#but it isn’t social media and sucks for community

[aholefilledwithtwigs]

I really like your strange sounds/music :)

Thank you!! 💖😸💖

I am so happy to find people who enjoy it! It’s a bit of an acquired taste, so finding people who connect with it is always amazing!

[void-tiger]

Well…if there’s one (1) good thing about having a crush, it’s that when I’m (for the moment anyway) not worrying about the other person’s boundaries and terror about whether I’ve stomped on them or not + my own frustration at how slow things are to just communicate verbally and directly instead of constantly dancing around nonverbal reads (that are two-way, I suppose but still no substitute, can still mean just about anything)…

…yeah. I do let myself be selfish. Acknowledge what I want instead of burying it so deeply away from my consciousness to not “take up space” I suppose. Finally give myself some damn permission to fall in love with another person “despite” being ace, and “despite” being chronically ill and struggling with my mental health.

And what is it I want?

To feel cared for. Cherished. By someone here. To wake up and have someone greet me with a gentle embrace mindful of the constant chronic pain especially in the mornings to not accidentally pinch things, but not treating me like glass, either. To be given autonomy instead of having it taken away—to do things together, FUN things, without being made to feel guilty about that “taking away” spoons from chores or “well why won’t you just work a job then!” but also respecting my need to rest periodically or take a longer rest after the fact.

To feel heard. To trust that there’s love enough for us to disagree and feel angry and frustrated and sad around eachother and with eachother without judgement, without the risk that things are forever one disagreement or misunderstanding away from falling apart completely or worse.

And please tease me. Teasing is a love language just as much as communication and encouragement and acts of service and finally being held. It’s verbal play, and I trust you to not bully me.

And…I’ve shown as much as I can, I think. I know you’re trying to mirror at least some of it. And I think I’m reading you correctly, but I wish I understood why you seem so terrified to talk directly to me.

[lemons-roses]

Okay I said I wouldn’t but I’m making a post about it

Rant under the cut

Why is everyone so upset that these exist? Contrary to popular belief, MENS CLOTHING DOESNT FIT EVERY TRANSMASC. Transmasc people sometimes have larger thighs and hips! The only pair of men’s jeans I own I need to wear with a belt, because they fit at the hip but not at the waist, because they are styled for cis men’s bodies.

The worst part about this is seeing all the other trans people making fun of these, even transfems saying things like “why don’t they make transfem blouses tho” THEY SHOULD. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make clothes for transmascs!!!!

Everyone wants to say transmisandry or transandrophobia doesn’t exist, or that it’s just another way to say transmisogyny, then you treat transmascs like shit for… wanting jeans that fit??? Everyday on every accursed social media site people say things like “ew why would you wanna be a guy at all lol” or “trans guys should know their place worshiping the dolls.”

Everyone forgets that most transmascs have lived as women. Some of us still have to. Some of us face misogyny and transmisandry every day of our lives. And it fucking sucks. All I’m asking is that other members of the community that transmascs believe we’re safe in show some basic fucking respect. This isn’t transmisogyny. This isn’t being a “mens rights activist.” This is wanting people around you who should understand your experiences better than anyone to treat you like someone worthy of respect.

(Original tweet is sarcastic btw)

[pineapplerightsideupcake]

So.. I'm confused about something. If your beliefs in radical feminism say that trans people aren't valid in their feelings of being trans, what's stopping you from making bisexual people not part of the LGB? B stands for bisexual. What if their sexuality is just a phase? What if they are *actually* just heterosexual? For that matter what's stopping you from excluding YOURSELF from the community? At some point, you can't exclude any more people from a space that wasn't supposed to be gatekept to begin with! -Vero of CFC

You people always use that word “valid”. It’s absolutely meaningless post modern nonsense. Trans people feel that despite having a male or female body, their feelings about it change reality. I’m not telling trans people how they feel. Because you’re right, I can’t know that. What I’m telling them is that their feelings don’t change their bio sex. I’m telling them their feelings don’t supersede the rights and dignity of women. That’s not at all the same thing as being same sex attracted.

If I tell you that I am attracted to both men and women you can believe me or not. It doesn’t change my sexuality. You can’t know how I personally experience sexual attraction. But if I tell you I’m an Olympic Figure Skater, that’s something external and material. That’s something that either is or isn’t. And it doesn’t matter how true I want it to be.

This isn’t about people being invalid or valid. It isn’t about telling others I know better than them how they feel. It’s me telling them that their feelings don’t change material reality.

And we don’t get to sidestep reality because language is limited and imprecise. We create words to express ideas and categorize things so we don’t have to start every conversation from the ground up. Think of the quote “a rose by any other name”. The word ‘rose’ is made up but the flower it refers to exists in the material world. And you and everyone on earth could declare a rose a tulip but as long as people needed to specify they’d find a way to invent the word rose again. It’s why every 3 years your movement declares old terms verboten. MtF and FtM got used until people got mad it didn’t erase the reality of bio sex and people just used those terms in place of “male and female”. Then the same thing happened with AFAB and AMAB. Now we’re onto TME and no one knows what anyone is talking about because at the end of the day, people are male or female and no amount of “validation” or the right words erases that reality.

