#my other post isn’t gaining traction and I haven’t gotten anything

[b00thills]

Hi my name is Maeve. I’m a disabled lesbian with elderly and disabled parents. My mom is currently in the hospital recovering from a brain bleed, my dad is staying with her.

Monday our lights will be turned off due to an overdue bill, we need just $50 to keep them on. If five people sent $10 we’ll be set.

PayPal.me/AKirk432 (pls send via friends and family)

Venmo: @catmom934 (pls don’t send via purchase protection)

[bookshelf-dust]

how did you gain traction with your fics? You and others have inspired me to get back into writing again, and I’m feeling a little disheartened bc I haven’t received any feedback… do you have any tips?? You don’t have to answer, love your work angel x

i won’t lie this made me kind of emotional?? you have no idea how much i appreciate you asking me this or saying that i’ve inspired you. me?? are you sure??

also i’m gonna try my best to answer this for you :)))

i started writing on wattpad before on here, and i did that purely because i wanted to. that’s why i write here too! i’d been writing stories in the notes on my phone and decided i’d revise them and give sharing them a shot. there isn’t a lot that’s made me as happy as writing does, so i guess my main piece of advice is to write because you enjoy it and write what you want. then all the other stuff will come later.

my blog is little and i quite like it that way, but there’s a set of billy headcanons i wrote that have a thousand and some odd notes? which might not seem like a lot to some people but it is to me. honestly i get scared to post so i tend to post things and then go to sleep. but that one is the most notes i’ve gotten. and it’s shocking because i posted that and didn’t think anyone would read it (i have very low expectations for myself).

so really i just write things i’m happy with and i post them and i completely understand the disheartening feeling that comes with a lack of feedback. i really appreciate comments and reblogs because they tell me if someone likes something and then that gives me motivation to write more. i have something i wrote that was the longest thing i’ve ever written, and it’s got less than twenty notes i think. and likes don’t tell me anything, you know? so i try to leave feedback on everything i read because i know what it feels like to not know if anyone is enjoying your work.

as for tips, i have noticed that there seems to be a time zone thing? like if i post at a certain time, no one sees it, but at another time it gets a little more attention? it’s odd. i also try my best at getting loads of tags in there. but honestly i didn’t start using tumblr until 2022 (almost said this year) so i’m still new and learning as i go. and i’m not totally sure about traction, i suppose? i think it depends on the characters too. my gareth work doesn’t do as well because he isn’t as popular a character. my eddie stuff does well right off the bat because he’s more popular, but then it sort of calms down after that. billy does well over time. i think sometimes people might be shy to share their feelings about billy. idk. maybe that’s bullshit and sounds silly.

so i’d say: do it for yourself. if you enjoy it, then write whatever you want for whoever you want. but i know it sucks to not have feedback. sometimes i post and it’s radio silent and it can hurt. and i think there is a definite problem with the lack of responses on here—i’ve seen people compare it to things like instagram where likes mean everything, and that’s not the case here. but really, if you enjoy it, keep at it. i think the good stuff comes later, if that makes any sense. sometimes i feel like quitting, but if i take a step back, i realize that i enjoy it and it doesn’t matter if no one reads it, because i had fun making up this little escapist world.

i don’t know if that was helpful at all, but again i really appreciate you asking me. thank you for reading my crap and for being here :)))

[floral-poisons]

a small vent post about creating

if you come across this post, you can feel free to ignore it. but i kind of need to get this off my chest and i’m posting it on here because i truly believe that what i have to say has value. and maybe this will gain traction, maybe it won’t. who knows.

i haven’t gotten to my drafts in over a month. in truth, i am exhausted. it’s hard to write when your energy is low. but also, part of my disappearing motivation, which kind of disappeared within a snap, is because of how my posts just plummeted.

maybe it’s because the interest in twisted wonderland went away. things come and go in cycles after all. but either way, seeing my posts plummet in numbers suddenly made me not want to create anymore.

it’s really easy to say “create for yourself and the rewards will come.” but in my opinion, every single post i’ve seen about that (and that i have even reblogged) comes from a privileged standpoint.

creating fandom content is work, unpaid work, and often underappreciated and also heavily scrutinized. i was fortunate enough to have the energy to make content and share it to others and even more so to have people take interest in my work.

but it’s extremely disheartening to watch my posts plummet and essentially bomb. and to say “create for yourself and x will come” is privileged because it tells me that your voice has always mattered. it matters to the point where you are fortunate enough to have the patience to wait for the rewards to come.

for me, i’ve been told my voice hasn’t mattered for, essentially, all my life. since i was born. seeing my posts get interactions, seeing people like what i write, comment on it, proves to me my voice does matter. it’s solid, inevitable proof that people appreciate my hard work and a craft i am still attempting to perfect for myself.

the way my spirits just collapsed when i wrote my twst dorms hanfu series and seeing just the lack of interactions. it broke my heart in so many ways. i wanted to write something connected to my culture in a way that is appreciative, in a way that isn’t fetishized and viewed with a skewed lens of racism. the way those posts plummeted told me that my culture and therefore my being didn’t matter anymore. this fandom got its angst and fluff and general writings and left. it’s so easy to tell when readers are only interested in reading if it fits their whiteness.

(of course i can’t even begin to address the fact that my posts do much more poorly in comparison to posts that are tailored to fem! readers alone and the politics behind that)

to say “create for yourself (and only yourself) and the rewards will come” and that validation isn’t necessary just strikes me as so so privileged. some of us writers need, and like, validation because it brings a certain message. our voices matter, our stories matter.

on top of that, i pride myself on my personal beliefs. i grew up in fandom spaces tailored to white readers (specifically white girls/women). those spaces created very real insecurities in myself and only enhanced my self loathing as a person. i want to make stuff that doesn’t just stick to the usual formula. i purposely craft my language to be inclusive. no descriptions of skin tone or outright descriptions of blushing or hair textures or eye colors or height or body shape or anything. and yet my reward for being inclusive? posts that just don’t gain traction.

i don’t just want to create for myself. i want to create for other people to give them the fandom spaces and fics that i didn’t have, let them see themselves in fics that would normally exclude them. and yet, the work is so exhausting. and it feels like creating for myself isn’t enough because what my posts tell me is that my work doesn’t matter. my culture doesn’t matter. my existence and voice don’t matter.

i’m grateful for the followers i have amassed, for the people who interact with my posts regardless of what they are, for the people who appreciate the lengths i go to to create a space for everyone. i can’t write everything sadly. i wish i could. but people in those groups can and their voices deserve to be heard.

i don’t spend much time on here on purpose. i have schoolwork, applications, friends, a life outside of this. getting caught up online only leads to my already poor mental health to being poorer. i am just so busy and my interests also change quite a bit, causing my motivation to decrease in, say, twisted wonderland but increase when it comes to anything related to ghost (the metal band).

this is not supposed to be a post that’s a pity party. i don’t want pity nor comfort. this is also not a call out or anything. just a general observation i’ve personally noticed.

i just want people to listen and to consider the fact that saying things like “create for yourself and x will come” and “you don’t need validation” comes from places of privilege. those places told you your endeavors, personhood, voices, products matter.

be careful about your wording even if it’s meant to be appreciative and you had good intentions.

and algorithms, you fucking suck. probably because whoever coded you was all kinds of -ists and -phobics.

[gwendeeagain]

Kayano Kaede/Akari Yukimura is a character so full of wasted potential.

(Screencap taken from Manga Chapter 128)

This is probably the first manga panel that made me fall in love with Akari Yukimura. Look at her. She could have been amazing. 

(If you feel like reading an essay of a textpost on the injustice she was dealt, feel free to click more.)

(I’m probably rehashing things i’ve said previously so if you know me you’ve probably read bits and pieces of this post before but I’m in a Mood and I just want to say them again.)

Kayano Kaede is a very interesting concept. However, she’s generally a forgettable character. This is because of the lack of anticipation and buildup for her character so no one really expects anything or gets attached to her, and her as an individual does not seem to hold much appeal.

Kayano’s character was poorly handled from the start, in my opinion. She was marketed as one of the main characters - the RGB trio, along with Nagisa and Karma. She was clearly slated for this role from the get go, which makes it even sadder because of the lack of groundwork and buildup there could have been.  I would have preferred it if her backstory came about because of “shit, we forgot to give Kayano lines, let’s just slap tentacles on her and spin something insane out of it” because then you could explain the injustice.

(On the other hand, her two counterparts have pretty nicely-developed arcs that pretty much span the entire series but despite that, Kayano never gets the spotlight until the tail end of the narrative.)

This normally wouldn’t be a problem because many of the side characters in assclass are well-developed. Just to name a few, Sugino, Isogai, Nakamura - all not main characters, but over the course of the series we get a pretty good feel for their personality. We have fun with them and are invested in them. 

Pre-reveal Kayano Kaede, on the other hand, is boring. Even if you think she isn’t, she is. The only character traits I can name off the top of my head are that she likes pudding and hates big boobs, which, what? She has possibly the longest wiki page out of everyone and yet has the least personality. 

An argument for that is that Pre-reveal Kayano Kaede was an actress. She was meant to be incognito, to blend into the background until time comes to strike. So we can say she did her job well - too well, in fact, that to the audience she’s perfectly forgettable. Yeah, narrative wise, she did her job. But did it get us to like her? Not really. 

By the time that Kayano gains some traction during her reveal at the tail end of the series - ergo by the time she becomes an interesting character, everyone has spent the previous 120 chapters/1 and a half seasons laughing along and liking the other characters. We have all gotten our favorites by then. Sure, Kayano still piques our interest, but there’s really no real time for everyone to get attached and have her as a “favorite” before she’s immediately overshadowed by her sister’s background story arc and the subsequent Save/Kill civil war. 

I’ve seen posts where there were maybe a silhouette of a shadow of a tentacle in the background of what could have been 3 manga panels but let’s face it, this does not count as plot building or character development. It does not. There are no hints or throwaway lines you could reread and think “oooh damn”, no set-up, nothing. I don’t even think there was a callback to her being an exchange student/not being in Kunugigaoka prior to 3-E. 

Kayano’s proximity to Aguri is also of issue. There’s interest drummed up about Aguri right from the start as the “mysterious woman” that Koro-sensei reminisces about. That does fill us with interest and satisfaction once the puzzle pieces connect (who doesn’t like solving a puzzle?) but there’s none of that for Kayano’s reveal. The fact that Kayano’s arc was intersped with Aguri’s admittedly more developed backstory arc also portrayed Kayano as more of a “stepping stone” to get to Aguri. To “add insult to injury”, Aguri’s just more of an interesting character than her. She’s got more personality, her character interactions with Koro-sensei and Yanagisawa/Shiro are interesting. Compared to her, Kayano’s just more forgettable.

