#don't give these garbage people any more of a platform

[liminalweirdo]

As people falsely claiming to be Palestinians ramp up their scam attempts please remember that Palestine does not have access to Paypal!!

If someone is saying they are Palestinian and soliciting donations through PayPal, it is most likely a scam. Just because something says it is vetted does not mean it's true unless vetted by a trusted user on that person's blog.

PLEASE read the guide below so that real Palestinians can receive access to mutual aid and scammers stop receiving so much support.

How to report phishing on tumblr:

Click on the meatball menu at the top right corner of the post

Click "report post"

Click "report something else"

Click "unlawful uses or content"

Click "Phishing"

[vaspider]

Since I just turned off reblogs on another post that quickly went from "let's have fun" to "this is fucking awful, I'm taking away this toy," please read this BlueSky thread from rahaeli, who I don't think is on here.

Most of it I've c/p for ease of readability bc BSky's threading sucks.

Okay, it's time again to talk about what the experience of having a social media account with a bunch of followers (*) is like. (* "a bunch" of followers is platform dependent. I'm getting irritating shit at 2k on Bluesky I didn't get until 10k on Twitter.)

(Ugh, wait, nevermind, I hit 3k while I wasn't looking. Anyway.) Someone who has never had more than 100 followers literally cannot comprehend the sheer volume of the responses you get. Even if individual posts don't get a ton of replies, if you post with any frequency, it accumulates.

Once you hit the first degradation threshold, your experience gets a little bit shittier. It's overwhelming volume, but the people who are following you are mostly ideologically, socially, and culturally aligned to you. You have the same concept of social media manners.

You'll get a few duplicate comments, because nobody reads the comments before they reply, but they're mostly from cool people, so you just roll your eyes a little at the same joke five times. You still make friends. You still have fun and can wind up finding neat new people.

And then those neat new people retweet your stuff, and it starts reaching out to an audience of people who are less aligned with what you think of as social media manners. You start getting some replies you find obnoxious: they're in good faith, you can tell, but they just grate on you sometimes.

And then *those* people start reposting your more viral threads, and you get people following you who are three degrees of separation from the people you are most likely to vibe with. And three degrees of separation is the second degradation threshold.

The second degradation threshold is where you start getting the constant, low-grade sand-in-a-pearl annoyances. The person who wants to argue with everything. The 15 people making the identical shitty "joke" that's actually just doing the exact thing you're complaining about, "ironically".

The people who look at a post that contains no question marks and think "there is an implied question here and I will answer it!" and leap to offer the most basic advice that you already thought of because you have existed for more than three seconds and can, in fact, think of the obvious answers.

The people who are spoiling for a fight no matter what, because you used one word in the post that is their particular berserk button and they're going to scream at you for hating waffles because you said you like pancakes even though you never mentioned waffles.

It is constant. It is never-ending. You cannot escape it. Every time you post anything at all, opening the app means wading through twenty garbage replies for every reply from someone who is actually cool and you'd vibe with just fine if you chatted with them.

You want to bitch about a minor annoyance? There will be 40 people all giving you the same useless advice. You want to squee about something you're enjoying that's making you happy? There will be 40 people coming to scold you because that thing isn't morally pure enough.

Every post. Every day. About 75% of the time you compose a post, you will get halfway through writing it and think "I can't deal with the replies this will get today" and delete it. You stop talking about things you enjoy, because you're tired of people shitting on them.

You stop complaining about the tiny annoyances in your life that you want to bitch about, because weirdly enough you already HAVE tried the first fifteen obvious suggestions you're going to get, and you don't want to spend an hour explaining why they won't work to everyone who's "helping".

(But you can't just ignore the "helpful" posts and not engage with them, because then you start getting accusations of being "elitist" and "standoffish" and jesus, lady, we're just trying to help here, why do you have to be so fucking rude and stuck-up, you full of yourself bitch.)

If you are any less gracious to the 40th person than that person thinks they deserve, there is a very good chance they're going to call you a cunt and drag allot their friends in to dogpile you and make the site unusable for at least three days.

The third degradation threshold is when you start needing to regularly call your local police department and politely remind them there are people who get very mad at you online and will try very hard to have you murdered by armed agents of the state and you'd appreciate it if they didn't do that.

I first had that conversation with my local police department in 2003. It's gotten faster now, at least? You usually don't have to start by explaining what social media even is.

Bluesky has tighter thresholds than Twitter did. On Twitter it was nicely exponential: the breakpoints were around 1k, 10k, 100k. Bluesky is running faster. I'm getting Twitter 10k annoyances at a Bluesky 3k. I am trying very, very hard not to switch over into Twitter 10k defensive posting.

I want to leave the defensive posting back on Twitter. I really do. I want to be able to bitch about a thing without having to wade through 20 "go try [extremely obvious thing]". I want to post about a thing I enjoy without 20 people yelling at me I'm bad for enjoyjng it.

There's a difference between arguing about an idea (which I love) and the onslaught of constantly infuriating replies plucking at your last goddamn nerve. And the more "last goddamn nerve" replies you get, the crankier you are, and then people lose their shit at you because you snapped at them.

So maybe let's all start keeping a few principles in mind: 1) if there's more than one reply, check to see if your point has already been covered. If it has, you don't need to repeat it.

2) Even the funniest joke gets old after the 20th time you hear it in 3 hours.

3) "I'm going to jokingly do the exact thing you just were complaining about because ha ha the real joke is I would never do that asshole thing" is never funny, and it is indistinguishable from you actually doing the asshole thing.

4) If there is no question mark in the tweet, think twice about offering "helpful" advice unless you and the poster know each other *mutually*, not just parasocially, you know it's likely to be new info for them, and you ask "do you want to hear how I handle this?" first and get an affirmative.

5) If you are going to ignore 4, ask yourself "is this a suggestion that someone with a reasonable level of generalized adult knowledge would think of trying within the first 15 minutes of approaching the problem?" If so, do not suggest it.

6) Do you really need to nitpick that grammar, spelling, or word choice? Did you understand what they were trying to say before autocorrect mangled it or they blanked on the exact word they wanted and found a close one? If you understood the meaning, don't be their volunteer copyeditor.

7) Is someone excited about a thing you hate? Are they having fun with the thing? Is the thing a front for white supremacist recruiting or organizing the overthrow of the US government? If the answers are yes, yes, and no, respectively, shut the fuck up and let people enjoy things.

8) We are all occasionally That Commenter. If someone you have a pre-existing relationship with replies to you and lets you know you're being That Commenter, it's because they have a positive enough impression of you they don't want to go straight to block. Treat this like the warning sign it is.

9) It deserves repeating: remember the Law of Large Numbers. Even if you only commented once, you may be the hundredth irritating comment that person got that day. Bluesky's terrible threading makes this worse: people don't keep a single thread of mounting crankiness the way they did on Twitter.

9a) If someone's top tweet sounds really annoyed at something, maybe check their timeline or follow back their nested self-QTs to see what level of irritable they're at and over what so you don't step straight on the same rakes they've been dodging all day.

10) However, remember that BSky also doesn't show replies made by people the OP has blocked in a thread. If they post about a pattern that's making them cranky and you look and don't see anything, they probably already blocked the worst of it. They still saw it in their mentions in order to block.