I am bisexual because I am attracted to both men and women. Lesbians are women exclusively attracted to women. Gay men are men exclusively attracted to men. Straight people are exclusively attracted to the opposite sex. The LGB community formed because the thing we had in common- same sex attraction- is punished in most societies. It absolutely was designed to gatekeep. It was a civil rights movement- not a secret club house. The LGB have no more moral responsibility to admit opposite sex attracted people than black activists have to include white or Asian people.

“Queer” has nothing to do with it. Demi flux genderoo aroallo fox kin have nothing to do with it. A group of men that believe their internal state of mind makes them literally a woman has nothing to do with it. You people overran a movement for same sex attracted people, convinced everyone to call our community a slur, and demand that we center heterosexual teens too immature for a relationship thinking that makes them the same as a Gay man.

I’m tired of arguing with 19 year olds that read too much mlm fanfiction that having short hair and wearing hoodies from the boys section doesn’t mean they’re gay men. I’m tired of arguing with those same girls that the 45 year old man with pigtails and a pink pinafore sucking his thumb and holding a dolly on social media isn’t a brave woman defying The Man. He’s just a pervert.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[writingwithfolklore]

5 Ways to Set Yourself Up For Success as an Aspiring Author

While these things don’t guarantee your manuscript will be picked up or that you’ll sell more books (and aren’t necessary to achieve that!) here are five things that publishing houses look for in authors to help make the book as successful as it can be, and you can start working on now.

1. Get an agent

I can’t say this is true across every publishing house, but in my small publishing house that accepts submissions from both agented and non-agented writers, we move the agented writers to the top of the manuscript pile. This is because they already have a professional in the industry who has vouched for the work.

However!! Important to note that a bad agent can tank your chances as much as a good one can raise them. I had a coworker say about a particular agent, “if I was on the fence about a manuscript and saw (the agent) was representing it, I would move it to the pass pile.” The agent was in general difficult to work with and didn’t actually listen to what her writer wanted, demanding for the house to make poor marketing decisions for the book based on her own personal opinion on what looked good. Oh, and she had also worked in publishing for Penguin Random House for over a decade, so what previous experience they have in the publishing world isn’t all you should consider when reaching out to agents. You want people with lots of experience actually—y’know—agenting.

Check out their previous clients and how many they have! Yes, small agents with only a few years of experience can still be amazing—but make sure you do your research no matter how experienced they seem and see if you can’t do a background check. (The agent mentioned above ended up firing her author! I’m sure the author has tales to tell about her).

2. Come up with marketing ideas

Your publicist is going to do so, so much work for you. Seriously, we have some really awesome publicists who are kicking ass submitting to contests and putting on events and sending authors on tour—but they’re also managing several titles at once, so authors who can pull their own weight a bit when it comes to coming up with marketing ideas for their book are highly appreciated.

If you ever have any ideas on how to reach your specific audience, write them down and try to fill them out with as many details as possible (who is involved, where will it happen, how will it happen, how much funding it requires etc.) and share them with your publicist, the marketing team will thank you for it!

3. Form relationships with the industry!

This one is huge! One thing we actually ask of authors right off the bat is if they know any industry contacts such as booksellers, media contacts, or other professionals/authors. If you can, intern/volunteer/or work for a newspaper, magazine, book store, agency, or anything similar. Having a list of people who know and like you to reach out to for writing articles or otherwise supporting your release is going to help a lot with the promotion and selling of the book! People are much more likely to help out or feature the book of someone they know, rather than a stranger, so start collecting your contacts now.

4. Grow some sort of social media following

Definitely not essential, but seen as a boon for sure if writers already have a community that are likely to support their new release. If you can point to a group of people that already like you or are interested in your work, we’re going to see that as an asset! Especially for book launches—there’s no greater publisher’s fear than a tanking book launch, and it’s so much more likely to go well if you have a community of people you know will show up.

5. Trust your publishing house

You’d be surprised how many authors drag their heels and kick and scream when it comes to the marketing decisions our team makes. While yes, a cover you aren’t necessarily thrilled about, or author bio that sounds a little too self-aggrandizing can suck a bit, know that these decisions are coming from people who have decades of experience in the industry and know how to get your book into the hands of readers. If they think a certain cover, title, subtitle, bio, photo, layout, etc. etc. would be best for your book, trust them. They’re the pros.

I’m happy to answer any other questions you have about the publishing world!