The lasting impression most people get from Kayano is her status as a love-interest to Nagisa. Pre-reveal Kayano Kaede is a bland and boring character. Post-reveal Kayano Kaede (after her brief bout of insanity) defaults back to that same boring personality, and it is explained off by saying “Kayano realized how liberating it was to be a good person and adopted her nice personality throughout the year into her new one” or something along those lines. That’s boring! Her character doesn’t seem to gain any development from that experience. There’s no character trait that we can look towards to distinguish pre-reveal Kayano from the “new Kayano”, other the fact that she now has a crush on Nagisa. That label as Nagisa’s potential love-interest goes onto be carried post-canon and to the timeskip, and that’s the lasting impression of her.

(That adds to why a lot of people don’t like her, because 1. her crush on Nagisa seems out of place, 2. Nagisa’s already shipped with a lot of people by this time, and canon disrupting that doesn’t have the best reception.)

Kayano’s character brings the narrative full circle by giving us some closure to whatever happened to the first teacher of 3-E and provides reasonable incentive for Koro-sensei to bring up his backstory. She as an individual does not hold much appeal. She doesn’t have a standalone arc like Itona or Isogai or Sugino to solidify her character as an individual. She’s just used to bridge the gap between two much more important parts of the narrative, making her seem far more insignificant in comparison.

(Speaking of Itona, I think I would have liked to see her interacting with Yanagisawa/Shiro a little bit more. It’s one of the little things they could have built up on, I think. At that point Shiro had still been a rather interesting and mysterious character - Kayano’s reveal preceded Shiro’s by a tiny bit of time. They did interact in one or two scenes with ambiguous lines if I remember correctly - but they were working together despite a mutual hatred because of a common enemy. There was a really cool dynamic that I wish we saw more of.)

Pre-canon Kayano Kaede was honestly very interesting. From what little we saw of her, we know that she had her suspicions about Yanagisawa/Shiro from the start (I think they stated her dealings with unscrupulous people in the media industry gave her experience). She swore a pledge for revenge and stuck to it for a whole year, stole chemicals and injected them into the damn back of her neck, and I’m sure she probably didn’t even fully understood what they did at the time. We also know she broke Principal Asano’s laptop right in front of him to get into 3-E, and really, who else can boast about having the guts to do that? There’s so much you could get from her character from just knowing she did these things, and in the end post-reveal her didn’t do her justice, I think.

Wow, I’ve typed a lot, HAHA. This took me longer than I expected. Kayano is mt favorite female character in assclass apart from Irina, I think. To conclude, I love her.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t read or watched canon content in a long time. I’m going off the open wiki page and my leftover memory/impressions, so if I’m interpreting something based of inaccurate information, feel free to let me know.)

[galvus]

I love ur stuff but sometimes it is very discouraging... Every character you make is beautiful and has the perfect backstory.... Your edits are flawless.... Everyone loves them instantly... I have been posting things for years and don't get any thing.... I can't use mods or edit any thing.... How do you do it?

oh, darling. thank you for reaching out to me. i appreciate everything you said about my characters; i’ve only just gotten out of a terrible funk where i couldn’t create anything or even think about my characters without feeling sick. being reminded that those thoughts are just my thoughts and not actually reality is nice. very nice, actually.

as for everything else, i’m so sorry that you haven’t gotten the same response as i have. i can promise you that it even comes and goes with me. for instance, i struggle to get many people interested in my writing, which sucks because that’s what i have the most pride in! it’s difficult to fight against the feelings of jealousy that well up in my chest when i come across someone whose writing seems to flourish in the same fandom mine struggles in.

one of the most important things you can do to build friendships and a line of support is reaching out -- and not on anon. by supporting others, you’ll find that same support echoed back to you. excitement is contagious! if i get really hyped about someone’s ocs or edits or writing, i find that i become even more enthusiastic about my own stuff, which means i’ll post more and gain more traction and all that.

as for everyone loving my ocs instantly, that isn’t true! i’ve gotten incredibly lucky with some of them, but others just don’t get the same response, and that’s okay! your characters are probably just as unique and interesting and beautiful as every other character i reblog on the daily. ❤

reach out when you can. spread positivity. encourage others. do what you love doing and always try to improve at what you’re capable of, and the love will find you!

have a wonderful night, sweetheart. and if you ever want to talk, feel free to come back!

[aktiophis]

I’m having some half-baked thoughts so I thought it best to write them down. Specifically about the common views on Protestantism and Catholicism I’ve seen espoused in online Occult spaces, at least on Tumblr.

I don’t mean the anti-Christian crowd who claim every holiday was stolen from some Ancient monolithic Pagan society where everyone was a witch (or whatever), I mean like, people who can talk out of their mouth rather than their ass. 

[I’m not going to edit this whole thing but this sort of goes from a discussion about how I feel some people don’t put adequate thought into their opinions on Christianity to a realisation that what actually annoyed me was completely unrelated to that. It wasn’t anything at all to do with an opinion as much as whether the opinion came from someone’s thought and experience or if it came from basing your opinions on what other people have said without thinking critically about it.]

Especially as I have gotten older I have much more affinity for Catholicism and how it relates to my Irish ancestry (after all, my Mother’s side only converted a few generations back and they are descended from one of the oldest Irish clans, to my knowledge). Being raised Protestant in Northern Ireland I suppose that might hold a bit more weight than elsewhere but that’s really neither here nor there as far as this is concerned. Due to a number of reasons, not the least of which being Occultism and the rich traditions Catholicism has gotten itself tangled up in over time, I have personally come to favour Catholicism’s viewpoint more than The Protestant ones I was raised in, namely Anglican, which personally feels about as legitimately spiritual as it’s founding was a legitimate reason to or a Church to be formed. That, and I do enjoy a good statue.

This all being said, I do feel like it has become somewhat of a popular attitude to say that Protestantism is objectively worse than Catholicism. I’m not going to say I don’t prefer it, but like so many other things I feel like only half the people I’ve seen espouse the view have thought about it. It also feels reductive to paint with so broad a brush, and I feel like Tumblr especially is at risk of someone reading an offhanded joke about it and then like, erecting a whole psychological monument to the Great and Universal Truth that Protestantism is Objectively Bad, because one of the blogs everyone is idolising at that time said it.

And I suppose the lack of nuance is part of the issue. Catholicism itself isn’t really a monolithic religion, because there are so many regional variations that have sprung up. Protestantism itself is arguably even more nebulous, because now not only do you have geographical variations, but there is no one Protestant Church Hierarchy in the first place. It’s an Umbrella term for any number of denominations, and none of them necessarily agree with each other. As I’ve said, I don’t particularly like any of them, but I feel like when people talk about Protestantism in this context they mean something very specific.

This is sort of the second thing I wanted to say, which regards the very US-centric attitude on this site. It is what it is, idc, but it’s still part of it so I’m bringing it up. Protestantism, as far as I can tell, means specifically Baptists from the Bible belt and other denominations prevalent in the US, and specifically the experience of them in an American cultural lens. I think I personally have known about a dozen Baptists in my entire life (I largely try and ignore and avoid them because they have been universally annoying), and just in general the proportions of the denominations is really quite different in America to Ireland, and I’m sure to many other places.

I’m sort of starting to lose my train of thought over this so I’ll try and sum it up here; What I mean by all of this is that although I personally agree with what seems to be a general preference among occultists for at the least certain ideas from Catholicism over Protestantism (if there is one at all), I think that like a lot of things on Tumblr, these opinions are transferred from the people who have the experience and nuance and have thought about the topic, to the people who haven’t, maybe never will, and who need  to for lack of a better word ‘meditate’ on things rather than simply mirroring whatever seems to be gaining traction in the online cultures they frequent. 

Having written all this, I realise It isn’t actually this topic specifically that annoys me, especially given that quite a bit of the magic I have worked is pulled from a historically Catholic framework. I don’t really care either way what people think about any sect of Christianity, and in retrospect this feels like a silly example to have fixated on but I’ve written it now so it’s getting posted. I don’t belong to either and I have significant issues with many of the spiritual ideas let alone the institutional corruptions and toxic cultures rampant in both. What this was really about was the tendency on Tumblr for people to just be a mirror of whatever they happen to be exposed to. If you don’t mull over and digest things yourself, you will never be like the people you idolise. As knowledgeable or as wise as someone else might seem, even if it’s through the lens of a blog, if you act as a mirror to them in an attempt to be like them or to gain their level of wisdom or power or secret knowledge etc., at the end of the day they will have flesh and blood and substance and your practice/depth will end at the foil of your mirror, and when the other person leaves it will reflect nothing. A puddle can reflect the whole of the sky and still not have enough water to drown a rat.

So yeah I basically wrote this whole thing only to realise I’m just irritated how people think that mimicry and blindly following things is at all a way to make headway in the occult when the entire history of this practice is centred around Deep knowledge and a search for the unknown and divine. 

[hhemeraa-a]

Update / Haitus

I’ve been a ghost the last two weeks and I know that my last post was very succinct - which I had to delete because apparently porn blogs started reblogging it for some reason????????? And I’m just?? not in the place to deal with that.

I really hope to get back into a place where I can be here again, I know before I said I was on discord but I’ve had zero (zero) time to do literally anything else other than deal with my current situation so I’m barely even there. I do read all of your messages and I’m really sorry I haven’t responded. 

A lot of people had or have questions and wanted to know how I am, etc etc so under the cut will be a quick explanation of my absence and everything that’s happened within the last few weeks.

As some of you know, I am a Peace Corps volunteer servicing in China. I had been serving as a university English teacher for the last near 2 years. This was a very very very important and huge opportunity for me. 

Years ago when I was in college, my Mom was taking student loans out in my name while I was living with her. I went from having $54k in student debt (which is a lot already) to having about $108k in student debt in private loans. She shirked all responsibility on me, I had to graduate college early with a degree in something that I had credits in (International Studies with a focus on Chinese language and history), I was homeless for a while working random jobs, trying to join the Marine Officer program, etc etc -- needless to say, things were really really messy for a few years there. I ended up getting a really nice job for a logistics company getting paid about 2200 a month, but I was paying about 1600 a month in student loans. I had a lot of support from a friend who let me live with her and to this day I literally cannot thank her enough for everything she provided to me while I was suffering through all of this. 

After working that soul sucking job for nearly 4 years, I took a chance and applied for Peace Corps because it was an opportunity to finally make it to China. I was supposed to study abroad in college, but when my mother maxed out my debt, it was no longer feasible. I never thought I was going to get in because I had been out of school for years at that point, I had never taught English before besides 1-on-1s during college and I kind of thought I was too old???  

BUT LOW AND BEHOLD I GOT IN.  This shit meant everything to me. I was finally going to study abroad, I was finally going to have a chance to use my degree, I was finally going to have the chance to learn a language, I had an opportunity to have a complete career change. 

It was so incredibly hard though. I worked my ass off during training, I worked really really hard to integrate into my site, but if anyone has ever heard any of my horror stories of being the only foreigner in the middle of south east China, you’ll understand that it’s not always fun ���� I even had a whole mental break down and had to be sent back to the States for 45 days so I could stop stressing, but I got my ass right back on that plane and came to finish the job I started. The low were low, but the highs were so incredibly high that it made up for every bad moment.