I really cannot overstate how absolutely exhausting and soul-destroying the experience of having a large account can be. It's also somehow still rewarding, or we wouldn't do it. But especially if you're a woman or a person of color or a female POC, that balance is really, really close most days.

And of course, the ones who stay are the ones who do find it still rewarding enough to keep doing it despite the constant irritations.

From here, the thread moves into a conversation about stuff specific to BlueSky, but the majority of the thread is truly applicable to Tumblr as well.

You may be the first person to comment "op lives on a planet without music," or "op has never heard of [thing OP didn't mention for whatever reason]," but you're probably not, and at a certain point, it becomes like someone tapping a sunburn.

So yeah.

[levyfiles]

is it just me or is this kinda not a good idea?

I think it's a gamble. And like anyone who cares about something deeply, watching it take a high-stakes gamble can be terrifying.

What I think people don't take into consideration is just how flooded their recent youtube videos have been with scammy sponsors and cheap fast-product get-rich-quick scheming vendors. Sure, their writers and producers made it fun by adding some really excellent characters to the mix, but I wouldn't touch a thing like Mistplay if you paid me as much as they paid Watcher for their video. However, the thing is, look around at all the youtubers you know who are up and coming. You can't make it on that platform without advertising trash to your audience.

With the vimeo OTT program, i believe there is a shared revenue and more incentive to promote more simple dedicated engagement; it's not ad sense clicks; it's just clicks. It's a soft start and there are going to be some kinks to work out but if they get to control their brand more and decide what gets made without needing some nu-venture, cash hungry sponsor to look at it, then I think they could change media online for the better.

Having said all that, the execution? Not their best. Watcher--listen, I love them so much--has had a consistent and terminal administrative problem and that means stuff falls through the cracks. From a communicative standpoint, when you're about to take your company in a controversial direction, you should know two things.

The backlash! You gotta get ahead of it. You need your PR team on the go a MONTH before launch

Always soft launch a big move. Get your feelers out for how people react especially if you don't have the kind of shark PR person who would know already that people don't respond well to paying for something they didn't used to pay for.

Watcher is still a baby company in so many forms and I will wholeheartedly support their move to do what they can to keep control of their creative content today and in the future. I'm not in their offices so I can't make as prescriptive a judgement as Twitter feels emboldened to about capitalism and greed or whoever they think their audience is however I can and will say that with any form of growth, the growing pains are going to show. i'll give them grace as they pivot and figure out how best to move forward especially with the volume of vitriol the internet loves to spew when they feel entitled to art forms that used to be free.

I'll say it again. At least we're no longer having garbage peddled at us regardless how much I crave Fabian Sax biblically.

[toskarin]

hey rin, a friend of mine enjoys composing music digitally and has a lot of respect for you as someone with more experience with that sort of thing. he has a hard time convincing the people around him to listen to the things he makes, in both the "finding an audience" way and "getting the people around him to give him their opinion on something he's working on way," and he wanted me to ask you if you could speak on your own experiences with those problems and how you've dealt with them. less related, he was also curious about your inspirations for the music that you make. i know this is a lot to cover, so if it would be easier for you to speak with him directly then please let me know

so I'll open by saying that, as far as people who can give good advice on this go, I'm probably not one of those. a lot of what I do only works because of some specific problems with my brain that are oddly adaptive to this sort of thing

that being said, this is a bit of the "tough love" kind of advice for surviving as an artist, so I'll make a second reblog for the second half of the question

this is either advice that will work or a ramble that will lead your friend to making his life unbearable, so look before you leap

-

The Easy Section, or "You've Gotta Be a Bit of a Tradie"

let's go over the business stuff quickly before I start rambling at length about the boring stuff

learn to love the work itself. "find a job you enjoy and you'll never work a day in your life" is garbage, but creative work really is the one area where you should double down on this. kick back and bump your own album on release day, thinking about how every second of it is something that didn't exist before you put it together. this is what's gonna keep you above water when the wind is dead

get on bandcamp. there is nowhere better for small musicians right now. bandcamp is basically the last remaining website with an effective suggestion algorithm that caters to people who want to actively engage with music and buy it

consider getting on instagram. in the majority of places you're likely to live if you're reading this, the local music scene is on instagram. probably don't use your personal instagram for this

consider getting on soundcloud. you won't make sales through soundcloud, because it's a streaming-focused site (more on that in a moment) with a focus on passive listening, but it's pretty decent for networking, especially with digital music production. soundcloud is linkedin for deadbeats

stay off spotify. streaming generally isn't worth the trouble these days unless you're playing concerts or are otherwise already established. if you aren't uttering the words "you can find me on..." more than once a month, it's probably not worth pursuing a spotify presence to end that sentence with

self-promote. if you have platforms, use them. find the subreddit for your genre and post yourself on the self-promo day. consider posting some bandcamp album codes when you do this, not just so you can get word of mouth, but because someone having an album in their collection means you effectively have a permanent zero-cost advertisement for your music which will only show itself to people who are verifiably looking at something similar. companies pay dizzying sums for ads that couldn't dream of being this targetted. this is a big reason why bandcamp is THE place to be for small musicians

cross-promote and collab. work with your friends. if you don't have musician friends, go make some and then help each other out. "independent" music is a misnomer

blind yourself to the metrics. do not look at engagement metrics. pay them no mind at all. don't look at them unless you're trying to see how effective a specific, deliberate course of action was and already know what you want to find

remember that strangers are unknowable. people do things for arbitrary reasons. if you don't have someone giving you written feedback, don't make any assumptions at all about why they did something. skipped tracks and minimum-price pwyws mean nothing at all

present your stuff in a way that gives it context. why should someone care about your stuff? give them a reason. carve out an hour to really work on a nice album cover, go the extra mile and include track-by-track narrative with your dungeon synth album, or just describe what you're expecting people to buy. I firmly believe that NOMAD/VIRTUE was successful in large part because of its presentation

gimmick. gimmick gimmick gimmick. discount codes are more fun than automatic discounts, free album codes are more fun than free albums, contests are more fun than giveaways, so on so forth. lacking any physical goodies to bundle in, you should still endeavour to give people Something To Do that makes them feel like they're really engaging with your music

zero expectations, zero overhead. do not rely on the whims of complete strangers to justify whether or not you end up in the red. if you ever find yourself saying something like "I can afford to pay for a session musician because I'll just make it back" you can't afford to pay for a session musician. you're probably never getting bailed out if you eat a loss, so try not to put yourself in a situation where you can eat a loss to begin with

someone else's expectations, someone else's overhead. if someone else is paying you to make this music for a soundtrack or something, if (and ONLY if) you have the money in your hand and know you have it, you're no longer gambling. at this point, you can start to look at expenses as investment

now onto the less fun stuff. here's where I ramble for like an hour at you.

-

if there's one thing I've really had hammered in over my decade-odd as a somewhat commercial artist (in all the disciplines I've worked with, which is most of them), it's that you have to be a bit of a bitch about it sometimes

that nagging fear in the back of your head that you're annoying? it's stopping you from doing what you need to do: annoy people

with that being said, this next section is kind of...