[ladylooch]

(Ik your requests are closed so pls don’t feel super pressured to write but you write Nico perfect everytime so I choose you :3)

So we all know neeks isn’t into anything super hardcore or kinky when it comes to sex. But when he’s particularly frustrated with hockey or the media he can get a bit rough, needing to take his emotions out on something. (Here’s the angsty part? Idk if this even counts as angst but) maybe one night after a rough game you’re kind of just letting him use you as he needs, but he kinda ‘blacks out’ for a sec and gets a little too rough with you. Nothing super dramatic but you have to say something about it and he’s instantly reeling himself back in and profusely apologizing and completely shifting focus to make it up to you. Poor baby is in near tears over hurting his girl.

His Superstar- Nico Hischier

A/N: I just love the way I was selected for this blurb. Hahahah! I love you anon 🤭 fluff my feathers, bby. You know it works. Also, you know I have to be big sis here and address this theme: communicate with your partners. Keep it safe and respect boundaries.

Warnings: SMUT 18+ Content, sexual boundaries talk

If one more reporter asks Nico if he’s frustrated with his lack of scoring so far this season, he might have to show that reporter just how frustrated he actually is by popping them in the face. 

Day after day, he stands up there in front of their cameras and microphones, answering questions he really doesn’t want to. 

It never gets easier. The vets told him  it would in this first season as captain. It doesn’t. He still has to resist hulking out at some of the dumbass questions and comments he gets in his media scrums. 

But when he gets home to you, none of that matters. He falls into your world where he isn’t an NHL captain. He isn’t a multimillionaire who is underperforming. He isn’t an international superstar.

He’s only yours. Y/N’s Nico.

You, his sweet girlfriend, were waiting for him in the kitchen with fudge brownies using the chocolate his mom sent from Switzerland. He knew exactly what he wanted from you when he saw you in those tiny, red shorts you know drive him nuts.

And it wasn’t food. 

You were unsuspecting, chewing on your bottom lip at the outward frustration you saw gathering in Nico’s eyebrows on social media that morning. He was at the rink longer- getting treatment. But the wildness in his eyes when he walked in did not prepare you for the position you were currently in.

Nico slams into you deeply again. It feels incredible. You moan out your approval to him again. He has you on the kitchen table so he can use his thick thighs to pound at full throttle. Nico rarely gets like this and the excitement of it all has your nipples piercing the air, meeting his groans. His hands come up, groping your breasts as he leans over you more. He is so far gone, whispering in Swiss German, losing control of himself completely as he pushes harder into you. The table moves slightly. You reach out for his arm for safety, holding and rubbing at him while moaning his name.

Nico grabs both of your arms, pinning you down with his palms on both your forearms. You are so close to reaching your climax. You open your legs wider, taking him deeper. Your breathing stutters and you move to pull your arms from his grip to hold his shoulders for security. Nico forces his fingers deeper into you. You’re eyes snap open in unease. You try again. Now his grip is uncomfortable. 

“Nico let go.” You stutter abruptly, feeling panic close your throat. It takes him a moment to hear your words. His head is knocked back as he begins to dribble into you. The reaction of his impending orgasm has him tightening further. “Nico! Stop!” You yell suddenly. Nico snaps to immediately, releasing your arms. You push at his abdomen until he falls out of you. 

“What!? What happened!?” You are still splayed beneath him, completely exposed. You suck in a shaky breath, trying to ground yourself. You can tell he didn’t mean to, but you suddenly feel very naked and uncomfortable. Nico can see that. He grabs his jacket on the chair to his right, draping it over you. His expression is worried. He tentatively reaches out for your hand. You lace your fingers together. “Did you say something and I missed it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m so sorry. Oh my god. Baby, what did you say? I didn’t hear. I’m so sorry. I’m so…” He trails off, dashing a hand through his hair. He looks around the table frantically, trying to find the pants you both dropped on the floor in haste.

“Nico.” You call, reaching for him to come back to you. He is berating himself internally. You can see it with every twitch of his facial features. His shoulders are slumping inward as he leans over you, reaching out for your cheek then recoiling his fingers. You grab his hand, placing it there and leaning into his touch. “Can you please calm down so we can talk about it?”

“I hurt you!”

“No you didn’t.”

“I crossed a line!”

“Yes, but unintentionally.” You sit up, very aware of your naked core settling against the kitchen table. You open your arms and Nico steps in. He presses his forehead to your shoulder, his jacket still covering most of your naked body. You turn so you can brush comforting kisses along his stubbled jaw. “I asked for you to let go of my arms.” Nico shakes his head.

“I didn’t hear.”

“I know.” You murmur, “That’s why I yelled.” He nods.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. I am okay. And I want to finish, but can we not do it this way anymore?”

“Of course.” He nods. He pulls away to look at your face. “I’m so sorry. I did not hear you. I would never keep doing something you weren’t comfortable with.”

“I know, Neeks. Now let me finish you off on the couch.” You smile, wrapping your arms around his shoulders. He lifts you up, walking to the leather couch. He chuckles as you shiver when your back hits it, like always. The air of safety returns as you straddle his lap, sliding down until he’s fully sheathed inside of you. He grips your hips tenderly, creating a line for you to buck yourself into. 

