could possibly think i could be of help hahah. I totally understand where you’re coming from though - before writing for bly, i hadn’t written anything creatively for like, YEARS. Last March is when i first started thinking about writing again cuz suddenly i had all these time and then I...simply didn’t do anything for another 8 months lol. Just based off my own personal experience i’d say: 

start small & with manageable expectations: the first thing i posted on ao3, fall and fixture, was actually initially written back in october right after bly came out, and it was supposed to be part of some sort of sprawling, long fix-it; i had very ambitious mental expectations for it but then it wouldn’t go where I wanted it to go (because I hadn’t written shit in years! I did not have the skills to write anything longer than 10k words lmfao) so I got discouraged and gave up on it. In December I reread it and i was like, u know what, no this isn’t what I wanted it to be but it’s still Something so i might as well clean it up and let it see the light of day. And I feel like getting past that initial mental barrier of wanting perfection and just being like “fuck it i made something” really helped me to trust my ideas and the value of my writing enough to write more after that. So I guess my concrete suggestion there is to just get down whatever tf you have in mind, even if it’s just disparate scenes or even if it seems terrible to you, bc sometimes u just have to shit out something if only to prove to yourself that you can do it! And you have to get it out of your head and onto the page in order to work on it and improve it. 

I feel like if you go into it with super high expectations then it’s very easy to give up on ideas before you even start on them, but it’s like, your ideas have inherent value just by virtue of Being Ideas - it’s worthy to create the art you want to create because otherwise it wouldn’t exist, etc. If u start with something small and manageable you can work on shaking off the rust (since u said u haven’t written in a while) without saddling yourself with a project that’s beyond your grasp currently. Even if that means just writing and publishing a single scene, or something based on a single, easily-solved trope or conflict. Right now the hardest thing for me, still, is accepting that there are some things that I am just going to be bad at as a writer until I do it enough and can learn through the process of sucking at it a lot, but i think it’s an important thing to understand so that you can accept that it’s valuable to write stuff you want to even if you’re unsatisfied with it yourself

read other stuff that inspires you: Reading a fuck ton of excellent fic (not published writing, as much as i love it, because I’m a perfectionist and if my favorite actual books were the standards I held my fic to, I’d stop entirely LMAO) always helps put me in that creative headspace, just in terms of getting personally excited about writing. Also, thinking critically about why i like the things i like helps too! Like, if I can pinpoint that a story is really affecting me because of a certain theme or aesthetic, i can then take that aspect of it and translate it to something I can write myself & be excited about (and, selfishly, be like ‘maybe something EYE will write something this good’ lol)

As for failure - there’s 100% no fail-state when it comes to writing or creative work imo, and even moreso with fanfic. Like the worst thing that will happen is something doesn’t get as much attention as you want, but even if that happens...you still wrote it and can always write more and get better. Plus, again, art has inherent value just by virtue of being art. i remind myself of this when I feel like i’m not Saying Anything with something i’m writing - you’re creating something new no matter how you feel about it, and it’s valuable and worth writing because of that. Re: being unsatisfied with your work...I am unsatisfied with everything I write literal minutes after I post it so I feel like that’s just a little inevitable LOL but again.. u have to at least attempt it in order to get better! The cool thing about fanfic is that it’s such a low-pressure, low-stakes environment to try being creative; like you can literally slap whatever up on ao3 and still have an audience, especially for a fandom as small as bly, which i think is really cool! We’re all learning and making art together! amazing 

Also, this document of writing advice is always my go-to whenever i’m stuck or just need other words of wisdom. I’ve found it really helpful to read other writers (vastly more skilled than me) talk about their processes, especially when it comes to the initial parts of drafting, because it helps make writing feel more attainable to everyone rather than something magical that only a few people are blessed with the ability to do

This is really long and meandering lmao. I think it all just boils down to Just Do It, which is easier said than done but is also true! I hope at least some of this was helpful to you, and if not feel free to hit me up again if u have more specific questions or anything. 