This program meant everything to me.  My first semester sucked ass, it was harder than I ever thought it would be. My second semester was so much better, my third semester I was over loaded with about 450+ students and 8 classes, but I was finally getting the hang of the language, the school, the people, and I had gotten the ‘ok’ from my school to work there as a full time teacher once my Peace Corps contract was finished. This?? Was such an opportunity?? I literally had started making the moves to start a life here -- at least temporarily. Work at my school as contracted teacher for a year, pass the HSK Chinese language test above a 4, use the money to find a better job in Taiwan -- there was a whole plan. 

Every year, Peace Corps meets for 1-2 weeks for In Service Training. We met from Jan. 12 - 17. Usually it’s just to reconnect and make sure all the volunteers are doing their jobs, medical check ups, etc etc etc. It’s a good time to see how other volunteers are doing. 

Jan. 17th we were formally told that the Peace Corps China program was being closed. After 2020, there would no longer be any new volunteers and that we needed to start preparing our schools for the transition. They called it a graduation, but we all knew it was a political move. For five hours, a room of 200 people ripped into the US PC HQ staff as to why they were “”graduating”” the program. They said it was because the budget didn’t call for it and that China no longer needed volunteers in their schools. Which is a lie. Tensions were already really really high, the answers kept gettin more vague, and we finally flat out asked if this was a political decision to remove Peace Corps from China. 

We didn’t get an answer. 

Needless to say, all the volunteers are livid. The information spread like wild fire to all of the schools and volunteers were faced with having to be the representative of a shitty political decision. It was extremely difficult to have to face students and try to explain that Americans don’t hate them when the political system there does. 

Chinese New Year was from Jan 25th - Jan 27th this year. I lived in Chongqing city in the Chongqing province/municipality, a city that has about 32 million people in it. During this time, the city becomes a ghost town due to the holiday being similar to Christmas/Thanksgiving where everyone goes back to their hometowns to be with family. All the shops close and for foreigners it can be difficult to find food because everything isn’t open lol. 

However on Jan. 25th was when news about the corona virus started getting around. It wasn’t very big, but the news was starting to spread. The Hubei province touches Chongqing province, so whispers were starting to come through and most information volunteers got were through foreign sources, but even my Chinese friends were telling me that I shouldn’t go out or if I do, I need to be sure to wear a mask. 

Sunday Jan. 26th, notices are starting to go up on store fronts saying that they are required by law to be closed, but I managed to find a place that was still open. News about the virus is starting to gain traction and more and more information about what is happening in Wuhan is starting to spread. My friend who is staying with me who lives in a small town near the border of Hubei (where Wuhan is placed) gets a call from his school telling him that it is safer for him to not come back to site. We are starting to hear that small towns are shutting down travel in and out, bus systems are starting to shut down and certain areas in the city are no longer allowing taxi or Didi (Chinese Uber)  services. 

Monday Jan. 27th, my friend leaves because all train and bus tickets out of the city were being canceled. My city was slowly starting to quarantine everyone. I live on campus, and when I tried to return after walking my friend to the metro, security took my temperature (with those neat little temp guns) and then wouldn’t let me in because they thought I was too warm. After arguing with them in my broken Chinese and convinced them that I lived there, they finally let me back on campus. They told me that no cars or people are allowed to go in and out anymore. 

I lived near city center and it was obvious that the government was slowly locking everyone away to try and prevent the spread, but it was so eerie and apocalyptic. We had been receiving emails from the PCChina director giving us daily updates that were inching towards the idea that all volunteers were going to be ‘consolidated’, so everyone just needed to be prepared. 

Tuesday Jan. 28th, the notice went out that the volunteers were being ‘consolidated’ to Thailand because China made it illegal for any group of 4 or more people to be together. We were only allowed 1 check in bag and we weren’t sure if we were ever going to be allowed to come back into country. People who were not at their sites were not allowed to go back to their sites. Wherever a volunteer was in that moment that we got the notice was required to get their ticket to Bangkok and leave immediately. I had to pack 2 years of my life up into a single suitcase not knowing if I was ever going to come back. 

Wednesday Jan 29th, I was on a plane and landed in Bangkok. I am a safety warden of my province and the first warden to arrive so I was in charge of all safety until staff arrived. 

But after that, things were very much in the air. We had no idea what was going to happen and every day things just got weirder and more serious and we didn’t know if at all we were going to be able to go back. We speculated a lot, as the news got worse and worse and worse. By Friday, all USA government employees were told to evacuate. No gov employee is allowed to enter China until the travel restrictions were let up, which meant that many PCChina staff - if they were to leave, would be allowed back in until China decided that it was safe enough or... if they wanted them back. 

Sunday, Feb. 2nd, all the volunteers who were at the hotel had a skype meeting with the head of the PCChina program and were told that due to the severity of the situation, all currently serving China volunteers would be forced to COS (Close of Service) by Thursday. The program was ending and we would all be sent back to our respective homes between Wednesday and Thursday. 

When I say it was the shittiest delivery of news imaginable, I cannot even put it into words. After we were all told that we could no longer return to China, we had lost our jobs, and couldn’t even say goodbye to anyone; HQ Staff had the balls to tell us that in order to get our final service allowance, we were still required to fill out paperwork and that we shouldn’t be sad. We should be happy we served at all. 

They gave no time for mourning, many of us put two years of our lives on hold to do this program, some of us don’t even have homes to go back too and they want us to make decisions in 4 days. After Thursday, they will no longer provide any assistance with travel, we do not get health insurance, the moment we COS, PC shrugs off complete responsibility of over 100+ volunteers. 

I have been so busy filling out paperwork and I have been so incredibly angry and sad and resentful that the only person I’ve told is my Dad. Returning to the USA isn’t really an option and the plan I had set into motion is now nonexistent because I’m no longer allowed in the country I gave two years of my life to until they decide that this virus has been resolved. 

I have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out where I’m going to live, what job I’m going to have, how I can get a cellphone plan, where I can go because I’m being quarantined for having been in China within the last 14 days, how to manage the money I’m getting -- everything has been changing so rapidly that I still don’t know where I’m going to be by Friday since Peace Corps is only paying for the hotel up until then. 

I promise I’m not ignoring any of you, I really really want to be in a place where I can RP and chat with y’all, but life for me right now is moving so fucking fast and I have to make so many decisions that will affect my future that I literally have not stopped going since Sunday night. 

I still stand by my last message: I really appreciate all the messages you guys have been sending me. I do read them. I just don’t want to talk. I don’t have the emotional capacity to and I haven’t even been given time to just... process and be mad. 

I promise I’ll be back, just give me some time. 

[best-science-dad-tony]

Are you all still active? And do you accept oc rp accounts or only canon based ones?

((Oh boy.

So here’s the thing...I’m probably not going to give these blogs quite the attention I did in the beginning, and I should explain why because you all deserve that.

At first, I didn’t think these things would go anywhere. I figured they’d be fun to play around with, banter, get some jokes in and see a few likes, maybe a reblog or two. But then they started gaining traction, and before I knew it, people were invested in my silly little accounts.

I wrote down a quick sketch of a plot and some ground rules for myself, rules that I intended to follow. I essentially wrote a post-Endgame story before Endgame after I saw Infinity War incorporating the elements I wanted to see in the next movie. At the time I was one person. No one was helping me. I knew I wanted to tell a story you all could participate in and enjoy, and to do that I thought it was best if I laid out a groundwork for myself on ways to do that. Things like resolving to answer every Ask, even if it was just to warn the person to stop what they were doing. To adopt every kid (at first that wasn’t on Anon but then I gave in). To give you guys Milestone rewards as thank yous, because even when I just hit fifty subscribers on Tony’s blog, I was ecstatic and appreciated you all so much, and felt like you deserved something so I could show you my gratitude. Unfortunately, before they went up...someone forced me to use one I wasn’t expecting. Literally right after I had made the rule for myself.

I told myself that if anyone found an Infinity Stone, it would be the one Tony had.

The Soul Stone.

I needed the Soul Stone for the plot to work, but I needed Tony to have a safety precaution around it too since Thanos was (is?) still alive. I told myself that if someone found out Tony had the Stone and wasn’t supposed to, he would have a way to protect it. So I had to use the solution I gave him: FRIDAY sending the Stone to an unknown planet with one of the Iron Man suits and promptly wiping her databanks of its location so Thanos or anyone else would be unable to find it. 

So someone found an Infinity Stone...and it was just...gone. Before I’d figured out how Tony would get it back.

My fellow Admins all know this. I can’t begin to tell you how many discussions I’ve had with them trying to write myself out of this hole. Usually, I’m pretty good at getting characters out of seemingly impossible situations...but I haven’t come up with anything that feels believable, that I feel like justifies the plot I have in mind or really respects the characters and who they are.

Normally I would have just gotten rid of the plot point of the Soul Stone being lost completely...but this isn’t an unfinished chapter in my Google Docs. It already happened. I can’t change it.

I don’t know if you guys have read Mercy by Stephen King or watched the movie, but it makes an excellent point that I strongly agree with:

Annie Wilkes : When I was growing up in Bakersfield, my favourite thing in the whole world was to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons for the Chapter Plays.

Paul Sheldon : [nodding]  Cliffhangers.

Annie Wilkes : [shouting]  I know that, Mr. Man! They also called them serials. I'm not stupid ya know... Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DID'NT GET OUT OF THE COCK - A - DOODIE CAR!

Paul Sheldon : [long pause]  They always cheated like that in cl... chapter plays.

I don’t want to cheat you all. As arrogant as it might sound, I think I’m a better writer than that. And you all certainly deserve better than that.

When I went to see Endgame (in full Tony Stark cosplay, might I add), I hoped to find inspiration to continue. And let’s just say that ending killed a part of me and I’m still dealing with nightmares and panic attacks over it. My mom asked me if I wanted an Avengers cake for my 22nd birthday and I burst into tears. I just...I can’t handle it right now.

But I recently got my inspiration back for this plot. I remembered how much I loved my ideas, the little timeline I had laid out for myself. I remembered how much fun it was for Tony and Stephen to interact with their kids, for Thor and Loki to talk to Midgardians. I remembered how much fun it was to use obscure ships. And I want to do it. For those reasons, I want to come back to it. I want to see that plot through to the end of the line, whatever that may be.

So I’ve added some elements, and I’ve decided to go in with firmer rules than I had at the beginning, where I would let anyone tell Tony and Stephen “yeah, so...I’ve been stabbed, ‘sup with you guys lol”.

The catch is...it won’t be on these blogs.

It would mean going through everything on them and pretending it didn’t happen, which hardly seems fair, especially when so many people still like and reblog some of my more popular posts. It doesn’t seem fair to just throw all of that away.

Like I said, I don’t want to cheat you, and doing that feels like cheating to me.

So instead I’m starting over. I’m in the process of setting up new blogs, a new Discord server, and I’m working with my Admins to put these new blogs into place.

The other big twist is...I won’t be advertising them here.