The Rough Section, or "You've Gotta Be a Little Hard-headed"

at the end of the day, you'll often find that you are your only advocate, and that means you kinda have to get your foot slammed in a few doors if that means holding them open. this also unfortunately means that you've gotta convince yourself you're pretty good. you don't have to think you're great, but confidence is a trade skill

the last opinion people see before the first time consciously engaging with your work (which here means "the thing that primes them for how they feel about it") is yours

which brings us to the first uncomfy rule

absolutely no cutting yourself down before anyone else even gets a swing

you can be modest if you want (you don't have to), but you absolutely cannot prime people to see the flaws in your work. if 50% of people are discerning enough to notice a flaw, why make that number 100%? what do you gain from that?

if something isn't as finished as you'd have liked it to be, but you've pushed it out the door anyway (which you will sometimes have to do), you absolutely cannot prime people to consider it unfinished

if the thing is still being worked on, there's nothing wrong with being forthcoming about that, but the fastest way to make someone think of something as "inferior product" when they otherwise would never have reached that conclusion is by telling them it is

and that, of course, leads us into a bit of an inversion of the previous rule

absolutely do not take the majority of your validation from strangers

doing this is bad for a million reasons, but I see the worst of this in visual arts, where artists double down on what gets them the most engagements and lay themselves at the mercy of complete strangers who have no actual investment in them

of course, it's normal to desire validation and approval from people you respect, but if you put yourself in a position where it's possible to enter a negative feedback loop that crystallises into you no longer making art from the default response of neutral apathy from strangers, it's not a matter of when: it's going to happen to you one day

so what's the move here? spend 8 years making music you don't release like you're in a compressed time chamber? probably not. I did it that way, but I didn't get much out of it, so you probably won't either

the actual answer is that you've gotta network. you need an inner circle. you need people with shared interests so that you can gas each other's stuff up

just like everyone else, you need your friends

you need to have friends who care about you, about what you're doing, and you need to care about them and what they're doing

this is because, while self-confidence is important...

the majority of your external validation as an artist should come from your friends and peers, not strangers

it's important to have artist friends, because then you can encourage each other in ways that are personally meaningful, but having your friends behind you, whether or not they're musicians, is so incredibly important

if you're motivated exclusively by success, however you're choosing to measure that, what you're actually doing is forming a nightmarish parasocial relationship with the concept of a crowd. not even a real crowd! a fictional group that materialises when you've created "the conditions for success"

there is no such thing as a truly independent artist. if your understanding of artistic success requires competition against others, you're going to lose that competition and then explode (unfortunately common)

finding your audience as an artist (and mind you, art is a social field) is very much a process of networking, but it feels gross to say it that way, so I'll just leave that at "if you want to be known by others, you need to be willing to know others"

anyway, this doesn't really terminate in a complete sentiment. I was just transcribing a train of though

if I were to boil this down to a shorter, snappier answer that I could read comfortably read out, it'd be...

TL;DR

the process of finding an audience is so much less about actually finding one than it is about learning to create happily whether or not you have an audience. developing an audience is the largely incidental byproduct of long-term creative efforts coupled with self-advocacy and interpersonal networking

if you want to be found by a scene, you have to participate in a scene, and if you want to participate in a scene, you need to be in the scene. so on so forth

as stupid as it might sound when I put it into words, the truth is that you can't build any kind of audience in isolation. someone has to find you somehow, and it's a lot easier to be found if you're actually somewhere that people might look

[thatdogmagic]

Remember this smug as hell post?

Well, keep it in mind.

I'm going to give some people here the benefit of the doubt and go into this post with the assumption that they genuinely don't know how fucking awful the Tumblr """"porn filters"""" are for images deemed - or reported by users as - 'NSFW.'

This is a rehash of everything I wrote out before, but it's going over all of it in one big post, because this issue with community labels moves well beyond debates over what is and isn't NSFW. There are doublestandards within doublestandards, and no way at all for artists and creators to know for sure if their post is going to get blacklisted.

We're not merely talking about the fact that these filters exist. We're talking about the fact that they are wildly inconsistent, and that reported images aren't seen initially by a person so much as an extremely stupid algorithm. That's why there's the option to say 'this ruling was made in error.'

There are literally no set guidelines for what qualifies as NSFW, and what doesn't, when it comes to nudity, and to what characters those guidelines actually apply. Staff rulings do not match up to one another. They legitimately do not make sense. You cannot divine how a ruling is going to end up, and it is infuriating that staff is jerking us around like this when the platform very clearly wanted artists like us back.

Not only that, they were, yes: that fucking smug about it. In case you forgot, that 'cheater' picture is talking about people who fled the NSFW ban specifically.

Examples follow:

Both of these images were caught by the filters, and then appealed. The first one was (visibly, as you can see) downgraded to Everyone, in spite of the character showing more secondary sex characteristics than the first (breast, visible nipple).

Similarly, a male character showing a pube fluff was left alone, even in spite of being cited in my appeal on the second image.

Last, there is, as noted, this readily available image of Felicia, that you can find by searching 'darkstalkers Felicia' on the search bar. Did people forget that she's bottomless, and those aren't panties?

Using fluff to cover junk is an age-old trick for characters like this. And it clearly isn't a problem with the male character.

Further, you can go through just about any archive and see a ton of images that were not subject to community labels, many of which are much more racy, and much more legitimately "NSFW."

So, yes, beyond the disgust of Tumblr staff treating any body like mine as filthy and inherently sexual in nature, this is also about a system that is arbitrary, penalizes artists for no good reason, and has deeply opaque standards. You never know when a piece of yours is going to run afoul of a bot, or what a staff ruling will ultimately be, or why the ruling is there in the first place.

And that's bullshit. If you think it's anything other than bullshit, you're being a contrarian ass. Especially since a forced label absolutely WILL kill your visibility, where compared to implementing the label yourself. It is punitive, it is punishing, and I will say again: it is completely unnecessary to jerk us around like this when the platform very clearly wanted us back.

And now that we are, we're back to being treated like garbage, constantly having to guess what the rules actually mean, how they apply, and to which sorts of bodies they apply, all while watching our viewcounts on contested posts eat ten kinds of shit.

tl;dr, do not talk to me about 'following rules' when the rules are so ill-defined as to be quite literally useless, to me, and to every other artist on this website.

[sardonicdoll]

able-bodied artists (or artists who don't have the relevant disabilities even if they are physically disabled in some way) really need to start checking themselves because i have seen more than enough ableist garbage on my TL recently. i don't get any traction on twitter though so i'm posting this here instead.

1. i'm not giving my thoughts on "AI art" because i do not have the patience and energy but bringing up physically disabled artists with limb differences, motor impairments, etc. (the ones that able-bodied people put on a pedestal because inspiration porn, anyway) as a gotcha is just as bad as the "AI art" bros you're arguing with who aren't disabled themselves (or disabled in these ways) but also tokenize these forms of disability. we're not ammunition in online discourse, i bet 10-1 that you people never uplift and empower and give a platform to disabled artists w/ limb differences/motor impairments/etc. in your online art spaces otherwise, and any logic that amounts to "this disabled person can do [x] so you're just not trying hard enough/what's your excuse?" is always always ALWAYS ableist no matter how you try to spin it, sorry.

if you don't have these conditions and consider yourself an ally to us then you do not have any business speaking with any kind of authority in conversations involving limb differences, motor impairments, etc. and art-making, or bringing artists with these conditions up when people are talking art-making and accessibility. full-stop. speaking from experience, being an artist with coordination and motor skill impairments when i'm surrounded by artists who aren't hindered by those things (even if physically disabled) really takes a mental toll on you and being all "oh this guy learned to draw with his teeth, so" does not help that whatsoever.