When he came into the apartment, he wanted to take you his way. But now, watching you ride him so good, he thinks about how much better this is. You always have better ideas than him. The bed you picked. The apartment you moved into together. The bedding. This couch.

And this fucking tempo. His head falls back; his belly burns with fire. Your inner walls suck him deeper and he releases white ribbons into you.

“Baby.” He moans against your mouth as you wetly kiss him in praise. You’re not quite there yet. He sinks deeper into the couch cushions as you use him for your own pleasure. He watches with heavy and lustful eyes, biting his bottom lip when you shout his name to the ceiling. He curls forward, groaning, gripping himself into your chest as you pulse around his sensitive cock. He shivers when your nails drag along his shoulders, leaving red scratches as you bounce up and down once more.

“Oh god.” You croak out when you find your voice. “That was… Fuck.” 

“You’re a superstar, baby.”

“Thought that was you?” You murmur, raking a hand through his mused, brown locks.

“No… Right now I’m only yours.”

[olderthannetfic]

Most of my dash is people moving to cohost or mastodon or bluesky over the photomatt thing and posting goodbyes. I don’t know if *tumblr* is dying, but the specific community I love here appears to be leaving. This isn’t my first time seeing a social media community crumble, but I feel particularly adrift rn, especially with the collapse of the NaNoWriMo forums, which were my main social platform for years and years.

Any advice as to how I can find a new social platform that fits me? Ideally it would be a space that supports longform text and back-and-forths in the comments.

--

The key thing to realize is that lots of platforms we loved in the past had absolutely garbage features—at least at the point when we set up camp there. Both LJ and Tumblr had features that were absolute ass and then somewhat improved before tanking again in various ways. The next hot platform will also suck, just like the last 10.

If you want longform text and discussion, start by posting longform text and responding to anything even remotely response-worthy that anyone sends you.

Granted, twitter clones directly prevent longform text, but a lot of the time, the main sticking point is culture. Everyone told me that Tumblr wasn't good for longform text, that it violates social norms to post it without a readmore, etc. Years of How To Tumblr posts discouraged this behavior. Tumblr haters pining for LJ still constantly tell me that discussion is impossible here due to the lack of threaded comments...

To that, I say it's only impossible for cowards who aren't willing to fill people's dashboards with 37 of the same post and all its chatty reblogs on the same day.

Cowards, I tell you!

Who says I can't post 90% text-only and a million long-ass posts to the gifset-and-no-commentary website?

--

The actual features are only marginally important. Social conventions like linking to the ask you're referencing or snipping irrelevant stuff from the prior e-mail chain can take care of most feature issues.

The important part is either following a community or making the community come to you. Being consistently active is a huge part of it. If you're publicly findable and friendly, people will come hang out where you are or invite you places. It can take a while to get visible enough, but it does work. It's a matter of having the energy and time to invest.

Another key is to recognize that a lot of people feel adrift. If your blog/forum/discord server is the logical place for them to collect, they will do so. They have to know it exists and they have to find it welcoming, but that's all it really takes to collect up people who are feeling lonely and unmoored.

[secretmellowblog]

I hope tumblr doesn’t die because No other social media site is as good for long, thoughtful, nuanced analyses of media. Yeah tumblr is also full of dumb shallow hot takes and shitposts, but you can make dumb shallow hot takes and shitposts anywhere —-there are no other popular social media sites that let you easily format and share long essays on the media you enjoy, and then have conversations around those long essays.

Fandom on all the other big social websites just seems so utterly …shallow. And it’s not because people on other websites aren’t thoughtful or don’t have deep things to say, but because these sites’ formats do not allow for any kind of long nuanced conversations.

Tiktok? Things have to be crammed into a super short video with an attention grabbing headline, and you can’t hyperlink sources. Instagram? Everything has to be in an image format with strict limits on length, and nothing will be shown to your followers anyway because of how Instagram’s algorithm works, and also no hyperlinks. Twitter? Strict character limits, and if you split it into threads it means someone can retweet a part of your essay completely out of context, and also very little freedom with formatting.

It frustrates me so much. If I go into the Tumblr Les Mis fandom I’ll find really compelling long essays on the original novel (including essays being written for the ongoing book club) on the story’s historical context, or the parallels between different characters and their narrative foils, or the way the politics were defanged for certain adaptations, or the way Victor Hugo’s personal life and failings affected the novel. But on tiktok I’ll get the same five shallow stale jokes from 2013 over and over, or maybe the same “DID U KNO THAT IN THE MUSICAL JAVERT AND VALJEAN SING THE SAME LEITMOTIF” style of basic Intro To Les Mis 101 For Babies media analysis (which is what Tiktok considers deep media analysis), or stale “LOL JAVERT ACTS GAY” style jokes as if we’re living in the early 2000s and calling a character gay is still a funny punchline. And it’s impossible to have any kind of deeper thoughtful discussions than “DID U KNOW <x Kool Fact>” or “lol <shallow observational joke>” on tiktok because the platform just isn’t built for building niche communities around in depth conversations. it’s built to churn out bland generic content for as wide an audience as possible, which means pointing out a small detail like an Easter egg and calling it “cool” is deep media analysis, because you cant have longer more in depth conversations without alienating people. And I hate it. Bc like, it’s not because there aren’t smart clever thoughtful people on Tiktok— there are—it’s because Tiktok isn’t built for these conversations, and anyone who wants to have them has to really fight against the things the website encourages or prioritizes!