[moodymurda]

shanemundi forever and ever

tw: mention of death

i knew i was going to want to come here for this but i kept putting it off.  thinking about this and everything else it makes me think about hurts so bad. i honestly don’t know where to fucking start. idk. I’m going to try.

so shanemundi. my fucking niggas. my fucking family. my babies. all that shit. shanemundi is what the fans of the shane show are called. (i write this shit like someone reads it, no one reads this shit. download the shane show app tho. they’re also on the podcasts shit if you have an iPhone.) i became aware of who shane was and then the show obviously like mid 2015 thru being subscribed to golf media and listening to golf radio on dash. (for some reason tho i didn’t realize that there was a whole ass community of fans and shit on twitter until 2016. i truly do not know how i had no clue fr. i deadass live on fucking twitter). but anyways, the shane show quickly became one of the most important things in my life. it became something that got me through the day. i’d listen to the live show and then re listen throughout the day whenever i felt like i needed to. even then tho, i don’t think i realized just how much that show was going to mean to me. I’m just thinking back to the headspace i was in in 2015, i would not be able to comprehend what the fuck happened. i wouldn’t believe this shit.

so anyways like i said, i realized there was a whole ass community of fans on twitter in 2016. i followed a couple people, i really wish i could remember who i followed first and all that. i know it happened around the time where everyone was taking over the shane show snap. i know my takeover was march 7th, 2016. It’s crazy that I was sitting last night and realizing i dead remember that day. like i rememberrrrr that shit, i remember what i did that day and how nervous i was when dc dm’d me the password for the snap bc i was 100% sure my snap takeover was bout to be weak as FUCK. anyways. I remember ru had quoted my tweet and said something along the lines of “i enjoyed your takeover” or something. i remember some of the replies people sent to my snaps and shit. and a couple people dm’d me bout some shit i was talking about on snap, saying they could relate and shit. anyway. I’m all over the fucking place. but recalling this shit is, fuck i don’t know. it’s just like we were innocently just encouraging each other while basically being fucking strangers. we just knew for sure that the shane show and OF were two things we had in common. fuck the fact that that shit is damn near the foundation for all this shit is fuccking crazy.

anyways. we have a twitter group chat for the show now. i am so assy at timelines bruh i can not remember how shit happened i just know what the fuck happened. other shit happened between there but imma make this shit short and sweet so I’m skipping to the twitter gc. i think it got started early 2017. i know it was after cfg 2016 had already happened. it was so that anyone could be in the chat and it wasn’t about like who’s s100 and who isn’t and shit (I’m not going into explanations about what the shane 100 is rn. i don’t have the time i got too many thoughts flowing rn and i gotta get these bitches out. I’m already bad with words and this shit probably don’t make sense already). anyways by this time i had already bonded with some people but honestly the bonds i had grew stronger after this chat was made and i gained some new ones. the chat is a fucking mess to say the least. i say that in the most loving way possible. so many disagreements have gone down in that bitch. full out arguments. so much shade (yassss honey i LIVE!!!!). but one thing you can’t question is how much we all love each other. i really grew to love everyone like family. like i was talking to my mom today about me graduating next yr & my grad party. deadass my main concern was who would be able to make it and how much i just want my friends to be there. I’m thinking about it and i’ve dead talked to these niggas damn near everyday. that shit is fucking crazy. i traveled alone for the first time and i did it with them. fuck. thats crazy thats fucking crazy.

but yea anyways. i guess i gotta get to what i’ve been avoiding now. so a lil while ago someone had added ru back to our chat. now that I’m thinking about it i don’t remember when he left or for what reason. everyone was like “where have you been” etc etc but he never responded. thinking back on it I’m wondering why i didn’t think anything of him not responding to us…. anyway. last night lost came in the chat and was like he hadn’t realized ru was “gone”. when he said gone my first thought was “fuck do you mean we just added him back to the chat”. and i checked to see that he was in fact in the chat. and then i looked at his twitter account and realized his last tweet was december 15th i think. then i started to reconsider exactly what lost meant by “gone”. like “fuck does he mean gone like gone gone” i don’t know bruh. i didn’t want to believe that he meant gone like.. ya know. and i don’t know. i didn’t reply to the chat when i saw it because i just.. i don’t know i don’t know i do not know. i can’t remember who asked what he meant. he sent an article though and the article had a video of a news report attached to it. which i put off watching because i felt like if i didn’t hear it then it wasn’t real. i watched my friends be like “wtf” “is this real” etc in the chat but i was just like nah this can not be for real right now.