2. speaking as a horror artist/author - critically examine what you consider monstrous or horrific and the overlap between that and visible physical disability. not only have i had the above nonsense shoved in my face but then semi-popular art account posted a few photos (from online assumedly) that they called "monster eyes" when one of those images was leukocoria and another looked something like tonic pupil and/or coloboma (the pupil looked atypically large and out of place.) structrual eye conditions that cause visible differences aren't "monstrous." one of the images had crystals growing out of the eye, which, yeah! do more with that. but consider that images of "freaky" eyes you find on the internet are in fact eye conditions that real people have and what you're doing is associating how their bodies look with "monstrosity."

people have talked about this quite a bit with limb differences, bodily proportions, gait differences, motor impairments, etc. but i've never seen it talked about nearly as much with eye conditions. stop associating aspects of visible bodily differences with horror and monstrosity. even if it's unintentional that's purely due to your ignorance of the wealth of conditions that cause disability. exploration of disability and bodily difference within the context of horror and monstrosity can and honestly should be explored but that should be left to to those of us who actually understand what that is like rather than those who only have an outside perspective.

generally i'm very tired of able-bodied artists and then any physically disabled ones who lack respect for those of different experience to their situation.

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/766688842914938880/wait-soif-the-only-things-making-companies-censor?source=share

So I've been keeping half an eye on the NSFW AI chatbot and image generation scene (because it's funny watching how fast they flare up and burn out), and the app store and payment processor thing is really evident here

Horny AI image generators can't go in app stores. Full stop. It generates pornography, there's no really getting around the artistic merit stuff, and anything that generates believable photographic styles can actually spit out literally illegal images (digital content which is indistinguishable from a real life photograph recording of a living child) if it's good enough. Users only have minimal control over if what they generate will comply with the ToS; if you ask a bot to give you an image of a "cute boy" it might give you a heartthrob pop star, a generic smiling toddler, or a shota with a huge dick. If the shota is against the ToS, you are now breaking a rule that you have no control over.

And becaues it's AI, it can't actually be filtered. The robot doesn't know what it's looking at, it can't generate an image and then make a judgement call about how that image applies with the ToS because it doesn't know what a ToS is and all it knows is that the image it generated from the "cute boy" prompt is the kind of image that is associated with the caption "cute boy".

App stores and the big payment processors don't want to deal with that mess, so these platforms will have apps that can be downloaded from their website or from discord, and weird sketchy ways to pay, like crypto or some small payment processor that you've never heard of and that sounds like a phishing scam.

Horny image gen platforms tend to be very short lived, and either rebrand as SFW platforms or completely shutter after only a few months. It's funny, but the tragedy is that this happens because of poorly moderated NSFW images, not because the images it generates suck.

****

Text does a little better, since it's copyright laws, not "we can't let people pass off recordings of child abuse as digitally generated art" laws that AI text tends to violate, and "horny is bad" as a social more is applied more strongly to visual material than to plaintext.

The bigger text platforms, like Google's Bard, have filters in place that will refuse to show NSFW text, and they're more or less accurate. The smaller platforms, which most of the "talk with your anime waifu" chat platforms are, have stupid insane garbage filters on what text users can enter, but not on what the chatbot generates. So you can prompt "describe her sexy vagina" and get "I'm sorry, I want to keep people safe so I can't talk about that", but if you type "describe her petals" you get a graphic description of a vagina from a bot that obviously has a mountain of het erotica in its database.

There are some text-only NSFW chatbot platforms that seem to be chugging along just fine with paypal, but they have strict rules about what images can be uploaded as avatars. Some will allow users to make sexually explicit loli bots, but won't allow any images of young characters, sexual or otherwise, anywhere on the site. Many text-only platforms don't seem to be in app stores, though. Paypal is fine with them but Apple isn't.

It's a weird, weird, little microcosm of the internet, and an interesting insight into what's going on with payment processors and app stores in re the pressures placed on websites.

****

The takeaway from all this (aside from the fact AI is amusingly ridiculous) is that text-only sites like AO3 and or Literotica are probably just fine, while sites that host images, like Tumblr, are under more scrutiny.

--

[fuck-your-proana-blog]

Fellow disabled people/in recovery people/suicidal people, please avoid interaction with @skylarthethompson .

I tried to kill myself last year because of my ED and chronic pain. I was in a coma for 2 days, in the hospital for 2 weeks, and am still suffering the after affects of the damage the 3 months worth of pills I swallowed did to my brain and body, and I'm still struggling with suicidal thoughts due to my many physical and mental illnesses. I just hope me exposing this cruel human will keep them from hurting anyone else who is also struggling.

Telling someone they have nothing to live for is so fucking beyond ok and I just want to warn anyone else who is suffering from chronic pain/illnesses/disabilities and mental illnesses/suicidal ideation that this person is a cruel and insensitive troll and to not let them rent space in your mind.

I reported them; anyone else who sees this please report this despicable behavior so they don't do any further damage to the mentally ill/chronically ill community here on Tumblr.

The first comment is clearly suicide baiting, and I guess they realized that and tried to seem a little less depraved; but you can't undo saying shit like this:

Also, take a look at the victim mentality at work here: "you're a smart smart nice person and I'm a dumb dumb mean person." 🙄.

And then there's the fake "do-gooder" story. So telling a very disabled person that their life isn't worth living is helping, and "a good coping mechanism"?? Anyone with half a braincell can tell you're just trying to seem less like an asshole when you've been exposed as one. Nice try to not seem like an absolute garbage person; but it didn't work.

And this selfishness: "I don't feel safe now! I don't want my virtual life ruined! I don't want gross people telling me horrible insults when my mental health can't take it!" Funny, because I didn't want your gross opinion on why I should just kill myself because my life is too miserable to be worth living with all my mental and physical illnesses. Nice ableism you got there. Also I didn't ask anyone to send you "horrible insults." I just asked my followers to avoid and report you for suicide baiting; which is a very severe problem on the internet that no one deserves; least of all mentally and physically disabled people like me and many of my followers.

"Please don't ruin my life over this!" If you say things online that you don't want everyone to see, that you can come to acknowledge are the actions of an asshole, that's your problem. Don't tell people they should just give up and kill themselves if you don't want people to see how heartless you are. If your life is "ruined" by something you said you have no one to blame but yourself.🤷

And of course the classic "I reported your post; I won't let you ruin my Tumblr life." ...are you even serious? You wrote those words; all I did was take screenshots and show them to my followers so they don't become victims of your harassment themselves- not everyone has the great support system I do, so they deserve a warning about people like you. Plus I said nothing wrong, I just told you that telling people to kill themselves is fucked up and made a post exposing your cruelty so you couldn't harm others who struggle like I do. If your "Tumblr life" gets "ruined" from this, your have no one to blame but yourself because all I did was post the words you put on my posts. I don't give a shit that you're "only 18;" you're still an adult and should know better than to tell strangers on the internet that their lives are so horrible they should just kill themselves.. also if you were actually "sorry" you wouldn't have said more cruel things after your oh-so-sincere apology.

