#either through enabling notications or reblogging from one account to the others

[tired-and-unjellied]

The same fundraiser asked me thrice to reblog their stuff across 3 different blogs today, and I wish I found it hilarious instead of frustrating 😮‍💨

yesterday: *think back of blog1 contacting me to reblog their post regularly, go and reblog their post*

a bit later, blog2: could you reblog my post and schedule daily?

blog2 at 3pm: could you reblog my post and schedule daily? (I reblogged a bit later)

today, blog1 at 1pm: Thank you for reblogging. could you schedule daily?

blog3 at 5pm: Thank you for reblogging. could you schedule daily?

[searchingmyfeelings]

If You're New To Tumblr & Have No Idea How To Use This Place

(created specifically for phone users)

(and find yourself tumbling around-- aight aight I'll excuse myself--)

When I rejoined Tumblr, I was so confused and scared on how to use this site properly. I was afraid I'd be doing something offensive, or breaking the norm or not respecting the culture here or doing what I'm not supposed to be doing and so on. (I think I'm also breaking the norm by making this guideline fjsjc but please forgive me)

Anyway. Here are some stuff you need to know.

We'll start off with the buttons, then move on to the other feature exclusively available on Tumblr (filtering posts) and then etiquettes (for posting and reblogging etc.)

Buttons

You see that blue pencil button? That's the button for when you wanna make a post. The buttons available once you click on that are pretty intuitive so feel free to explore them by yourself.

Next, the house button. Pretty obvious? Yeah. That's the dashboard button. Posts are usually chronologically shown to you -- but some posts might not appear. We'll get down to that in the etiquettes section.

And then the magnifying glass. That's the 'search' or 'explore' button. There's also a similar tab on your dashboard at the top but you can explore them yourself to get used to them.

Then we have the chat bubble with a smiley. That is the equivalent of DMs here. We don't really call that our inbox here because that is specifically for the ask box. But eh each users could differ. Some users may turn off the chat feature so you might find yourself unable to 'Send A Message' to a user.

And lastly is the person icon. That is your page. You can also access your settings there. You can drag from top to bottom to refresh (works on both dashboard and your page). You'll find these at the top of your page.

If you notice the triangle pointing downwards, that's the option for you to create a side blog. But beware, you are not creating multiple accounts with that feature. Instead, you are just creating another pseudonym and using the place under that pseudonym. When you wanna send an ask or a comment, you will be automatically using your main. (Main is the URL or username, that you chose when you signed up and set up stuff).

The magnifying glass is for users to look up specific posts (either through tags or through keywords) available on your blog page (whether you originally posted it or you reblogged from others).

The icon of three dots connected by two lines is the share button. Press on it if you wanna share or grab the link to your blog page.

And beside it looking like a gear is the settings button. You can optimize stuff yeah. From here on, we shall move to the next 'chapter'.

Other Feature: Tumblr Specialty

There are quite some features that only Tumblr has (which is why I love this place so much tbh). We'll go through them one-by-one.

I will only explain about drafts, queue and inbox.

See, sometimes on Tumblr, you can end up scrolling & reblogging so many things that it may end up spamming our followers/friends on their dashboard. Below are how you can access the three features. Either you press on the three dots or press on the blue button long enough it'll show up as the icons as appeared on the right side.

To avoid spamming others' dash (if it bothers you care about them), you can opt to saving the posts to the Drafts. In there, you can edit the post to add tags or comments that you feel suitable or add-ons or simply to go back to (to read and stuff).

In Queue, you can set up the saved posts (or readily queue them from the dashboard) to a specific frequency and a specific time period. (Or just use Schedule feature if you have a very specific time you want it posted.) Using this will let the post be out there during the set times. Also very useful to make it seem like you never left.

As for inbox, I've nothing much to say. Just that, inbox on Tumblr does not mean instant messages for instant chats etc. It's for asks and submissions (you can liberally enable or disable both). Asks are where people send you stuff and you can respond to it by answering them, either privately or publicly. Heads up though, if you answer it privately you'll never see the ask ever again. (I regret it till this day... Sobs.) Submissions are posts sent to you that when you post it, it becomes a post on its own.

Ay, we move on to my favourite feature now. The tags and filtering.

Scrolling up a little bit upwards, you'll notice I put in a red arrow pointing to 'Content you see'.

The tagging itself will be explained more in the last 'chapter'. Just lemme share how to use this and how useful it is for you so that you curate your online experience on here to the best you can.

Click on the 'Content you see' button. You'll be directed to these two below.

Filtered Tags and Filtered Post Content.

Say for example, like me, you try to avoid 18+ content because you might open this app in public and you don't want to weird out the people around you irl with the sudden passing of sexual pictures as you scroll.

Simple! You can put in the keyword '18+' on BOTH of the options.

You see, filtered tags is to filter out the posts tagged as such and such. Whereas filtered post content is to filter out posts containing the keywords in the post (not placed in the tags).

Don't be afraid of using this. If for example, a user makes you upset and you dont want to see whatever it is they post, you can just put their URL in both sections. You can use this feature for as many keywords as you wish. There's a whole other explanation for Trigger Warnings and stuff, but I'm not good at that so I'll leave it out of this post. (Anyone else seeing this feel free to add on).

Now... that's done and over with. We'll be moving on to the last 'chapter'.

Etiquettes

Fhshcjs okay for real I didn't expect to write this much. I was expecting to give up writing this halfway. But welp. Okay so first things first.

1. Enjoy a post? Content? Artworks? Fanfics? GIFsets? Headcanons? Meta analysis? Stuff in general?

REBLOG. Liking works more as a bookmark and doesn't help with exposure nor algorithm whatsoever. So please. Reblog that content (unless the op, original poster, specifically says not to reblog - sometimes they put it in the tags so check the tags) and help get that post be spread around. This is very helpful for creators to get more exposure!

While reblogging, you can choose to save it into the drafts, quick reblog it or reblog with comments/reactions/add-ons.

Now. When you reblog and you wanna say something, you have two options. Either you add to the thread or you add in the tags. USUALLY, people would leave reactions either in the comments or in the tags as they reblog.

(More of this will be explained in the 'Tagging' part.)

"Wait. So reblogging is better, why's there a like button then?" you may wonder, as I once did.

As I've mentioned, likes can be like bookmarks (you can access posts you've liked in the 'liked' tab on your page). But. In some cases, for eg, when someone you follow is venting or just posting random stuff,...you can op to just liking it. Not every posts are suitable to reblog sometimes. Or like, when you post something and someone dear to you reblogged it, you can like that post to show that, "I see you reblogging my post, I really appreciate it fam". Honestly, this is something you will learn as you use the app more and more often. It's part of the fun Tumblr experience.

2. Donations post Vs Commissions/Tips etc.

There are a lot of donation posts here, but PLEASE be careful. Some of these might be scams. They will show pictures and stuff for evidence but they could be reused photos and so on. It's your money, so it's ultimately up to you what to do with it. But seriously, if you reblog such posts, don't be wary of someone coming into your DMs or askbox telling you the person is possibly a scammer. It is simply for your own safety. They are looking out for you. Basically, I guess you'll have to judge it yourself.

HOWEVER. In contrast to that, you will also see creators posting links to their KoFi, Patreon etc. Reblogging such posts would be very, very much welcomed. As a creator myself, I got some of my first commissions from someone that saw my post being reblogged by other people outside of my following circle. The only thing you should be wary of is if the links are safe, or if the creator doesn't plagiarize and claim what they have as theirs and so on.

3. Tagging

There are a couple of posts out there regarding this feature alone. If anyone makes an add-on, feel free to reblog this with them links.

Anyway.

I've already mentioned part of it in the previous chapter, under the part where I explained about filtering keywords.

It's very, very important that you do NOT censor the words. Don't sugarcoat it. For eg., s3x, rac1sm etc. Because we already have the filtering system! Just use the exact words without the symbols or numbers or whatever way of sugarcoating it.

Hard reminder: DON'T CENSOR THE WORDS.

If you censor it as we the example if gave up there, the post would not appear as filtered for other users. That might become triggering for them or give them an unpleasant experience. Even if you don't care about other users, if you don't want it to happen to you then don't do it upon others.

Wish upon others what you wish upon yourself.

Now. As for general tagging as reactionary tags: Please. You are allowed to be as incoherent as your mind truly is in the tags. You can scream, you can squeal, you can ,,,, yknowwww, just say stuff!!! I'll demonstrate with the tags on this post if you're still not sure. :) ...or just observer how others use it. However, please refrain from being mean in the tags or saying really nasty stuff. Be mindful of the person you're reblogging from or the op who might be triggered by it.

4. Fandom

I am not gonna go too deep into the anti Vs proship topic. Just. Just gonna re-emphasize basic internet etiquettes in this section. Along with a mention of red flags you should be wary of.

- those who tale-tell on others' behaviours whether in asks or DMs, especially as anons. This in turn causes a rift and potentially invokes call-out posts or cancel culture etc. (Not gonna discuss that here)

- they are very lenient with throwing out violent threats or words that sound violent. Or verbal violence. As funny as that sounds... It's not funny and it can be triggering to read. Or cause discomfort to those who read it. There's a distinction between advocating something and threatening others to oblige to whatever they advocate for. Imagine it in real life. Would you follow someone who says they'll do violent things to uphold what's right or would you follow someone who is patient and proactive with their words and actions to uphold what's right?

- suicidebaiters. Just no. People come here on Tumblr as escapism in general. Please don't tolerate this behaviour. Even if it's for the 'greater good', if someone does end up off-ing themselves, that will be on these baiters. Block them on sight if you must. How to block? Oh yeah crap I forgot to show how to block fhsjx

Go to that person's page and press on the 'person icon' and these options will appear.

Bear in mind the block button may not be your best friend, but it is definitely your very good reliable ally. (This doesn't make sense sorry I just really wanted to make a sentence with the phrase fhdj)

And lastly,

- cult-like circles. If they seem controlling, or you feel like you have to screen everything according to their moral compass, leave them. If they monitor everything you do, whom you reblogged from, whom you follow, whose posts you commented on or with whom you've interacted with etc. etc., be wary and be smart: leave them. You don't deserve to feel like you're stepping on eggshells while being here. If one's got a problem with something, they can filter the keyword using the features available on this site.

I believe that is all that I can share. Anyone else feel free to add-on.

Just one final message from me to you guys:

This is a pocket world. Yes, what goes on in here is significant. But you are not obliged to be as serious here as in real life. Be mindful of people and be mindful of your words.

Lastly, welcome to Tumblr. Hope you have a good time while on this hellsite and please don't make it hard for others already on here.

Take care!

[wildlyminiaturesandwich]

It’s time we talk about SimsDom again.

