#intuition album

[mermaidinthecity]

Intuition by Jewel

[periodically80s]

[skalidra]

It is however worth noting that this particular story is in a medium that is not nearly as accessible as many others.

The Wizard of Oz or the Hobbit, yes. Those are books and a movie, the plot is well known, whatever.

Wicked, on the other hand, was not a large part of the public consciousness until it became a play. It is much more difficult (and expensive, usually!) to see a play, and honestly rarely in all the years since it's out have I heard people say 'just read the book' when talking about it. Many people know the Wicked play purely by the album, which excludes at least one song for spoiler reasons, and doesn't include any of the spoken bits or 'show' of the play that would give context.

With that in mind, it's entirely reasonable for people to ask, "Hey, please be careful with your spoilers for this new movie," because there's a much higher than usual chance of people not knowing the details of it. The context of the media is important.

[nacho475]

[oregonkoolaid]

[themagikmirror]

INTUITIVE LISTEN OF THE MONTH🎧🎶

Something I don’t talk about enough is the way I’m tapped into music and how many times my ancestors and guides use songs to communicate vibes and spiritual messages to me. Growing up as a kid in the early 2000’s we weren't on the internet. We had television and music though. I would binge listen to music growing up. I’m always surrounded by music everywhere. Songs get attached to me, sometimes unconsciously. I have a library of music I can pull from just based on memory alone. Spirit has asked me to use this knowledge and gift to pass energy and messages to you that you may not receive by listening or reading overtly spiritual things like a video full of channeled messages, someone’s podcast, etc. but by just passively listening to some good songs!

What came through for June was Kanye West’s album DONDA! Interestingly enough, Kanye West is a celebrity and public figure who actually has JUPITER IN TAURUS (a transit we’re collectively experiencing now) in his Sidereal Birth Chart! He is currently experiencing his second or third Jupiter Return. Put aside your opinions about him as a person and just listen to the music! Add this album into Rotation for June 2024 and see what happens! Listen to the album without skipping around for once if you’ve listened before or even if it’s your first time!

How does this affect your energies?

What messages did Spirit have for you hidden in this album?

There are different ways to feed your Spirit besides trying so hard to live a cookie cutter “spiritual” lifestyle. Spirit said I gotta mix it up and make sure y’all are PLUGGED IN to that! Comment below if you have answers to these questions or want to share your listening experience/downloads with me ✨🕯️🎶⬇️ Per usual, booking for spiritual services and courses available through the link in my bio!

[tha-wrecka-stow]

The Album

The Single(s)

[stellophiliac]

how to build a digital music collection and stuff

spotify sucks aaaass. so start downloading shit!!

file format glossary

.wav is highest quality and biggest

.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality

.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality

.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know

downloading the music

doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.

i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)

i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)

of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download

file conversion

if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.

.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion

if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done

this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.

soulseek

another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.

you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known

it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row

tagging & organizing your music

tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display

if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it

i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me

basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)

there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity

how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:

artist > album > track # track

using a music player

the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)

you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with

i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)

don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here

click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS

syncing

if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this

you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify

you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)

disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!

if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server

afterword

i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment

[mermaidinthecity]

Oh, when you know, you know. I don't wanna take it slow, oh. I don't wanna use my mind. No need to be defined, oh. Oh, it's a wilderness. I'm tasting you on my breath, yeah. Anything before you was just stardust and rust. You're the real thing. Flashing like a diamond in a dream, oh. Living in a full-time fantasy. I'm into you instinctively. I've got an intuition. I can see your outline in the dark. Looking like a midnight work of art, you're like a work of art). I just wanna write this in the stars, oh. I've got an intuition. I've got an intuition. I've got an intuition.