i haven’t had to deal with the death of someone that i knew a whole lot yet. the first death of someone in my family that i actually knew and was close to was november 2016. that shit was rough as fuck for me because it was the first ya know. for some reason i thought that the next time i had to deal with it, maybe i wouldn’t take it as hard. boy was i fucking wrong. the thing about death that i guess I’m not understanding is that it’s final and that it kinda just creeps up on you. whatever all of our (meaning shanemundi) last encounters/conversations with ru were, we didn’t know that would be the last one. shit he didn’t know either. makes me wonder like what if, what if niggas knew ahead of time ya know? maybe we (as people. like society) would appreciate shit more. idk. anyway. one part thats super hard for me is that we found out damn near a month later. i guess thats the trouble with internet friends. the only way we know whats going on with each other is when we decide to get on our phones and post some shit. and truly i be checking for my internet friends on social media more than my local friends because they’re less accessible to me and I’m a mom friend at heart. i need to know how everyone is doing. (hi friends if you are reading this. i stalk all of you. like i be seeing all y’all’s tweets and snaps and shit. i love y’all okay. anyway)

ru was probably one of the most dedicated fans to the show. he had a whole ass meme account where he made meme’s related to episodes of the show. that was highkey something i looked forward to, seeing what meme’s he’d make. he was a fucking witness for the world record show. (s/o shane & vanger. they fucking killed that shit. also s/o all my other friends who were witnesses). he went to vanger’s games to support him like.. so much shit. fuck. I’m sure he made sure everyone around him knew about the show. he shit on my music opinions a lot to fuck with me. and he’d always tell me nas was better than jay (nas was his fav, jay is mine.. so you know how that goes) that shit used to be so funny. fuck man.

i feel like at this age a lot of us feel kind of invincible. i truly don’t realize that any day could be my last.. whats going to stop me ya know? i’m 20, i’ve barely gotten to live yet. I do what I’m supposed to, what could possibly go wrong? i didn’t realize that was my mindset until shane kind of said it on the show today. life truly is so precious and we don’t ever sit back and realize that. on top of that, we impact others lives so much with out even knowing it. the HARDEST part about this for me is not my own sadness but knowing that my friends are hurting. Seeing everyone reminiscing in the chat and on the timeline just makes me think did ru KNOW. did he know how much he meant to everyone? and do we realize how much we all mean to one another? There have been times where i’ve felt down & I didn’t bring it up to anyone because I’m not always up to talk about how i feel. But somehow one of them said something in the chat that inspired me, or simply made me laugh & realize whatever was wrong wasn’t THAT big of a deal.

i don’t entirely know what i’m trying to say here because i’m feeling so many things at once. what i do know is that we should all cherish our lives and make the most of it. we should also cherish and love one another because friends/family is all we’ve got. to this day it still amazes me that the shane show brought all of us together. i gained close ass friends from having a fucking radio show in common. HOW THE FUCK.

Rest in peace Ru. Thank you so much for being a friend to all of us, I’m glad to have known you. If any of my friends are reading this, I’ve said it a million times already at this point but I love all of you so much. I hope that you all keep growing and learning and prospering. You can literally have whatever the fuck you want in this world. You guys are deadass the coolest group of people I’ve ever met and I’m so inspired by all of you in different ways. I'm not just saying that, I'm deadass. Shanemundi for fucking ever. I can’t wait until i get to see and hug all of you again.