Most of you probably already know who and what Simsdom is but for those that don’t, Simsdom (or SimsDomination) claim to essentially be a CC finds website, which in essence I suppose they are... But don’t get your hopes up for a Lana replacement because they are SO much more than that. And not in a good way.

I know this is an old subject, and most people probably thought it was all over and done with, but Simsdom is still around and what’s worse is that I’ve noticed a growing trend among my fellow Game Changers who create content for Youtuber and Twitch/Mixer of promoting the site by using it to do CC shopping haul videos and streams, which is encouraging their viewers to use Simsdom. I’m not going to name names or point fingers but it made me realise that maybe some people don’t understand just how bad Simsdom is for the community in general, but especially for the amazingly dedicated CC creators of Simblr. And it’s just so disappointing to see people that some many in the community, including myself, look up to promoting this garbage site!

If you’re curious to know why this is a problem, I’ll explain under the cut. If not, keep scrolling... But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you visit the Simsdom website (which I’ve purposely not provided a link to because you absolutely shouldn’t visit it) you’ll notice a whole bunch of custom content is available there, more than likely you’ll even find quite a bit from some of your faves like @peacemaker-ic​, @nolan-sims​, @storylegacysims​, @crypticsim​, @renorasims​, @savvysweet​ and MANY more. My stuff is even on there as well and if you’re a creator, the chances are high your stuff is too; whether you want it to be or not.

But don’t be fooled, myself and most of the other creators whose content appears on their site did not give permission for our content to be shared on there. In fact, most of us have specifically asked Simsdom to remove our content from their site. I say “most” because there are some people who willing uploading their content there (god knows why). The easiest way to the tell the difference is to look at who posted the content. If you see this:

That content has been shared by a bot, without the creator’s permission and more than likely against their many requests that Simsdom NOT share their content. If it says the name of the actual creator instead of “Exchange”, that creator uploaded it themselves.

You might also ask why anyone would care if their content was shared on a CC finds blog, after all, it means more traffic to our blogs and content, right? First of all, whether it brings in more traffic or not, is beside point. These creators have specifically requested Simsdom not share their content and they have been ignored, disrespected, threatened, and harassed. Simsdom claims that their users make up 30-90% of Tumblr creators traffic, but I call bullshit. I check my Google analytics every single month for traffic coming in to both my Tumblr and Blogger from Simsdom and I can tell you that LESS THAN 1% of the COMBINED TOTAL traffic from BOTH BLOGS comes from there. And when you understand how they operate, you’ll understand why that is.

- UPDATE -

In reference to Simsdom’s response to this post, they linked 5 creators that they claim meet their crazy statement that their site provides creators with 30-90% of their traffic. So I just thought I’d point out some interesting facts I noticed while looking at those sites.

One of those sites is dead; literally, it doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever even did. Another, @simiracle​, is a fellow Game Changer who reblogged this post, so I’m guessing they don’t have support there. And the other 3 are alpha CC creators, none of whom have ever uploaded any of their CC to Simdom, nor have they ever mentioned Simsdom on their sites in any way. However, all three earn money on their own content via either adfly, adsense, patreon, or some combination of the three; my guess would be they wouldn’t be too happy to find out Simsdom is making money off them too.

You see, Simsdom might sometimes link back to the original creators site, but often times they don’t. I’ve noticed quite a bit of the content of my own on their site directly links to the file on SimFileShare, completely bypassing both my Tumblr and my Blogger. This might not seem like a big problem, but what about if the creator has put specific instructions, requirements, or notes on the original download page that if the downloader doesn’t read could result in broken/unusable CC, or worse, a broken game?

- UPDATE -

In reference to Simsdom’s response to this post, they linked to SimFileShare’s page on SimilarWeb and claimed that I was lying about direct-linking to my files there because their site does not appear in the list of referring sites. What they failed to mention is that that list only shows the TOP 5 sites that link to SimFileShare regularly. There are still 385 other sites that aren’t shown and can’t be seen without having an account with SimilarWeb. Convenient, huh?

I also said they only direct-linked SOME content. With my content it was only about 4 or 5 things out of the 15 or so they have on their site and I didn’t check anyone else’s stuff but I have heard other creators say the same thing. So of course they’re not going to show up in the top 5 if it’s only SOME links.

But wait, there’s more.

Anyone downloading from their website without an adblocker is forced to wade through potentially harmful ads as well. Notice the blue button that says “download” at the top? That’s not a real download button and if you click it, it will instantly begin shoving pop ups in your face claiming you have a system error or that your local law enforcement agency has detected illegal activity from your IP. Yes, I clicked it. There is nothing of importance left on my HDD (it’s all stored safely on an external drive that isn’t connected to the PC at all) because this drive has been slowly dying for weeks and I’m destroying it tomorrow and replacing it with a brand new one, so I decided to take a chance.

These ads, which are on pretty much every page of Simsdom, are what’s called “Ransomware”, and it’s whole purpose is to distract you with fake pop up “warnings” when you click on it so that you don’t realise it’s actually downloading a very harmful file to your computer in the background. It’s designed to be next to impossible to close the pop ups, so that even if you somehow became aware of the download happening, you couldn’t get past the pop ups to stop it before it’s had time to finish downloading and automatically begin running it’s payload when it’s done.

What payload? That’s the scariest part, you won’t know until it’s too late. It could be something as simple as a trojan that will force your PC to mine bitcoins, which is still harmful because these mining trojans are resource hogs and put a massive strain on your CPU. Or a trojan designed to target and encrypt specific files on your computer (usually sensitive ones) and demand you pay a literal ransom (usually either in bitcoin or pre-paid cash) and if you don’t, your files will either be complete erased or leaked.

Or worse still, it could be something even more sinister such as a key-logger; a piece of spyware that is designed to track and log EVERY. SINGLE. KEY. you touch on your keyboard. So every password you use, every online banking key code you enter, all the conversations you have via Discord, Twitter, Tumblr, or any other form of instant messaging, that fanfiction you’ve been working on that you are too scared to show anyone in case they think you’re a pervert, your credit card and bank account number you use to shop online, what porn you look for, even your Google search history (regardless of if you’re incognito); all of it will be no longer private and in the hands of someone who could use it to steal your identity, empty out your bank accounts, charge thousands of dollars worth of goods to your credit card, or expose every little strange thing you do on your computer that you thought no one would ever find out about, unless you pay their ransom.

Scary huh?

Also notice that those Get Famous recolours I made don’t say that they actually require Get Famous? Why is that a problem, you say? For most people it’s not, you see “Get Famous Recolours” and you automatically know you need Get Famous to use them, but what about people who are new to using CC and don’t know that for my recolours to work you need the pack they came from? Yeh, that’s a problem, because that particular download is one of those ones that leads straight to SimFileShare:

It leads directly to the merged file, which is NOT the only file available for download in that set, just the largest. But no one who finds my content on Simsdom will ever know that will they? Nor will they read the part of the download page that clearly states Get Famous is required to use the recolours.

I hear you saying “But adblockers are a thing”. Yes they are, but that doesn’t solve the issue of them linking straight to the file. And also, here’s what happens when you try to download something from Simsdom with an adblocker enabled:

You’re forced to wait 180 seconds before the download button appears. THREE WHOLE MINUTES in which you cannot move from that page or the counter will stop, and it will only restart when you go back to that page and stay there for the entire three minutes. Even Adfly isn’t that gross.

So, all of that isn’t enough to discourage you from using this vile site you say? Well, let me introduce you to the person/people who run the site. There are plenty of examples floating around Tumblr of how disrespectful, arrogant, immature, and disturbing the owner/s are (just search for “Simsdom” and you’ll see) but here’s just a few posts showing “receipts” of what happened to creators when they ask for their content to be removed from the site: Here,  here, and here.

They have threatened to doxx several creators, tried to blackmail others, threatened to shut down some people’s sites, and even actually refused to remove people’s content unless they say “please”; as though these creators are six year old children who need to learn a lesson for not wanting THEIR content on someone else’s website!

All of this was said AFTER they made a post on their Tumblr saying they would respect creators wishes to not have their content on their site. I myself had a run-in with them as well but I don’t have the receipts because as soon as they finally agreed to remove my content (after almost 4 days of arguing with them and being threatened several times) they blocked me... and they continue to share my content to this day. That’s part of the reason why my motivation to create has been so low lately; I know its just going to end up over there, locked behind a paywall making money for these disgusting people and tricking simmers into thinking they have to pay to access my stuff.

But back to the story! Once they realised 99% of Tumblr creators — the people they get most of their content from — were going to ask to have their creations removed however, they changed their mind and instead started refusing to remove content. In fact, if you go to their website and use the contact form and choose the option “Remove my Content” they literally ask if you are Tumblr creator or not, and if you say you are, this is what you get:

And that “Our Rights here” link? That leads to this nonsense that literally contradicts itself with almost every single sentence:

“Creations can’t be uploaded without the creators permission... but we do not need permission to share your creations” “Feel free to contact us to ask to remove your content... but actually don’t bother contacting us asking to remove your content because we won’t” “SimsDomination is a free website... We don’t steal any content... *literally has other people’s free content locked behind a paywall and charges people membership fees to remove said paywall*”

And as for the EA terms part... I have news for you Simsdom, YOU are the only one breaking EA’s terms of use by putting content behind paywalls. I’m an EA Game Changer, I have actually read the terms of use AND spoken at length on the topics of earning revenue from CC, and why paywalls/memberships/exclusives are against EA’s terms of use with the Sim Gurus, have you? Didn’t think so.

If you had, you’d realise that we are allowed to earn revenue from our CC by having ads on our blogs/sites provided they aren’t deceptive — you know, like that ad with the big blue button you have that shows up on every single page of your site — and don’t lead to anything malicious, which yours do. I clicked several of the ads on your site and they all either lead to disgusting 18+ websites, started producing ransomware pop ups like I described earlier, or tried to download a mysterious file called setup.exe to my computer (which was most likely a trojan as well). We are also allowed to earn revenue via donations and Patreon early access systems provided the content is also made available for free to the general public within 14 days.

We are not, however, allowed to lock content behind Patreon exclusives, memberships and paywalls such as Adfly; which is exactly what you are doing. Like Adfly, you are not only potentially exposing underage children to 18+ content and risking the safety of people’s PCs, but you are also forcing them to wait to click a link and charging membership fees to avoid having to wait to download said content that isn’t even yours; content that you have been asked REPEATEDLY to remove. That is the very definition of a paywall. It is NOT the same as Pinterest or Facebook AT ALL, they might have ads but they aren’t malicious and they do not force people to wait to view content.

- UPDATE - 

In reference to Simsdom’s response to this post, this is probably one of my most favourite Simsdom lies, because it never changes but it’s so easy to prove false! “Users don’t need to pay to download any content and don’t need to wait to download them” Oh really? Shall we take a look at your site on the old SimilarWeb that you love so much?

