#feel free to unfollow me if you hate this and don't wanna discuss it with me

[gab-has-adhd]

Hey uh so just to make my opinion on the subject clear

I SUPPORT AI ARTISTS.

I SUPPORT AI ART TOOLS BEING TRAINED WITH FREE, NOT STOLEN IMAGES.

I DO NOT SUPPORT AI ART BEING MADE FROM AI TRAINED ON EXISTING ARTWORKS FROM "REAL HUMAN BEINGS" WHO REFUSED TO HAVE THEIR ART USED LIKE THIS.

I BELIEVE AI ART IS A VALID FORM OF ART. MANY ARTISTS ACTUALLY USE AI FOR CERTAIN WORKS.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE SOME KIND OF TORTURED SOUL WITH WICKED CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION TO BE A REAL ARTIST.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO GIVE PURPOSE OR SIGNIFICATION TO YOUR ART TO BE A REAL ARTIST.

THINKING ART IS SOME KIND OF MEDIA RESTRICTED TO PEOPLE WHO ARE ABLE TO DRAW/PAINT EXTREMELY WELL, HAVE MESSAGES TO SHARE OR ALL THAT KIND OF STUFF IS LAME.

ART IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN.

PLEASE SUPPORT AI ARTISTS. DO NOT SUPPORT AI ART MADE WITH STOLEN IMAGES. DO SUPPORT AI ART AS ANOTHER FORM OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION.

BE ANGRY AT BIG CORPORATIONS MAKING QUICK AI ART APPS FOR EASY MONEY, NOT AT INNOCENT AI ARTISTS.

END THAT WHOLE MORAL PANIC.

[smores100]

hey.

so. haven't been around for quite some time, mostly due to my health issues (the usual + muscle aches and joint pains, i'm having a great time), but also in part due to The Situation. it's hard to care about anything with everything that's been going on, it all seems so pointless and meaningless, i'm living in a completely different universe from everyone else here. wish i could be that privileged, but alas. it's also hard being around here, and on other social media platforms for that matter, and seeing the raging antisemitism and sheer hate everywhere. i haven't checked my dash in almost 2 months, haven't checked specific blogs like i used to either, and have no plans on doing so anytime soon. i know what i'll find, i don't want it.

i was gonna stay quiet like i ususally do, especially since i genuinely don't have energy for anything rn, but it's been 2 months and i've been biting my tongue and screaming and crying into my pillow daily and i just need to get some of it out before i implode. there's only so much ignorance and hate that one person can take before snapping, so. here i am.

i have so much i want to say, i've written a million posts in my mind in the past 2 months, but i'm too Tired to actually write them down, and it'll just be one big messy ramble anyway, so i'm just gonna reblog a couple of other people's posts and make do with that. just a couple, don't worry, i know these are issues most either want to avoid dealing with or the opinions shared in those posts are a complete 180 degrees from what's trendy to believe in today. but i have to share it anyway. for 2 months i've been terrified, frustrated, bitter, angry and absolutely heartbroken, but there's one thing i haven't been, and that is ashamed. i'm proud of who i am. i'm proud of my people and their spirit. you will never understand what it's been like for us, what it still is like for us, but let me just say this: they wanted to break us, they wanted to break our spirit. they failed. we've never been more united. they just made us stronger.

so i'm gonna reblog some stuff so i can get it out of my system and move on. at worst i hope you just ignore and scroll past it; at best i hope you keep an open mind and maybe for the first time read things from a different pov instead of just the one sided propaganda everyone is continuously exposed to. maybe you'll see it isn't all black and white, maybe you'll see there are nuances you're not even aware of, maybe you'll realize you've been fed a lot of misinformation, half truths and even lies over the years. maybe. if you have questions or want to have a mature and civil conversation about it, feel free to msg me and i'll try and reply when my health allows me to, i'm open to discussion. if you want to unfollow me after this, feel free to do so. i'm not gonna force my truth on anyone, but i'm also not gonna change who i am for anyone either.

and on a more personal note, i wanna say thank you again for the msgs i've received last time and haven't replied to (due to health, Situation etc), and for the ones i've gotten since (will get to those soon i hope). i do feel the need to say this tho - i did have a peek or two at my dash and on twitter earlier on and saw some things. i was in a super sensitive state at the time and it was pretty disheartening ngl. it's hard nowadays, with all the hate going on and public opinion being what it is, to know whether or not you're still welcome in these spaces, whether or not people still like you and care about you, or if you've officially become persona non grata. most days it feels like the latter tbh. i just don't know where i stand. i said i'm not gonna force myself on anyone and i'm not, so if you're still ok with me…i guess the ball's in your court? 🌻

thanks for reading. thanks for sticking around, to those who decide to do so. take care y'all. never again is now. am yisrael chai. 💙

[jellybeanium124]

Hi, Australian Jew here.

