#i genuinely don't know how to tag this because. not exactly a lot of overlap here

[cosmos-dot-semicolon]

Just got Gumi and Vsynth Pro on sale today as my Christmas gift to myself. Was a bit sad I didn't have anything festive to post today... until I remembered this little thing I'd been working on months ago >:)

This is a very rough version which has no tuning at all (and I did literally only get the software today), but I thought it'd be fun to share since I probably won't get more done of it for a while. You don't see enough covers of the lyrical Club Penguin songs out there.

[rockturbot]

Can I just. Thank you. For existing. And posting art. Because sometimes I look at how much content is out there for other ships and it feels like you're single-handedly carrying the Damon x Manfred ship. So much art over the years to scroll through, so much content for, what, the… 7 people who like this ship genuinely? I OWE you for getting me into these two (and Blaise too as a bonus) and carrying the entire ship. Like, on days that are stressful or tough just THINKING of these two gets me giggling like I'm high, and I owe you for contributing the most to this. You, my respected person, are my saviour.

Thank you so much for these extremely kind words! I feel very much the same about those two and I'm honored if I can play even a little part in getting others into them as well.😇 I'm very glad my art has had a positive impact on you!

"Our" corner of the fandom feeling quite lonely at times, I think, mainly stems from the fact that most people who *would* enjoy the ship, be it in a platonic or romantic way, don't know it's a thing. It's largely fanon, it's hard to stumble upon unless you specifically go through Manfred's, Gant's, or Blaise's tags, which not many people do, and there doesn't seem to be much overlap between evil old men enjoyers and creators of juggernaut ship art either, so there's very little "cross-contamination" happening as well.

From what I've seen over the years, though, when people are finally introduced to the idea for the first time, their reaction is very often something like "I never knew I needed this in my life" - which, yeah, same! That's exactly how I reacted when I first found out about them. So, all in all, rather than unpopular, I'd say their dynamic is simply still largely unknown, and luckily, with enough patience, that can change. We're still not many, but even now there's already a lot more people both drawing and writing about them than just a few years ago! I'm sure that in time, there'll only be more. :D

Again, thank you very much for this kind ask. Real life has been rough lately and reading this cheered me up a lot. I hope you have a great day!

[stonefemblues]

hi, I don't know if you're the right person to ask about this (and if not I'm very sorry for wasting your time!) but how do you know if you're a stone butch? and if so... what do I do? what are some resources? how do I talk to my girlfriend about it? have a good day!

im a stone femme so i don’t have the same perspective of a stone butch, but i know and have talked to many so i might be able to help a bit! there is actually a lot of overlap in the experience of stone butches and stone femmes. even though we may seem like opposites, both our identities are about knowing that we have specific boundaries around sex, and respecting our own desires. 

stone butches do not want to be penetrated in any way, and may also have other boundaries regarding being touched in other areas or ways (such as external genitalia or chest), depending on the person. a stone butch is an exclusive top. whether or not you have attempted non-stone sex, think about how bottoming/having penetrative sex would make (or has made) you feel. does it make you very anxious? does it make you dysphoric? does it bring back traumatic memories? does it just feel uncomfortable? when you fantasize about sex, do you only think about topping? do you get turned on primarily by the thought of pleasuring your partner? all of those could mean that you are stone.

stone is less of an identity that you need to do deep introspection to figure out what you Truly Are, like a gender label is, and more of a label that describes the way you already are. it’s a label to communicate something specific to your partner. sometimes it can be hard to figure out if you have trouble discerning what your actual boundaries are, separating that from what you just feel obligated to do, or from what you actually want to do but just feel anxious about because you have never done it before. some people begin identifying as stone, but as time goes on they work through their trauma or dysphoria or discomfort, or find a partner that makes them feel more comfortable to try new things, and they no longer need to call themselves stone. if this happens that’s okay, but its also okay if you are stone for your entire life.

as for talking to your girlfriend, its really best to just sit down with them and say “hey can i talk to you about something?” if they know what stone means, just be up front about it and say that you are a stone butch. if they don’t know what it means, start with a discussion about its meaning and then tell them that that’s what you think you are. explain the specifics of your sexual boundaries and how you would like to have sex, since it’s not always exactly the same for each stone butch. talk to them about their own sexual boundaries/desires too. if they are not stone, talk about ways that you can both feel comfortable and desired during sex. if your girlfriend is concerned that they aren’t able to pleasure you, tell them about how the kind of sex you desire genuinely is pleasuring you, even if you aren’t “receiving” what most people think are the primary pleasure-giving sexual acts. it is vital that your boundaries and needs are understood and respected in your relationship. however, its also important that your partner’s boundaries and needs are equally understood and respected. if there’s a conflict between both of your boundaries/needs, thats unfortunate but not the fault of either of you. there are ways to work around conflicts like that, but just make sure that neither of you are compromising your hard boundaries to do so. 

and as for other resources, you can check out my #stone tag, and of course you are welcome to ask for an invite to my stone server too! if any stone butches are reading this and you’d be willing to chat with someone questioning stone butch identity, please leave a comment!