How strange. If you don’t make people wait, then why do you need adfly? And if no one has to pay, then why do you need premium memberships to get rid of the ads and wait time you don’t have? Odd.

Also, lets talk Adsense. I never said I had a problem with you having ads on your site; I said I had a problem with the TYPE of ads on your site. If you seriously don’t think your ads are in any way harmful, I’d suggest you take another look at your Adsense, because either it’s been hacked or you seriously don’t know what you’re doing. Oh, but that’s right, “Google will never display suspicious ADs“... Mmm hmm, you just go right on believe that. Yeh, it’s definitely not possible for Google to be hacked... Nope, definitely not.

Also, if you use your Adsense revenue to pay for your site.... what happens to the extra? Because based on your SimilarWeb page I can take a rough guess at how much you earn every month through Adsense alone and there’s no way your site costs that much to run. For that matter, where does all the extra revenue from Adfly, Short.st and this mysterious “other” go? And all the revenue you get from your premium subscriptions that you totally don’t charge people money for?...

Is that fish I smell?

You are not doing anyone any favours here, so stop pretending that you’re in this for anything other than money. Stop sharing content you’ve been asked REPEATEDLY to remove/not share and breaking EA’s and many creators TOUs!

If you’ve managed to make it this far, congrats lol I know this has been long and probably boring but thank you for taking the time to read the whole thing. All this post was meant to do was explain why people should not support Simsdom, and why I’m so disappointed in other Game Changers for promoting it, but it kind of got away from me a little.

Oh well, now you know what Simsdom is and why I will NEVER support them or willingly allow my content to be shared on their site. And if you do decide to still use their site, just... please be careful. My content will always be free and safe to download, just like the majority or CC creators here on Tumblr. Don’t pay for something you can get for free from the original source.

Also, if you’re looking for a Lana replacement (aka a good CC finds blogs that isn’t shady af like Simsdom) check out @maxismatchccworld!

- UPDATE -

This isn’t in relation to anything specific, just the situation as a whole. It seems Simsdom has just removed the search box from their website completely:

I’m sure it was totally legit reasons and not at all because they didn’t want anyone searching for their own content on the Simsdom website. Just like it wasn’t for that reason the last time too...

[pokkop15]

(Ok so I was a fool and had had a lot of this meta written up yesterday and instead of saving it as a draft while I watched critical role, I, like a fool, just left all the tabs open and then went to bed after the episode. Then firefox crashed in the night and everything was lost. Press F to pay respects I guess cause here I go again.)

First off, Aradia is best girl and I am so happy she's RELEVANT again. I had a whole preamble the last time I wrote this post, but I can't remember what it said other than mentioning that this is gonna be a long post beneath the cut and that I have other metas that will kind of overlap with what I'm saying in this one so I will try to keep my discussion of the narrative styles of the The Prince and The Muse to only what is relevant to this post and to what is RELEVANT. Also previous metas should be reblogged directly before I post this to make it easier to check them out before hand or to reference them more easily.

The main points of focus will be: The differences between how the two Time gods interact with The Muse and her narrative, as well as the general level of metatextual awareness of characters within Candy. | The juxtaposition of the Knight and the Maid. | The possible suppression of the Ultimate nature of The Knight, and by extension The Seer. | The Muse's unique state of power and presumed Awakening | I swear there was more but I flat out don't remember what they were.

One last thing. I am a rambly motherfucker so if you haven't read my previous metas, here's your warning to expect a very long and very chaotic mess of a post beneath the cut. Also for anyone confused anytime I emphasize someone as 'The Class' it's referring to their actions as a potential narrator and as an Ultimate Self. For example, the difference between The Muse and the Muse is that 'the Muse' would be for character moments like when the dead cherub possessing Jade's corpse in Candy is just talking with Davebot and Aradia, while 'The Muse' is for when talking about her influence over the narrative. (There's a lot of different ways I put emphasis on words or phrases, but “The Class” was the one I felt really might need clarification)

I find it interesting how Davebot acknowledges and shows distaste for The Muse interjecting her narration and thus inhibiting his ability to live in the moment. I find this interesting because as an Awakened god of Time, he is simultaneously living in every moment but as a Knight, and as The Knight, he is also intrinsically separate from those moments as he is the Ultimate One who Wields Time. Aradia on the other hand is the Maid of Time, who while almost assuredly having reached the pinnacle of her god tier after the hundreds of years we now know her to have lived, is not ascended to her Ultimate Self. As a Maid, Aradia literally embodies her aspect. As such she doesn't worry about living in the moment because she is the moment. Because of this Aradia is more prone to just accept, agree, and repeat the sentiments The Muse dictates in her constant exposition. However, despite acknowledging the narration, Davebot still ends up being incredibly passive in the face of it. Even though he has an Active class and is a dreamer of the Active moon, Dave himself has always come off as an incredibly passive character to me in a lot of ways. (Even the aspect of Time itself and its heroes are specifically denoted as incredibly Active in the {official and Canon} extended zodiac test [which means its contents are NECESSARY, RELEVANT, and TRUE]). Always acting under the direction of other characters, subject to The Lord's rule over Time, and constantly struggling with his seeming lack of control. Here, even after reaching his Ultimate Self, he still only makes passive-aggressive remarks instead leaving the flow of the story and the big decisions to others. (In my last post I went into deeper detail about the nature of, and relationship between Aradia and Dave's classes and how that affected their sessions, but I can't remember what the tie in was unfortunately so for now I'll leave it at this and move on)

Among the human players of sburb, the Strilondes have always been the most genre savvy and possessed the most awareness of the narrative and its' influence, (although Dave was never near the levels of Dirk and Rose). But up until this upd8, direct interactions with the narrative have been few and far between in Candy (at least as far as I can recall). I mentioned this in my previous meta as being a result of The Muse being the type to inspire characters to action whereas The Prince is far more heavy handed in is dictation and rarely attempts to hide his presence in the narration these days. But we see here once again, that not only is The Muse bad for the people under her influence, she's also just really not good at constructing a story. She relies too heavily on tropes and cliches, on plot contrivances; she tells too much and doesn't show enough, (something that should literally be her greatest strength as a Muse). Yet despite this, Davebot and Aradia are seen multiple times to interact with her dictations directly and Aradia even points out on page 284 that she is aware of The Muse “observing (their) every action and noting its relevance : )” (the emphasis on 'relevance' being mine). As such we can infer that it doesn't take an Ultimate Self to recognize The Muse's narration. But if not that, then what? If it was just pre-disposition of character that let them notice, then between her own abilities and self awareness, surely Candy!Rose would have by now, but she hasn't. Then is it proximity? Maybe The Muse is getting complacent and starting to unknowingly imitate The Prince and his methods? Or is it because both Davebot and Aradia are Heroes of Time? The aspect opposite The Muse's. After all, The Muse did express that the way (either Aradia specifically or that the both of them) experience time is “woefully unfamiliar” to her. Perhaps that makes it difficult for her to write a story that resonates with them fully. Whatever it may be, all the information up until this point doesn't come to a head so much as it is something that I believe to be RELEVANT.

With that, let us switch gears while keeping the previous information in mind. As I said before, in spite of all the active components of Davebot's Mythological Role, his character has often been passive. And the precise story beat I want to focus on right now is his Awakening to his Ultimate Self. Candy!Dave was out on patrol with a wife who he loved, but who also had very much always been the driving force of their dynamic. He was pulled to the ancient bunker by the narrative where a hologram of Obama expertly guided him through a conversation like a true politician, somehow knowing a lot about Dave while at the same time withholding “classified” information as if that word had any meaning without a country or government holding Obama accountable. (Unless of course Obama was still answering to someone... *Cough cough*the authors*cough cough*). Look, all of this is me saying that Obama was a leftover contrivance of The Prince that The Muse utilized for her own means. Dirk was a skilled programmer and engineer. He had a deep understanding of how to build AIs that could easily impersonate someone. He had an even deeper grasp of how to manipulate Dave. Dirk built the bots. The Bots. The bots that are supposedly NECESSARY for one to Awaken to their Ultimate Self and survive. And yet even if that is TRUE, it isn't true. The Prince claims he was a special case but his powers are of the soul, not the body. And it is the body that breaks down. And we know that Rose really was suffering in her path to Awakening, but I will remind you that her poor condition was first established through narration that we know was under the control of The Prince. Further more it happened prior to the Meat/Candy split, in which the Canon still possessed TRUTH, which is why it still remained RELEVANT in Candy (and it was obviously NECESSARY in Meat for reasons about to be discussed). Both Rose and Dave ultimately played a passive role in their Awakenings, guided to their Ultimate Self by another even though they are both Active players. I believe that The Prince established these rules about Ultimate Selves and built the robot bodies as a way to give him an upper hand against the two characters most likely to overtake him. Because to reinforce a point from a previous post, Rose is the only full on published author among the players and Dave himself has written comics and presumably screenplays for his films, making them the two people who might not only do a better job than The Prince or The Muse, but just do a flat out GOOD job. The Seer especially, which is why The Prince went through the extra effort to disrupt her sense of self as she was coming into her Ultimate Self. If these two had played an Active part in their own Awakening and without The Prince’s influence I think they both would’ve been quite capable of giving The Prince a run for his money. But the humans are not the only players in this game...

As I've already alluded to, Lord English (The Lord), was almost certainly his Ultimate Self. Awakened and Empowered by the treasure (a juju so powerful that it enabled John to retcon things in a way that overrides the timeline instead of splitting it, and it did so without even granting him its actual power). When The Knight awakened, The Muse described it has having all of Time flow through his consciousness, allowing him to experience every instance of his own self. Conversely Jade described that her Ultimate Self would be “like... one ultimate self distributed across multiple bodies. so in multiple places and states at once. every jade that exists is like a light being shined through a thousand cracks in the timeline.” (Hey remember those cracks in the universe that had light peaking through them? Idk, seems RELEVANT if you ask me.) So if we reasonably assume that ones aspect heavily affects how one's Ultimate Self first Awakens and how it operates than that means there will be similarities between those who share aspects. If Awakening for a Hero of Time is an experience of everything that ever has, is, or will happen to a version of themselves, and Lord English possessed a juju that allows one to retcon and not split, than the combination of those powers would make it so he could be the singular instance of himself while at the same time always be “Already Here” than there is truly no difference between Lord English and the theoretical Ultimate version of himself. And since the Muse consumed Lord English at the end of Candy, granting her the power to punch a wormhole in the black hole. This is also presumably where she gained the power to “...exist in several narrative structures at once” (pg 286) (also see the above explanation of Jade's Ultimate Self for why that is RELEVANT). Because of this, we can assume that The Muse is just as indistinguishable from her theoretical Ultimate Self as The Lord was. But these powers and this simultaneous existence is not without consequences because the Muse's collapse at the end of this chapter is almost assuredly a result of Meat!Jade's rebelling against The Muse in chapter 6 (specifically the action on page 167/168). And finally, to tie this back to the imposition of bodily destruction to those who Awaken their Ultimate Self, it is worth noting that The Muse does not possess a body of her own to be destroyed. Instead inhabiting the body of various Jades.