I don’t want you all to think I don’t value and appreciate all your kindness and support.

But I don’t want you all to join those new blogs just because I made a joke on Bucky’s account (in this set of blogs) that you liked. I want you to join because you’re invested, because you enjoy the interactions, because you like my writing for what it is and not just because it’s me typing it. It’s the same reason I have a separate AO3 account I never share.

I feel proud when people come to these blogs and see Tony confronting Steve and find out I was writing both of them, not bouncing off a fellow Admin.

I hope I don’t sound ungrateful. I’m swear not. But I want the new blogs to earn their following just like these did. You all saw something in these blogs, whether it was a joke, some advice; something that meant something to you. Maybe you saw family. Maybe you saw a friend. I don’t know. But I sincerely hope that whatever it was, I earned that follow from you. That I earned those likes and reblogs of my own volition.

All I ask of you is if you want to see where these new blogs will go, if you want to follow them, if you find them, please, don’t spoil what will happen for any newcomers who join the ranks. Certain plotpoints will carry over. I want any new fans to be as invested and surprised as you were.

Maybe one day I’ll tell you where the plot moved if you can’t find it and you want to know the big picture. Maybe you’ll just unfollow me or ignore the fact that I’m working on something else.

But I’m not going to just up and abandon these blogs. For a long time, they meant something to me, and at least to some of you. They’ll stay up, and I’ll answer your asks and engage with you. I can’t speak for the other Admins. But with me, you’ll always have someone to message, even if I take forever. But no more nitty-gritty plot. We’ll say Thanos got tired of holding Quill prisoner and fucked off somewhere. These blogs are now just for lighthearted family fun.

This is a long-winded rant to say that yes, I am still active in some ways, and I’m not in others.

As for OC accounts, they have always been welcome, but they don’t get put on the Masterlist or get OC-centric plots. Just be sure to follow certain rules- like Tony having no biological children.

I’m sorry for the rant.

TL;DR: I’m making new blogs to write this plot as I originally intended, but these will stay up and you can message them (at least mine). Also, OCs are cool and always welcome. ~Admin Chara))

[highabovethecloudssomewhere]

The BNHA Fandom and why I haven’t been creating content for it

I’d wanted to do this several months ago, when I first returned from my break through the month of February, but at the time I was wound to the point of snapping, exhausted, and overall in a pretty rough state of mind creatively. I’ll go into why in a moment, but either way, now, I think enough time has passed for me to be able to articulate my thoughts in a readable way that makes sense.

Before I get into it, let me start by saying:

A lot of this is personal. A lot of you will agree with me; a lot of you will disagree with me. Overall, please take this as my own personal thoughts and experiences. I’m doing this in the hopes that you can at least understand my mindset and where I’m coming from. I’m not attacking anyone particularly. I just want you to be able to understand, because you’ve all stuck with me this long, and feel you deserve an explanation.

This is not a callout post. This is just me, a tired writer and creator, explaining my mindset in a way that I hope you can understand. And maybe even relate to.

This has been long overdue. Here we go.

I started writing fanfiction for BNHA somewhere in between the spring and summer of 2017. Around that time, the show’s second season was airing and quickly gaining traction. I hopped on the bandwagon, fell in love, and began creating content for it before I even finished watching the anime. 

From there, I read the manga, and before I knew it, I had a new favorite series. And for a long time, it was my favorite series. I loved the cast of characters, I loved the engaging story, I loved all the different arcs, and I loved how the characters played off each other and grew through each other. I still love the characters with all my heart.

And this is where I start ranting. This is where a lot of you are gonna disagree with me. This is where the fandom divides.

Because ever since last year, the fandom has been in a meticulous state of divide, hate, arguments, controversy, and disarray. And suddenly logging onto social media to breeze through a boring 10 minutes became a truckload of fandom divide, arguments, hate, and overall toxicity. 

Of course, not all of the fandom is like this. It’s wrong to generalize like that. But oh my god, the divide in the fandom is bad. Maybe it’s not as bad as it could be. I’m sure it could be a hell of a lot worse. But it is bad. And it didn’t help the fact that [SPOILERS FOR THE MANGA] Endeavor, one of the series’ most hated characters (up to a point), had his own development arc. As a survivor of abuse and someone still fighting through it now, seeing this abusive character get such an arc in the story--arcs that his abused wife didn’t get, arcs that his abused children (sans Shouto) didn’t get--really, really crushed me. And that mashed with the declining state of the fandom for a whole mess of hurt and disappointment. [END OF MANGA SPOILERS]

Since then, it’s only gotten worse. The arguments are more heated than ever. The creator is being harassed (again, actually. This isn’t the first time). There’s so much war between users in the fandom, and even if the entire fandom isn’t a part of the fighting, they’re still affected by it. They’re like me, trying to make my way peacefully through it and inevitably running into so much divide and hatred it’s unbelievable. 

Every fandom has its bad parts. But as of late, all the bad in the BNHA fanbase has been more prevalent than the good. And that’s not even going into the issues I have with the original source material, or the fact that I’m no longer reading it. I’m not going to get into that, because that isn’t the point. 

And here’s where it gets personal. Here’s where “general fandom crap that every fandom has” became even more than that. 

In February of this year, I needed a break. So I took one. I posted no content through the month of February, consumed some other media (Ao no Exorcist and Mob Psycho 100 specifically), wrote stuff to post come March. And it was alright. Taking a break from the fandom was just what the doctor ordered. 

And then I returned. And I started posting again. And god, did the floodgates open. 

The attacks, the toxicity, the hate, flooded into comments. Demanding why I didn’t update when they wanted to; questioning what took me so long; ordering me to never do that again. Several comments that only contained the word “finally.” An entire, maxed-out page of the word “update” and nothing more. False accusations that were removed/deleted before anything could come out of them. And now, recently, a stolen work of mine up on Wattpad. 

If you go looking into the comments sections of my fics, you might find a couple. But only because I didn’t delete them. Up until this point, I’d hoped I’d be able to shove it under the rug, so to speak. After all, in my experience, the fandom was already full of toxicity. Of course. I should expect it, right? Expect it, not let it get to me, and move on. 

Except, it didn’t stop there. When I started posting again in March, along with my BNHA updates came a few works from the other fandoms I’d dabbled in. Specifically, Mob Psycho 100 fics. 

The bulk of the comments I got on those MP100 fics (comments which have long since been deleted, of course) were from anonymous users demanding to know when I was going update my BNHA fics.

Crazy, right. Give them nearly 1 million words worth of content from one fandom, and the second you try creating anything for another fandom, they come at you with pitchforks. It’s... actually really sad. And I felt trapped. 

Because at that point, to them, I was a creator. I was a writer. But I wasn’t a person. 

And of course, not everyone was like this. The majority of people were happy to see me writing again. They were understanding and encouraging, not just of my works, but of my taking time off, too. I have a wonderful community, I really do. And I’m so thankful for each and every one of you who offer such positivity towards me and my works. Those of you who treat me like a person.

But... it was a lot. Too much all at once, really. During what was already a really hard, dark time in my life. During a time when the majority of the stuff I wrote were vent/coping fics, because writing was the one thing I knew I could run to for solitude. And, by the end of February, I was scared of updating my bnha fics. Because I didn’t know if I could handle every update ending in a flood of demanding comments from people who cared more about what I could give them than about me as a person. 

You may be reading this and think I’m overreacting. You may be looking at all this and saying to yourself, “Oh, that isn’t so bad. [Creator] has been through worse and they’re still writing.”

Which I guess then begs the question: am I overreacting? 

No. 

No, I’m not.

Because this incident made me question my worth as a writer. Made me question if I was only worth the content I'm able to produce. And as someone who’s already driven by my abilities, as someone who already pushes myself, as someone who can only be proud of myself if I have something to show for it (which is a toxic mindset that I’m trying my damndest to work myself out of), this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

On one hand, when I was able to pull myself through this whole fiasco, when I was able to ingrain it in my head that I’m more than what I create, I was okay. I could write. I’m still writing now. Focusing on an original project as well as smaller projects in other fandoms. 

But on the other hand, the past couple times I’ve opened any WIPs I have for my BNHA fics, I’ve hesitated. I’ve opened them, and they were left open, untouched, until I closed them at night before I went to bed. 

Because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. 

Because I can’t bring myself to write for this fandom anymore. 

So, there you have it. A long, unedited, overdue explanation that I’ve been struggling to get off my chest for far too long. Does it make sense? Maybe. I don’t know. I hope at least you can understand where I’m coming from. Even if you think I’m overreacting, I hope you can at least see my side of this. 

So, what does this mean for my in-project bnha works? 

For stories like LAH and AHDAI, which are in their final stages (both with only one chapter and an epilogue left to go), I plan on finishing those. I’m proud of both those projects and want to finish strong. When will they be finished? Good question. I don’t know. 

As for my more recent works--specifically Resident Ghost--I honestly have no idea. I’m trying to pull myself through a few chapters, trying to at least tie up the USJ arc, but I honestly don’t know at this point. And I feel bad. Because I have ideas, I have thoughts, I have a story to tell, but the motivation isn’t there anymore. And that’s the battle right now. 

I really want to be able to write and finish it. And I’m gonna try my damndest to do it. But I can’t promise speed. All I can promise is that I’m going to try my best. I don’t know what else to say. What else to do. 

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Thank you for supporting me and being a wonderful part of this community. I love you guys so much. You’re such an encouragement, and honestly, a big portion of what’s kept me going for this long. Maybe I’ll be able to keep writing like I did someday. Maybe I’ll work myself out of this eventually. 

Until then, I hope this explanation has been enough. Thank you for all your support. 

[aroworlds]

cipheral replied to your post “herefortheacenaro: aromantic-official: Recently, @aroworlds...”

I don't want to start anything, but I'm curious: what about arophobia and aphobia are ableist by chance? As aroworlds said this seems to be an overnight thing, and as someone who is aro (and autistic, which may be why i dont get it) I don't want to use that when it has bad connotations

By “overnight” I mean that “the posts @aromantic-official and @herefortheacenaro made went up while I was asleep because I’m Australian and live in a different timezone”, not that this movement is a sudden one. I’ve been talking about this for years and years; this is just the first time that someone has been willing to listen to me when I talk about it. This is just the first time any of my discussions have gotten rebloged or linked to. There is a good number of frustrated people in the LGBTQIA+ community with phobias who have been talking about this to no avail and have been feeling dismissed and ignored; it says something significant about the aro-spec community that people here are beginning to make change.

You too may only be taking about time zones, but I feel like I can read your words as implying this conversation is a brand new one, and it isn’t--many of us have been talking about this for years. The only difference here is a considerate audience allowing our words to gain any kind of traction outside our own blogs.

(By the way, @aromantic-official placed a link to my original post, one that I’d made nearly a week ago, at the bottom of the one on which you’re commenting, for folks who want more information about why they’re making this change. Please, make sure to read through the post to check that links haven’t been provided before asking questions like this, because they did take care to provide and reference my post as the source.)