There were even more responses they made saying they were going to kill themselves and it was my fault because I posted things they publicly said on a public platform, telling me they were going to Livestream their suicide and publicly blame me for their death, etc. (I reported those comments to Tumblr for a suicide threat but didn't get screenshots before they were deleted.) You can look at the amount of notes on said posts; this one has 27 replies with only 2 from me so they were harassing me all day with 25 comments while I went to some of my many appointments, so obviously I didn't get screenshots of them all, but the ones I did screenshot are more than enough proof that this person who told me I should just die and was trying to blame me for their mental state; saying I was guilty of something THEY actually did to ME, and that if they killed themselves it would be my fault... For simply making a post telling vulnerable people to be aware of them and their disgusting behavior because no one deserves to be told their life isn't worth living; especially when they've been fighting with those thoughts in their own mind for years and don't need some asshole online trying to push them over the edge towards suicide.

When I was a fucking child I knew that telling people to kill themselves is wrong. Not my problem that you're so cruel you can't see it that way and harassed me all day as I went to my disability appointments finding out if I need more surgery while my notifications were going off at a ridiculous rate as you were trying to convince me I'm the bad guy for warning vulnerable people about you; a person that told someone they don't even know who is a suicidal, ED recovering, physically and psychologically disabled person, that their life isn't worth living and they should just kill themselves.

This person is a threat to the mentally and physically disabled and they need their blog to be terminated so they can't trigger people on the edge like me and so many of my followers and others in the disabled/ED communities on Tumblr.

[lastoneout]

Everyone: YouTube is such a garbage platform! It only cares about ad money and exploiting creators, and they have frankly draconian rules about what you can say or show, and sometimes even if you follow all the rules you'll either lose your money and viewerbase to demonetization, and there's basically no way to fix that unless you are a huge creator who makes a massive stink about it on Twitter, or to the algorithm just deciding your videos aren't worth promoting anymore. I hate how many ads there are too, 2+ prerolls, midrolls, and ones at the end?? Tons are unskippable and they often contain triggering content with NO warning. And like, half the sponsorships are for corrupt scams and full of lies. And ugh the switch to prioritizing short from content is fucking over anyone who doesn't want to make discount tiktoks. Plus they're trying to stop people from using adblocker in fucked up ways. And on top of all that Google is just straight up evil. YouTube really does suck these days :/ I feel bad for the creators I love who are stuck using it.

Watcher: YouTube was a good place for our shows at first, but as you all know if you want to make money here you have to compromise the types of content you want to make to please the algorithm and advertisers, and we don't want to make content for them, we want to make quality TV shows for and supported by our viewers, so we can grow and offer even more, much higher quality stuff, so it's time to open our own independant streaming service. It's as cheap as we can make it, and we also want to give our fans more control and so there's a deal if you sign up now where you get 30% off for the first year and can vote on our next show, plus we will never implement any measures to prevent account sharing, one person can share with whoever they want. We're still going to upload trailers and premiers on YouTube, and we will NOT be deleting anything that's already up here. We hope you can support us, because it's your support that matters to us more than anything else.

Everyone: Oh my god you guys are such assholes who hate poor people, what the fuck is your problem!! How dare you abandon us, here's a huge paragraph about how your shows are the only thing that makes my life worth living because [xyz systemic issue], just so you know you're actively ruining our lives by trying to get rid of ads, make better content, and focus on what the viewers want. Why didn't you switch to Nebula or something?? Idc if that's not how it works. Fuck you all, I'm going to go review bomb all your videos. This is so evil and scummy. Also, I'm pissed because people are claiming this isn't avaliable in the rest of the world, even though no one has offered a single source to back it up. Anyway back to watching Dropout, a service you have to pay for, which I'm not mad about at all.

Me:

[genericpuff]

Hello. I wasn’t the anon from last time but I realized my question came off as rude and standoff-ish. it was actually just a genuine question of whether you think all webtoon original creators are/should be held to the same level of scrutiny as LO is. You said before that its okay for indie comics to look messy or unprofessional because they’re passion projects. But I was just thinking of all the webtoon originals that are overworked and under paid. Kind of makes me feel bad because webtoon presents them as professional works— yet treats them like indie projects. And its throwing them under the bus because they dont have any of the same resources as traditional print. When rachel gets called out for reusing panels/artworks, adding filler, and taking shortcuts it sets a precedent that all webtoon originals shouldn’t do that.

Oh you're good!!! Sorry if I came at you like a flying monkey, it was just very similar to the last set of asks so I made a faulty assumption LOL

I do think there's a lot of responsibility on WT's shoulders to do better by their creators. A lot of them are burnt out, underpaid, overworked, as you said, and I'm definitely not looking past that. The only reason I get on Rachel's case as much as I do is because she has WAY more assistants than others, people who are literally industry professionals (seriously, look up their socials/art pages sometime, some of these people literally work in the larger entertainment industries like movies and gaming, it makes it feel like their skills are being SEVERELY wasted on LO with how bad it looks week after week) and there's just a lot of evidence that points to how much Rachel lies about how much she contributes (she's also definitely one of the top earning creators on the platform, at least here in NA). That's not even getting into how much WT carries Rachel and LO on their shoulders, from giving LO extensive ad space every week (ad space that's constantly being fought for by other Originals creators who are lucky to get even a couple hours per season in the ad roulette) to outright paying for awards and articles to be written about it. Like, far be it from me to make assumptions as an outsider looking in, but I don't get the sense that Rachel is in the same ballpark of struggling that a lot of Originals creators are. If anything there are probably creators struggling to be seen right now because of WT constantly giving her and her comic preferential treatment over others. And yeah, that's on Webtoons, but you don't exactly see Rachel doing anything to lift up her peers or talk about her experiences with Webtoons the same way many other creators are and that says a lot IMO.

And, speaking as a creator and as a reader, I'm definitely not against the notion of webtoon creators using whatever shortcuts they need to use, but I still feel like there's a line you gotta draw somewhere before those shortcuts become definitively "lazy" low quality crutches. Those kinds of shortcuts can become a very slippery slope between "doing the best you can" and "making no effort at all". If I can use a creator who's not Rachel as an example, Let's Play has a LOT of this kind of thing going on.

I can totally empathize with needing to use shortcuts, I use them all the time and I'm not being burnt at both ends the same way Originals creators are, but while there is the concern that criticizing them sets a precedent that people shouldn't use them ever, there's the opposite concern that not talking about it when it's very obviously cheap sets a precedent that it's okay to give your audience garbage and still expect them to stick around and pay money for your work.

It's not really a battle that sits squarely on the shoulders of the creators, though, a lot of it does come down to Webtoons. But I think there are also creators who are just sorta like that. See Snailords as an example, they use WT underpaying them all the time as an argument/excuse for their behavior, but they're a genuinely shitty person with a nasty attitude who very blatantly manipulates their young audience (literally made up of children!) and they've been like that since before they joined WT as an Originals creator, so it doesn't matter if WT is in the picture or not, Snailords is just like that.

When it comes to Rachel, I genuinely believe that she wasn't always like this with her work, there was a time when she put actual effort into her art - but that time has been long gone since 2019/2020. And I don't think WT paying her more or loosening the strictness of her deadlines is the solution, I just think LO should have ended a long time ago before it got to that point. When LO's art and writing started to turn, there was that initial concern that it was her taking these shortcuts out of necessity for her health and work/life balance... but then there's a point where it becomes abundantly clear that the creator just doesn't care anymore and I think that's a point Rachel crossed a long time ago, probably around the start of S2 if I had to try and guess exactly where.