Alright, so once again sorry if you thought there would be some big culmination to this post, and hey, what pumpkin?

[sage-nebula]

((DO NOT reblog this post, or I will just delete the post (rendering your reblog meaningless) and block you, thank you.))

So, about a month ago, I was prescribed and started taking Lexapro for my anxiety disorder / chronic severe depression.

I’ve made a few posts on this here or there, particularly because the thing that drove me to seek medical assistance was because I was in a really, really bad place. I’m good at hiding it; I spent two weeks in a constant panic state where my heart was palpitating and I could hardly breathe because of it, and I’m sure that no one at work could tell because I’m really good at keeping a chill facade. But being able to hide what I’m feeling doesn’t change the fact that I am feeling it, and the panic state was pretty much unbearable. My severe depression has made it so that I typically always lowkey want to die, but my suicidal ideation tends to be passive. I think “I want to die” but I have no intention of acting on it. But during the weeks that I was in that panic state---a panic state which didn’t even make sense to me, because consciously I wasn’t worrying about anything, it was just my body having a never-ending panic attack from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep---started pushing that passive ideation to active. I live close enough to a train that I can hear the trains when they pass by, and I started having very strong daydreams of throwing myself in front of one because getting hit by a train would have to be better than living in a constant state of panic. That, and the sense of hopelessness and despair when I thought that the panic might never end, was what drove me to seek medication even though I’ve always been afraid of antidepressants. (Due in part to a sort of imposter syndrome, where I wondered whether I really did have a chemical imbalance, or if I was somehow just making it up.)

Well, I started taking the Lexapro, and as I mentioned in a few posts, the side-effects were not fun. At all. Actually they were pretty goddamn terrible, and I won’t get into all the gruesome details here, but let’s just say that for the first week and a half, my body seemed pretty intent on rejecting the Lexapro, or at least making me quit taking it. But I didn’t quit taking it. I haven’t missed a single dose. And I can tell you right now that I’ve noticed a difference beyond the brain fog of the first day. (Basically---and I laugh about this now---the first day I took the Lexapro I had a surprise work meeting wherein we learned how to use new admin privileges we’d been given. I didn’t know about this meeting until about two minutes after I had taken the Lexapro for the first time, which I did at work in case it gave me a seizure. So I sat through that meeting completely spaced out, learning absolutely nothing, struggling to set up my account. I know how to do the things now because in all honesty it’s not hard to figure out once you get logged into the admin portal, but jfc. It would be my luck that the day we have those permissions handed over to us is the day I tried taking my anti-anxiety/antidepressant for the first time.)

First of all, it really does work at subduing the panic state. Even when the side effects were kicking my ass up and down, my heart wasn’t palpitating and I wasn’t hyperventilating. Even that very first day, despite my doctor saying the Lexapro wouldn’t take effect for about two weeks, I noticed my heart rate slow and everything calm down. It was incredible. It made me eager to get to the next day so I could take the next dose. (Don’t worry, I’m not overdosing; I’m taking one pill at the same time each day as instructed.) I haven’t missed a dose because I don’t want to miss a dose. When I wake up each day, I can feel my heart doing light palpitations, as if it’s just waiting for me to forget so that the panic state can start again. I haven’t missed a dose because I want to keep that at bay. It’s not perfect; I can still feel those palpitations rise up sometimes, and even just a few minutes ago I was feeling it for whatever godforsaken reason. (I actually think I need a stronger dose and wish my doctor had prescribed me one, but since my anxiety and depression scores are better than they were last time, and since I’m pretty small in size, he said he wants to keep me on the low dose for now and we’ll see how I’m doing next month. I get it, but still.) But it’s far less than it was. I’m not in a constant state of high panic. The lowgrade anxiety is still lurking on the edges, but even when I feel it flare, I can get it to die down quickly enough. Hell, last week (or the week before?) I saw an ant in my kitchen, and you know what? I didn’t have a panic attack! I quickly swatted at and smashed the ant, but I didn’t have a panic attack. That’s huge for me. Similarly, last night I thought Morgan had found a dead roach (she didn’t---it was a silverfish), and again, I didn’t have a panic attack. I wasn’t thrilled to see either the ant or what I thought was a roach, but I didn’t have a panic attack. And that’s really big for me, because typically those two insects will send me into panic attacks due to childhood traumas related to them, but that didn’t happen this time. I was able to just handle it, like an adult. It was incredible.

And it’s not just with the anxiety. I think that the Lexapro is helping with the depression, too. Not so much with my low energy (that still needs a lot of work), but like . . . it’s easier for me to employ CBT now, to bat back intrusive thoughts. My suicidal ideation isn’t as frequent. And it’s like . . . over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about things. I mentioned this in another post, but to go into more detail, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I regard myself, and how I treat myself. For years now, I’ve had such a hard time seeing any good in myself. I’ve had a hard time appreciating myself, or thinking that I deserve good things. I’ve been immensely quick to tear myself down, and when I’m complimented, I’ve found it difficult to accept or believe. My intrusive thoughts are often in second-person, and it’s things like, “You should just kill yourself,” or, “you’re worthless,” or variations thereof. And I’ve been thinking lately . . . why? Why is it that my brain tells me that I don’t deserve good things? That I should feel ashamed for doing nice things for myself, or even basic, necessary things like eating? I’m not a bad person. I’m not. I might not be the best person in the world (who is?), but I’m not a bad person. I don’t hurt others, and I don’t condone other people hurting others. I try to be kind, and I’m compassionate. I’m smart, and resourceful. I help others when I can, and I’m supportive and loving toward those I care about especially. I might not be the best person in the universe, but I’m also not bad, and there are so many terrible people out there (people who do hurt others) who are nice to themselves and happy with themselves, so why shouldn’t I be? Why should I be here tearing myself down, hating myself, punishing myself when there are truly hateful people out there who like themselves and treat themselves kindly? Why should I sit here feeling like I’m the scum of the Earth when, even if I’m not perfect, I’m a far cry from some of the worst out there, and the worst out there do love themselves?

Maybe that’s not the best way of looking at things, but my basic point is that I’ve realized that all those thoughts I have about how I’m horrible, undeserving of even basic kindness from myself or others, a waste of space, stupid, worthless, completely unlovable---even if I’m not a wonderful person, on a basic level, I’m nowhere near as bad as my intrusive thoughts make me out to be. And those intrusive thoughts aren’t doing anyone any good. They’re not doing me any good, because they just make me feel bad about myself. They’re not doing anyone else any good, because me feeling bad about myself doesn’t contribute anything to society either, and it also means I’m less likely to be present for opportunities where I could make a difference, maybe. I shouldn’t be burdened by this. I deserve to like myself, I deserve to have some confidence. And that’s not arrogance, that’s not vanity, that’s just basic self-care. (And yeah, I’m kind of lowkey quoting the Fab 5 here, but let me live, they teach good lessons.) I’m not perfect, but I don’t have to be. I can still appreciate that I’m not a bad person even if I’m not perfect, and I can always try to do better.

I don’t know if it’s the Lexapro that has enabled me to think about these things, or what. I do know that the intrusive thoughts have been a bit less lately, and also that I’ve been able to more easily combat the intrusive thoughts back. (Like when I have the intrusive suicide thoughts, I can say “no,” and when I have the intrusive thoughts about how I’m undeserving of kindness, I can bat that back, too.) It’s not perfect, just like with the anxiety. It’s still there, and even over the past couple weeks I’ve had some real depressed moments / nights. (The fact that I’m so addicted to Hollow Knight at the moment is part of this; I always crave video games when I’m depressed, because they’re genuinely good for my mental health.) Maybe I do need a stronger dose, or maybe it’ll just take a little more time to sink in as my doctor has said. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ve noticed a difference over the past couple weeks, and an improvement, and I want to keep getting better. And you know what?

I’m kind of mad at myself for being scared of medication for so long. I’m kind of mad at myself for not doing this sooner, for having to get to such a state where I could not calm my body down until I finally went and got it. I could have been improving YEARS ago. But the important thing is that I’ve got it now, and you know what? They always talk about how SSRIs can be addictive and you should wean of, but I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t know if my brain chemistry will ever be “right.” I might need this medicine forever, and I’m fine with that. You don’t say a diabetic is addicted to insulin, do you? So why would you say that about someone who needs some medication to make their brain not try to kill them each day? If I have to take a pill every day for the rest of my life, I’m cool with that. If it helps me with the anxiety and depression, I’m more than cool with that. Because for the first time in a long time I feel like I’m getting some of my fire back. It’s not perfect yet, I’m not at a full 100% yet, but I feel like I’m starting to get there, and I want to get there, I want that back. And if this medicine gets me there, I’m all for it.

So yeah. I’m not a terrible person. I am deserving of basic kindness. I deserve to get this flame re-lit, and I think the Lexapro is actually helping me with that. And if it is a result of the Lexapro, then I’m excited for it to keep helping me.

Also?

JAPAN IN ONE MONTH WOOOOOOOOOOO

(a reminder: DO NOT reblog this or I will delete it and block you, thanks)

[vulva-o-queef]

@hestiaq​ (making a new post because I don’t want to keep reblogging a long threat)

I’m really sorry for what you were put through. I sincerely hope you’re in a better situation now and doing okay. That’s horrific.

I remember the Ted Bundy bit you’re talking about- and she’s…. honestly quite right? If enough men have NPD/ASPD a few of them are going to seem intelligible, I think. I don’t really understand what you’re saying about Ted Bundy- if it’s tongue in cheek or not.

Okay, like I said, I haven’t seen this post she made. necromancerdoll just said that larps said sociopaths/psychopaths “can’t perform well in society/function with others.” I know aspd and being a sociopath are often considered the same thing, and I know a lot of them are pretty transparent assholes. Psychopathy isn’t a formal diagnosis at all, but criminal psychologists do use the term, and there’s a pretty solid consensus on what it means. Some people say psychopaths are a subset of sociopaths, and other people say it’s a similar but distinct thing, but in either case, one of the main characteristics of a psychopath (which a sociopath doesn’t, or doesn’t always have) is that they’re smooth and charming, and they use those traits to manipulate others.