To summarise, I said that using phobia, a word that describes one of my mental illnesses, as a synonym for the hate, violence, aggression and toxicity levelled at marginalised people is ableist. I said this usage of -phobia for “hate” conflates my experiences of mental illness with thoughts and behaviours that often intentionally harm marginalised people as though they’re the same thing. We have two different experiences using the same word even though they have nothing, at all, in common. Phobia is disabling fear, an illness. It’s a condition that impacts my ease of living in the world. Aromisia is hate and aggression based on prejudice, impacting other people’s ease of living in the world.

What I didn’t say, and other people did, is that mentally ill people are also routinely accused of being violent while regularly being the victims and targets of violence instead of its perpetrators, and here we have the use of a word that describes our mental illness experience conflated, routinely, with hate and violence. It also denies people with phobias, especially in LGBTQIA+ and other spaces making use of -phobia constricts, clear language to talk about our phobias without it being confused or misread.

Phobia is a mental illness. It isn’t the hate, aggression and violence levelled at a marginalised population. We really shouldn’t be using language that suggests these things are the one and the same when the implication and conflation causes harm in multiple ways to people, like me, with phobias.

[scummy-writes]

Hi! I didn't know who to talk to about this, but since you're one of the people in the fandom I look up to, I figured I should gather my courage and send this ask. As a writer, how do you deal with people's underwhelming response? Very few likes, just one or two reblogs, no respect or acknowledgement unless you open requests... It's breaking my heart at this point and I don't know what to do.

a…aaaa.. I can’t believe someone looks up to me. 

I’m sorry if this post is kind of all over the place. I kinda jump around with topics a lot.

Well, first off, I’m not going to lie- usually, I feel a bit hurt. It always hurts writing fics/drabbles/hcs and never seeing any response, or just very very little response. I often don’t write fluff or more serious topics because I know that those themes are always going to be overlooked for my smut instead. And if you’re a minor, writing smut is a no-go, which makes trying to gain traction or readers even more difficult.

There have been several times where I’ve barely gotten any notes on stuff I’ve poured a lot of time into. I’ve even written an off-anon request before only to have the person who requested it not even like/reblog it, or make any sort of comment. I’ve been there, we’ve all been there, and it’s tough to climb back up. 

I’m not sure how long you’ve been following me, but there was a point where my normal note count for hcs dropped from 700 notes down to 20-60 notes if I was lucky, just depending on what I was writing about. In fact, I even left the blog due to some bullying I was enduring and the combination of barely getting a note count that I had considered ‘good’. Since I’ve came back, I’ve focused on what made me happy, and even though I still have the knee-jerk reaction, I’ve learned not to try and compare notes. Ultimately, it’s made me happy, though I might have a bit of ‘survivor bias’ going on since I’ve been collecting readers since the start of 2017. 

I have a few things that help me out, and one of them is learning to appreciate the notes I do have.

For example, even though its just been a day, I only have about 29 notes on my recent yooran drabble. Thats not including my own reblogs, and then if I were to not include friend reblogs, it’d be about 27 or 26. That’s incredibly low for me, personally, because if I post up a fic (depending on the character and theme) I can get around 80-100 notes depending on how lucky I am.

(Now thats not me trying to tell you 30ish notes isn’t a lot, because it is!! It is a lot and if you ever get that many notes on a post you should feel proud of it! But, if you’re me and you’ve been here for a while, that’s low compared to other posts of mine. Please keep reading so I can explain more: )

If this was back to last year, when I was contemplating leaving my blog, that would have hurt me a lot more than it does today, because I was constantly in a loop of comparing notes with my other posts or even my friends posts. I had convinced myself that notes = quality, when that’s not the case at all. Believe it or not, just because a post has 5 notes, or 1 note, or even 0 notes, doesn’t mean whatever content on it is terribly written, or shoddy, or dumb. There have been wonderful hc posts, wonderful pictures of art that I have seen that have barely gotten 10 notes. 

So I think one thing that is hard to get yourself to learn is that a lack of notes doesn’t mean what you are producing is bad. Learning this is hard, and it’s especially hard when you’re constantly discouraged by lack of notes, but you need to write for yourself first and foremost. I haven’t been writing publicly for long, in fact I think the first fanfics I published were in 2016, but I had been writing since middle school. I used to carry a worn down composition notebook and write the most absolutely cringiest fanfiction ever. It had self inserts, it had ocs that were children of me and my favorites, it had terrible, terrible, references to games/music I loved as a kid- but no one read it but me. I never posted it online, and I wrote it to make me happy- and cringy middle school me was super fucking happy with that story. I’m pretty sure I was working through a second compositon notebook before I moved on from the show I was writing about. 

From that point on, I knew I liked writing. I joined writing classes, wrote cringy fiction for my english teachers to read (good fucking god bless my teachers for putting up with my terrible shit but still encouraging me).  

Eventually, since I liked writing so much and my drawing skills declined, I ended up promising to write stories for my friends birthdays. Where one person would be reading it, besides me, and that’s how it was until I posted my first MM fic on AO3. Even with those first few fics, I feel like it’s unfair to count them now, because they were posted just a few months after the game released, I believe, and I honestly just really consider myself lucky that those first two mm fics of mine got the traction they did.

But I think because I was so used to writing to make myself happy, it really fucked me up when I started trying on focusing my writing on only making others happy instead of myself. 

So, a lot of newer folks might not know this, since I’m assuming a lot of people think this is just a pretty photo queue blog with occasional posts, but I started off writing Hcs on here. At first, I don’t think they got a huge traction, but as I slowly got more followers, I got more notes and requests. But eventually it got extremely taxing to keep those up, because what I had wanted was to make others happy with them, but it’s hard to believe you’re doing a good job when you drop from 700 to 20-60 notes. And so I stressed a lot to the point of ‘leaving’ (but as you can see that ended up just being a few month hiatus), but one thing was that I was forced to acknowledge how bad my viewpoint was on the whole situation. I had lost the motivation of writing for myself to make me happy, and instead tried to treat myself as a writing machine only meant to make others happy. That’s not a healthy viewpoint when it comes to writing, especially if you’re doing this as a hobby.

Because of all that, I stopped writing hc posts and focused on fics, because writing fanfics made me happy. It still makes me happy, and because I kept on truckin and still posting, I’m accomplishing things I never thought I would accomplish. 

Writing for success is a long, hard, road that will often leave you unsatisfied, but writing for yourself is a shorter road that will make you happy- even if it’s just venting away emotions you couldn’t let out in any other way.

If it helps you out any, because I’m unsure if I’m making any sense, some pieces that I’m super happy about are pieces that no one but me and maybe one other person has seen. They’re locked away as drafts or in folders and I’m even unsure if I’ll share some of them.

Besides all of the stuff I’ve mentioned, if I’m feeling bad and what I just told you isn’t helping me, sometimes I just talk to a friend or two. Just hearing someone in real time, even if it’s possibly extremely bias or something, tell me that they like my stories or they think my writing is good- that still means a lot to me, and sometimes it perks me up. If that’s not an option with you, you can always talk to your family as well, or old teachers you may have shown some of your work to. I’m very fortunate to have a few teachers willing to help me out with a few questions, even though I’ve…long since graduated orz.

I’m sorry if none of this helps. But if anything, please please don’t give up writing. If you choose to do something like that, please have it be 100% your own decision that isn’t influenced by a note or hit count. I’m positive that whatever you are writing is good, and I know that not seeing that note count get higher hurts, but that note count has absolutely no bearing on how well written your story is.

If theres anything else I can talk to you about, please feel free to send me some more questions, and again I am really sorry if this didn’t help you.

[blue-shaded]

Hi Dolphin anon! It’s me again. Thanks for reading the whole long message, I did not realize how long it was while I was typing it out LMAO. Yeah I’ll concede a lot of your points as well, when I spoke on the reputation of the MC speedrunning community, I was more so speaking about it in terms of just the Minecraft community itself, I hadn’t really considered the perspective of those in other speedrunning categories, so fair enough! As for the moderating team, yeah, their legitimacy and fairness did get called into question but like I said in my last submission, I think this questioning was a little deserved. Geosquare was the one who was heading (or seemed to be taking the lead) on the Dream situation so most looked to him as the figurehead of the mod team, and I think by allowing his bias to affect how he handled the situation initially, I think he shot himself as well as the other moderators in the foot. So on that end, I think the bias deserved to be called out, but you’re, as always, welcome to disagree!

I also agree that he needs to say it more publicly on his twitter. He has a tendency to say it on his private account and in replies because he tends to be very reactionary. Usually if he makes a separate tweet on his alt or main twitter account, it’s after he’s already seriously replied to people or made a serious thread on his private, so he just starts making lighthearted jokes about the situation to try to get both sides to stop taking it seriously in hopes that they’ll stop sending hate and move on.

To his credit, I think he likes to more explicitly say that stuff on livestream. I don’t know how closely you saw or if you saw the Kaceytron situation at all, but when he went on her stream to discuss with her, he explicitly states “I do not condone any death threats or doxxing or any sort of hate” and I know he’s shared similar sentiments on other livestreams. But he definitely needs to have it somewhere on his main Twitter accounts where it’s easily accessible.

And yes I agree that things get trended way too easily, but I think people are too focused on the wrong thing (not you, just people with this argument in general). There have been multiple instances where POC fans try to get people to shut up or to stop livetweeting or to go private (so that their tweets don’t add to trending phrases) whenever important things are happening and while there are many people who listen, it’s unfortunately just not possible to stop it from trending. Because of how fans recieve the content (typically live, all reactions are immediate, whether it be in response to a content creator’s tweet or talking about a stream), there’s a tendency for a word or name or phrase to get repeated amongst several tweets. The Twitter trending algorithm tends to favor sudden influx of tweets over longevity. This is why you’ll sometimes see something MCYT-related at the top of the trending page despite the fact that it says it only has around 1,000-2,000 tweets, whereas other phrases and trends will have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of tweets and still sit lower on the trending tab because those tweets slowly came in over throughout the course of the whole day rather than all at once.

If we’re focusing specifically on Dream and not MCYTs as a whole, he himself can average around a good 130K watchers, if not more, while streaming. Say that an important real world issue is being talked about on Twitter, and most people who are watching, aren’t tweeting about the livestream (either because they don’t use Twitter or they’re someone who knows of the situation and is being conscious and respectful to the community being affected by that situation) and that only 1% of the people watching that stream are still tweeting (whether bc they’re ignorant or bigoted or just don’t know of the situation. regardless, definitely a low-balled percentage). That’s still a sudden influx of 1.3K tweets and is still enough to put it near the top and if not the very top of the trending page. And it sucks and it’s dumb and people have tried to find ways around it. Many people in the community censor names if they’re livetweeting while something else is going on, the last time this happened, people censored karl as “k4rl” and k4rl got tweeted so much that it ended up trending anyways. So 100% get what you’re saying and I get the criticisms of the fanbase surrounding that, but I think it’s just a thing of Twitter needing to fix its algorithm because it should not favor sudden influxes over longevity like that.