Sending this anonymously because I'm not openly Jewish on Tumblr, however I am considering doing so in the short-term.

I'm sorry to bother you but I wanted to ask you a few questions, if you're open to it (feel free to ignore this if so). Just so you know, I'm asking the same questions of the Jewish bloggers I follow who post regularly - both those who blog about the current Israel/Palestine situation, and those who identify as Jewish but post mainly fandom/other content.

Do you or have you receive/d abuse for being Jewish, or for your stance on the war? If so, how often? How do you respond to any hateful messages? Do you post them publicly or answer them privately? How much would you say your mental health is/has been affected by any messages, or by the content you see on your feed? Have you developed any strategies for handling social media during this time?

Thank you for reading. :-)

I've received maybe half a dozen antisemitic hate anons since 10/7. I wanna say maybe 2 or 3 between june 7, 2020 (when I created this blog) and oct 7, 2023. I think I've posted the hate anons publicly once or twice, but after that I just screenshotted, blocked them, and sent them to one of my jewish friends for mocking. honestly they didn't bother me that much. a lot of them were low effort. nobody even threatened to kill me. the terfs put more effort into harassing me and I'm not even trans. frankly the antisemites need to step up their game.

while the messages haven't hurt me... yeah... the war in general has affected me. I've lost a lot of faith in the strength of my relationships with goyim. several of them have left me. every time I post about the war I'm certain I'm going to lose another friend, and that hurts. it's been a little nerve-wracking discussing it with my irl goyische friends, but to my massive relief all of them are normal about the situation. however, about a month ago, me and a friend of 15 years got into a small tiff about it, and when they went radio silent all day, visions of them hating me filled my head and I had to send a super annoying socially anxious text to make sure they don't hate me now. thank gd they do not. I love them deeply and want them to be in my life for as long as we live. we still have to come up with a gender-neutral alternative to aunt/uncle for my kids to call them someday. if they decided to cut me off that would've been the last straw for a mental breakdown, actually.

sometimes it gets really tough to see this stuff on my dash. I've gotten better at just filtering out all the blocked posts that pass me by. to be perfectly, 100% honest with you, if tumblr didn't allow me to block content so thoroughly and I had to see every single post about the war put onto my dash... I would've left tumblr months ago. or just unfollowed 95% of the people I follow. I could not handle that. I'm sorry. this war did upset me enough to the point where I decided to take a two-day break from tumblr (I... have a problem... you all know how much time I spend here...). I've lost a close friend on tumblr of several years that made me cry. as for other social media? I only look at two people's instagram stories these days. one of my friends, who posts her outfits daily and basically nothing else, and con o'neill. I don't trust anyone else not to put stuff that will upset me in front of my eyes. I've unfollowed a couple of people on instagram because I can't block stuff as thoroughly there. I'm also just... not on ig that much.

the past several months have also made me deeply disillusioned with the state of the left. why should I care about unrelated leftist movements when I know all of my comrades there would turn on me in a millisecond if they knew that I thought israel should keep existing even though it's done horrible things? it's turned me off of activism... seeing these "pro-palestine" protests quickly turn into "harass jews" protests and the way these college students discuss these issues, fetishizing palestinian pain and not knowing a single thing about it, is just... it makes it all feel so fake and hollow. these privileged college kids are comparing themselves to gazans and I'm supposed to believe they actually care about gazans and don't just want to feel like righteous heroes? these people verbally and physically harass jews and I'm supposed to believe they're the good guys? I don't like feeling this way. I wish I didn't feel this way. but right now the only political action I give a shit about is voting. I'm gonna vote. I'm always gonna vote. but why on earth would I get involved with people who say "punch nazis" until nazis are on their side and increase their numbers then suddenly it's all "uwu nazis are hard to get rid of 🥺?"

