#because of ME AND MY FRIENDS.

[vonpharma]

“handwaving genuine, good-hearted concrit, to refusing to even engage in the conversation at all, to constant changes that make the event less fun for a huge chunk of us”

Do you mind if I ask more about this? I’ve also participated in sicktember (casually) and I haven’t really noticed anything that fit this, so I just wanted to ask more about your experiences if you were comfortable elaborating. I’m mostly curious what changes were made that made the event less fun (other than delay in prompts released I heard about that)

yeah sure! right off the bat i wanna say that this is not something i was like. PISSED OFF or intending to start any drama about, just some stuff that made the event less enjoyable for me.

i also wanna say that you haven't noticed it because sicktember is very very careful to not publish anything that makes them look bad. they do not engage with any of their replies or asks unless they can spin it in a very sanitized, pr-friendly manner. try creeping through the tags and replies on some of their posts, and while a lot of shit is deleted or lost, you can still see traces of it, some of which i will link to here.

the prompts becoming more delayed. i wasn't here in 2021 (when they dropped in early march), but in 2022 they dropped in mid may. that was awesome because it gave us all lots of time to prep--my favourite thing about sicktember is how accessible of a prompt event it is! the prompts don't all drop like a week before the event starts, you have all summer to write so if you have a full time job or responsibilities you can still participate. this year they made it very clear the prompts were ready to go in may but didn't drop them until mid-june.

when people started sending asks about this, they responded thusly. they maintain this weird kinda... pr-friendly, stepford smiley vibe whenever anyone tries to open a dialogue with them? and it just comes across as so dismissive of anyone trying to make genuine points.

here they say that "many things go into planning prompts" but don't elaborate on that at all. for context, the night before this ask, they had made it clear that the prompts were all ready to go. the hand-waving comes in the form of all the "suggestions" they offer here--"well, you don't have to do every prompt!" (but i want to. it's fun. it feels good. and that's what i've done in the past) "you can write after september!" (i did that last year. it was kind of miserable. i like posting with everyone, it feels like a big celebration!) "we give you like 100 days!" (that's cool. but you could give us more at no detriment to yourself. a lot of us didn't make the deadline last year.)

check the notes on this post and you'll see several disappointed contributors/fans who are trying to open a dialogue with the event runners, all of whom were ignored. several people have reached out to me saying that their asks about this were ignored.

2. last year, they said they would only be accepting fills on the sicktember blog through submissions, and only posting 10 random ones a day. in the past, sicktember has reblogged every single fill directly from the writers.

here's why this is shitty:

when you submit something to a blog, the blog owner then becomes the one who effectively "owns" its engagement. that means any notes, reblogs, comments, follows, etc. all go to sicktember. they do not go to the person who MADE THE STORY. if you, the author, want to see what people are saying about your work, you have to pull up the sicktember window and obsessively check it. if you want to respond to any comments, you give sicktember more notes.

this is just more work, especially if you still want those notes. you would then have to make TWO posts, one on your personal blog and one on sicktember's. and people are probably disinclined to reblog a story twice. it is not exposure or engagement to do this, it actively robs authors of engagement.

sicktember might not even post your fill. they pick ten random ones a day. this is because...

they literally admitted that they lose followers when they reblog every fill. they said aloud that it is all about engagement for them. maintaining followers means more to them than highlighting the contributions of all the people who are making their event what it is. they are quite literally trying to maximize followers and stealing engagement from their contributors. it's kind of fucking insidious.

the only valid point here is the thing about reducing mod workload. still, they could've just... opened apps for another mod? inquired for some extra help? lord knows i would've jumped at the opportunity to curate! i'm sure others would've too.

contrast this to whumptober, who religiously reblog every single fill despite being a much longer running event than sicktember.

this is why i started @sicktemberfeed. with permission, but the mods were even weird about THAT... i asked if it would be ok to make, and they said "well, it's not like we could stop you." weird fucking answer. it's fine to say no.

3. i didn't speak out about point 2, but did speak out a little bit on this blog about point 1. @yes-i-am-happyaspie's husband (@spaceninjas42) dug through my blog, somehow found my untagged critique (it was not vitriolic or cruel, just a plea for an open discussion) and started getting on my case for talking about it on my personal blog. there was a second, much more vitriolic reply that he left but i was a dingus and blocked him as soon as i saw it, which means it's now marked deleted and i have no way of getting it back or proving it. that's kind of a "just trust me bro" situation.