My comment about Ted Bundy was sarcastic (and probably not in very good faith, but also wasn’t really related to the main point of all this), because saying psychopaths “can’t perform well in society/function with others” is the opposite of the truth. Ted Bundy was charming, socially adept, approachable, and likable, which was exactly how he managed to lure in many of his victims. He would put on a fake cast and ask women to help him get things into his car, which is what that scene from silence of the lambs is based on. Larps might be totally aware of all that and just phrased something too broadly. The only way it would be relevant to the rest of what I’m saying is, if she really meant to say that psychopaths are socially inept, it would be another example of how she tries to speak as an authority on mental disorders she doesn’t understand. Mostly I was just poking fun.

Women are over-diagnosed. But I don’t understand how Larps pointing out shitty behavior is the same as “diagnosing everyone”. Also, she’s talked about how borderline personality is over-diagnosed and often ascribed to women who are dealing with trauma. She’s also not talking about it from a “I don’t personally like them” only- “these people” are people who are cruel and vicious and play victim when called out on their cruel vicious behavior.

Clearly, you and I interpret the things she says about bpd and ‘cluster b’ in general very differently. For one, diagnosing anyone over the internet is absurd. In my first response to her, I did agree that she has made some good points, mostly about the link between autogynephilia and narcissism. But that’s about noticing an overarching theme within a specific population, and there’s already a decent amount of academic writing about that link. Case studies done by real psychologists. Actual studies done with controls and statistics and so on. And even with stuff like fucking “trans lesbian” dating profiles that larps points out herself, there is some solid evidence there due to the sheer repetition of entitled attitudes, fetishism, etc, the list goes on. My issue is with the way she thinks she understands BPD when she clearly doesn’t, how she applies “cluster b” or bpd to an awful lot of people, largely young ‘transmen’ or radfems she doesn’t like, and how whenever anyone she’s put down for having BPD tells her to cut it out, or tells her that she’s wrong about them, she dismisses anything they have to say by citing “people with bpd are insane,” or telling them they’re being irrational due to their disorder. Basically she’s using it as a shield to avoid being held accountable for the things she says. “Anyone who’s telling me borderline people aren’t irrational is only saying that because they’re borderline, and therefore they’re irrational!” I���m not saying she’s diagnosing “everyone.” And regarding transmen specifically, there are a lot of psychological factors involved in that situation, and for someone who’s so vocal about the cultlike, exploitative, backwards nature of the trans movement, you’d think she would understand how absurd and frankly just plain egotistical it is to think she can simplify all of those psychological factors and dynamics down to “cluster b.” Again - remember that she’s talking about people she’s never met in her life, usually judging from one blog description, a handful of posts, or sometimes nothing more than a fucking selfie.

Even as a younger girl with supposed “BPD” (who even identified with the label)- I wouldn’t have found this stuff offensive, and if it did (which I might have, and sometimes still do)- it’s really that easy to log off or go outside.

That’s good for you, and I respect your perspective. And you’re right, I could just log off and ignore what larps is saying. You can say that about anything anyone says on the internet, and technically it’s true. But I didn’t. The things she’s saying are ignorant, I find them personally hurtful, and I think she’s spreading misinformation, harmful stereotypes, and regressive thinking. I see that she’s saying dehumanizing and belittling things to women on this site who deserve respect, and probably worst of all, I see that there are a lot of people who look up to her, ask her for advice, sometimes idolize her a bit, and many of them will believe pretty much anything she says. She’s feeding them bullshit and some really vile ideas about mental health stigma, and how people with certain disorders (mainly BPD) deserve to be treated. I don’t think she’s the devil incarnate, and I don’t think she’s out here ruining lives and destroying families. I think she’s an asshole with an inflated sense of her own insight and knowledge, and I decided to say something. I could have logged off, but in this case, I didn’t. That’s all.

...I don’t understand how Larps memeing on a Tumblr blog and often posting insightful ideas about personality disorders is “insulting, ignorant, and dehumanizing”.

Yeah I don’t know what you consider “insightful,” but posting the definition of “insane” and copy-pasting a list of bpd symptoms and saying “see? these people are insane,” and tagging her response to my post with #have u ever noticed how all of these people have personality disorders (callback to “anyone who’s telling me borderline people aren’t irrational is only saying that because they’re borderline, and therefore they’re irrational!”) ...doesn’t quite cut it in my book.

She doesn’t bring up cluster b whenever she “feels” someone is acting unreasonable and dramatic- they… are unreasonable and dramatic- at least in whatever context, and people don’t have to dig deep to see who someone really is to be able to just say “no that’s insane, bye”.

Mmmm... I realize you see the situation differently from me, but am I acting insane? I mean, at worst, I’m making the undeniably blunt way she talks to people into something bigger than it needs to be. And yeah, I know... classic cluster b, amiright? But even if that’s the case, even if I’m misinterpreting her views, surely you can see where I’m coming from. And there are quite a few people who have the same objections that I do (mostly radfems, radfem adjacent women, terves, etc.). When she wrote that tag #have u ever noticed how all of these people have personality disorders, isn’t it clear that she was referring to me, as well as the rest of the radfemmish women who have been speaking against this behavior from her lately? Isn’t she making an assumption that I have a personality disorder (which I do not)? 

Do you really think my objection to the way larps talks about bpd is an indication that I have a personality disorder, and that I’m insane? Unreasonable at worst. But yes, she is absolutely using the excuse that those who object to her saying borderline people are irrational are saying so because they’re borderline/irrational. And like I said, I’m hardly the only example of her saying things like this. Someone just reblogged the original post of all of this and said #I just blocked larps bcuz shes been reblogging random old posts from me calling me a cluster b as bait #as far as I know I’m the only quote on quote crazy bihet that doesn’t have a pd? Someone else wrote #I really looked up to larps hence I’m so torn about this #if I didn’t believe she was a smart and decent well meaning person I wouldn’t care. That’s just on that particular post, within the last few hours.

People with personality disorders are diagnosed because they’re anti social and cause harm to those they “love”/interact with and the cluster b community (that I hung around) spend most of their time groveling in misery- despite often constructing their own fantastical narrative of people horrifically abusing them and demanding to be coddled for every emotion.

Some of them, yeah. Not all of them, and not enough to justify making assumptions about people you’ve never met.

What I mean is- the pain that they’re feeling is an offense to ego a LOT of the time. And other’s shouldn’t have to walk around eggshells to make sure that they don’t injure others egos.

Agreed.

Like it’s not real, rudfems don’t enable or contribute to violence against women. None of these women, no matter how mean they are, contributed to the pain I experienced in childhood for being called BPD- actually it was always men and handmaidens.

I didn’t accuse larps, or any other ‘rudefem’ of contributing to violence against women. I know that men were the reason ‘hysteria’ could be diagnosed in the past, and I know that men are the reason bpd is being overdiagnosed in women today. And I’m honestly not even trying to say larps is being misogynistic to the women she says this stuff to (though re-reading, I realize it could easily sound that way). Misogyny or not, dismissing someone’s perfectly measured, reasonable objection as irrational just because they have a bpd diagnosis - which in several cases, dr. larps diagnosed all by herself - is unacceptable, is the same pattern and circular justification used on ‘hysterical’ women in the past, and is particularly bad because, as we agree, bpd is too often being diagnosed as the new version of hysteria. She’s re-enforcing age-old stereotypes about mental illness, and she’s buying into it so completely that she really believes that borderline people are so unreliable that she knows what’s going on in their heads better than they do. Hence saying that borderline people objecting to her backwards stereotyping are doing so out of a kneejerk reaction to a damaged ego, rather than because they know what she’s saying is false.

Also - she isn’t talking about everyone with “diagnosed” BPD.

If that’s what she means, then she’s the one who needs to say it, not you. Again, I respect that you have a different view of this, and I understand your perspective, I can’t believe what others say about her intentions and supposed read-between-the-lines distinctions, when she doesn’t say it herself, and the things she says and the way she acts do not communicate what you’re saying about her.

Meaning, there’s a distinction between people who have been diagnosed and are suffering, and people who have been diagnosed (or not) and are cruel and have a total lack of insight and disregard for other people.

Mental health is complicated. You can’t divide people with bpd into two clean categories like that. That’s not how it works. And you CERTAINLY can’t lump people into the “bad” category simply because they don’t like how you talk about their disorder. You can’t see someone objecting to what you’re saying and assume that YOU know that they’re coming from a “total lack of insight.” People are not psychic. Larps is using the fact that some people with pds have a lack of self-awareness to dodge accountability when it’s convenient for her. It’s complete circular logic - something you would think she would be above, no? “they’re irrational, and when they complain about me calling them irrational, I can shut them down by saying that any complaint they make is irrational.” I know I keep saying this, but it’s true. In my first comment, I pointed out that this is her pattern, and what was her response? hashtag have u ever noticed how all these people have personality disorders. fucking exactly what I said her response would be, because that’s the only excuse she has. 

And yes, insight is a qualifying factor that “””exonerates”””” (quite a loaded word in this context????) someone from being “really” BPD. The thing about BPD is that they will not (or cannot) change- like it’s not a fixed part of your personality, and if it is- you deserve to be called out, and if it isn’t and you still behave like that… you deserve to be called out, still.

Again, no. If this is the case, then we need to make a second definition to separate “REALLY bpd” from “sorta bpd,” since currently they both meet the same diagnostic criteria. It’s not up to you, or larps, to create definitive new categories of mental illness.

I went from being told I had “borderline tendencies” to being diagnosed with full BPD, to basically nothing at all, because I became aware of those patterns, learned how to be objective about my thoughts and emotions, and practiced resisting them to the point where they only show up if I’m already in a really bad state. I don’t consider myself to have - or to have had - a personality disorder, because I’ve almost completely gotten rid of those mental reactions. But I know people who do have BPD, who are self aware, who are trying the same things I did, but the difference is that even though they now have the tools to keep them in check, those mental and emotional reactions are still present for them, and likely always will be. To say they don’t REALLY have bpd because they’re able to control it is frankly insulting. “If you’ve been able to improve it through treatment, you never really had it in the first place.” I know that’s not how you meant it, but that’s what it boils down to.

BPD is not defined by a lack of self-awareness. It’s a pattern of ingrained emotional and mental reactions (and, subsequently, behaviors). These often develop as a method of self defense against external abuse. Or sometimes there’s no abuse and it’s there anyways. The cause isn’t always clear. But the criteria calling these symptoms “pervasive” doesn’t mean the individual is unaware of them. People who know they have bpd, and who are working on treating their bpd still have bpd.

“...deserve to be called out”... it’s not larps’ business to “call someone out” for having bpd. She can call someone out for acting like a shithead, but simply having bpd is not a flaw that needs to be criticized. Your phrasing makes it seem like that’s what you’re saying, and although I’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant, that’s what larps seems to think.

Not only are neither you nor larps qualified to determine the “category” of bpd that people on the internet who you’ve never met fall into, but even IF that’s how she sees it, then, again, she needs to say that herself, and she needs to reflect that view in the way she treats people.