Or like, if I go into the LOTR fandom on Tumblr, I’ll find tons of extremely long analysis and fanfic, and analysis of queer readings of the story. On Instagram people will still shriek in terror if you suggest the characters are gay, and most of the popular lotr posts are stale memes recycled from like 2007. There’s really no room for thoughtful media analysis, and even if you did create it, instagram’s algorithm would make sure no one saw your post anyway.

And everyone’s going to say “the algorithm shows you what you’ve seen before so maybe it’s your fault ~” or whatever but i do look for things I want! I do! “The algorithm” doesn’t know me or what I want or value or care about beyond this meaningless surface level.

The only thing that was worthwhile about these sites was the great visual art people were creating, but now the websites are overwhelmed with meaningless soulless machine-generated AI glurge, and it sucks. It just really, really sucks.

I’m honestly confused about why people don’t use tumblr….There’s no character limits! You have freedom with post formatting, and can insert images throughout textposts to illustrate specific points you’re making beneath the paragraphs where they’re necessary! You can add hyperlinks, linking to your sources! People can reblog your entire essay and share it, and then add on with commentary that then becomes part of a larger conversation! People can find your stuff through the tagging system! Reblogging means posts stay in circulation for years instead of being dead 30 minutes after they’re uploaded! If you want to have genuinely interesting text conversations about a piece of media, there really isn’t a better social media website for it anywhere.

To be clear, I’m definitely not saying Tumblr media analysis is *always* clever and thoughtful or etc etc. there are shitposts and nonsense here too (plenty of which I’ve created lol.) I’m saying that Tumblr gives people the tools for in-depth insightful analysis to happen. Whether people choose to do it or not is their own decision XD. But the reason lengthy in-depth conversations and book clubs are even possible here is because Tumblr is built for allowing these conversations to happen, in a way other sites simply aren’t.

It’d really suck if it died, because it’d be a huge blow to…being able to easily find long insightful in-depth media analysis written by fans. I currently don’t think there’s anything that could replace it.

[loptrcoptr]

It’s come to my attention that a lot of people in the BES fandom are new to fandom-culture in general (or lack there of; we denizens of tumblr are residents of a cesspool) and don’t know a lot of general old school online manners, laid down in Days of Yore by earlier generations. So let me bring up a crucial one that is generally being ignored on tumblr in the BES-sphere: ship tagging!

I am not doing this to condescend, I genuinely want to be helpful and to help us all enjoy our enclosure and our enrichment in said enclosure together. I think a lot of grief going around the blue eye samurai world on social media could be solved if everyone remembered one good old cardinal rule of fandom bullshit:

you do not put ship wank in a ship’s general tag.

let me say that one more time in different terms:

If you want to rant about how much you hate a ship, general practice has always been, on tumblr anyway, not to do so in the safe space created for said ship.

once again, lemme be very clear; I don’t give one rat’s ass or 800 collective asses of rats what you ship, why you ship it, whether you ship anything at all, why you hate x y z, etc. That’s great, that’s what fandom is for! Enjoy yourself! The issue is that there’s all this infighting fuckery going on that is exhausting to even watch from the sidelines, and I think there’s a lot of confusion as to why anyone is fighting over any of this shit at all as it is 2024 and ship wars are 2011 superwholock garbage that we all collectively agreed to jettison into space by 2015, ya feel me?

(and if you like to start shit and throw hands then obv this post isn’t for you as you know what you’re doing, this is for the folks who don’t know and are confused as to why they can’t rant without blowback)

So if you’ve gotten on tumblr recently and noticed your anti-ship post blowing up for some reason or other and asked yourself “Jesus why are these assholes from that ship always coming for me?? They’re such dicks!!” ask yourself:

did I tag them in my post?

Because when you tag a ship in a post about how much you hate it, it’s not a beacon that says “Hear Ye Hear Ye, Interacteth Not Ye Fuckos From Ship I Hate, This Is About How Much I Hate Your Ship”. For that to be the case, you would need old-school anti-ship tag nomenclature, like this: #anti-[shipname] or #[shipname] wank. Those tags would communicate your intent to rant, which is your sacred fandom right to enjoy doing! It is not, however, your sacred fandom right to enjoy doing it in the wrong space, that’s what’s happening here. A post that tags a ship with its normal tag, but whose content is anti/wank content about said ship, sends the signal: “ayyooo, who would like to debate this with me?”