When it comes right down to it, Webtoons Originals is still a form of publisher, and if you sign that contract, you're going to be held to higher standards than creators who aren't because you're no longer a hobbyist, you're doing this as your job. That's not to say you don't deserve empathy ever, especially in the working climate that WT demands, but if you're gonna be working as a professional in an industry that's begging to be respected among its peers, you gotta hold yourself to higher standards. To really get across what I mean by that, if the webtoon/webcomic industry wants to be taken seriously, especially here in the west where it's competing with DC and Marvel, maaaybe it should at least have some modicum of quality control to ensure there's a mutual level of respect between the audience and the creator. I think that's something WT needs to be taking more seriously and, by extension, they should be doing more to both provide assistance and accommodations to their creators as well as quality control to ensure they're holding these works to a standard they expect people to pay for. This is especially true for a comic like LO which they're insisting still has a show in development (they aren't but that's another topic lol), of course people are gonna have higher standards for a comic that's won as many awards as it has and has gotten television and merch deals.

And aside from all that, I don't think anyone gets mad right off the bat at a comic that isn't "perfect", usually they'll just go "oh okay, this is what the comic is, it's not for me" and move on (Religiously Gay is an example of a comic like this, there was already a lot of controversy surrounding it when it came out but it was pretty clear that was just what the comic was so I didn't bother reading it further). It's when a comic starts off on a good note and builds that rep and then becomes a cheap reproduction of what it used to be that audiences tend to get more upset - because the creator has built that rep with them and set those expectations, which they're now failing. Look no further than S8 of Game of Thrones. It's often WAY more disappointing than a project just never improving in quality in the first place because you're seeing, in real time, a project you know can do better fail at that and even get worse.

I'll also mention, on a personal note, that I've found shortcuts that I tried and ultimately didn't end up liking, even if they technically improved the output of my work. I started using 3D models last year for my main project, and while they improved my anatomy consistency, now they're making my poses feel very stiff, lifeless and boring, and my characters just don't feel alive anymore. So I'd MUCH rather have expressive art that's a little messy sometimes than stiff art with an accurate hip to torso ratio. I still aim for consistency as best I can, obviously I don't want my characters' appearances to be morphing from panel to panel, but in practice, most people don't care or notice if an arm or leg is a little out of place.

All that said, when it comes to LO, I don't call that stuff out as like, a genuine legit criticism. It's more just because it's hilarious and I often can't believe I never noticed those things (which is exactly the former point I just mentioned at play, most people don't notice these things). So that's where I'll repeat, don't confuse my shitposting of LO and how silly it can look in hindsight with like, legitimate criticism that I would blanket apply to every project I read. Apply common sense where necessary. Don't ever punch down.

And maybe also just don't use me as a monolith for these things, I'm literally just a guy talking shit on the Internet and participating in some of the worst that fandom culture has to offer LOL Time will tell if I will ever pay for my crimes（；´д｀）ゞ

[majimasleftasscheek]

Im getting back into yakuza upon hearing the kiwami switch announcement, but not sure where to find the other fruits...is the Fandom more active on Twitter? I used to use it but left when muskrat started sniffing around, is it worth the return?

it kinda depends on what you wanna get out of it me thinks :o

the fandom is imo bigger on twitter but it's also twitter lol so you're gonna get a certain kind of interaction/people there compared to here. if you're wanting to follow say, more jp artists and stuff, twt is definitely the place to find em. and as much as people hate it, the 'for you' tab is decent at giving you relevant content especially when the algorithm picks up what you're getting into

also twt is good if you wanna directly follow any of the official accounts. it's how I keep up with merch since tumblr is pretty much barren for that sorta thing. I think it's worth a shot if you really wanna branch out to the fandom more. just cater your space and do what's best for the mental (like blocking /muting, etc) and twt is honestly fine. I use twt exclusively on pc so I got extensions to mod out all the musk garbage

there's also discord servers too but that also depends on what level of comfy you are with the # of people hanging out and what the server focuses on. I enjoy my server very much cuz we got that goblin braincell and I can always be very normal about the boys™ (｡◕‿◕｡)

oh and there's bluesky! I don't really know how the fandom is on there tbh. I have an account myself but ngl I get real lazy keeping up with other social media 😩 as a platform tho it's twt but competent lmao

[anamericangirl]

Hominis was literally posting videos (not snuff) of Israelis getting kidnapped on Oct 7, I suggest ignoring whatever he has to say

I don't know what he's posted, especially recently, but I stopped giving him any attention a long time ago. It's sad though because he used to be one of the smarter and more rational people on this platform but he's gone completely insane and is just an antisemitic terrorist sympathizer now so his opinions on everything, particularly as it relates to the conflict in the Middle East, are garbage.

[imptwins]

re: that stuff going around

Time to clear the air I guess, because people are getting asks about Kim and I, accusing us of grooming a 15-year-old. Thought I could ignore it because the person shouting about this has been doing so to the two people that follow them for WEEKS and constantly sending Kim harassing, abusive asks, but I guess not, because now it's starting to spread through bigger platforms a little.

This is nonsense garbage. The 15 year old in question read both Kim's and my own 18+ work without our permission and was subsequently blocked by both of us. Later on we joined a public Discord server that they turned out to be the co-owner of. After talking to them, they promised to stay away from our 18+ work and 18+ socials, which is why we both tell them to stay the hell off our profiles on these sites. The only place we talk to them is a, again public, Discord server, where they do not have access to the 18+ channels, and we never discuss anything inappropriate with.

During the course of this we also found out that they, as a minor, wrote NSFW fanfiction. We (publicly) recommended they not upload any more erotica until they turn 18 and cease interacting with 18+ work and creators, which they also agreed to. We did this because minors bumbling around in 18+ spaces is, in fact, unsafe.

We also found out that they are in an abusive household situation, and (still, in the PUBLIC discord) have been giving them occasional advice regarding their situation of having Fox News-quality parents that have seized all of their devices and cut off all their social networks due to the fear of them catching the 'trans contagion' or whatever. They are already trans and cannot transition due to their parents. Very few other people are helping them with this, they would frequently rant into the discord and receive no assistance, so both Kim and I sometimes step in. Obviously people like the person spreading this crap, Snowcollector, have no desire to actually help this person, or anyone else. They don't care. This minor is a prop for them to feel morally superior.

To call Kim a groomer because of this - not to mention misgendering them - betrays this person's mindset. They think a trans person talking to a minor is grooming. They think that anyone who involves themselves in anything 18+ interacting with a minor, even just in casual conversation in places that won't expose them to 18+ content, is a groomer. This is the same logic as calling drag shows unsafe, as saying that sex workers need to be banned from anywhere that involves children, that a teacher who published salacious images on a private account needs to be fired. It's just standard puritan rhetoric.

In the interest of transparency, both Kim and I make some Highly Questionable art. All of this art is properly tagged, behind age warnings, and has copious content warnings. Neither of us want anyone who does not want to see our work to see it, and we DEFINITELY do not want minors viewing our work, and have in fact gone to considerable lengths to ensure they do not.