But to conclude, she really does make that explicitly clear that she doesn’t think everyone with BPD is a “screeching, manipulative, hysteric”.

Where

You made a bunch of excuses for her and I still have no reason to believe any of it is true

However, I’m mostly speaking for myself here because I’ve been hanging around tungle for too long and I mostly want to say that this all doesn’t really matter. Like, so many feminists on here ramble on about “but what about bpd women who get misdiagnosed?” yeah I didn’t face brutality at the hands of snarky women on the internet. These are not the people that even enabled the violence that me or many other women with trauma face.

Again, I didn’t say that. I don’t think she’s destroying lives either, I was just frustrated, saw that many other women are frustrated about her too, and I felt like saying something, so I did. That is the extent of my motivations here. I do think that she is spreading harmful stereotypes and misinformation, but I’m under no delusion that she is causing damage on a massive scale. She is, however, just one more raindrop in the proverbial ocean of mental health stigma. Insignificant as a single drop may be, surely it’s no less significant than any of those people with bpd whose bad behavior you say should be called out. If it’s larps’ business to call them out, then it’s just as much my business to call her out.

It’s not up to her and other women like her to clarify every single thing they say- people DO generalize and we should be able to communicate without having to specify for everyone.

I’m not asking her to clarify “every single thing” she says, I’m asking her to stop acting like a shithead, labeling people she’s never met, acting like she’s an authority on personality disorders, and using her actually wildly skewed perception of these disorders which is steeped in regressive, harmful, and demeaning stigma and stereotypes about mental illness in order to manipulate her way out of being held accountable for any of it. I’m not telling her to stop generalizing for the purpose of communication, I’m asking her to stop making inaccurate generalizations based on stereotypes, and to stop using “cluster b” as a catch-all for bad behavior. Just because someone is a shithead, or unreasonable, or overdramatic, doesn’t make them borderline, and it’s insulting to the people with bpd who are truly good people, who also have to deal with their disorder being an internet trend for self-dx’ers to milk sympathy and excuse their abusive behavior (sounds just like what larps would diagnose as cluster b, I know, but it turns out that many people who don’t have bpd exhibit these traits as well), deal with shitty treatment from healthcare providers who read the diagnosis and think they know everything about you before you even walk in the door (back when I had the ‘full bpd’ diagnosis, a therapist said to my face that people with bpd were considered ‘used goods,’ and my current psychiatrist treats me with an absurd and totally unjustified level of suspicion), deal with the massively pervasive stereotypes everyone else holds about bpd (ranging from ‘serial killer’ to ‘used goods’ to ‘fake trend on the internet to get attention’), as well as dealing with - oh yeah - the actual fucking disorder, as well as often comorbid cases of PTSD, depression, anxiety, bipolar, etc.

I’m just saying, it would be a lot more effective and hurt a lot less people you supposedly didn’t mean to target if you just called out the actual behavior instead of “calling out” a disorder. Additionally, I’m pretty sure that people with bpd who do lack self awareness are far more likely to respond to direct criticisms of their behavioral patterns than they are to respond to the label of bpd being “called out.” They’d just see the latter as more fuel for self-pity. It’s a little harder to justify being the victim of someone saying “hey stop being abusive.”

And if that’s not enough reasons for you, consider: people who have shitty behaviors who don’t have a cluster b disorder (yes, larps, they exist) are just gonna hear criticisms of a disorder they don’t have and brush it right off. Call out the actual behavior, and there’s a chance they might recognize it in themselves. It’s like a quadruple win.

A hallmark of bpd/npd/aspd/hpd is having no insight into that, that people say shit, and you take what you can and leave it-her, or me, or anyone else mincing that up….. doesn’t help bpd women live in a world where nobody is going to mince anything up ever. It did not help me when people coddled me, and I intuitively knew that and was deeply frustrated with it.

You’re right that it doesn’t help to have people make excuses for you or ‘coddle’ you. But not being unfair and pushing harmful stigma is not the same thing as “coddling.” Nor is “not mincing” words the same thing as saying things that are untrue, unfair, dismissive, and insulting. Much like Trump saying blatantly racist things is NOT “just telling it like it is.” (and no I’m not comparing you or larps to trump or calling anyone racist. except trump)

Many of the women who have ‘spoken up’ about larps on tungle, I’ve seen on other mediums (fb, wordpress) and they’re often just blatantly manipulative

Really? Am I being blatantly manipulative? Or insane? And, to reiterate, is what I’ve said on her post enough for her to assume that I - and anyone else raising these issues with her - ALL have personality disorders? Is it justification for her to say that I’m “glorifying” ASPD/BPD?

and will never have any insight to the fact that all of this is really a non-issue

I gave you several examples above, and here's your treasure trove:

https://larpsandtherealgirl.tumblr.com/search/cluster%20b

Notice how she loves agreeing with everyone saying they’ve been abused by someone with a cluster b disorder, or otherwise says something negative about a person/people with a cluster b disorder, makes sweeping generalizations and basically uses “cluster b” with the same tone that you would call someone an asshole - that is to say, using the same logical standards of “you said some shit I thought was rude, so I think you’re an asshole & I’m going to call you one” when talking about psychological medical diagnoses?

Yeah, occasionally she claims she’s only talking about The Bad Ones, but that’s a pretty thin excuse when 99% of the time you make no attempt to differentiate, and post things like screenshotted symptoms (which - if the “good ones” with that disorder actually have that disorder - would apply to the “good ones” too) with captions like “these people are insane.”

Again, I realize you see the things she says very differently from me, but surely you can see where I’m coming from. And I would hope that you can see that my having this perspective does not justify saying I have a personality disorder, that I am insane, or that I am “glorifying” ASPD and NPD. I would hope that the similar shit she’s said about several other women who said things similar to what I said would also strike you as unjustified. You can make excuses that she wasn’t literally diagnosing me with a personality disorder, but you can’t make that excuse every single time she says something like this.

but instead “leave radical feminism because it’s so full of mean lesbian separatists” and make huge texts about it everywhere else and how rfeminism is a cult.

Okay... this is an entirely separate and irrelevant subject and I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up. I mean it sounds like you’re saying “people who don’t like being told they’re insane are just butthurt kek” which I really hope is not what you’re saying. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of radical women who would object to being called insane and having their opinions dismissed because of a mental health diagnosis, who would raise their objections and still believe in their politics, probably due to the fact that - in this context - those things have virtually nothing to do with one another.

My point is- she’s not just saying ppl who criticize her have bpd- they often do because people with personality disorders come out of the woodwork to be hideously angry at anyone who calls them abusive or “wrong” and “bad” (whatever that means at any given moment).

In summary: I appreciate and respect that you interpret the things larps says in a very different way, and I’m not trying to tell you that you should be hurt or anything like that. But I can’t accept what I see as excuses that you’re making for her, since she doesn’t offer any of those explanations herself, and I don’t see any evidence of the intentions you’re attributing to her, in her own words or behavior.

At the end of the day, larps is the only person who can speak for larps’ intentions (much like the people whose criticisms larps deflects by claiming they’re motivated by irrational emotion and a threatened victim complex SHOULD be the only ones who can speak for their intentions).

And at the end of the day, larps didn’t show anything but disrespect and a total unwillingness to even consider that the way she speaks to, and treats, people with bpd and people who criticize her portrayal and internet-diagnosing of bpd, might not be 100% faultless.

At the end of the day, larps read what I had to say about her dismissive attitude and manipulative, circular justification for avoiding accountability. Her response was to double down on calling people with borderline “insane,” and double down on her own belief that googling a list of symptoms makes her an expert on psychology, as well as an expert on the thoughts in other peoples’ heads. She used the exact circular, dismissive excuse I was calling out, yet again said that the people criticizing her were all doing so because of their - well “our,” I should say, since she diagnosed me - personality disorders, rather than their actual thoughts, opinions, and perfectly reasonable objections. And then she answered a bunch of messages laughing about how crazy and terrible “cluster b”s are. No, she didn’t literally say “EVERY SINGLE PERSON with bpd is like this,” but come on. She’s not the only person who can recognize patterns of behavior.

[shinelikethunder]

disconnected thoughts on fandom and the indieweb

Recently I discovered the IndieWeb project, and I... think I am a lot more intrigued by it than by other Better Social Media Platform pipe dreams and decentralization projects I’ve seen? Because it’s not a monolithic platform that has to be all things to all people, or even one that has to gain a critical mass of userbase before it’s useful for anything. It’s just a bunch of people, making sites that work for them, and banging out protocols so their sites can talk to each other and hook up to the social-media hangouts du jour.

The basic idea:

- Have a personal website, preferably a personal domain name, that is the hub for your online identity and stuff. Posts, tweets, pictures, links, reading list, events, whatever you’d normally be posting to social media. You host it, you control it, you own it. You tweak it to fit your needs, no Xkit required.

- Once the original archival copy is up on your personal site, cross-post it to whatever social media sites it belongs on. You don’t have to quit your Tumblr habit, or convince your friends to quit theirs, or give up the audience you can reach on a large site.

- Use a pingbacks-on-steroids tool to collect all the responses (likes, reblogs, comments, etc) from the various sites you’ve cross-posted to. Ideally, display them at the bottom of the post back on your website.

As an idea, I like it a lot. In practice, a lot depends on what tools are already available, how useable they are, how capable you are of coding/templating/configuring to fill in the gaps, and how difficult large sites make it to push/pull from them automatically. That’s pretty much what I’m interested in exploring in the near future, for my own use if nothing else. I already have most of my Tumblr content backed up to a Wordpress install on my own shared hosting account, so I’m kinda curious see how much IndieWeb compatibility I can manage using plugins and template tweaks.

Indieweb and fandom:

As a potential tool for fandom to wean ourselves off the various hellsites we’ve inhabited over the years... okay, it’s an interesting thought. One with lots of unanswered questions, but interesting.

Lots of unanswered questions, so the rest of this is going under a cut.

- Upside: I know a lot of older fans are still nostalgic about the early blogosphere and even--heaven forfend--the Geocities days. Many things about them were shit, but the archipelago of personal fan shrines, indie blogs, having a personal site with a personal archive of your work, etc. was awesome. And the “own your own creations” ethos fits in nicely with AO3′s “we have to own the servers” philosophy.

- Enabling factor: Fandom builds and customizes stuff like crazy. Yes, including the younger generations who weren’t around for the “build it yourself” days and seem to think AO3 burst fully formed out of the forehead of a long-lost deity. What, you haven’t noticed that even on a hobbled hellsite like Tumblr, teenagers are using the relative freedom of the theme system to spontaneously rediscover all the sins of Geocities web design? (I rib with affection, as someone who definitely had a page with flaming torch gifs and a sparklecursor back in 2001.) Full, out-of-the-box, point-and-click setup is necessary to get fandom to adopt something in any decent numbers. But once we’re there, a disproportionate number of us start tinkering with anything that’s customizable, and when someone with actual coding skills comes out with a useful tool to supplement missing capabilities, it spreads like wildfire.