4. the prompts this year were not very good. that is a purely subjective opinion i have, but a lot of us agree that they really stray from the concept of sickfic. we have a lot of heavier whump events floating around and the appeal of sicktember is that it is for fluffier, more low stakes stuff. seeing "cardiac arrest" and "anaphylaxis" and "medieval treatment" on there had me and a lot of others scratching our heads. their response to this is always "just sub it out!" but when we start running out of alt prompts because so many of the main ones are not what the audience is vibing with... there is room for critique there. there is room for a discussion.

i can't stress enough that the problem isn't necessarily these changes--they are not dealbreakers! the problem was sicktember's attitude. every single time anyone in the community tried to say 'hey, i think this idea could use work/tweaking' the response was basically just, again, the happy-go-lucky stepford smiler pr voice "we'd like to remind you that blah blah blah! happy writing, authors!" and absolute refusal to talk to their community at all. as i've said many times, this is not a dichotomy--where one side is "we fold to any criticism! our fans control us!" and the other side is "you're not entitled to anything! we run this event for free despite our busy lives!" like you can very much find a happy medium there but they just. do not.

none of that is a deal breaker, genuinely. i was still planning on participating up until the very end, and i obviously am now.

what was a deal breaker was them posting harry potter shit.

[daftpatience]

slow down for your disabled friends. thats like a bare minimum kindness that we shouldnt have to ask for. i love that youre so quirky and walking fast is a cool personality trait to you and all that but i bet you can count your physically disabled friends on less than one hand

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

I think one of the kindest things you can do for people with various mental health struggles is just... let people back into your life after they've been absent for a while.

Making friends as an adult is so fucking hard already and isolating yourself from other people is a very common symptom of depression, anxiety, burnout, ocd, trauma, grief, etc. Which means that someone will do the hard work of recovery/healing and resurface back into a world where their previous friends have written them off because they stopped showing up.

So if you know someone where you're like "yeah we could have been better friends but they fell off the map a bit" and that person suddenly reaches out, or starts showing up to events even though you kind of forgot they were still in the group chat... well they may have been Going Through It and you don't actually have to punish them for their absence you can just be glad that they're back.

[saint-soap]

???????????????? ????? ??????????

[haroldhighballjordan]

sometimes I randomly think about the time a girl posted in this girls only Facebook group I’m in telling everyone how she broke up with her boyfriend and he lied saying that he lost the spare key she gave him, only to then break into her apartment when she wasn’t home and steal the cat they’d adopted while they were together, but then he denied having done this and she didn’t really have proof that he took the cat since he wouldn’t let her come into his place and look for it. And then another girl saw this post and knew her ex-boyfriend, and she was like “girl. I used to hook up with your mans back in xxxx and I still have his number. If you want, I’ll hit him up and get him to invite me back to his place and see if your cat’s there.” And the OP was like “bet.”

So this woman hit up homie dog, asked him out for drinks, went home with him, slept with him, and then woke up in the middle of the night and TOOK THE CAT. Like she had only said that she would confirm if the cat was there but then she took it upon herself to steal this woman’s cat back. Like she full on Trojan horsed this man and then hit up homegirl like “I got the goods. Where you wanna meet.” And then the two of them posted a photo of them together with the cat to the group.

And I just think women supporting women is so beautiful.

[verified-villain-fxcker]

This might be the last time we see Tom Hardy Venom on screen so I just wanna say, from the bottom of my monster fucker heart, it has been an absolute pleasure to go through this series with you all these last 6 years.

[collaredkittyboy]

[humming-fly]

was anyone gonna tell me shadow saved rouge's life in sa2 or was I just supposed to find that out playing the game myself

(this worked out as a rather fitting closer for the Final Day in Year of Shadow haha, hope ya'll have a fun new year! 🎉🎉🎉)

[egophiliac]

don't think I'm not still obsessing over 7-12

[nyanrial]

making little snowmen ⛄⛄

[crystalliumdaisy]

loathing…

[magicicephoenix]

i finally finished reading I see you, Sundrop! by @shirajellyfish and IT'S SO GOOD I CAN'T BELIEVE IT TOOK ME THIS LONG TO FINISH IT RAAAAAAA

i will be gushing about it in the tags but here's a lil animation i made based on the below paragraph in chapter 6 that gave me such a strong mental image that i had to make it real :)

[h0tdog-water]

i don’t give a shit that he’s 6’2 i want him MOANING and WHIMPERING

[anotherpapercut]

do you guys think Karl Marx would've liked Thrift Shop by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis because it promotes waste reduction and the subversion of both capitalism generally and brand commodification¹ specifically through second hand buying or do you think he would not like it because it still promotes consumption as an activity especially of items one does not actually need.² or do you think he'd like it cause it's a banger³

References

¹ Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. (2012). Thrift shop. s.n. [2:38]: ""They be like, "Oh, that Gucci? That's hella tight", I'm like, "Yo, that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt", Limited edition, let's do some simple addition, Fifty dollars for a T-shirt, that's just some ignorant bitch shit, I call that getting-swindled-and-pimped shit, I call that getting tricked by business, That shirt's hella dope, And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't"

² Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. (2012). Thrift shop. s.n. [1:29]: "They had a broken keyboard, I bought a broken keyboard, I bought a skeet blanket, then I bought a knee board"

³ trust

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Just your average male living space.

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