I understand why you're hiding your jewishness. I've started hiding it too. I stopped wearing my magen david on october 13th. I recently had my first paid film gig (yay for that at least), and whenever I was telling a story that involved my jewishness in some way, I bent the truth to go around that tidbit and told no one. someone asked if I was irish. I answered I was eastern european. a year ago I would've said I was jewish without a second thought.

I'm tired. I want the war to end. I want there to be a peace deal. I want innocent civilians to stop dying and be safe.

I don't think I'm brave, or anything. I'm a safe lil american thousands of miles away. I don't know what palestinians and israelis are living through right now. my pain is a single molecule of sand compared to the pain people actually affected by this war have gone through. all I want is for people to listen to us. I don't speak up to be brave, I speak up because knowing a jew is the only inoculation against the hatred spreading through the pro-palestine movement. because if you know me, then jews aren't foreign. noa's a jew. noa's my friend. noa likes billy joel. noa writes silly incorrect quote posts. noa's a person. she's not some scary unknown. she's my friend.

I wish people still wanted to be my friend.

[icyxmischief]

I honestly cannot stand the Loki fandom on tumblr anymore. This is the most toxic, hateful fandom I've encountered in a long, long time. I don't know how you've managed to stay for so long, but I've always enjoyed your content and wish you the best of luck going forward here. I don't think I've ever been so disappointed or outright ashamed of a fandom before, but this series has really brought a whole lot of ugliness out of Loki's. And it's such a shame, because it wasn't always this bad.

Friend, it makes me so sad that you feel this way. I know from negative experience in other fandom spaces what you're going through. It's really painful because we come to fandom with an earnest piece of ourselves that we want to share, project or INject, into characters who resonate with us, for any variety of reasons. This means each of us has a very personal, individual, and sometimes fever-pitched stake in how our "comfort character" is portrayed in canon.

This fandom angst derives from a couple of logical fallacies which I wanna spell out here, and from which, I hope, you can free yourself, in order to remain in a psychological space where you can still enjoy the things you love. <3 No really. I am a 38-year-old, successful professional, I have been around the block with fandom discourse and "grown-up real-world" intellectual discourse, and I am telling you, THIS is how I've "lasted this long":

1) Fallacy One: "Canon is the "most real" version of characterization." No. We don't even have to go into "Death of the Author, baybee" or Reception Theory or any of the other stuff in 20th and 21st century media crit to refute this. Simply put: you experience the media. The media exists in a wholly fictional realm anyway. The only difference is money/resources and breadth of audience. Your experience and, say, Kevin Feige's, or Kate Herron's, are all equally "real." Your Variant of the Sacred Canon (I DO think they're being that meta with the fans in the Loki series, yes), if you will, deserves to exist as much as the one Tom Hiddleston acts out on screen. You have a right to the Loki that exists in your head. 2) Fallacy Two: Seemingly opposite but often entwined with Fallacy One, as a defense/coping mechanism against Fallacy One: "My version is the 'most valid' version, and departure from my version equates lack of authenticity or effort, or, most dangerous of all, moral/ethical inferiority." No. We all have the right to the Loki in our heads. Now this one is trickier, admittedly, because the people who gravitate to characters like Loki tend to share his experience with social Othering/marginalization and trauma. That means that if you tell them "you're wrong, and stop getting in my face and being so aggressive," you could be accused (indeed, perhaps rightfully) of tone-policing someone who identifies with a marginalized group (racially, in terms of ability, in terms of gender identity or sexual orientation, etc). The best thing, therefore, for you to do is acknowledge that your readings of the "text" (here, a tv show) differ, and that you respectfully decline to discuss the matter. Even if it rankles you, don't engage. These people have a very personal stake in the media and in essence, it's kindest to let them depart to be angry in their own space.

3) Connected closely to the above, “What we condone in fiction equates what we condone in reality,” God, no. Much ink has been spilled by more eloquent writers on this, so I won’t expound. But don’t go there. Don’t fall for that. Lol. It leads only to misery. 