- Gaps and directions to expand: Indieweb principles include “scratch your own itches,” so here are my itches, which I’m going to shamelessly project onto fandom at large.

Import--needs rock solid LiveJournal-clone and Tumblr support if your site is to serve as an archive. I don’t know if there even is a working Wordpress plugin to import from LJ or Dreamwidth. The best-supported Tumblr->Wordpress importer is actually better than most standalone Tumblr backup tools, but it still mangles video posts/embeds. It’d also be cool to have import tools for AO3, Deviantart, and other major fanwork repositories.

Once your Tumblr posts are in, there's no way to automate the very first thing I’d want to do upon liberating my data from the vise-like jaws of What Tumblr Wants You To Do With Its Site: separate out posts I created, posts I added comments to, and posts I just shared via reblog. A nice addition would be the ability to copy Tumblr tags to a metadata field that’s separate from Wordpress tags--WP tags tend to be organizational, whereas on Tumblr, tags are often a sidechannel for comments that don’t propagate on reblog, thus filled with all sorts of crap.

On that note, Itch #3 is mass-organization tools. Select all posts that fit certain criteria and do a mass edit on their tags, categories, post types, or other taxonomy data. Lots of fandom folks have years or decades worth of content from various sites, making organizational tasks highly impractical to do manually. I’ve dicked around with a few Wordpress mass-edit plugins, but none of them seemed to work that well.

Not sure how well the existing backfeed tools support Tumblr notes, but for fandom to bite, the Tumblr support oughta be pretty damn slick. And the cross-posting should ideally support all the features of a native Tumblr post, because by god, we will use them, and we will notice if an expected one is missing. I can spot IFTTT cross-posts from AO3 without even reading text, and tbh my eyes usually skip right over them, unfair as that may be.

If this project extends to feed readers/aggregators, the embrace of multi-site cross-posting implies a need for deduplication. Preferably getting rid of Tumblr’s charming “barf the full post back out onto your dashboard every time someone you’re following shares/responds to it” behavior in the process. For fandom use, it’ll need a blacklist feature. And I’d love some more heavy-duty filtering, selective subscriptions (like to just one tag of a blog), creating multiple feeds based on topic or on how much firehose you want...

This may be a personal itch, but at least for personal archiving needs, I’m sick, sick, sick of the recency bias that’s eaten the internet since the first stirrings of Web 2.0. Wikis are practically the only sites that have escaped chronological organization. It would be cool to have easily-manipulated collections with non-kludgey support for series ordering, order-by-popularity, order-by-popularity with a manual bump for posts you want to highlight, hell even alphabetical ordering. None of these things are remotely unsolved problems, but they’re poorly supported on the social-media silos most people’s content lives on these days. Fandom’s suffered from this since at least the days of LiveJournal, which had the ominous beginnings of what’s since become the Tumblr Memory Hole. Relentless chronological ordering + the signal-to-noise ratio of any space with regular social interaction = greatest hits falling down the memory hole unless a community practices extensive manual cataloguing. Hell, LJ fandom did practice extensive manual cataloguing, but even within that silo, there was so much decentralization that content discovery was shit if you didn’t know the right accounts to search through. Like, fuck, at least forums bump threads to the top if they’re still active--LJ and blogs have the same "best conversation evar falls inexorably off the map as new posts are added, no matter how active it is” problem that InsideTheWeb forums did in 1999. (Anyone else remember InsideTheWeb? AKA 13-year-old me’s first experience with platform shutdown, frantic archiving attempts, and massive data loss. Fun times.) Tumblr and Twitter, meanwhile, spam you with duplicates of the original post every time someone you’re following replies to/shares it, a key component of the endless firehose of noise drowning out any attempt to hang on to the signal.

All those itches are things I could probably code myself if I got a stubborn enough bee in my bonnet, which might well happen. On the other hand, I have some deeper doubts, ones that aren’t going to get addressed by Wordpress plugins or shiny backfeed support:

The whole concept of IndieWeb fails to address (and might even worsen) what I suspect is the core dysfunction of social media. Which is the degradation of community spaces, and their replacement with a hopeless snarl where all content lives in individual accounts. There are a lot of weird effects that arise when the “social” sphere is built entirely upon the one-on-one connections created when someone subscribes to another account or gives someone else permission to view their restricted posts. Echo chambers, shame mobs, out-of-context remarks going viral, popular accounts setting off harassment storms whenever they disagree with someone, the difficulty of debunking hoaxes once they’re out in the wild... all of those are either created or made much, much worse by the lack of any reasonable, stable, shared expectation of who a post’s audience is.

Basically, if “own your content and host it on your site” also applies to your comments, interactions, etc, it starts running counter to one of the strengths of the Old Web. Which was community contexts where you explicitly weren’t posting to your own space or addressing everyone who might be looking at the main clearinghouse of all your different stuff. You were posting to the commons shared by a particular group with a particular culture and interests, not all of whom were people you’d necessarily want to follow outside that limited context, some of whom you might disagree with or dislike, but in any case you knew what audience you were broadcasting to. You knew what the conversation was, how similar conversations had gone in the past, and the reputations of all the main participants--not just the ones you yourself would subscribe to and the ones attention-grabbing enough to get shared by the people on your subscription list. And you weren’t spamming all your other acquaintances with chatter on a topic they weren’t interested in.

Shared spaces can also establish whatever social norms they need and moderate accordingly. (Plus, plurality of spaces = plurality of norms for different needs, which would solve a LOT of what’s currently ailing fandom.) Peaceable enforcement of a code of conduct, beyond the “minimum viable standard” sitewide abuse policy, is fundamentally impossible on social media, where individual muting is the closest thing you can get to moderation. That + unstable audience = any social norms that exist are so unenforceable it turns people into frothing shame-mob zealots, ratcheting up the coercive pressure on everyone the more it fails to work on the handful of unrepentant assholes who would’ve been permabanned from any self-respecting forum within a week. Moving onto personal sites with beefed up syndication/backfeed capabilities ain’t gonna fix that. Meanwhile the truly heinous dickweeds who’d ordinarily run afoul of the sitewide abuse policy will have the same capabilities, minus any risk of getting banned.

If there haven’t already been epic drama meltdowns caused by the “reply in your own space by making your own post, which includes a copy of the original post for context” model... it’s only a matter of time. You don’t even need malicious actors, just a human conflict where one party has overprotective subscribers. Or information turns out to be faulty and in need of correction. Or an argumentative type stumbles on the permalink of an acrimonious reply post that was actually resolved amicably several replies downthread. Or someone edits an apology into their controversial post and someone who’s been attacking it refuses to update their copy because tilting at strawmen is more fun. Or someone tries to make an embarrassing post go away by deletion and their co-conversationists don’t cooperate. Tumblr’s “reply by reposting in your own space and adding commentary” system already spawns endless floods of drama and misunderstanding, and that’s a system with some limits on the participants’ control, and relatively disposable accounts/identities if the shit hits the fan.

Basically, I’m all for personal websites as archives of your creations, but seriously dubious of them as archives of your interactions. Especially if the interactions aren’t well-segregated from the regular content feed that goes out to everyone who follows you. Yes, abuses of moderator power when interaction is all taking place on a site the mod controls are a thing. But if those sites are an archipelago of indie spaces rather than a monolithic platform, shitty mods don’t thwart the development of a healthy social ecosystem, they just drive everyone away to a competing space whose mod sucks less.

(Private/access-restricted archives of your interactions might be a compromise? You still have your stuff in case the other site goes down, but it’s not out there replicating the ill effects of the Tumblr reblog-to-respond model.)

Leaving aside all that, the IndieAuth component--using personal sites as stable identities you can log in with--is just as workable for community platforms as it is for cross-blog commenting. Proliferation of unlinkable accounts was one of the downfalls of forums, after all. That said, one potential point of friction is that fandom is far more pseudonym-centric than the devs and tech hobbyists who’ve coalesced around IndieWeb so far. But stable pseuds with years of reputation behind them have social effects that resemble real names more than anything else, so as potential culture clashes go, I’d hope that’s fairly surmountable.

As noted in the musings on LiveJournal archiving above: CONTENT DISCOVERY IS A BITCH IN DECENTRALIZED COMMUNITIES and that’s a major stumbling block for fandom. OTOH, platform-agnostic protocols with customization potential = room for experimentation with independently-run discovery/search/tagging layers. (Life goals: stay uncool enough that my “Like Uber, but for ___” elevator pitch ends up being “It’s like Technorati, but for fanfiction of Kirk drilling Spock.”)

Okay, that’s it, jesus christ it’s time for me to go to bed.

[digiworld]

How to Use Tumblr for Blogging and Social Networking

So maybe you've heard of Tumblr, and you're interested in getting in on the action. After all, it's the hottest blogging platform among the younger crowd and has the potential to completely skyrocket your content in terms of eyeballs and shares if you get the social networking part of it right.

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Sign Up for a Tumblr Account and Access Your Dashboard

Tumblr is both a blogging platform and a social network. You can use it strictly for blogging or strictly for social networking with other users — or you both. The power of this platform really shines when you use it as both.

Once you start using Tumblr, you'll probably notice a lot of similarities between it and other popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and even Instagram. Although "blogging" traditionally tends to involve writing, Tumblr is in fact highly visual and is more about publishing short blog posts that have photos, animated GIFs and videos.

The more you use Tumblr, the more trends you're able to identify on the platform, giving you clues about what users love to see and share. A Tumblr post can go viral in a matter of hours, even spreading across other social networks. Imagine if you could make your posts do that!

Getting started with Tumblr is easy, but you can browse through the following slides to get the main tips and hints for making your Tumblr presence and experience the best they can be.

Navigate to Tumblr.com in a Browser

It's free to sign up for a Tumblr account at Tumblr.com or even through one of the free mobile apps. All you need is an email address, a password, and a username.

Your username will appear as your Tumblr blog's URL, which you'll be able to access by navigating to YourUsername.Tumblr.com in your preferred web browser. Here are some tips on how to choose a unique Tumblr username that hasn't been taken yet.

Tumblr will ask you to confirm your age and that you're human before moving on to ask you about your interests. A grid of GIFs will be displayed, asking you to choose five interests that most appeal to you.

Once you've clicked five interests, which helps Tumblr recommend blogs for you to follow, you'll be taken to your Tumblr dashboard. You'll also be asked to confirm your account by email.