[kane-and-griffin]

I'm really sad about something I don't understand and was hoping you could explain. Why do people block without giving a reason to? I don't why it first seems like it's all going so well then the next you're blocked and you don't know why or what you did or said wrong? It's happened twice now and to say it hurts is an understatement.

Oh, my precious Kabby babies.  Circle up, it’s time for some firm butgentle life advice from Mom. 

First of all, unless I personally am the person who blocked you (whichI’m obviously not since we’re having this conversation!), in a very real sensethe short answer to this question is that you know I can’t actually answer thisquestion.  You’re asking me to tell youwhy a person I don’t know did a thing for which I have no context, and forwhich there could be a thousand reasons. So in a concrete, specific sense, my answer is: I do not know.

However.

(You knew there was going to be a however.)

Social media is a deeply personal avenue for self-expression and it’s also aworld where many of us spend a great deal of our time, which means that we havethe full and free right to customize it into exactly what we want it tobe.  The things that you post are personal reflections of you, which is  why it bums you out when someone mutes or blocks or doesn’t followback; it feels on some level like a personalrejection.  But the space you curate is also a personal reflection of you.  You have the rightto post anything you want and other people have the right to choose not to seeit.  Both of those rights are equal, eventhough you’re only on one side so naturally the other one feels like it’s insome way “wrong.”  

I’m speaking with zero context for what your preexisting relationship withthese people was beforehand (like obviously if it was a close friend and theyblocked you out of nowhere, you’re going to have to sort that out with themdirectly, I can’t advise you there), but it’s important to remember that theremay be no “right” and wrong” in this scenario.  It’s fully possible forboth of these things to peacefully coexist at the same time:

1) your absolute right to feel a little bit rejected and hurt that astranger on the internet made the choice that they didn’t want your socialmedia sphere to overlap with their social media sphere,

and

2) that other person’s absolute right to say “if something or someone makesme feel even the tiniest bit ‘nope’ I am purging it out of this space so it isexactly what I want and need it to be.” 

They don’t need to have a reason.  That sucks, when you’re on the receiving end of it, which all of us have been - it truly and genuinely sucks - but it’s also reality.  One of the hard truths that incidents like this make us sometimes have toface - and we don’t want to face these things, because they can feel reallyicky and vulnerable and ping all the little gremlins in our brain  - is this:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

This sounds mean and brutal, and I don’t mean it to be, because you know mom loves you, but it’s incrediblyimportant, so I’m going to say it again to make sure that if nothing else, thisgets through:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

The celebs you stan don’t owe you a response to your tweet, justbecause you want one.  The people you tag in meta don’t owe you rebloggingit to continue having that conversation with you forever, just because you wantto prove you’re right.  The fans of the fic you write for your mostpopular ship don’t owe you crossing over to give you hits on yourrare-pair fic if they don’t feel like it.  Nobody owes you a certainnumber of followers, nobody owes you a response to every anon you send them,nobody owes you finishing that fic you like in time for them to read it whenthey feel like reading it.  We owe each other one thing and one thingonly: basic human decency.  That’s it.  Everything else is freelyoffered to the world, and freely taken by the people who want it.  It’snot a transactional exchange.  If you make art or write fic and you put itout there into the world, you’ve done a cool thing, and whether it gets tenhits or thousands it was still worth doing.  There will be people whoaren’t interested, but if you get hung up on feeling rejected by that, it willparalyze you.

