#oversharing online is so important because like what if someone needed to know that

[foxmulderautism]

boys when they finish their degree at 2:48am on a friday 

doing something silly tonight

[butyou-callmewhenyourebored]

Matty Healy Blurb

Author's Note: This was the ending that I mentioned would be the blurb with my last imagine. Just one Matty Healy being cute and not being able to contain his love for you during an interview! Enjoy! I'm about to enter Ross territory, see you all on the other side! x

Warnings: Swearing if you all need that!

Matty Imagine

1.4K Words

Whilst the boys were in between records and tours; you and Matty had managed to get away with being together without your relationship being sniffed out by the fans. Your presence in their world as a whole had seemed to have gone undetected, this was probably due to the nature of the pandemic and being locked in your homes. But upon reflection was the best thing that could have happened to you both. It meant you could reacquaint yourselves without your every move being watched by the world.

I think the band appreciated the fact you weren’t in the industry because it came with no drama. George claimed the fact you could fight your way out of anything due to your job gave you the level headedness that came with dating someone like Matty. “Sometimes he needs putting in his place!”  You believe the words out of George’s mouth.

But now the boys were gearing up to to release their fifth record Being Funny in a Funny Language and Matty was doing more and more interviews and you were all left in the position of ‘what the fuck is going to say today?’ But that was the fun of being apart of his life. No day was the same as the last.

You were at work in an important meeting when your phone kept buzzing at the opposite side of your desk. Apologising to your client, you turned your phone on silent and threw it in your draw. Out of sight, out of mind. Whatever it was could wait until you had finished work or the very least once everything regarding your current client was done.

When you finally pulled your phone out of your desk drawer to order lunch to your office, you saw the group chat with the band going off, you also had messages from Ross, Carly and  Matty. What the absolute flying fuck was happening that they were all sending messages at the same time.

Opening Carly’s message first. ‘Your world is going to change in the blink of an eye babe. I’m here whenever you need someone x’ Your eyebrows furrowed as you opened the screenshot and caught sight of the headline.

‘MATTY HEALY’S ZANE LOWE INTERVIEW GOES VIRAL AFTER SINGER CONFESSES HIS NEW RECORD IS ABOUT HIS NEW GIRLFRIEND. OR SHOULD WE SAY OLD GIRLFRIEND!’

What the fuck! You hadn’t discussed going public per say and you didn’t know if you had it in you to open his messages at the moment. So you bypassed the multiple messages in the group chat and opened Ross’ first. ‘No filter Healy strikes again! Don’t go online yet love. Just let it die down before you try navigate that shit. Trust me. Text me if you need me for anything x’

Fucking hell, if Ross the least social member of the band is advising you to not go online, that meant the fans were going absolutely mental. Their rockstar had become unavailable and that meant I was public enemy number one. ‘Is it socially acceptable to have a glass of wine at 1pm on a Tuesday afternoon whilst at work? Asking for a friend? X’ You replied to him before finally opening your boyfriend’s messages.

'I’m so sorry baby!’ 

‘You know what I’m like, I have no filter when I’m excited about stuff!

And Zane pointed out how happy this new record was and I just…'

'I want to shout from the rooftop how much I love you’

‘Because I do. I love you so fucking much!’

‘I also may have told him all of our best loved songs are about you.’

‘Fuck! I know I overshared. Please don’t hate me xxxxx.’

You furrowed your eyebrows at the last couple of messages. What was he on about? Yeah sure, you had figured out the wedding in Menswear was about the wedding you both met at and If You’re too Shy was about when he’d call you every night whilst on the 2019 US tour. So what did that even mean? All our best loved songs are about you/?

Texting Carly back, you thanked her for looking out for you and asked if she knew the time stamp for when all of this went down. When you got your response, you opened up YouTube on your laptop and skipped straight to this so called viral moment.

“I must say this new record, there are a lot of love songs on here. You seem happy. Are you happy?”  Zane asked, a warm smile etched on his face as they sat in a cafe you had ventured to many a time whilst you lived up North.

“I am mate. Never been happier!”  He grinned back at the radio host.

“They’re all about your girl, yeah?”

“They are.” Matty had the audacity to look shy as he confirmed it. “This new record is basically my love letter to her. I’m in Love with You, Happiness, Oh Caroline, All I need to Hear, When We Are Together… About you.” He gestured to Zane when he remembered. “She’s the love of my life. My muse.” He shrugged casually like that wasn’t heart tuggingly cute.

“Now you mentioned previously that About You was almost a continuation of your hit Robbers. Surely they’re not the about the same person?”