If you want an upcoming example of this problem, I’d suggest for you to keep an eye on the trending tab on the 19th! Many black people within the community have been speaking up about Juneteenth and it’s importance to them as a community and that fans should try not to trend anything that day. Specifically they’ve asked Karl Jacob’s community (known as honktwt) to not post for honktwtselfieday, which happens every month on the 19th. These tweets have gained a lot of traction and have been seen by Karl Jacobs himself and he replied and said that he wouldn’t be posting for his selfie day and that he discouraged all of his fans from posting for this month’s selfie day either. Despite this, I’m almost entirely sure that a few people are going to be posting for the selfie day anyway (whether it be bc they’re ignorant n don’t care or they somehow don’t know), though it’s going to be much much less than the amount of people who would usually be postijgnfornthebselfiebday, but I’m sure you’ll see honktwtselfieday trending at some point on the 19th regardless.

Also! as for the shooters4dream tag, yeah, as an Asian, that was disgusting to see. I will say that it wasn’t the antis, though antis did boost it further by posting on it later on and saying to not use the tag (very. counterintuitive, but I digress). That tag came from inside the community as a joke (an incredibly poorly timed one). It’s a borrowed joke from the kpop community to say that you’re a shooter for ___, as in a defender of them, and some people were just being senseless when making the joke and it was really disheartening to see that people weren’t really thinking before using it. I think it’s since been widely addressed that shooters4___ probably isn’t a good joke to make at any time, so I think a lot of people have taken to saying shields for ___ instead.

I also don’t get the hate around the merch. I personally haven’t gotten any, but I don’t think it should come as a surprise to anyone that it’s just a smiley face when that’s his whole brand— the dream smile blob. People are obviously allowed to have their own tastes in clothes but the hate on that front seemed excessive. I think there are plenty of valid criticisms towards Dream, but I don’t think the topic of merch design is one of them.

As for your friend! Yeah I get that, and it’s sucks that she’s not practicing what she preaches. I think it’s very easy to get caught up on the toxicity of social media and it’s sounds like that’s what’s happened to her. Hope you do what’s best for you and your mental health! Like last time, this isn’t any hate towards you (in case any of it seemed like it was) and thank you to Blue for putting up with the longass submissions and for being a conduit for the conversation 💀

sdlkfjslkd don't worry about the long posts Passing on to dolphin anon.

[blazehedgehog]

I was interviewed to be part of this article over at Cultured Vultures! It talks about the history of Sonic fan games in the wake of Sonic Mania. Give it a read! I’m actually genuinely impressed the author (Ryan Atkinson) managed to track down Aytaç Aksu. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a very, very long time. That alone makes the article worth checking out, if you ask me.

I also checked in with Atkinson and he’s okay with me posting our full interview. I’m hiding it behind the “Read More” tag because as always I tend to be pretty longwinded (as usual; but that’s the entire reason I asked if it was okay for me to post)

Atkinson: How did you first get into fan games? Sometime in middle school, I started to wonder just how video games were made. My friends and I wrote up some very barebones documentation for a game we called "Sonic: In Your Face" and mailed them to the address Sega printed on the back of their game cases. Unsurprisingly, we received a rejection letter shortly after. But the idea of making your own games stuck with me; I started learning QBASIC on my home PC (an old hand-me-down 33mhz desktop running Windows 3.1). Starting high school, we all had to buy TI-8x calculators for Algebra, which came with TIBASIC. Using what I knew about QBASIC, I taught myself TIBASIC by reverse-engineering games other friends would send me. I started out by making simple text adventures (which I called "Moviegames," usually involving whatever my favorite movie was at the time -- Jurassic Park, Men in Black, etc.) and eventually started learning how to do ASCII graphics. The only problem was, if your batteries died, all software you had written would be erased. So it was a challenge to make anything substantial.

High school meant better access to internet-connected PCs, and eventually I stumbled upon something called "Sonic 2000." It was a Sonic game running in DOS, created by a fan. Or it was going to be, at any rate; I don't think it got very far. Either way, it piqued my interest, because there hadn't been any real Sonic games for a few years. It linked to a website called "Sonic Fangames HQ." Here was a whole community of fans making their own games, most primarily using a piece of software called The Games Factory (which was also available under a different name, "Corel Click & Create" -- same software, different brand). The talk of the town when I got there was the final release of the original "Sonic Robo-Blast," made in an earlier version of The Games Factory called "Klik 'n' Play." I wasn't impressed. The graphics were incredibly simple, the game didn't even have scrolling, and it was plagued by a bug called "Killing Death." It meant that sometimes, when Sonic would bop an enemy, it'd also kill him at the same time, even if you had rings. It was bad. I knew I could do better.  So, after acquiring my own copy of Click & Create, I set about learning. The rest is history.

Atkinson: How has the fan game community changed over the years? The advancements in tech are probably the biggest change. A lot of 2D Sonic fan games still use the great grandson of The Games Factory -- now called "Clickteam Fusion." That's because there's now a pretty robust open source code base called "Sonic Worlds Delta" that closely mimics how the Genesis games worked. Sonic fan games today can look, sound, and feel almost like the real thing, and Sonic Worlds Delta has gone on to power games like Freedom Planet. Back when I originally joined SFGHQ, we were all using The Games Factory's built-in "Platform" movement setting, which not only does not play like anything even close to Sonic, but is also just really buggy and terrible in general. It's amazing how much mileage everyone's gotten out of Clickteam's software. That tends to happen with these [easy] game creation tools; I've heard people doing crazy things with RPG Maker, too. The complexity of today's fan games versus what everyone was capable of 18 or 19 years ago is insane.

There's also the simple fact that the community changes naturally. There seems to be kind of a cutoff point for Sonic fan games -- usually you get experienced enough that you try your hand at entering the game industry proper (for instance, the founder of SFGHQ, Ryan Langley, worked at Halfbrick on mobile games like Jetpack Joyride, and now he works at Pikpok games on games like Doomsday Clicker) or you realize game development just isn't for you and you move on. SFGHQ seems to be a very "generational" place that you don't really stick around forever, though you do occasionally end up with people like me that never seem to want to leave.

Atkinson: How does it compare to other fan game communities? I think it's just in general more advanced. To my knowledge, SFGHQ was the first website specifically dedicated to fan games. It opened in either 1997 or 1998. It took a really long time for any other fan gaming communities to crop up, and they've struggled to gain traction for various reasons. SFGHQ was already a pretty busy place by the time I got there in 1999, and it only kept growing.

SFGHQ gradually slowed down when Rlan (Langley) left in the mid 2000's, primarily because it was difficult to find someone who wanted the herculean task of maintaining the database of games and resources. In the interim, other fan gaming communities have gained power in its wake, most notably the Mario Fan Games Galaxy (MFGG), which is far closer in spirit now to what SFGHQ was back in its heyday. But SFGHQ is currently trying to stage a comeback; the forums recently relaunched with the ability to publish games to the database yourself with an almost wiki-like functionality, eliminating the bottlenecks that were strangling the community in years past. Hopefully it bounces back.

Atkinson: When you first got involved with Sonic fan games were there many games available and were they easy to find? One of the benefits in those early days was how easy it was to make a game. Making games isn't easy by any stretch, but especially nowadays, there's a lot of work involved in making a good fan game. Standards are very high. Back then, the bar was considerably lower -- you could throw together just about anything in a few days and that would be good enough. I don't remember exactly how many games were available when I got there, but I know I was never short on new things to try out from my new friends.

Atkinson: Why did you start SAGE? I loved all the games my friends and I were making, but trying to talk to anyone outside of our community about them always resulted in funny looks at best. Many wanted to stay away from our games because they viewed them as an extension of piracy. They thought we were making illegal bootleg games, like that "7 Grand Dad" NES game or whatever. Technically, we kind of were, but I always hated that terminology. By that definition, fan art is "illegal bootleg artwork" and fan fiction is an "illegal bootleg book." It's all about your point of view. So, I figured I would change that point of view. The original goal of SAGE was to create enough of a focal point on our community to generate press coverage and destigmatize fan games. I wanted to show the world all the cool stuff we were making and get people to realize these games were actually okay to play. That was a struggle, but SAGE ended up serving a good secondary purpose in that it gave the community a milestone to revolve around. Suddenly the "when it's done" deadline became "get something ready for SAGE." I think that's the actual driving reason why it's still going today.

Atkinson: Please could you describe some of the 2017 SAGE games. Well, the big one would be Sonic 2 HD, a game that went through some turmoil a few years ago due to trouble with an unscrupulous coder. They're back now, having changed out a number of team members, and the end result is a gorgeous 2D game that I think puts even some professional efforts to shame. If you ever looked at Sonic's box art and wished they'd make a game that actually looked like that, well, that's basically what Sonic 2 HD is. It's still got some rough edges, but for what it is, it looks and plays incredible. If Sega ever wants to take another fan project under their wing, it should be that one.

Sonic World (not to be confused with Sonic Worlds Delta mentioned earlier) is one of a growing number of 3D Sonic fan games. It's been in development positively for ages, and has a big focus on community feedback. The game in its current format is almost too big; we're talking dozens of playable characters and something like fifty levels, many of which were made by the community. It's very impressive, but has sometimes had issues with accessibility. It's very easy to be overwhelmed by how much stuff is in that game, but that's the way that community prefers it. Watching this game in the hands of a good speedrunner like DarkspinesSonic is a sight to behold.

Crash N. Tense Adventure is an example of how, even early on, SAGE was never entirely about Sonic. I don't know if there's a hugely robust Crash Bandicoot fan gaming scene, but even back when I personally ran and organized SAGE by myself in the early 2000's, I made sure that this was more a community event than just a Sonic event. If somebody was working on a Mario fan game, or even a totally original IP, that kind of stuff was always welcome at SAGE. N. Tense Adventure is fantastic; I love the animation. All of the characters have so much personality that you can't help but laugh at them, and it helps that it plays exactly like the PS1 Crash Bandicoot games. Honestly, this beats the heck out of anything involving Crash Bandicoot since 2001.

Clash Force 2 is an interesting beast in that the original Clash Force game just went up for sale on Steam. This developer actually seems to be using SAGE as a way to promote the upcoming sequel, which is something I don't think has ever happened before. Sure, we've had games like Freedom Planet show at SAGE, but that's because Freedom Planet started out as a Sonic fan game. This is the first time a published indie developer has shown a game at SAGE, though that kind of praise probably depends on how much you value Steam's publishing system these days. It's a fun game though, blending Sonic and Contra with character designs that feel like distant cousins to something like the Battle Beasts figures released in the 80's.

Forces of Mobius is a game I feel like I should have spent more time with. It's one of the rare few non-platformer games at SAGE, being a role playing game starring Princess Sally from the Archie Comics series. I'm a little in the dark, but it sounds like there's a growing sub-community of people making Sonic RPGs in RPG Maker, as the author mentions other games not only in his series, but games made by his peers, as well. These sorts of games don't show up very often at SAGE, but maybe they should.