Social media is personal. That’s unavoidable.  It’s an extension of ourselves.  When someone is cruel to you or to one ofyour friends on the internet, even if it’s an anonymous stranger, it feelsshitty.  When you express an opinionabout something and a ton of people reblog it and the tags are full of “OMG YESTHISSSSS”, it feels great.  We all experiencethat in different ways.  Society has always selected arbitrary measures for young girls and women tolive up to in order to feel like they’re popular or they’re approved by thecool kids, and right now it’s things like “how many followers do you have” and “didyou get an RT from a celebrity” and “how many likes on your posts”.  So ona primal level, maybe having someone you thought was a friend block you on Twitter or Tumblr hits you in the same deep coreplace as having the cool kids not come to your birthday party.  That feeling is super real!  It brings upalllllll that deep stuff we try to hide and pretend that we’re aboveexperiencing, but we all have those squishy vulnerable inner selves that justneed the cool kids to like us and we feel bad when they don’t.  

I had this exact conversation with my therapist a few weeks ago when she wasgiving me a hard time because my book has 60 reviews on Amazon, of which likethe majority are 5 stars with two negative ones, and I have both the negativeones like memorized.  And she was like “CLAIRE.  WHAT THE HELL.  WHY DO YOU DO THIS?  58 POSITIVE AND YOU CANNOT QUOTE A SINGLEONE.  TWO SHITTY ONES AND YOU KNOW THEMVERBATIM.  THAT IS NOT HEALTHY BEHAVIOR.”  And I was like “… . okay fine when youput it that way, yes I do sound like a crazy person.”  So like my advice to you – advice which I havejust proven I am absolute garbage at taking myself, so like I may have justeroded my own credibility in my efforts to help – is to remember that you probablyhave a lot more than two followers so honestly this is probably not a badcollective ratio, and there may be lots of people who are very interested inwhat you have to say but you’ve focused a lot of your energy on these two people andit’s worth giving some thought as to why that is.

My question for you is this: what is the net negative impact of having thesetwo people block you on social media? Like in an actual, concrete way, separate from those sort of core gut “Ifeel unloved in this moment” feelings, what is the effect on your life?  You might be surprised.  It might be zero.  In which case, let yourself feel thosefeelings, experience them as valid, and then breathe through them and move onand keep on doin’ you. 

I’m pushing backon you a little bit here very gently because it feels, reading this anon, likeyou’ve made a determination of hurtful intent on the part of the person whoblocked you, or at the very least a certainty that this choice that made wasabout you and not about them.  That the fact that things seemed to be going fine and then they blocked you means you were somehow intentionally misled or mistreated.  Be really, really, really carefulabout deciding the cool girl didn’t come to your birthday party because she’s abitch who wanted to make you feel terrible and is sitting somewhere cackling atthe thought of your sad lil’ face waiting by the front door; maybe she didn’tcome to your birthday party because she has depression and it’s hard for her toleave the house sometimes and she knew your party would be loud and wild and crazyand too much for her brain to handle right now. Be careful about presuming negative intent with no proof it exists.  The internet makes this so easy, the internetconditions us for this, and itconditions us to respond in kind. The worst thing you could do here is to, like,make a callout post or subtweet in the hopes that it will get back to them andthey’ll feel bad, or to sic your other followers onto them, because that turnsthis into a situation that really doeshave a right and wrong; and since you don’t know if they were trying to makeyou feel shitty, or just went on a big block/mute purge to whittle their listdown for mental health reasons that are totally their own, once things escalateyou can’t put the horse back in the barn. It’s too late.  Now it’s A Thing,when maybe it never really needed to be A Thing.  And in almost all situations for almost allpeople in almost all ways, Kabby Mom’s advice is going to be, “please thinkcarefully before you make this A Thing.”

This got long, I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately about theconversations I’m always having with fandom folks the way we let social mediapermeate and shape our sense of self, in good ways and bad, so I apologize formy verbosity but also not really because that’s how things roll over in KabbyMom’s Advice Corner.  But I will sum upin bullet points for those of you who have been skimming, to bring you up tospeed:

Everyone has the right to curate their own social media spacehowever they see fit, and they don’t have to explain their reasons.

They aren’t obligated to include you in that space even if you want themto.

None of that is an objective measure of your worth as a person or a signthat you should stop being you on the internet.

Your feelings of rejection come from a real place and you get to feelthem, as long as

You are striving to move through them without permitting them to paralyzeyou, and finally

You never use someone else’s choice to curate their social media sphere as ajustification for treating them like crap.

Focus on your positive interactions instead of negative ones – your friends,creating stuff and putting it out into the universe – whether it be art, fic,opinions, a podcast, gifsets, crackposts, whatever – and your social mediaworld will be a better place.

In the immortal words of the great Michael J. Fox, “What other people thinkof me is none of my business.”