This person has been harassing Kim and I for several weeks now, calling Kim a groomer for being a trans person who exchanges words with minors in safe environments where it can be witnessed and anything inappropriate would be caught. They have now moved on to misgendering Kim, calling them a "guy," and making absolutely deranged claims that they misgender characters and are transphobic.

I highly recommend blocking Snowcollector because they've apparently decided to drastically up their efforts, dragging bigger names into it, joining random Discord servers, spamming ask inboxes, etc. The behaviour is, plainly, obsessive.

tl;dr: Kim is not a groomer, and we have in fact gone to considerable effort to make sure this minor stays away from our 18+ content and keep our interactions with them as safe and visible as possible. The event being called 'grooming' is that we stuck our necks out to help a kid who was in genuine danger, who is in a WAY better situation now, and I'm pretty proud of that. Fuck off.

[therealressii]

do you mind if i give feedback on the game you're making?

i played a little bit of it (i got to the temple place) and so far i love the art style, but it is super not obvious what is and isnt an enemy? like i saw these garbage worms that damaged me, but they where so thin i died to them and didnt even see them

i also encountered what i think is a bug, where if you jump and then quickly jump after, you can almost double jump, and it gives you enough height to clear distances you probably could only climb without, however it does feel satisfying to pull off, therefore im unsure if its intended or not. i also couldnt heal, despite there being a control shown at the beginning that said i could, not sure if theres a reason for that or not

(also sorry i realize its kinda rude to ask if you want feedback, but then give it anyway, take that what you will lol)

last thing, a lot of the enemies are super vague in how they attack, and a lot of the time i die, its because an enemy i encountered hits me with something i cant really dodge, like the firelizzard guy, i hit him enough and then it blows up and jumps at me? i cant do any damage to it without dying before i land a hit, its just super confusing

i will say though, the platforming is really fun, if its a bit finicky, but so far the art style is stunning, and i love how the main character moves and looks. they look like they give good hugs lmao

sorry if this seems overly negative, but i love the game so far, and i cant wait to play more of it! (it might also be a problem with my potato laptop that i use lmao) ((also i realize this is a MASSIVE ask, its really easy to talk about this game it seems. i cant believe how little people are talking about this! its such a cool game so far and EOURGH i love it and i love the characters they hit all the right spots with me EUIUGH))

sorry for my inefficient way of typing, and the wall of text uuuh your really cool and i wish more people talked about your game and your art because its absolutely amazing how much you have made and how little its talked about! this is such a diamond in the rough and its absolutely stunning

thank you so much for playing, i always welcome feedback so don't worry about that and to address each point:

it was deliberate to make some enemies very hard to spot (blame pikmin 2 and rainworld) but it could be worth considering adding some additional audio and/or visual indicator i did plan on adding low threat music to play when any enemy was near you (similar to rainworld) though i haven't gotten around to learning how to make music yet so we'll have to see

yea that's a bug that appeared pretty early in development, a consequence of how the game detects if the player is on the ground or not i haven't bothered to fix it as my general rule for bugs is if it doesn't negatively affect the player or gameplay, i wont bother touching it so semi intended

im curious, did you ever craft any upgrades or know about that, including the healing potions needed to heal i didn't provide any tutorial or indication that there was a craft system for upgrades since i assumed that at one point or another the player would try to figure out what they could do with the materials that came from enemies, plants, and such sorry if that sounded rude, im genuinely curious for obvious game design purposes since i wanted to make roa with as little tutorial as possible to let players figure out the game without too much hand holding, but i could definitely add some additional tutorial/indicator besides the interactable arrow indicator

im guessing you went to the ruda'ishvura temple region straight away and that area is purposely filled with enemies with much higher health pools and damage its basically to indicate to players who get there early that they may need more health and general upgrades though i don't block it off based on boss progression since i want to allow the player to explore and well figure out their limits tho i could try make certain enemies a lil less confusing (not promises on that sorry akfaghs)

lastly, im curious about the "potato laptop" comment, were you experiencing stutters or anything like that optimization wasnt really my main concern at the beginning given that i just wanted to get something out there and as long as the game ran 60+ fps on my setup in the editor, i considered it good enough to run on most pcs and laptops but i might have to do an optimization patch of sorts if there are issues on lower end setups

anyways thank you so much again for playing roa and for the feedback, it is always good to get insight from different player experiences and their reactions/responses to my admittedly silly game design philosophies for my game

[aquariclily]

🔞 Minors do not interact! 18+ only, & preferably 20+.

⠀General Roleplay Information!

All my blogs are listed here!

I personally prefer long RP stuff to be discussed through messages or Discord as I value OOC trust & communication. However, I'm good with filling in interest checkers as well.

I accept most inbox submissions, even for non-(Tumblr)roleplayers. But please don't expect for literally all inbox replies to turn into threads (though, you can ask.)

I can't consistently cut posts bc I'm generally on my phone & open Tumblr on the app.

I roleplay on both Tumblr & Discord. Discord RP's are a little more prioritized sometimes because it's more easy for me for short/more casual stuff. I'm open to try out other platforms if convenient.

NOTE: I am highly selective with my canons.

⠀Do Not Interact…

— DNI if your blog contains the following: Pedo/Incest/Bestiality/Anything Too Problematic (think of e.g. uncomfy~immoral/illegal taboo stuff, etc.) I really don't care what tf you're into - I just don't want to SEE these things on my dash. (Plus, I also don't want trouble.)

— OOC garbage behavior such as; Racism/Sexism/T.ERF/S.WERF/G.ender critical/M.AP/Z.oosexual/A.lt-right/Any discrimination or insensitivities to marginalized groups/etc. I will block that shit on sight.

— "Collectors". I block collectors on sight. I have terrible experiences with them. I usually block them on sight (for my mental health.) If you want your OC x Canon ship, you must offer double-up or leave me alone. Find some other blog.

— I'll repeat: No minors. Roleplay is for 18+ only, 20+ is preferred (not mandatory. This is because I'm 30+.) However, minors are free to follow my blog(s) if they are SFW. It's just that I don't want to roleplay with them.

— If I blocked you: Don't fucking block evade me!!

Notes: I block very liberally to curate my Tumblr Experience™ (it usually means that I just don't want to interact so don't take a block too personal) & it would be too laboring to fully elaborate on every small thing that just bothers me. (Along on how a lot of people on this website lack basic reading comprehension… not worth it. 🗿)

If you read this. Please don't worry about me blocking you out of the blue, I usually (kindly) confront people if we're mutuals for a while.

I admit that I suffer from trauma (C-PTSD) so curating my experience is very important. I don't want to list my specific triggers because it can be used against me but it's in the range of taboo/extreme stuff (what's in my DNI.)

⠀RP Do's…

— Just wing it. Don't get intimidated, I like casual RP's on Tumblr too. Don't worry too much about length/detail.

— Try to read the Blog/Muse Info's. Not mandatory, but it would be nice. This post is just the general RP rules (hence, it's posted on my main.)

— Be patient. Acknowledge that there is an actual PERSON behind the screen. I am not an AI. Don't treat me like one. I have my preferences, & prefer to stick in my comfort zone. And sometimes I get busy. Sometimes, I just want to do different things. Sometimes, I'm just too tired, moody, sick, or whatever reason. You can ask what's up when in doubt, though. It's fine. I'm just saying that I have a life, my preferences, and that I need my rest.