So, does all that make sense? If you tag your post analyzing all the reasons why you think a ship sucks with #ship, you are encouraging everyone who ships that ship to interact with your post. It’s like rocking up to somebody’s house, ringing the doorbell, and saying “I hate your fugly ass piece of shit house, asshole” and then getting irritated when the homeowner responds with “who the fuck are you, get off my lawn?!”

#anti-[shipname], #[shipname] hate (forgot about that one, also useful), and #[shipname] wank do two very useful things:

1) They let other people who want to gleefully rant with you know that you’re on the level and they give like minded individuals a chance to follow those tags so you can have more rant sessions together, and

2) they minimize likelihood of involvement by the shippers you’re ranting about, who can block the tag, while keeping the ship’s normal tag open for the people who enjoy it

tldr; *swordfather voice* it would be bitchin if people could stop bitchin in the wrong places so that we can all coexist like adults here, touch some grass, and chill. Tag ship hate #anti-[shipname], #[shipname] wank, or #[shipname]-hate and keep it out of the general pro-ship tags :)

if your response to this is “don’t tell me what to do, cuntwaffle” or “I have an unhealthy relationship with the idea of shipping and think no one should have a safe environment to enjoy media except me and people I agree with so I will continue to poison the waters” then ok, cool beans, keep on chooglin’; but know that everytime you walk into a tea party you weren’t invited to and yell I HATE YOUR FUCKING TEA YOUR TEA SUCKS ASS blowback is a bit inevitable

[centrally-unplanned]

Bocchi The Rock! is really hitting sweet spots for me on how it presents its main character’s core plot concept. Bocchi is essentially K-On! but if main girl Yui was too introverted to function instead of too stupid to function; which is a challenge to make interesting. The Yui of this show, Hitori, is a social train wreck who convinced herself learning guitar would substitute for having a personality and make her friends, with the expected 0% success rate. The plot follows her new desperate attempt to achieve friend-dom by joining a band. Which is a character concept that gives us some extremely relatable content: 

Yet the show does still have the challenge of making a character who sucks at socializing be the main character of a Slice of Life show about socializing. Its a comedy, obviously, but still that can get repetitive fast, these character types are often side characters for a reason. Shows like WataMote keep it fresh by making main girl Tomoko a degenerate scumbag on top of a shut-in, its the *degeneracy* that powers the show; you want to have an angle on characters like these

Bocchi’s angle is both character & directorial. On the character side, what endears me to Hitori is how much she is halfway there on understanding social interaction. She might be a breathing pink stress ball but she isn’t clueless, she knows, kindof, what you need to do to make friends - her panic-attack levels of social anxiety just preclude it. So you get opening scenes like these, where she dresses full-musician to go to school to inspire musician-types to talk to her:

And it falls flat on her face because she has been there for months already and still refuses to initiate anything:

But that is what fashion is for! She did look good, in another context this would work (and does accidentally to trigger the ~plot later)

Or when learning about her new also-weirdo band mate Ryo, she goes from “yes friend!!”:

To, 5 seconds later on hearing that she spends her time visiting ruined buildings & second-hand clothing stores, “oh no, not like me at all”:

Which is actually pretty smart for 5 seconds of thought, Hitori groks that interests correlate with personality and people relate to being alone differently.

The point is that Hitori’s social failure is stacked on top of social insight, the humor derives from what she gets right vs wrong. Her *almost* getting it is more enjoyable, and more importantly way more likeable, than her just flailing. She holds the stupid ball for sure but you get why, she is trying to throw it away at least, which is endearing instead of frustrating.

More exceptional is how the show communicates her struggle; she can’t talk good right? So tons of her dialogue is internal dialogue - which you have to spice up somehow, static shots w/ voice narration is not very fun. Bocchi has a grand time playing one of anime’s trump cards of having fantastical brain-scape setpieces to communicate mood. That ‘she is a loner’ revelation ain’t settling for some sparkling pink-background; we have a full apocalypse to carry her aborted dream instead:

Communicating information hits the same struggle as emotion; this is a show about music after all, and another of anime’s strengths its presumption the audience actually is interested in the details of the niche hobby stuff the show is about. But Hitori-in-actuality couldn’t teach someone how to breathe let alone music tips, so instead we get random artistic cutaways to diagrams and explainers by imaginary instruments:

Which I love! Its expressive, you can shift the artstyle in a way that doesn’t clash, it lets the animators flex technique, and the information gets across without dragging down pacing (a lot of media, *unable* to do this, simply cuts the information out entirely, primarily to spite me). 

And of course since all of this is happening inside Hitori’s head, she is, apparently, immensely creative - I love her now, teach me your ways my gumball princess! Her head would be a great place to be if you could lobotomize the anxiety somehow. All this means that Hitori, while awkward, is rarely cringe - partly because the directing always cuts away from any shots that would focus on cringe, but mainly because Hitori is too interesting to be cringe, you got other things to think about.

All in all Bocchi the Rock is my favourite silly-Slice-of-Life show of the season, and I hope it continues this level of playfulness going forward.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

Okay so here’s my thoughts on the staffcon thing.