Intuition by Ellie Goulding

[volkswagonblues]

a bibliography for us Daniel Malloy freaks

(a loosely pulled-together reading list about print journalism, New York, the 1970s & 80's, and the AIDS Crisis. Most of the credit goes to @islandbetweenrivers who started this)

On Daniel Molloy, California Boy

The show never explicitly states if Daniel went to college, but since college students were exempt from the Vietnam draft, which ended officially in 1973, it could be interesting to imagine Daniel in Berkeley.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

The White Album by Joan Didion

Berkeley Barb archives (link) -- weekly underground newspaper that ran in Berkeley between '65 to '80

The Daily Cal First 150 Years (link) -- student newspaper at Berkeley

On Journalism

Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm

From her reporter's seat, Malcolm observes that a trial is merely "a contest between competing narratives". (Guardian review)

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

“"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible," wrote Malcolm in an opening sentence that caused a sensation in the tiny, self-referential world of posh American journalism.” (Guardian review)

The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice by Trisha Romano

“The Voice’s origins were proudly amateurish. One early contributor was a homeless man recruited from a local street; equipment consisted of two battered typewriters, an ink-splattering mimeograph machine and a waste paper basket for rejected submissions. Morale spiked when a staff member discovered that dried pods used in fancy flower arrangements contained opium, which was boiled up in the office when the time came for a coffee break.” (Guardian review)

Note: The Village Voice was THE alt-weekly newspaper and it was run out of Greenwich Village in NYC. Lots of incredible writers start there and then move onto the Times, Vanity Fair, etc. Very much the sort of crowd a young Daniel would be mixed in circa 70's and 80's.

The Night of the Gun, by David Carr

David Carr redefines memoir with the revelatory story of his years as an addict and chronicles his journey from crack-house regular to regular columnist for The New York Times. Built on sixty videotaped interviews, legal and medical records, and three years of reporting, The Night of the Gun is a ferocious tale that uses the tools of journalism to fact-check the past. (amazing rec from @archive-z)

Note: imagine if Daniel did this and then fact-checked his way into remembering that vampires existed

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

Keefe can paint complicated portraits of victims and vigilantes alike while covering their lonely pursuit of justice. He intuits why a Dutch woman who has exposed the crimes of her gangster brother might lie about her present whereabouts. He understands why a man who lost his brother in an aeroplane bombing might spend the rest of his life trying to find the culprit. Again and again, Keefe surmises that even the most detailed of investigations can only speculate about human motives. (Guardian review)

Note: the sort of deeply human longform profiles that feels like the sort of writing Daniel does, based on his masterclass clip and what he reveals in his interactions with Louis

On New York, New York (in the 70s)

Notes from Underground, by Eric Bogosian + Perforated Heart, by Eric Bogosian

In four billion years the sun will explode. But before that we'll run out of fresh water and before that we'll all die of some mutation of AIDS that's spread by coughing. It's not my fault anyway. I can't think about this any more today. I'm going to masturbate.

Note: The OG. What else is there to say.

Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler

In the long sweep of American history, of course, 1977 is not exactly 1865, 1941, 1968 or 2001. Yet from porn shops to gay bathhouses, from Yankee Stadium to City Hall, from the blackout to Son of Sam, from Rupert Murdoch's New York Post to the rise of SoHo and Studio 54, the city was living through what Mahler convincingly calls "a transformative moment . . . a time of decay but of rehabilitation as well.” (New York Times review)

Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina, by Chris Franz (2020)

Frantz’s account of the early days, when the Heads lived in the pre-gentrified Lower East Side of New York, an almost literal war zone. While searching for a loft to live in, they viewed one building that was on fire. One spring afternoon, Frantz walked over to the now-legendary club CBGB to ask for a gig. The place smelt of “beer, roach spray, dog doo [the owner, Hilly Kristal, had a free-roaming saluki] and Chanel No 5”.

Winter’s Journal, by Paul Auster

Note: To me, Auster is one of the closest real-life Daniel Malloy analogues: born around 1950, literary career in NYC, moved to Paris in the 1970s for a few years, troubled middle-class background. Novelist though, not a journalist. There’s an anecdote in this book about a car crash that feels like a deadass Devil’s Minion fever dream. Crazy stuff. One of my personal favourites

On the AIDS Crisis

And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts

The book chronicles the discovery and spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) with a special emphasis on government indifference and political infighting—specifically in the United States—to what was then perceived as a specifically gay disease

The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts, by Andrew E. Stoner

Biography of Randy Shilts that’s very helpful for imagining Daniel in the early 1980s newsrooms covering Karposi’s sarcoma

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS by David France (2017)

It’s not easy to balance solid journalism with intimate understanding of a subject, and even harder to write eloquently about a disease that’s killing your friends and loved ones. France pulls it off, in his own words (his description of finding a college roommate’s panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt is heartbreaking) and in letting his articulate sources speak for themselves. (SF Gate review)

Timeline of AIDS (link)

Overview of HIV (link)

And some films, just for fun

The Panic in Needle Park (1971): Drama film directed by Jerry Schatzberg. Al Pacino is a heroin addict and small-time dealer in Manhattan who falls in love with another addict.