— Talk OOC, plot stuff, discuss dynamics between our muses, etc. I may fill in interest checkers but I personally prefer to work through messages. Interest checkers don't really work for me on my canons so I no longer do that. I value good OOC communication. This is how you get things done with me.

— If there is a problem, talk it out. Let's acknowledge that we're human and being humans means that we're flawed and we all can have our bad days; I want to keep my mind open and hear you out.

— Give attention, show some excitement; I gravitate to those who seem most interested & express it. Don't worry about ♥/reblog-spam lol, I don't mind. I like the attention.

— Come up with ideas. Talk about our muses & world-building. You could never ever bother me with genuine interest & passion. Passionate writers are admirable.

— If you struggle with coming up with ideas: Ask! I will not mind if you ask, because that indicates that you're interested! Which is a good thing. I'll gladly brainstorm for you.

— Drop threads & start new ones if you lost muse. It's fine.

— Take a break if you need it! ♥

⠀RP Don'ts…

And I can't stress it enough.

— Don't be weird. Respect my boundaries. I am very tired.

— Don't sexualize/romance the muses that are minors or child-coded.

— Don't godmod. Don't try to control my muse without my consent.

— Don't expect me to ship something if we haven't discussed it. Also don't be a jerk if I say "No". I'm still selective. Don't demand me to do double up for ships if I don't see you demand it to others & don't see it in your BYI/RP Rules. (It's unfair to put a double standard to me.)

— Don't disrespect my wishes and preferences in roleplays. I am not an AI that is willing to write literally everything. Don't get mad if my muse isn't going to act the way you want them to. Don't guilt trip me for retiring muses: My muse for things isn't going to stay the same forever.

— Don't pressure me to write things I'm not (or no longer) interested in. When in doubt, just ask. If you don't ask; I guess you'll just stay in doubt then! Sorry.

— Don't make OOC vagueposts & stuff like that. It makes me nervous and worry if it's about me. I also will raise a brow at you if you give OOC drama more attention than roleplay, this can result into me confronting you or even unfollowing you if we're not close enough. Outside that: I actually DO support callouts of genuinely shitty & problematic people with actual/proper evidence! I'd rather not want to end up interacting with e.g. someone who's predatory or weird around minors.

— Don't be afraid to message me!! I'd love to talk.

Discord…

— Feel free to message me for my Discord if interested. Be sure to have some clear information about yourself somewhere before I add you!

— My status often says that I'm "offline". I want to reply at my own pace.

— Even on Discord, I take my breaks.

⠀⠀♡ this post to confirm that you've read the "General Roleplay Information"!

— Message me if there are any questions! Don't be shy if you don't understand some things.

[frogsandfries]

So this Mr Beast thing

I'm weeeelllll over the age of eighteen, so Mr Beast has only occasionally come into my internet periphery. Unfortunately, my family really likes popping into walmart for everything, so it's felt hard to escape the brand. Still, for the most part, I've been able to avoid it.

Look, I'm just not into that reality garbage or the casual, walking around your life 24/7 with a camera shoved in your face like anyone cares. I watch probably more youtube than is healthy (well, I listen to a lot more than I actually watch; I've trained my brain that youtube time is art time), but it's usually long-form edutainment--Casual Criminalist comes readily to mind. Stephanie Soo, Kendall Rae, Prickly Alpaca. Stuff like that. One part true crime, one part art--be that sketchbooks, crochet, sculpting.

It's been a while since I've had any kind of (semi) internet drama put right there in front of me, but watching Rosanna Pansino of all people (another youtube personality that I didn't keep up with when she changed direction) concerned and calling out some Mr Beast bullshit (surprised?) got me to just dip the tippiest of my toe into whatever the fuck is going on over there. No, I'm not going to watch his shit. Luckily, there are plenty of people who've already done that and more.

One of the videos I watched has me unsurprised. Like, I figured there was something fishy about a man who just gIvEs AwAaAAayYy SoOOooo mUcH mOnEy; like, bullshit. Where the fuck is he getting aAalLlL tHiiISss MoNeEyYy?

I'm not sure what I wanted to accomplish by bringing this up. I guess it really bothers me to feel like someone is just casually getting away with preying on children on such a vast platform like this. And this isn't even getting into the accusations that there are at least a few people on his team who are doing more than training children to become gamblers, and beg for candy. But.....who do you tell? It also bothers me that......like, this guy's whole thing is directed at that under-eighteen market, maayyybeee 20-25 white males. It's not a secret. I don't even have to watch his shit to know this. And the first things that he does when developing merchandise and trying to branch out his income streams......is pop up fast food....and candybars???

As someone who was already well and fully an adult when he became popular--and an adult of his peerage, no less--I just never liked him. I know it's rich to say, but I would never have let my child watch his content just based on his face lol and I say that, but the older I get, the better I feel a face is a great way to just Know someone. There's a lot to be said for one's eyes and the way one uses one's face muscles; even before we get into the things that they say and do and who their audience is. It's also hard to describe. I know the common adage is to never judge a book by its cover, but can you really tell me, after interacting with way too many people who use their face in a similar way--again, it's hard to describe, but it's really in the eyes--that my predator radar isn't critical to listen to? That some time wouldn't be saved by trusting my gut? After all, I am the self-proclaimed worst at listening to my gut.

And then there's the way he talks on interviews. He's just so goddamn fucking disrespectful of his audience; like, I'm clearly not of the cleanest language, I don't have an inherent problem with swearing or cussing or whatever you want to call it. That's not the problem; the problem is the full language that he uses, the way he thinks that use of language in regards to his audience, kind of "behind their backs", off of his own channel, where maybe less of his audience is going to think to look for him. He's an all-round fucking predator. I get the feeling he feels like the smartest man in the room, but he's fucking weak because he has to prey on children.

Anyway, I don't even want to know what this bullshit is that he's up to now. I don't want to feel even more helpless; like, what am I really going to be able to do? Call the police? I have no idea. The guy has never been kosher; it's fucking weird for a grown adult to be making basically reality TV aimed at children. There's a reason TV reality TV is never aimed at children: Children don't understand how it isn't real. I mean, honestly, even as a teen, it's a little difficult to parse exactly how it isn't real; furthermore, a lot of older adults don't quite seem to grasp it either. But at least adults should have the wherewithal to either research into it or change the channel.

Additionally, the whole illegal gambling thing that he does, the just blurting out shit like "oh we'll give away x to y in the next five minutes" and he rarely ever does. It also looks a fuckin lot to me like he "gives away" these rewards to other youtubers so that other audiences will trust their favorite youtubers right back into Mr Beast's grasp. If Joe Schmoe off the street got one of these cool rewards, he wouldn't have a camera in his face; how would we know Joe Schmoe got this cool prize?? How could Mr Beast monetize Joe No-Camera Schmoe?!?!?

Honestly, I'm glad the channels I watch on youtube would never have anything to do with this predator, because I think I'd have to block those channels.

Okay, here's a challenge for you, I guess. If you see this and you or anyone in your family watches this predator, block him. Boycott him. Dry up his predatory revenue streams. Ignore him. Force him to go the fuck away.

And if you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, stay beautiful.