I still think collapsing reblogs so posts look more like other social media isn’t gonna work as a feature but they will probably roll them back a little and at least add a toggle off for it if they try it and enough people submit feedback. Edit: this is actually less of an issue, most of the discussion is based on a misrepresentation of what’s happening. They’re just making it easier to scroll past long posts. EDIT AGAIN: actually some people already have the initial roll out of the feature and it. Is bad.

I think submitting feedback is a takeaway. There was a pretty clear effort to just remind the user base that there are real humans on the other side of a paycheck having to read and respond to the inputs of every feedback method on the site, which is fair. It’s easy to be an asshole online in any semi anonymous platform and that is something that tumblr culture takes a certain bloodthirsty pleasure in.

And yes, of course, user complaints about issues such as accessibility and the many ongoing glitches and bots and the search function, etc. are valid and do need to be addressed. But at the very least it would be cool if we as users maybe try to cultivate a slightly less pitchforky social norm when submitting feedback about changes to the site. The ceo is not reading every @ to his blog. One of his employees is. The people reading all of the feedback are just people doing their jobs. All jobs suck under capitalism, maybe we could try not to make their jobs actively worse.

Would you be rude to an overworked server in a restaurant? No? Cool also try to not be a dick to the person getting paid to answer customer or user complaints.

Related to that, funding. Many current and former members of staff have been pretty frank about funding in the past. The company is trying to at the very least breakeven, which not a single company who has owned tumblr has managed because the hosting fees for this site are insane due to all of the stuff on it.

If they don’t get it to breakeven they’ll hopefully best case just open source the website which is a method they’ve done in the past. And it would probably work, and then the website would to my understanding be being maintained by users. Now this is where my understanding gets fuzzy so anyone with more knowledge of how this would shake out feel free to chime in. But my understanding is that the source code for the site would be opened up and maintained by the community likely through mostly volunteer work. I would guess largely uncompensated.

So personally I think maybe the vitriolic response to every change they make going forward to try and monetize the site and pay even some of the cost of operation is perhaps a bit overblown, because they’re still trying to find a way to keep paying those people to work on tumblr, and I think people continuing to be paid for the work they do is better than volunteers doing unpaid labor.

I do also think there’s a secret third option for automattic and every other company finding themselves with a worse outlook now the Silicon Valley bubble has started to really burst, and that is for all existing staff members to unionize and then turn the whole thing into a worker coop. Much more stable organizational structures. Worker coops are also one of my favorite short term solutions to many other systemic problems we are currently experiencing.

I do hope this site continues to exist for many years, especially as it is one of the only places on the internet where the culture makes it safer to talk about some of the more permanent and long term solutions to various systemic issues that function within societies. Also funny text posts.

[thequeenofthestorm]

Wow so like there legit isn’t any other safe social media sites is there? At least none I’d want to migrate to. Like legit I just wish that places could be not transphobic for two fucking seconds so that I could feel like I belonged. Back to becoming a hermit at my editing software again it seems hehe

I mean, I know I wasn’t super active here regardless but it still kinda sucks yknow? I left Twitter because it wouldn’t stop shoving transphobia at me and now Tumblr is going down the same path. Ugh.

Just cuz I’m bummed doesn’t mean I won’t shill a little because I DO have a discord that gets a lot of the same art and updates that my tumblr does, so if you’re here for my artwork or YouTube channel feel free to pop in I guess lol.

[polyamzeal]

Public Breakup Post

On my personal Facebook I posted a long post about my recent breakup. I am going to cross-post it here as a record of the rawness of polyamorous breakup. I appreciate all sympathy given but honestly I have talked to people a lot about it already. I honestly hope this is more of the opposite that it can help other people going through a breakup or hard times to have something relatable to connect with. Also totally fine if you skip this one and keep on scrolling.