Serpico (1973): biographical crime drama film directed by Sidney Lumet. Al Pacino is a hippie cop (yes, I know, its part of the plot) with one foot in the 1970s bohemian art scene

American Graffiti (1973): teen movie set in 1973 Modesto ("I'm just a shitty kid from Modesto"--Danny Malloy)

The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974): More grimy 1970s NYC stuff

All the President’s Men (1976): THE ABSOLUTE JOURNALISM MOVIE??

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

Cruising (1980): 1980 crime thriller written and directed by William Friedkin. Al Pacino is a cop (again) but this time he goes undercover in NYC gay leather clubs

Almost Famous (2000): Set in 1973, it chronicles the funny and often poignant coming of age of 15-year-old William, an unabashed music fan who gets the chance to write for Rolling Stone

Spotlight (2015): More journalism movies! The true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese

everyone say thank you to @islandbetweenrivers for starting this, I just polished up our google docs and posted it on tumblr.

Also if anyone has something to add please let me know!

[nctafraid]

Carlos was worried that with the breakup he wouldn't get to keep some of the friendships that he had made. And he didn't get to see anyone from the 126 besides Marjan when he had to pick her up. But Grace was still around, she still checked on him. He appreciated it, because now he had this beautiful loft that he and TK loved but he gets to spend his time in it alone. Thinking about the life they could have had. "We were supposed to have game nights here, a life that we could build. Now it just feels too empty." Looking up slightly, he relaxed himself at her touch. He wanted to believe her that it was going to be okay. No matter what. But TK was the first person he had truly loved, and now he was gone. "He said I was a control freak and that's why he couldn't be with me."

Grace wanted to comfort Carlos, to ensure him that things weren't as bad as they seemed and that they'd all be okay. True, the 126 had been shut down, but it was just temporary. They were all getting their jobs back from what she heard, plus a lot of the crew at Dispatch actually felt bad as well and were pushing for it to get opened up a lot faster. "You don't have to do anything with it, baby, don't push yourself. It just happened last week, and you're mourning. That's normal, and it's healthy and you should. You should get it out, deal with it before it gets to be too much." Finally she reached out, her hand grabbing onto his with as much affection as she could from her spot. "You were trying, Carlos, everyone knows that. Even TK. He's not gone. He's taking time."

[justnone88]

Leave it to *Billboard* to write an article about Beyoncé and make it about somebody else entirely. They claim the only reason they didn’t choose the other person was Beyoncé's longevity, but I can give you more than just that reason for choosing Beyoncé over anyone else. Beyoncé has the vocal capability of an opera singer, the dance skills of the best dancers in the world, and an unparalleled intuition for making a difference in the industry—she changed the game with that digital drop! Her visuals pushed everyone to step up their game, and her storytelling through her albums is something that deserves to be studied.

Not only that, but she has been a loud advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, gave us *Renaissance*, and has spoken clearly about her stance on racism in the USA. This woman’s career goes beyond anything we could have imagined 27 years ago when she first entered the game. She has earned the respect of her idols—Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Prince, Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer, Whitney Houston, and more.

This list should not be about sales. It should be about artistry and the act of creating work that transcends time. In that regard, the other person wouldn't even come close, I guarantee it. However, we all know the real reason behind *Billboard*'s rant, and it starts with a big R. White supremacy and white women's feminism often go hand in hand, trying to make us believe they are better than those truly doing the work.

So open your eyes, because even if you don’t like Beyoncé, you certainly know that list is not the most accurate one. Otherwise, Gaga would be up there behind Beyoncé!

Also, where is mariah carey? Or jazmin sullivan in that godforsaken list? What about Janelle Monáe or even Miley Cyrus?