And I just can't avoid mentioning SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, a remake of the notoriously bad Sonic 2006 Xbox 360 game. I think there will always be at least one modder out there who is obsessed with "fixing" a broken game, often by creating an unofficial patch. Here, the solution is apparently to just strip the game down to its spare parts and completely rebuild it in Unity. It's an interesting proposition, though I'll admit I'm more befuddled than anything else, especially given how close it's sticking to the source material. I'll still try the finished product, though, if it ever gets that far.

Atkinson: What does you believe the future looks like for Sonic fan games? I think as things continue, 3D games will grow in numbers. Sonic fan games are dominated by 2D games because those are the easiest to make. But with the availability of programs like Unity, and the existence of open source code bases like SonicGDK (Unreal Engine 3) and HedgePhysics (Unity), more and more people are trying their hand at building 3D Sonic games, and the tools are only going to keep getting easier to use from here. Perhaps some day, we'll get a 3D equivalent to Sonic Mania -- a game built by the fans, for the fans, with the blessing, support, and budget of an official Sega title. That'd be nice.

Atkinson: Is there anything you would like to add? I'm not kidding around when I say I really want to help fan games grow. It makes me sad and angry every time yet another news story comes around about a notable fan gaming project getting hit with a "Cease & Desist" shutdown notice. These stigmas are still alive and well, when the people making these games are honestly some of the biggest, most passionate fans out there. Making a fan game is not something to be taken lightly these days; it takes months, more often even years of dedication to finish. AM2R was in development for something like 11 years, and one of the oldest Sonic fan games still in active development, Sonic Robo-Blast 2, is probably over 15 years old at this point. That kind of dedication doesn't come easy. It takes these corporations minutes, maybe even seconds to invalidate a decade or more of work. There is no bigger sign that they don't really care about their fans -- they just want their money. A "Cease & Desist" is like watching your hero rip up your love letter to them. It's awful, and it needs to stop.

A few years ago Sega actually gave their blessing to Sonic fan games, so I think the community will only continue to grow. Hopefully, maybe, my original goal for SAGE will come to pass, and the sheer volume of Sonic fan games will make it a little easier for all fan game creators to make whatever they please without restrictions. If Nintendo can have a whole wall of fan art in their offices, why can't they celebrate fan games too, right? Maybe they're still just lacking the right point of view.

[firelxdykatara]

💔 and 💢

💔 ship that makes you sad: Truly, and from the depths of my soul: Logan and Veronica. And I think the saddest part of all is that it didn’t have to be that way. Like, there are ships that make me sad because they go through angst but at the same time it’s cathartic and satisfying and at the end of their story I’m either left wanting more or feeling as if they came to a good ending even if I wished better for them, and then there’s.......the entire relationship getting tossed into the garbage and set on fire by the revival that was supposed to be giving back to the fandom. Veronica Mars season 4 wasn’t about drawing in new viewers, it wasn’t supposed to be accessible to people who’d never even heard of the show before--and the only reason it was able to happen was because the fandom came together and enabled the post-series material to gain traction. We literally threw money at Rob Thomas until he could put together a movie for us (and yeah, there were people who complained about the fanservice in said movie, but as it was intended to be a labor of love for the fans, that criticism didn’t hold much weight in the fandom at large), and it was on the strength of the fandom that he managed to sell the revival to Hulu.

And then he let it crash and burn.

I’m not sure if it was just hubris, or if he truly misunderstood his own characters and his own story that badly--did he really think the audience tuned in for the mediocre mysteries in seasons 2 and 3? did he think it was the crime that held our attention in the movie? did he think it was veronica alone, and not her relationships with everyone else in her life? and, if so, why was the ‘mystery��� in season 4 so flimsily constructed that it falls apart like a house of cards under the slightest scrutiny?--but either way, the net result was that I sat through an entire season of a show that had, at its center, one of my favorite OTPs in all of my fannish history, which had me making excuses for everything throughout the season that made me cringe, and I came away from it wishing that it had never gotten greenlit to begin with. If I could go back in time and prevent Rob Thomas from making any veronica mars content after the movie, I’d do it. And I can’t even look at LoVe content without wanting to just break down and sob because it’s that damn depressing.

They deserved better. We deserved better. And at the end of the day, my anger will eventually fade, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop being sad about it.

💢 ship that is most misunderstood: Oh, for this I have to say Zutara. I don’t know if it’s because of its popularity, so a lot of people know of it even if they don’t know the details because they haven’t watched the show, and also the people who watched the show and didn’t ship it feel like they have to overcompensate for reasons not to so much that they project a lot of things onto the ship that just... aren’t actually there in canon, or what, but... there are just so fucking many really bad takes (some of which come from zutara shippers, too, but a lot of it is from people who aggressively dislike the ship because of things they built up in their minds about it that aren’t actually true), like ‘they bring out the worst in each other’ (demontrably false, and zuko helping katara gain closure for her trauma is like the opposite of toxicity but go off) or ‘they would fight all the time if they were a couple’ (also false, because they fight approximately zero times after becoming friends and, in fact, seem to be on the same page emotionally) or ‘zuko sees katara as an annoying little sister’ (which is a particular brand of Bad Take that is very transparently there just to make them seem incompatible and isn’t actually supported by anything in the show, but hey, if that’s the only way they can make their ship actually work then whatever) and it’s like... did they watch the same show i did? do they even like katara? (it’s usually katara who gets shafted, although if i see one more ‘kylo ren is the zuko of the sequel trilogy’ take i may actually break something)

anyway, yeah. zutara is heavily misunderstood, occasionally within the fandom but especially outside of it by people who evidently have a vested interest in the ship not being ‘possible’ and want to cast it in the worst possible light so their preferred ships seem so much better by comparison, and anyways it’s exhausting.

ask me about my ship opinions!

[turgutderman]

This Female Founder is Equity Crowdfunding Her Cannabis Company

This female founder is equity crowdfunding her cannabis company (and absolutely crushing it) HEYHELLOHIGH JANUARY 31, 2020 Calling all aspiring and active cannabis entrepreneurs – this interview is for YOU!  I recently had the incredible opportunity to speak with Jane West; Industry Icon, Superconnector, and Total Badass. If you aren’t acquainted with this absolute queen of cannabis, allow me to give you the sparknotes. 

Image via JaneWest.com

  Jane’s career was launched into the spotlight in 2014 when her cannabis-friendly cocktail parties gained massive media attention and she was forced to resign from her day job in corporate event planning. From there she went on to co-found Women Grow and start her own glassware, travel and CBD collections. In 2018 she closed her first equity crowdfunding campaign that raised $189,000 from 550 investors across 17 countries – and, she’s back for round 2 of fundraising. Her company, Jane West, is 80% owned by women and people of color. Incredible. Now, if equity crowdfunding isn’t something you’re familiar with, you’re not alone. When it comes to raising money for your budding biz, you might know about taking a loan for the bank or pitching your idea to a team of VCs a la shark tank.  Equity ( shares in a company) + crowdfunding (taking small sums of money from a big group of supporters) means that average people like you and I can help fund a growing business while receiving a percentage stake in the company. Pretty cool, right? Jane West just broke the exciting news that she’s raising another equity crowdfunding round, which inspired me to reach out for more details. Let’s dive into the interview. 

Image via JaneWest.com

  B: Jane, thanks for taking the time to chat today! You’re a very widely recognized female in cannabis. What’s the secret sauce behind building such a strong personal brand?  Jane: I wish there was an easy formula that other people could simply apply. But for me, I try to be constantly breaking new ground. Doing something that’s going to make a big impact. Social media platforms are so fickle and unwelcoming to cannabis that traditional marketing. Advertising isn’t working at all. I have 5,000 friends on Facebook and most of them are highly engaged, but I’ll make a post and get like three likes. That’s not real. I know that’s not real. So since [social media] is a black hole, I don’t put money into it. So, my secret sauce has been being able to leverage earned media. And by earned media, I mean just someone genuinely finding you and talking about what you’re doing.

Fans & followers post about Jane West on social media. Image via JaneWest.com

I never turned down an interview. There’s plenty of people whose sites I checked out (when they first reached out to me) and they didn’t have a big following. But the fact that they were interested in what I was doing is what really mattered to me.  As a company, we have to try our best to leverage our network to make the biggest impact. And means getting more people, who didn’t know you or your brand are, to know what you’re doing.  That’s hard to do. A lot of people are new to the industry and it’s almost like being a freshman in college. By the time they’re a “junior in college”, they’ve picked their friends and business partners and that’s something that you can’t do if you’re going to keep breaking new ground.  I see a lot of people falling into this trap of finding their group, which is great, but then they go to events and they’re standing there with the same 10 people and that’s not helpful. You need to be standing there with nine people that don’t know who you are. And then at the end of the day you can say, wow, nine more people know who I am and the brand that we’re building. 

Jane’s network effect has allowed her business to expand rapidly across the U.S.

  You have to constantly be looking towards what you win if today someone met you or learned about you who did not know who you were. Always be looking for that next lily pad of people that don’t know anything about what you’re doing, educate them and whenever possible, leveraging the use of media to get your name and brand name out there.      B: You’re doing the hard work by going out there and meeting so many new people. I’m sure that’s exhausting at times and exhilarating and others. But you’ve built an amazing network out of it. So let’s talk about the unique way you’re funding your business. Why did you choose to do an equity crowdfunding campaign instead of going the venture capital route?  Jane: Venture capital in the cannabis industry is just so predatory. It’s very Caucasian male-dominated, and it’s not a friendly place for new businesses.  In a lot of ways, once you learn about how a lot of [venture capital] deal structures work, you see how advantageous they are to the VCs, not to the actual businesses. Many capitalize on the idealism of new entrepreneurs.  We hear about these big deals closing and money being raised. But, some of the most widely known cannabis brands are just holding companies that have all these licenses – they haven’t built anything yet. They haven’t started selling cannabis to customers on a regular basis where they actually have a real business. Even though they may have found a way to own a bunch of licenses and a ton of square footage and be able to grow flower. They need to realize that customers are going to care what they’re buying.  And so it’s really interesting how it all evolves. I think there are many professionals in finance who saw this opportunity in cannabis because they could foresee how it could become a bubble.  Oh, only the Toronto stock market is taking investments? And there’s only a handful of  companies in this burgeoning industry? Of course there’s going to be a bubble! Of course we’re going to be able to rush in and drive up the price, even though these companies have never even sold cannabis to a single person yet! My overall point is that the VC world is a game, and it’s not a game I’m interested in playing. I can tell what investors really care about the future of my business versus the future of their personal bottom line. At the end of the day, you need to have people that are your investors who actually care about the longevity of the business.  So as difficult as it was to build the company this way, I wasn’t going to take a deal that wasn’t good for me or the overall integrity of the company. What matters to me is having invested customers. I’ve already closed a handful of $25 investors on Republic and those people mean just as much of me as bigger VCs. It’s somebody that believes in you and what you’re doing. If I’m able to scale my equity crowdfunding to reach more people and we’re able to meet the same numbers my company needs (by closing a thousand people at a smaller number instead of 10 people at a much bigger number) than I’d much rather do that. 