When I first became polyamorous I came to the realization that my relationships are my business. I don’t need to be public about them. I purposely limit how much I post about partners on social media. That is privileged information that I only share with people I trust. If someone wants to know about my relationships they can message me privately. But this time it feels appropriate to share a bit more than usual, so I am making a conscious effort to share for a number of reasons. One of the worst parts of polyamory I always say is the breakups. The last two breakups I stayed mostly or completely quiet about. Those partners were closeted, and combined with that, most people didn’t even know I was dating them or how much they meant to me. Furthermore the most common response a monogamous person will have to a polyamorous person with another partner while going through a breakup is, “What is the big deal, you still have a partner so you aren’t single.” This is incredibly hurtful and inconsiderate. The other common response is for them to say, “See, polyamory doesn’t work”, as if countless monogamous breakups across history wouldn’t show that monogamy doesn’t work. So most of the time it is best to just keep breakups secret and not talk about them. Which really sucks and hurts a lot. But I had a breakup recently, and it seems fitting to not keep this one secret and make it public. It was hard, painful, and I have questioned it ever since. My ex is a great person who I still love very much and want the best for them. I don’t regret the relationship and I have many fond precious memories of it. But recently it had just felt “off” in ways that are hard to explain and recognize. Plus we have both had a lot of personal stress outside our relationship as well. There was still a lot of happiness and great times mixed in but also just a lot of stress and anxiety. I wasn’t happy like I used to be and I just felt like I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of the relationship anymore. I am also sure what I wanted has definitely changed since the beginning, also in hard to explain ways. It felt like I was asking for too much out of the relationship. I needed to take a step back and breathe. Focus on my own mental health a bit before I could figure out that particular relationship. Get better at communicating all those hard to explain emotions and expectations. Learn about how I have changed and what I want out of relationships has changed. Sadly, I knew I couldn’t do that while still being in that relationship. It feels unfair to them but I needed to put my own emotional health first before that relationship. One reason I am posting all this is because of society overdramatizing breakups. It makes for good entertainment the more of a dumpster-fire train-wreck a breakup is. But not all breakups need to be like that. Society has told us that if a relationship breaks up then it is labeled a “failure”. THAT IS BULLSHIT! A relationship isn’t deemed a success based on how it ends. The Multiamory Podcast has an important saying as part of their relationship advice, “It is okay to break up.” Also ‘The Polyamory Breakup Book’ by Kathy Labriola gives a ton of examples why people might break up without it being all one person’s fault or someone being bad. A lot of times things just change. People change. I treasure and value that relationship so much. I feel so lucky it happened. They had a positive impact on my life and I hope I did on theirs too. I am sorry that our relationship had changed to this but I am also hopeful that this change will be an evolution, not a downgrade. That right now this is what is best for us and hopefully the future will be bright for us.

[vadersaber]

Your post about Chappell and Hozier made me think and I realised that I don’t even want to be a part of any kind of fandom anymore.

I’ve been on the internet since I was like 10 years old and I’ve been in so many fandoms and eventually, things always turn toxic and weird.

And it sucks because my real life isn’t the greatest and I’ve never felt like I really belong anywhere? So I get invested in fandoms, trying to fit in somewhere and belong somewhere. And I’m 28 now so tbh, it’s probably a bit embarrassing. But when you’re alone in life I guess you try to find companionship where you can lol and the easiest way is with common interests so fandoms make it easy.

But I’m so tired of the toxic-ness and hatred and everything that always comes with fandoms now. The cliques and “I’m better than you because of this” “I’ve known this thing longer than you” and just all of it. It’s not fun anymore because it always gets ruined eventually. I think social media can be so amazing and I’m always trying to curate my experience in a positive way. But fandoms aren’t positive anymore. People always feel entitled and superior they’re so obsessive and possessive and there seems to always be a loud majority that ruins it for everyone.

Idk what I’m trying to say and idk why I’m sending you this message but you’ve always been really nice with anon messages. I just felt the need to share because this just hit me today and now I feel a little lost and alone but I think not getting invested in these kind of things anymore is probably much more healthier..

I'm glad you felt comfortable to share this! 🥰

I absolutely get where you're coming from. I myself have been in fandoms since I was around 10 years old as well and as you said, somehow it always turns toxic - or weird.

And it's so stupid too, like why can't we just maintain friendliness and normalcy in this community that's revolving around mutual interest for actor/musician/whatever? We're all here because of that, why turn against each other and act foolish? We are literally all the same.

It is definitely healthier to not engage with content that upsets you and just keep enjoying the music/movies without digging for drama. It's so pointless and it doesn't bring anything good with it. Besides, fandoms should be enjoyable for everyone, no matter the age or fuck else.

[psshaw]

2 things to mention since I made that post about a year ago:

> Neocities has shot up in popularity, which means server strain. I dunno when/if Kyle Drake intends to upgrade it, but sometimes when updating your site ya gotta be patient. (You should also learn how to refresh your cache, since a lot of “errors” I see reported are just people not knowing how a computer works.)

To get around server strain, consider editing your code in a program like Visual Studio Code! And while Neocities is a great way to learn webmastery in an inspiring community setting, there are also people who eventually learn enough to migrate their page to a paid webhost for more features and reliability, while still keeping in touch with Neocities’s social aspect.

> This kinda worry:

Neocities is not a platform with millions of users like Twitter. Don’t go in expecting it to be— that’s actually part of the charm! We NEED a creative space online that isn’t inherently commercialized and targeted by investors, advertisers, and whatever creature replaced those tech guys who made open-source software out of a love for spreading information.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t build a website to sell your merch or host your commission prices. More people than ever understand that social media is not only a limiting, addictive, rage-filled time suck— now it’s an attractive asset for billionaires and propagandists. Apps are walled gardens. A webpage is a headquarters that no one but you can meddle with. The sooner we teach our fans to check a site even occasionally, the less we’ll have to worry when the next Twitter shakeup or algorithm change rolls in. More people going back to nurturing sites on the side means more control for everyone!