[timdrakesbussy]

Sambastian is known as Sun/Moon pairing but I bring you: THIS type of Sun/Moon

I think people like to brush Sam off as this dumb/himbo character or a golden retriever type of guy but like guys… he’s very intuitive and can be serious if he needs to. I mean, he carried the baggage of being the temporary paternal figure for his seven-year-old brother (especially with the constant worry of his dad actually dies in the battlefield) so I definitely think there are some unresolved tensions somewhere in him. I think he’s similar to his mom where both hide and eventually distract their true feelings (Jodi with chores while Sam with his devil-may-care attitude). To me, Sam (and to an extent, Jodi) is like a ticking time-bomb.

So imagine this:

Sam is passionate when it comes to his craft. The label that picked them up a few years ago loved them, but they need to keep up with their demands or else they’d be replaced with another fresh-faced, youthful band. Their previous album sold amazingly, so predictably, this new one needs to be on par or, better yet, surpass it.

It was different now than it was back then. Then, they could mess around with their instruments and have jam sessions to pass time in Sam’s bedroom before Sam even had any ideas for the lyrics. Now? They can’t even be in the same room with him because Abigail and Sebastian distract him too much.

And it wasn’t like they couldn’t help with the lyrics! Sure, Abigail can’t really write lyrics, but Sebastian worked with him on their previous album. Yes, their lyrical styles are different, but variety is a good thing, right? So why must he do it himself?

Sam can’t even take care of himself. It was jarring to see him go outside his room just for bathroom breaks before locking himself in again to write with his new guitar, as the old one was smashed due to his frustration. Sebastian wasn’t even sure he eats, sleeps, or drink for that matter. Sometimes he brought some refreshments for him, but they were left untouched, and the door was still tightly shut.

It was somehow worse when he finally left the room with papers clutched rather tightly. The papers were crinkled, pen ink was smudged on some of the pages, but nonetheless, they had something.

Sam, however, was in terrible shape.

His hair's a mess, more so than usual. His cheeks were hollow, and dark circles formed under his watery green eyes. His figure was gaunt; his long limbs somehow made him loom over the both of them more. It was alarming to see the usually youthful and bouncy Sam being more... well, like Sebastian. Yet, somehow, even more sickly.

But the bright smile and the small crinkle on his nose and eyes were still so Sam. Sebastian then realized just how much he missed seeing those, especially if they were directed to him.

He just wished Sam wouldn't look like a slight wind could knock him down right now.

[keen-li]

"Forget the song...focus on your health"

Idol au, y/n is an Idol

.......

Youve been quite stressed and unwell because comeback season is soon and the finishing up of your album is killing you. You're currently working on a song with straykids. You've never written a song with them and you're really excited. You've never interacted with straykids much, only saying hellos and HIs at award shows. You've also expressed to each other how much you really want to work on a song together, which brings you to now.

You're sat on the couch as changbin sits in the chair instructing han on his verse. Today it's just you, 3racha and one other producer.

Chan's on his phone next to you on the couch as you wait your turn in the booth. The headache you've been feeling for sometime decides to remind you of its existence as a sharp throbing pain hits your head. You've haven't been feeling too well lately, nausea and constant light-headedness have plagued you not forgetting the said headache. You've been eating well. Sleeping well, well not really, but you've been eating well that should be enough.

But its not enough. You've been having them for like two weeks or more, you haven't counted. You've only been taking pills to sooth the pain, not going to the doctor assuming it will be fine and it will just go away, just like the other times. Have you told anyone? Well your friend, but you just shrugged it off as stress and told them not to worry.

But now you think it's otherwise as you feel a wave of heat rush over you even though the air in the room is cool. Your vision goes blurry as your head starts to slightly spin. You grip the arm rest of the couch and rub your temple.

Chan notices your behaviour and scrunched up facial expression and turns from his phone.

"Are you okay?" He asks

"Yeah yeah" you smile weakly at him, "I think I've just been tired lately"

"Understandable" chan chuckles and smiles at you still a little concerned as you turn and try to focus in your phone screen.

For a few minutes your strong enough to endure but as the minutes go by the feeling gets worse then unbearable unlike usual. You wish you could get in the booth, sing your verse and go home. But you're very sure that you won't be able to enter the booth and do a good job.

It's getting unbearable as your temperature rises and you feel yourself boiling, you could just strip. You try and stay a little stronger cause you don't want to embarrass yourself during your first session with straykids in the studio. You feel bad that you know you won't be able to record today and that you're gonna set everyone back.

