#hours on this Webbed Site.

[nathaniacolver]

oh no you're telling me over a quarter of us on this website need physical affection and we can't GIVE IT TO EACH OTHER?????? VIRTUAL HUGS TO EVERYONE I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. go get a massage or something GIRL bc i can't rub your back or touch your knee or shoulder or hug you or cuddle you 🥺🥺

[same-picture-of-a-rock-every-day]

That rock deserves a solid boop.

The Rock has been thoroughly bapped, my goodness.

[taffywabbit]

"why not just make your own website?"

with the announcement of cohost's death and amidst all the other tumultuous shit currently going on with social media as a concept (i am AMAZED twitter has survived this long given the circumstances), one suggestion that i've been hearing a lot is "we should just go back to the good old days of personal websites. let's all just make neocities pages!!"

(this is gonna be a long one sorry)

and like. idk! it's certainly something i've considered, i think it would be a fun thing to have, but it also feels like the equivalent of "capitalism sucks so let's all just run off into the woods and live in a cabin outside of society" to me. like it would be nice, it would be fun, but it doesn't ultimately solve the actual problems that are present with the modern internet, it just evades them. more importantly in my case and many others, it does not really help people who rely on the modern internet and the connections they're able to make there for their income. sure i can make a website and host my art and blog posts there, but who's going to see it? i can't build a consistent audience and make a living off of random passersby who peek at my website once, say "huh, neat!" and MAYBE add it to an RSS feed or whatever if they really like it. there's minimal potential for meeting and impressing new people outside my existing circles if i don't ALSO still have some manner of social media platform to promote the website on.

a lot of the "solutions" i see people proposing for the slow, painful decline of social media as a user experience keep coming back to old-fashioned, more isolated/insular systems. we miss forums, we miss personal webpages, we miss newsletters, etc etc. but like... those things were ideal in the "old web" because the old web was more about sharing hobbies and interests with whoever happened to pass by and check them out, and even just USING the internet was a niche hobby in and of itself for a lot of people. if you wanna be kinda cynical about it (and not unjustifiably so), web 2.0 is much more blatantly business-oriented, and its algorithms and carefully crafted UX's are primarily meant to funnel you towards viewing ads and spending money on products. looking at it that way, it sure does suck and Everything Was Better Before! but the modern web is ALSO more powerful than anything before it for just like. connecting people. spreading information and news. showing your art/music/writing/thoughts/etc to strangers who never knew you existed an hour ago. putting the tools to reach out to someone and tell them you think they're cool right there on the same website where their art is hosted, just a comment or a message away.

if you're able to avoid patterns of engagement-bait and obsessing over follower counts as a measure of self-worth (a big "if", i realize, but i view it like installing an adblocker - it's just kind of a basic prerequisite for modern internet safety and survival), a lot of these systems can genuinely be really positive and life-changing in ways that were simply not possible 20 years ago! almost all of my current closest friends are people I met through sharing our art on platforms like Twitter who were complete strangers at the time. all of the art clients that regularly pay my bills and support my work came from places like that too! the "social" part of "social media" is really what makes it ultimately worth keeping around in any form, and makes the pursuit of a Good social media platform still valuable.

there's a lot to love about the old web - its aesthetics, simplicity and freedom for personal expression - but every time someone says "just delete your socials and make a personal website" i am forced to confront the fact that i could never do what i currently do or be the person i am on the old web. if i was stuck hanging out in my own little space and only ever interacting with people who openly and loudly share my interests, i couldn't support myself with art full-time, i probably would never have met the kind and quiet strangers who are now my best friends and have made me who i am, and i'd just generally get a lot less insight into the vast range of experiences and perspectives that exist outside of my own. my life would be on a fundamentally different trajectory in countless ways without the advent of web 2.0.

and that's not to say "well twitter and facebook and tumblr all suck but you kinda still have to hand it to them" cuz you don't, obviously. they're corporations, and their job is to take the personalities and thoughts and art of the people who use their products and try to scrunch it all into something uninform and marketable that generates profit and pleases their shareholders. but like, you CAN still make a good thing out of them! these websites are tools just as much as geocities or myspace or IRC used to be. and the one thing these newer tools are pretty much all REALLY good at is discoverability. if you're just a hobbyist at the things you wanna share on the internet, then you likely don't have a lot of use for those tools, and perhaps you WOULD genuinely be happier just keeping a personal blog site or hanging out in private groupchats or sticking to specialized federated Mastodon instances or whatever. it just isn't feasible for me, and there are a LOT of people in my same situation. my entire industry of online freelance artists barely existed 20 years ago, and the web culture of that era is largely incompatible with my continued survival in the mid-2020s. i would LOVE to run off and live in the woods in concept, but all my survival skills are adapted for city living and i would just eat the wrong berry and die out there. i want- i NEED people to try and improve the spaces we're in, and support better forms of social media (like what cohost was trying and largely succeeding to do!) instead of just complaining that it all sucks, everything was better when we were kids, and digging ourselves little holes to hide in. much like all the other problems and frustrations and systemic issues of the world we live in, the modern web isn't going to go away if you just ignore it, so we may as well try to make it better for everyone.