[biggamebrass]

hey there! just dropped you another note re: boy updates. wow, that's so lovely to hear him say that to you! nothing beats someone expressing their appreciation for you. re feeling unsure about everything: there is nothing wrong with being skeptical and conflicted. mixed signals suck. overthinking is inevitable when it seems like you have opened up your heart to him, the feeling is mutual and it's uncertain what lies ahead. also don't think you're a lost cause, ok? you are enough. ⭐️

bleeehhhh just a lost cause because i’m like

that’s it, i’m done

and then he calls me and i’m like lol okay i’m not done hello welcome

but anyways

okay time to respond to your long and beautiful ask (thank u so so much again btw you’re my favourite person)

i'm so glad you were able to have a zoom movie party with them tho! that sounds so great and i'm glad you were able to at least get a little socializing done w them!

of course you've inspired me! how could you not have? i read a couple of excerpts from your msg to one of my roommates and they were so inspired as well - beautiful beautiful!

i'm glad you're also taking steps to enjoy life exactly how it is now and in the phase you're in now! because your right, if things change then you'll definitely miss aspects of life as it is now! well... minus the uhhhhh quarantine

anyways, yes!

i was disappointed yes, but i'm confident enough in him, his communication, his maturity that he would let me know if this is something that's passed, something he's no longer interested in pursuing and he hasn't yet so i'm remaining hopeful, you know? he still reaches out, he still is very present and that says something. actions speak louder, i like to hope

i think he does accept me for who i am, just like how i accept him for who is. i know he's fucked up from this last relationship. hard. it's unreal what's happened to him, but i accept that 100%. we're all imperfect, and i'm willing to be that person for him who's there through anything, i really am. it seems to be reciprocated, but idk. things can always change too. but.

he definitely is showing his authentic self, he's opening up in ways that i can tell are really hard for him. he's a guy that likes to be confident and know which end is up all the time, and he really doesn't right now. he texts things that i'm sure are so hard for him to say but i appreciate it so much. he really seems to feel comfortable w me. he told me that it's so easy to talk to me and he appreciates me which is always nice to hear. regardless of how i feel about someone, i like to be the person that can be there through anything, you know? i went through a LOT in my early 20s and it taught me that everyone needs support sometimes, and it's important to be that person for sure.

without getting into too much detail bc that's an invasion of his trust and privacy, he got hardcore mistreated, cheated on while living with his partner, got a lot of rumours spread about him to his friends and family post-breakup and just... yeah. it's a lot. i get it.

in terms of your question, yes i've told him how i feel. i told him really early on.. like after we'd hung out only once. it was about five weeks ago. i told him that i didn't expect to feel so strongly about him so quickly but it is what it is, and he assured me that we were on the same page etc etc but idk. with all of this shit coming to the surface and him being in the space he's in right now, that could have changed. i suppose that i don't know for sure. i always forget how recent all of this was for him - the phone calls and all this "new information" was.... two weeks ago. fuck.

i'm really hoping that it's not C. i'm hoping that he's not just keeping me around for a backup, i don't know. i mean i guess it's possible. i've been in that position a lot. but he seems to check in a lot and my housemates tell me that it would be like a full time job to check up on me, and other girls, as often as he does with me. does that make sense? idk.

i think that i am willing to take the risk. i mean, we're all in quarantine right now so there's only so much i can do anyways. i think he deserves, based on the connection we developed so quickly, to be given a chance. well, not him per se but the idea of me and him. i don't know. i think so? if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. but i don't want to be the person who runs away because he's in a bad headspace. i need to at least wait it out for a bit.

i don't think i'm open to being just friends with him, which is really upsetting because he's quickly turned into my best friend. i turn to him for everything. every vent. every happy thing. everything. and it's shit to lose that. but i wouldn't be able to just be friends with him and see him move past everything with someone else, you know? it would hurt way too much. my housemate asked me that same question a few days ago and honestly, no. couldn't do it.

but yeah i'm definitely happy that we had that conversation. it was super important and kind of brought us closer, if that makes sense. i understand him a lot more and he knows that i'm here for him through it all. i talked him through a bunch of the thoughts in his head and you could tell that he really needed it. i really love being there for him. he deserves it, he's the greatest boy