You decide to stand and maybe go rinse your face in the bathroom. As you do you stumble a bit but it goes unnoticed. You walk through your spinning vision and mind, you can barely pinpoint where the door is. This has to be the worst you've felt ever. Your steps are slower and you begin to breathe a little deeper. You're trying your best to go unnoticed but nothing goes unnoticed when you're legs give in and you fall hitting your head on the stand by the door and finally you hit the floor. You barely feel anything cause your mind goes blank and your eyes shut, darkness your only scene.

Everyone's attention is quickly on you as chan who's closest rushes to you, lifting your head off the ground. You're not bleeding, but he notices You're unconscious and your skin is burning hot.

Changbin who was on the chair now standing by chan looks over you, concerned and worried. He pulls out his phone to call an ambulance as chan calls out your name multiple times, worry engraved in his tone. He holds you in his arms like a little fragile egg as his eyes don't leave your face. He watches your unconscious face, you look relaxed. Chan uses the sleeve of his shirt to wipe the little droplets of sweat on your face. Your cute face he thinks. He noticed that your weren't okay, he should have acted on his intuition when he could've maybe you wouldn't have fainted. That isn't true you would've fainted anyways cause you've been neglecting yourself.

Changbin's a little worried whether you're breathing or not, but chan reassured him that you are after he checked, multiple times.

Soon enough the paramedics arrive and take you to the hospital as discreetly as possible. Chan should've just driven you to the hospital himself, but he knew they'd say no to him.

Chan, changbin and han were worried sick about you. Chan has been in contact with your friend through your phone. And when they heard that you were awake and in recovery they were relieved.

"Why are you still worried I'm fine" you say through the phone not sounding fine to chan at all.

"I'll have to come visit you myself to believe" he says softly "cause you don't sound fine."

You laugh through the phone and it lightens chan's heart to hear you laugh.

"You wanna come visit me?" You ask seriously

"Yeah, I care." You blush at that.

"Anyway the doctor said I can be out in a week" you inform, cause your situation was bad you had to stay a little longer.

"After that we can work on finishing the song" chan sighs as you say that.

"Don't worry about the song"

"Right now focus on your health. Get better the song can wait" he comforts you and you feel a little less guilty now.

"The boys said, they hope you get better and their gonna said you some gifts"

You smile even though he can't see it.

"That's not necessary, but thank you"

"Try telling that to a worried changbin and han" you both laugh at that.

"They wouldn't take no as an answer" you say wanting to cough but holding it in so that chan doesn't hear.

"Anyways" his voice lowers as he runs his hands through his hair, though you can't see it.

"What do you want me to bring when I come see you?"

............

Wrote this cause I'm awfully sick🤧

[patricia-taxxon]

I want to address what’s being said about me regarding my behavior as a teenager, because some of it is true. However, more of it is greatly distorted, and some of it is false. I won’t be reproducing the video that was made about me, the creator has acknowledged the misinformation present in it & has unlisted it, willingly ceding ground for me to give my own testimony. Some of it will require me to admit to things I am still ashamed of, some of it will require me to revisit a traumatic time in my life that I have mostly blocked out. The short version is that I believe I was being groomed at the same time and in the same place as many of the people who came out against me, and my ultimate goal is to find solidarity with those people and begin the healing process. 

When I was 18, and just beginning to accrue an audience, I created a discord server. For a lot of external reasons, mainly spending my entire life up until this point being shuttled around different special ed schools, this ended up being the first real social circle I ever had. It represented the first positive attention I ever received from strangers. It’s a time where I made a lot of mistakes, it’s a time where I was gravely vulnerable. In all honesty, I was too young to manage a community of any kind, I was hot off the back of being desensitized in my adolescence by unrestricted access to early 2010s internet. I knew well enough to create special NSFW rooms, and was advised later to create further division by requiring users to self-apply for a special NSFW role to access those rooms This extra layer meant that the rooms wouldn’t even show up for people who didn’t have the role, which led to some believing they didn’t exist. 