anyways tl;dr i probably WILL make a neocities at some point. it could be fun, even if it doesn't help my career stability or whatever. but i do also need ALL THE SOCIAL PLATFORMS I USE FOR MY JOB TO STOP EXPLODING PRETTY PLEASE, and failing that, some actual half-decent alternatives that aren't going to fizzle out in a month would also be great thanks ✌

[cozylittleartblog]

just left deviantart lol

everyone join sheezyart, i need it to replace deviantart (also they're way cooler & anti AI & have profile customization dA could never DREAM of)

like. i logged into deviantart yesterday. and saw the official deviantart team page promoting AI grifters who make $11k+ a year on their website selling "adoptables". instead of, y'know, real artists? who actually deserve the money? and in that moment i realized i could not fuckin' use deviantart anymore, they'll sell out to the highest bidder. fuck 'em. my deviantart has become a sheezyart shill page.

[whirlwindofcomplications]

TELL ME I'M YOUR NATIONAL ANTHEM.

I. excerpts from a book I'll never write #56, @blossomfully

II. desperation sits heavy on my tongue, @tullipsink

III. brute: poems - emily skaja

IV. "everything all of it," in 'then the war' - carl phillips

V. susan jeffers

VI. radical feminist therapy: working in the context of violence - bonnie burstow

for @gayferrari - everything always comes back to michael

[tgtbata]

once upon a time @zmediaoutlet ran a wincest survey and dean!michael didn't perform (ahem) very well. but i love a challenge so i wanted to draw some proof of concept porn. it is here or here.

[ifwebefriends]

Tumblr Sings Loser, Baby

Saw this post and thought it was really cool and also wished I was a part of it so I edited it to the song, enjoy!

People in the video: @2006-stupid-thatsme @a-bisexual-panicking @animationgirl89 @bella-bo-fella @blacklred @brokenaroacecode @clarity2electricboogaloo @deeznutzdontexist @johannepetereric @outrightelm @rateater2000 @rdfhyrsc @starlightsugar @toastybagel @yellowheartz

[shoku-and-awe]

It is Wednesday, my dudes! And it's Day 3 of THE LATEST LITERACY WALLCHART FOR CHILDREN Advent Calendar!

First of all, I love the tone of this one! Somehow I always picture it said by some snobby aristocratic lady—"Celery is a commoner's vegetable"—you know? Animated by old-school Disney (maybe 101 Dalmatians era), a white lady with a ski jump nose and a strawberry blonde bun. The kind of person who says "dreadfully" instead of "very." And I know it's probably that celery is a vegetable that's commonly available, but (1) that's not so much the case here in Japan, and (2) something about the phrase "a kind of common vegetable" really just does it for me. So snooty! I love it. The delivery, in my house, is always (in a pan-Atlantic accent), "Celery is a kind of ...........*sniff*.......... 'common' vegetable."

Also, "a celery." I think we need to embrace this nomenclature. People learning Japanese and Chinese love to complain about how confusing counters are, but English does it all the time too! English delights in doing it! We have a bunch of celery, a stalk of celery, a stick of celery, and when I Googled "how do you count celery," just to be sure that there was nothing else, I learned that celery counting is also an issue for programmers for some reason! Wow. My literacy wallchart really *is* educational.

[sleeeepy-demon]

this is for you @giorgione-cordileone. Im giving him a drink.

[cabinet-of-ecologies]

career-based crisis time

[mortellanarts]

heard it's year of the bnuuy

[silverraes]

how's a girl supposed to spread the bubblegum bitch babe agenda under these conditions (broken ass tumblr tags)

[glambots]

I...I don't know what happened. But I'd just finished organizing the Masterlist page. I had it all done. But then I saved it. And went to go check.

And the links. Were gone. And even in Editing Mode. They're gone. Again.

[weaponizedmoth]

Been meaning to do another one of these for a second, but didn't have any cool outfit pics--until I remembered these blurry pics I had from 2021 that I could never do much with. Libbyframe is the inspo for these as usual,✨️

[muzzlemouths]

Muzz!!! Hello I hope you're doing well waa!

I hope you're sleeping also!! squints my eyes at you (affectionate)

KIBS!!!! HELLO KIBBS HI. I'm doing alright thank you for asking!! I hope YOU are doing FANTASTIC!!!!!! don't look at my sleep schedule though. it's fine I promise it's FINE but don't. look at it ok

[bharv]

Some of my tumblr mutuals are buddies. Some are now ten year long fellow explorers of the wastes of this website whom I look on with deference and respect. Whose hands I would clasp in real life with both of mine. Others are legit muses, your creative works have influenced me in ways you’ll never know, words and brush strokes that I drink up with my tea and weave into the world with me. Others are like old-timey pen pals whose letters are sweetly perfumed and always clutched to my heart in a reverie.