Habits I would encourage, to avoid Big Fandom Wank:

1) When you see content you don't like, especially spoken in an incendiary or absolutist manner, block or unfollow. Do not engage directly. Vent about it in your own space if you must, or better yet, in private, to trusted friends. If you engage, which...sometimes it IS worth it to do so, if something has real personal significance to you as a consumer of that media, then be braced for people to be rude or even abusive, because human beings, especially in internet spaces, are messy emotional creatures who leap to conclusions without gauging for nuance. There is disagreement over different and valid interpretations of content, and then there is just being unpleasant on principle.

2) See advice in Fallacy Two re avoiding tone-policing.

3) Find your people and curate your dash strictly. This can be ten people or it can be two. Make a close-knit small group in a private space for all your sharing of ideas. Make sure these are people you trust, who, when you spend time consuming the media with them, make you feel better, not worse.

4) Unfollow liberally. Block liberally. You don't owe anyone your time, energy, or, especially, happiness. People will accuse you of cowardice or "running away from a grown-up debate." Let them. It's pitiable, in perspective. They're insecure and sad and they need to say manipulative things. But you know better, don't you? You're just preserving your peace of mind.

5) If you mess up, go quiet for a while, take a break from social media, and it will blow over. I promise. Delete anon hate (and know that you can block the sender, even an anon, on Tumblr, too!).

--------

Friend, thank you for your kind words. I'm so sorry you're so sad. I hope I see you here again someday. <3

Anyone who needs a boost can reblog this advice, btw.

[kittykatknits]

I love that when volcanoes and tempers are erupting in the fandom and there are wars and drama and anon hate messages- your blog is serene, positive and drama free; like hot chocolate and gentle bells ringing. I also appreciate that tho you've been in the fandom for years and have a know ASOIAF quite well you don't feel the need to rub it in ppl's faces. You're the chillest and one of the nicest ppl I've encountered in this fandom!

(this got long and rambly, sorry)

Oh, wow! Thank you anon!!

To be honest, I tend to miss a lot of what’s going on. With two young kids and a job that takes me away from technology for long periods, my time on this site tends to be limited to 30 second scrolls of my dash.

So, I’ll air my dirty laundry and tell you how I used to be in the ASOIAF fandom. Once, I was the person who engaged in every fight and would pretty much decide any/all opinions that disagreed with mine was close to an open declaration of war. I spent hours and hours posting, commenting, starting threads, and so on to explain to people why they were wrong and I was right. 

I used to get even more angry when I got called a Stan or was dismissed because I was a fan of Sansa or House Stark or whatever. It all came to a head in a discussion on whether or not Sansa would marry Aegon in the next book. I basically had a berserker nerd rage moment and realized I needed to step back from fandom Well, I did, and did my best to forget it all existed for two or three years.

The funny thing is, what people argue about now, is pretty much the exact same thing people were arguing about ten or fifteen years ago. It really hasn’t changed much at all. I’d say shipping is more popular now (asoiaf was not a shipping-friendly fandom once upon a time) and Sansa is a much more well-liked character. 

So, now, if people have different opinions or character preferences, I really don’t care. It doesn’t impact me so I scroll past, or unfollow, or block if I need too. I’m kinda over long debates or arguments, it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. Ship who you wanna ship, like who you wanna like. It isn’t gonna change my opinion on my fave characters or theories. Don’t get me wrong, I still jump in to the occasional discussion if i have time, especially if it involves one of my faves. I’m not trying to hide my opinions and I’ll happily tell you if asked. (heck, my blog pretty much gives it away). But, I really try not to behave like I used too. 

I don’t know, it’s like a lesson I need to constantly re-learn. Don’t feed the trolls, they’ll eventually wither up and die. It’s less work and a lot more pleasant. Some people enjoy conflict and debate more than I do, and that’s great. Maybe my way isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine, but it works for me. 

Besides, after all these years, I’ve kinda come to the conclusion that of all the things I want to happen in canon only two are extremely likely: 1) the others will be defeated and 2) one or more Starks will be back in WF. And that’s about it. In my head, it doesn’t matter, because I have the characters I love and I can do with them whatever I want. Canon or not. 

So, if people ship Jaime and Brienne or not, or think Dany is the absolute worst or the best thing ever…it really doesn’t matter to me anymore. I might disagree, even strongly, but I’m not going to do anything about. 

This blog will pretty much stay as you see it. A random dumpster fire of things I like. With the occasional surprise quality post just to shake things up. Oh, and my fic. 

Thank you for the ask anon!!!