However, I did not intuitively understand the “meaning” of sexual content, I didn’t understand the baggage that came with it. I used cropped fetish porn as emotes and indiscriminately showed the source to anyone who asked, sometimes outside of the NSFW rooms, because I found niche fetishes to be amusing, and since it was “funny” and not “sexy” it didn’t have to mean anything. The worst consequence of this happened when I was first formulating the ideas for my video about youtuber Rags, and I discovered that his youtube avatar was cropped from a NSFW image he had commissioned of his feral dog fursona. I sent this image to just about anyone who seemed interested, and this included a then 13 year old. I’m going to apologize just like I did when this first came out, but I will not be pressured as I was then into assuming predatory intent in myself. I’m not making excuses when I say that I had been a legal adult for under a year and thought of it as just an interaction between two teenagers, a kind of interaction I had with many of my friends (and some adults) before I turned 18. It was a misunderstanding, *and* I hurt you, and I’m deeply deeply sorry. 

There were some moderators besides myself, two were teenagers around my age, early adopters of the server who I felt I’d become friends with. One was a woman in her late twenties, who I won’t name simply because I’m not in the business of offloading my misery onto other people, but she knows who she is. She contacted me with a shower of attention & adoration, she left positive reviews for my albums when she noticed I was upset at their critical reception, she oversaw me as I posted my nudes in that server and later on my main twitter account. She encouraged this behavior in myself and others and participated in it too.

I want to make this clear, the bulk of the allegations against me boil down to punishing me for failing to surmise I was being exploited by the first social group I ever had. I jerked off in voice chats. I remember the day I started, I was surrounded by people older than me who were encouraging me to post my first nude pic in the self-nsfw channel, and I had to get hard for them first. I then considered this normal and did it often. At one point a 15 year old entered the room while I was doing it, and I went quiet until she left. I reconvened with this 15 year old recently, and she told me she only remembers being promptly told to leave. The claim that I “regularly jerked off in voice chat with minors” as if it were an orchestrated and habitual activity is an outright falsehood.  

I remember posting my nudes on twitter in a fevered haze of dissociation and dysphoria after being goaded by other users in my discord server. I remember doing it again and again, so that it could maybe eventually feel normal. I was 18, going on 19. I had twenty to thirty thousand subscribers, I was hot off the heels of being given 150 bucks for making thirty minutes of music for a much bigger youtuber. There are others who were in that server who were similarly exploited, and I am not here to contradict those testimonies, but I was uniquely denied the ability to understand what had happened to me as grooming, because I was technically of age and I had the very beginnings of a youtube audience. However, 20k subs didn’t give me more power than someone over ten years my senior. 

I was groomed, and just as I was beginning to understand what happened to me, the shame threatening to overtake me completely, I was slapped with the supposed news that I was the sole perpetrator of the entire situation that traumatized me so, that what I thought of as my first friend group all remembered me as a loathsome creep. The apology I wrote in abject panic was dissected and used as a cudgel against me in police-interrogation fashion, so I became afraid to say anything. A year and a half later, I made a post saying that I had been “groomed by a portion of my audience” and this immediately provoked a youtube video callout. I feel as if I have been beaten into silence and complicity, unable to form thoughts of my own regarding my experience. I am terrified, right now, writing this story that I firmly believe no one on earth will buy, because I have come to routinely doubt my own testimony.

Some accusations being made of me are so foreign that I have trouble piecing together what it could be referring to. I commissioned a NSFW size difference piece from dramamine, one where my lover is 11 feet tall, and I was pre transition at the time so I wanted a flat chest to help me feel feminine in my current body. It was wrongly tagged as “cub” (furry child porn) on E621, which I vocally protested at the time. This is the only thing I could point to as evidence for the claim that I commissioned cub porn of myself. I do not know how to convey the feeling of being flooded by accusations that require me to ponder what it could even be referring to, or to see my accuser insist that she’s receiving dozens of new horrible scoops on me without being able to see exactly what it is or what happened. I’m open to apologizing personally to anyone I ended up hurting in my adolescence who reaches out to me, I was a victim of grooming let off into a public space with a few thousand followers after all, but I’m not apologizing on behalf of people who might have heard something bad about me.

I am going to restate, my accuser has *of her own volition* unlisted the offending video & understands the misinformation she spread, there is nothing to gain from seeking her out and letting her know your opinion on the situation. I waited until this agreement was reached to make any statement at all for this exact reason. 

I am staying offline for about a day after posting this, I am under a lot of pressure, I am very tired.