Your dashboard shows you a feed of the most recent posts from users' blogs that you follow along with several post icons at the top for you to make your own posts. There are currently seven types of posts Tumblr supports:

Text posts

Single or multiple photoset posts

Quote posts

Link posts

Chat/dialogue posts

Audio posts

Video posts

If you're browsing Tumblr on the web, you'll also see a menu at the top with all of your personal options. These include your home feed, the Explore page, your inbox, your direct messages, your activity, and your account settings. These options show up similarly on the Tumblr mobile app at the bottom of your device's screen. There are also a number of browser extensions to aid your browsing.

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Customise Your Blog Theme and Options

The great thing about Tumblr is that unlike other popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, you're not stuck with the standard profile layout. Your Tumblr blog themes can be as unique as you want it, and there are a lot of great free and premium themes to choose from.

Similar to the WordPress blogging platform, you can install a new Tumblr blog theme skin with just a few clicks. Check out our overview of free Tumblr themes.

To start customizing your blog and switching to a new theme, click the user icon in the top menu on the dashboard and then click your blog name (under the Tumblrs heading) in the drop-down menu followed by Edit Appearance in the righthand menu on the next page.

On this page, you can customize several different components of your blog:

Mobile blog header: Add a header image, a profile photo, a blog title, a description, and colors of your choosing.

Username: Change your username to a new one any time you like (but keep in mind that this will also change your blog's URL). If you have your own domain name and want it to point to your Tumblr blog, you can refer to our tutorial to set your a custom Tumblr URL.

Website theme: Configure the customizable options of your current theme and see a live preview or your changes, or install a new one.

Encryption: Turn this on if you want an extra layer of security.

Likes: Turn this on if you want other users to be able to see which posts you've liked if they decide to check them out.

Following: Turn this on if you want other users to be able to see the blogs you follow if they decide to check them out.

Replies: If you want users to be able to reply to your posts, you can set this up so anyone can reply, only users who've been in your network for at least a week can reply or only users you follow can reply.

Ask: You can open this up to invite other users to submit questions they want to as you on a specific page of your blog.

Submissions: If you want to accept post submissions from other users to be published on your blogs, you can turn this on so that they're automatically added to your queue for you to approve and publish.

Messaging: To keep your privacy tight, turn this on so only users you follow can message you.

Queue: Adding posts to your queue will automatically publishing them on a drip schedule, which you can set up by selecting a time period for them to be published.

Facebook: You can connect your Tumblr account to your Facebook account so that they automatically get posted on Facebook too.

Twitter: You can connect your Tumblr account to your Twitter account so that they automatically get posted on Twitter too.

Language: If English isn't your preferred language, change it here.

Timezone: Setting your appropriate timezone will help streamline your post queue and other posting activities.

Visibility: You can configure your blog to appear only within the Tumblr dashboard (not on the web), keep it hidden from search results or label it as explicit for its content.

There's an option at the very bottom of this page where you can block specific users or even delete your account entirely if you want.

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Explore Tumblr to Follow Blogs You Like

There are lots of different ways to find new Tumblr blogs worth following. When you follow a Tumblr blog, all of its most recent posts show up in your home feed, similar to how Twitter and Facebook news feeds work.

Here are some tips on how to discover more blogs to follow.

Use the Explore page: This can be accessed at any time from your dashboard in the top menu on the web (marked by the compass icon). Or you can simply navigate to Tumblr.com/explore.

Do a search for keywords and hashtags: If you're interested in a particular topic, use the search function to find posts or blogs focused on something specific.

Pay attention to Tumblr's suggestions: In the sidebar of your dashboard on the web, Tumblr will suggest some blogs that you should follow based on who you already follow. Suggestions also appear every so often as you scroll through your home feed.

Look for the "Follow" button in the top right corner of any Tumblr blog: If you come across a Tumblr blog online without finding it through your dashboard first, you'll know it's running on Tumblr because of the Follow button at the top. Click Follow to automatically follow it.

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Start Posting Content on Your Tumblr Blog

Now you can start publishing blog posts on your Tumblr blog. Here are a few tips for getting your posts noticed by other Tumblr users:

Go visual: Photos, videos, and GIFs are a big deal on Tumblr. In fact, Tumblr recently launched its own GIF search engine to help users out with creating more visually appealing posts.

Use tags: You can add several different tags to any of your posts to help it become more discoverable by people who are searching for those terms. Check out our overview of Tumblr's most popular tags to consider using on your own posts.

Use the "extra" post options: In post text spaces and captions, you'll see a little plus sign icon that appears once you click your cursor in the typing area. Click it to open up a number of media and formatting options you can insert, including photos, videos, GIFs, horizontal lines and read-more links.

Post regularly: The most active Tumblr users post several times a day. You can queue up posts to be published on a drip schedule or even schedule it to be published on a specific date at a specific time.

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Interact With Other Users and Their Posts

Just like on any social network, the more you interact with other users, the more attention you'll receive back. On Tumblr, there are lots of different ways to interact.

Interact With Individual Posts

Like a post: Click the heart button at the bottom of any post.

Reblog a post: Click the double arrow button at the bottom of any post to automatically repost it on your own blog. You can also optionally add your own caption, queue it up or schedule it so that it publishes later.

Interact With Individual Posts

Follow a user's blog: Just click the follow button anywhere it shows up either on an existing Tumblr blog you're browsing on the web or on a blog you find within the Tumblr dashboard.

Submit a post to another user's blog: If you can get your post published on a blog that accepts submissions, you'll immediately gain exposure from their audience.

Submit an "ask" to another user's blog: Similar to post submissions, blogs that accept, answer and publish their "asks" (which are questions or comments from other users) publicly may also give you exposure.

Send mail or a message: You can send an inbox message (like email) or a direct message (like a chat) to any user who allows it, depending on their privacy settings.

When you interact with other blog posts and users, they're notified about it in their activity tab, their messages and sometimes even their Tumblr app notifications if they have them enabled.

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The caveat in Double Authentication

*TL, DR, Backup your Double Authentication key codes/QR codes or you are setting yourself up to lose your account permanently! If you rely on backups of your phone to cover this, you need to make sure they are configured properly such as being encrypted, or they likely won’t include your authentication keys. You can use the DMCA takedown form to get your content removed from a Tumblr account that you have lost access to. And, there should be better account recovery methods set in place when Double Authentication is initially setup. *

You use Tumblr. You post content. You like other content. You reblog other content. You follow other Tumblr users. You tie your identity into your Tumblr account, either by sharing who you are or sharing your Tumblr address with others in real life.

You don’t want your account to fall into the wrong hands. You enable double authentication. You load your double authentication key code into Google Authenticator on your iPhone. You log into Tumblr. You pull out your phone and take copy the number down and enter it after entering your password. You’re logged in. You post content.

Time goes on. You backup your iPhone into iTunes on your computer.

More time goes on. 

Your iPhone slows down and starts becoming frustrating to use with periodic crashes and reboots. You read online that iOS files on your phone may be corrupted and a backup, complete reset, and full restore of your iPhone might make it right. You run a full backup to iTunes on your computer. You do a full reset on your iPhone. You restore your iPhone. All your apps and email accounts are reloaded into your iPhone and it appears to not be crashing or running near as slow.

You open the Tumblr App. You login to Tumblr. It asks for your Authentication code. You open Google Authenticator. There are no keys in Google Authenticator. You did not realize or know that you needed to check a box in iTunes on the computer telling it to encrypt your backups of your iPhone in order for it to back up the password keychains or other keys such as the ones you had loaded into Google Authenticator. You look in all the usual places you could have backed up the key that was used to load it into Google Authenticator and realize that either forgot to make a copy of it, or you no longer have access to this backup copy. You have just lost access to your Tumblr account.

What now? Well, you can contact Tumblr support and tell them that you lost your authentication keys. What will they respond with? They’ll ask you for a new photo of you along with a link to a post on your Tumblr account which has a photo of yourself. That is it. If you do not have a photo of yourself on your Tumblr they will not help you. You might be tempted to try using posts from another account such as photos posted to your Facebook page showing date stamps earlier than their re-posting to your Tumblr. This will not work.

At this point, all you can really do is give up on getting your account back unless you’re some incredibly famous person and the account is clearly that person, there is no way you are going to convince them to unlock this account with any other means. In fact, the moment you try anything they will respond telling you that you can make a new account and then they will. never. respond. to. you. again.

It is over, and ultimately it is your fault. 

If you have double authentication enabled on Tumblr, or any other online accounts for that matter, you NEED to make sure you have BACKUPs of the either the QR Codes you scanned or the key codes you entered to add these keys to your authentication app of choice. You can and will lose your account if you don’t have these and do not have whatever arbitrary alternate identification Tumblr or other web service support centers choose to use in lieu of an authentication code.

Now, if you have content posted and you do not like having it up on an account that you have no control over anymore. You have one last recourse. You can use Tumblr’s DMCA copyright violation take-down report form to file takedown notices against your own account. The easiest way to get to this form is to go to google and search for Tumblr DMCA.

You will need:

links to individual posts on your Tumblr that you no longer want to have stay up.

links to same content posted elsewhere with a complete copyright notice which has your name, and the current year. This is considered evidence of an authorized publication of your content.

A description of each posted content item you want removed. Keep in mind that this description is limited to 1000 characters, so if you need to, it’s best to limit to about three to four URL’s per submission to avoid the accompanying description being too long. It can also help to plan this out with a spread sheet for the URL’s and a word processing document with word/character counter for the description.

If you don’t have the required evidence of an authorized publication of your content and all it is is writing and photos, this is really easy to create as long as you have access to a web server where you can host html and image files. All you have to do is open up a new document in a word processor that can both support embedded photos and save as HTML, copy all your photo and text posts into it, title it something like [your name]’s stuff, add a copyright notice at the bottom with your name/company name, the date, and the appropriate copyright symbol, (such as © [your name here] 2017), and save it as HTML. You should wind up with an html file and a folder full of all the pictures you included. All you have to do is copy the HTML file and the associated folder of pictures it created to your web server, verify that it shows properly when loaded in a browser, and include the URL to this new page. 

MS Word isn’t a good application for doing actual web development, but for this task, it is perfectly acceptable. It doesn’t have to be nice, it just has to exist and satisfy the need.

Once you’ve submitted your DMCA takedown notices via the form, it can take a couple days to go through, but it will go through.

Do I really despise Tumblr? Not really, in my case I was pretty pissed off/upset when it became clear that there was no recourse to get my account back, but ultimately it was my responsibility to make sure I had backups of my authentication keys. At the same time, though, I feel that Tumblr et al, could include prompts telling the user that they NEED to make sure they make backups of their authentication keys as well as including a form for special security questions/answers, or security photos that aren’t shown publicly to allow easier legitimate account recovery. Simply put, you can take all sorts of measures, but if you backup your keys to a hard drive, or you write/print them out and put them in a safe but if things go south enough, you can lose all that too in a worse enough disaster.

This is going to be the only post I make on this Tumblr account.