Jane West’s Republic deal page communicates her brand’s mission and vision to future investors. Image via Republic.com

  This also ties back into what we were talking about previously, which was the advertising restrictions.  By outlining what my brand is and what we do and what our goals are on the Republic website, I’m able to draw attention to what we’re doing in a way that isn’t advertising. People are reading about the nuances of my business and my overall strategy by reading my deal page on Republic. To me, that’s even better than having a billboard or print advertisement in a magazine that only makes a short term impression on a customer.    B: Yes! It’s such a smart marketing play too. For women that want to invest in cannabis in a thoughtful way, I think the idea of investing in an actual entrepreneur that’s building a real business is very impactful. I’d love to learn what you’re working on next. What do you plan to do with the new round of funding?  Jane West: We could raise up to $1,000,000. But I decided to raise $535,000 because after that amount we’re subject to another level of financial reporting that I currently don’t want to have to maintain with my team. I’m dialed in on the overhead of my company so I know that raising half a million dollars will cover our operating costs, so we can be much bolder in spending our revenue. To a lot of people, half a million dollars might not seem like a lot. But for us, it’s the perfect number to have our overhead covered and then to make a lot bigger plays with our capital.  In terms of what I’m going to spend the capital on specifically? I’m really excited about getting merchandise. I’d like to make actual promo items. We’ve never bought t-shirts, hats, hoodies, anything like that at all. I invested in stickers one time and I was like, where’d all the stickers go? We’re never doing that again.  That’s one of the things I’m most excited about doing because now that we’re in 10 different states and we have all these budtenders that are pushing our product, I’d like to to get some high-quality merchandise in their hands.  Additionally, we’ve gotten a lot of traction with Jane West CBD Coffee. I’m more of a coffee snob – I want to grind my own beans every morning. But a lot of our audience really wants our product in a ground version. So one use of the funds will be bringing additional variance to market of some of our products at a lower price point. 

Jane West CBD coffee and pre-rolled mini joints. Image via JaneWest.com

  Right now we sell the coffee at $48 MSRP in whole bean and you get 12 ounces. But if we sold it for $24 in a ground bag, we hit a whole different group and that’s what a lot of the consumer product goods brokers that we’ve been working with have given us feedback on.  Also, It depends on how [cannabis dispensary] shelf space evolves, but I’d like to start making upgraded displayers. I’ve always dreamed of having displayers for the brand that look more and feel like something in the Mac makeup counter – backlit with the logo and all the products, right there for you to try. Something where people can interact with the product and touch it and feel it.   B: How exciting! Anything else you’d like to share? Jane: I personally think we’re off to a good start with this latest equity crowdfunding campaign, bringing in over $2,000 a day in the first three days. So far I have posted on Instagram to share the news, and then my instagram got shut down for a week. Then, I emailed all existing investors about it. That’s all we’ve done as a company to get to this $6,800 total. So that’s a really good sign for me.  I’m super dedicated to equity crowdfunding. So if this goes well, this is something I plan on doing on a regular basis and continuing to build that audience.  It’s also notable that this campaign ends on 420!

—

Thank you to Jane West for her conversation and candor. If you’d like to get learn more about Jane and her equity crowdfunding campaign, check out her Republic page here.  Disclosure: The author of this blog owns shares of Jane West.

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by Ayodeji Awosika

How many times have you tried to set a goal and failed? You can’t even count…the number is that high.

You’ve failed to reach your goals so many times that, deep down, you feel eternally cursed to live the same life on repeat.

You look at the future and everything is…the same. It scares you, but you also feel like you can’t do anything about it. You have these little waves of motivation and have a little bit of hope, but then you fail again, which makes you less likely to want to try again. Then, after trying enough times, you just quit.

This is the story for 95 percent of people, but it doesn’t have to be your story.

At a certain point in your life, if you follow through with a handful of goals, you’ll become permanently motivated.

I failed at nearly every goal I set until I found writing. Since then, I’ve achieved most of the goals I set for myself. It’s as if the past doesn’t exist or count, You can get here, too. If you break that mental barrier and find a way to finally start following through, one day you won’t be able to recognize your former self.

I have hope for you. Not because I’m pandering. But because I spent a good chunk of my life is an extremely lazy royal screw up who couldn’t concentrate or focus on a goal to save his life.

So, while no listicle can fix your life, I hope at least one of these ideas sticks out and sparks the motivation you need to go on the magical bull-run you’ve been desperately waiting for.

Write your goals down — This seems basic and trivial, but there’s something about the mind-body connection that occurs when you physically commit to a goal by writing it down. Literally writing, too. Don’t type it. The physical act sends a subconscious signal to your brain that you’re somewhat serious.

Get as many ‘quick wins’ as possible — Lower your criteria for success and stack little victories on top of each other quickly to get momentum. If you want to be a writer and truly can’t bring yourself to sit down and write for long periods, commit to 10 minutes of writing per day if that’s what you have to do to build a streak.

Follow the rule of 2 — I learned this idea from James Clear. If you screw up on the path to your goal, e.g., missing a workout, just don’t do it twice. Allow yourself that mulligan to avoid the ‘downward spiral.’

Find compelling reasons to achieve your goals — The more compelling the reason, the why, behind your goals, the more likely you are to follow through. I was compelled to stick with writing because I was legitimately terrified of having to work for someone else my entire life.

Use negative emotions — I find negativity to be the most compelling form of motivation. Is it the healthiest? Debatable, but it’s been the most effective for me. I usually start seriously working on a major goal or initiative when I’m sufficiently fed up with my current circumstances. I move things from the ‘tolerable’ column to the ‘I can’t fucking stand to live like this’ column and then I change.

Don’t brag about shit you haven’t done — I see this happen too often. A friend of mine has a new ‘business.’ They have all these shiny business cards, a logo, and they’re posting all over social media about how successful they’ll become. 100 percent failure rate. Keep your big hairy audacious goals to yourself until you pull them off.

Brainwash yourself — Individual pieces of motivational content, including mine, are ineffectual. That’s why you have to consume so many of them. Combined with action, though, and done over a long enough period of time, this content can re-wire your brain. Mind you, you’re susceptible to becoming a self-help junkie who gets nothing done, but this route gives you your only fighting chance.

Stop looking for examples in ‘the real world’ — You can’t use people in your daily life as models for success. They’re not bad people, but odds are, the people you know personally haven’t done the things you want to do, nor do they have the level of motivation you seek to have. Most people get caught in that lower paradigm because they conform to their surroundings.

One thing at a time — Read the book The One Thing by Gary Keller for a full explanation of this. You always want to have a primary goal to focus on each day, week, month, year, etc. I do many things in my business, but my ‘one thing’ has always been getting a blog post done. Find that keystone goal that makes all other goals easier to achieve.

Use the chain strategy — Buy a calendar, mark off an ‘x’ each day you do the task that leads to your ultimate goal. You will form a chain of x’s. The longer the chain, the less likely you are to break the chain.

Be mindful of your environment — If you want to lose weight, you can’t keep junk food in the house. Having the T.V. on and 8 social media tabs open probably isn’t conducive to staying focused on your writing. This seems simple, but people dramatically underestimate the power of their environment.

Understand this truth — You think hesitation is less painful than following through with the action, but it’s the opposite. Hesitating and the anxiety it causes is actually more mentally taxing on you than just doing the thing. Re-read that and think about it.

Focus all your effort on the ‘tipping point’ — Keep your head down and work on your goal until you reach a point where your efforts start to compound, meaning you get more payoff for the same amount of work. Example: most writers quit too early because they don’t understand that once they get a little bit of an audience, their audience will grow at a faster rate in the future.

Master your strengths, then hedge your weaknesses — Set goals based on your natural talents and strengths. You’ll stick with them because you’re already decent. After mastering those you can set goals based on fixing up your weak spots, or you can find partners, employees, assistants, contractors, friends, etc who can complement your skillset.

Align your goals with positivity — Naval Ravikant has a saying “eat the healthy food that tastes good to you” For me, I realized I’d never reach my fitness goals by eating dry chicken breast and vegetables daily. So I didn’t even try. Don’t torture yourself to reach your goals. It just tends not to work.

Get help — Coaches, mentors, trainers, etc, serve one purpose — accountability. Often, investing money to get help in an area creates emotional leverage to stay accountable because you don’t want to waste that money.

Don’t choose dumb and arbitrary goals — If you set a goal like “make a million dollars” or “get rich” you won’t reach it because you have no context for the goal. Set goals based on the things you want to do and the outcomes you want to achieve. You’ll get things like money as a byproduct.

Don’t become a self-help robot — I’ve never once written down a S.M.A.R.T Goal on purpose. Many of my goals fit the criteria, but I’ve never gotten too in the weeds with goal setting or productivity routines because they tend to become a form of procrastination in and of themselves. I use a notebook and mostly journal about the things I want to achieve in a loose way. It’s been sufficient for me.

Use these rules of thumb — Use them loosely and keep them in the back of your mind while you’re working. It takes five years to overhaul your life, reinvent yourself, and build something substantial. Focus on the first 90 days of ruthless action to build traction. Continue these quarterly bursts and track your overall progress every 18 months or so.

Use time blocks — You want to do your task at the same time every day and preferably even the same place. This will help you reach a point where you expect to get your task done because you’ve conditioned your brain to be ready to do that task at that time.

Keep reminders of what it takes — Use two types of examples. One, find examples of people you look up to and research how long it took them to get good. This will keep you grounded and patient. Second, find examples of people who clearly have less talent than you or came from a more difficult situation than you. This will keep you from deluding yourself into thinking your situation is special.

Understand the 80/20 of reaching long term goals — The first 20 percent of your journey accounts for 80 percent of your success. The first 20 percent is the part where you’re overwhelmed with all the little nuances and minutiae of your path. It’s the equivalent of when you first go to the gym and you’re super sore. This is the part where you’re flailing around just trying to gain a basic understanding. Once you do have that understanding, though, you’re pretty much all the way there and the rest is just a matter of time and picking up a few more nuances along the way.

Think about dying — I use my own mortality as a motivator constantly. I want to get to a point in life where I’d be okay if I died. I’m pretty close. How would you feel about the progress of your life if you knew today was your last day? What would you rush to get done for the rest of the day? Think about that. Use it.

Use inversion — Set goals for outcomes you don’t want to have. Use people as models for what you don’t want to be like. Figuring out exactly what it takes to be successful is harder than figuring out what definitely won’t work.

Stop being soft — Society doesn’t like to use the word soft anymore. Why? Because society is full of soft people. Look, you need mental toughness to pull off major goals. Feeling like a helpless victim of circumstance isn’t conducive to reaching goals. You have to leave that self-care shit alone for a while. You have work to do.

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25 ways to dramatically increase your chances of reaching your goals by Ayodeji Awosika How many times have you tried to set a goal and failed? You can’t even count…the number is