“It is actually!” Matty laughed at Zane’s shocked face. “Funny you say that and she’s going to kill me when she hears this because I’ve never actually told her this but almost all of the band’s most loved songs are about her. Robbers, The City, Menswear, Somebody Else, If You’re too Shy. They’re all about my girl.”

You paused the video for a moment, your eyes glossing over as you tried to process this information. The City made sense buthe’d had girls since you, girls he was with longer than you that you were positive Somebody Else was about. There had to be, there were years between when he would have wrote that and when you broke up. You’d had never made that connection but your composure was quickly diminishing as the tears finally slipped down your cheeks. Your entire will power being tested so you didn’t sob loudly in your office as you thought about how heartbroken Matty really was over you, that it hurt him just as much as it did you.

But Robbers. When the boys finally released their long awaited (in your eyes anyway) self titled debut album. Even though it hurt to know you’d never see them again to congratulate them, how little did you know. When you heard Robbers for the first time, yeah it was beautiful but when the video came out, you just assumed it was about the characters of True Romance and his love for the cult classic. Not once did you put two and two together and realise it was about your rapidly failing relationship.

When you finally had the courage, you pressed play again.

“Shit man! Robbers and About You, really are the same girl? And Somebody Else, damn! She most be one special lady!”

“Yeah, she is! We dated before the band. You know me, love me some drugs and we used to fight about it all the time. Then I didn’t see her for seven years and she went on to bigger and better things. She’s a hot shot lawyer like the smartest person I know. Smarter than me and the band put together! But yeah, I thought about her a lot during our time apart and then fate brought us together again. Or at least Hann did, he bumped into her as we were on the way to an event back in 2019. I don’t think I’ve ever been speechless mate but I knew. I knew that I wanted her back if my life depended on it the moment I clapped eyes on her again. Eighteen months later, she’s still letting me love her and you’re getting our best record yet! So you’re welcome!” He finished with a giggle.

You paused the video again. A shaky breath leaving you as you tried to get oxygen back in your lungs, the temptation to just cry at how much you fucking loved this man. This completely ridiculous, irritatingly talented man. You could sit here and be mad about it but what’s the point. It’s not his fault, anything negative that finds its way to you wasn’t on him, but the person sat behind the keyboard and with that knowledge settling you knew you couldn’t ever be mad for sharing that he loved you with his mate.

You finally text him back.

‘You are the biggest pain in my ass Healy! You’re lucky you’re cute!’

‘I love you so fucking much!’

‘But we are definitely talking about Robbers and Somebody Else when I’m home!’

[newhappythoughts]

Honestly the @/kokobot thing has shaken me and I need to talk about it.

I don't know how old people that follow me are, but if you're in your early twenties or older you probably have been around the conversation of how common it was for barely teenage kids to go in the internet and have conversations with "random" people who were actively suicidal. Those "me at 13 telling my 24 yo only friend to not kill themselves" tiktoks that became a trend some time ago.

The thing is, this bot is recreating this situation. It's praying on people desesperated enough to vent to anyone and making that people give advice to other dessesperated people. This adds to the fact that the people most likely to need to go into the internet for support and community are kids and teens, that feed each other toxic ideas that they have learned in their already toxic enviroment. And if you're my age you know this! You've probably also been a deeply sad kid whose friends reblogued each others self-deprecating and self-harming thoughts and feelings. But it's worst!! because with how the bot works anyone could be the person giving the advice!!

In the first post you get if you search kokobot you can see how it paired a person that was worried they inappropriately touched someone else to a (to the bot knowledge) grooming victing that goes to school!!!!!!!

The internet is more accesible than never to pre-teens that don't have anyone to tell them the actual dangers of being online. We get websides that constantly censor words because they're "innapropriate" (like having to say korn or sewerslide on tiktok) yet when it comes to things that are ACTUALLY DANGEROUS towards kids, everything goes.

WE HAVE ALREADY GONE THROUGH THIS, WE ALREADY KNOW THAT CONNECTING PEOPLE MEANS EVERYONE GETS CONNECTED REGARDLESS OF INTENTION.

So please, if you actually want to "protect the kids" do not promote or use this bot. And if you're one of those people that comes in contact with people oversharing in vent channels and discords, try to educate kids on internet safety. Teens in the internet in bad mental health situations can trust anyone that does as little as to listen to them (from experience), it's important as adults to tell them (nicely) when they're sharing too much and how anyone could be reading what they write. I know it's depressing to think that people could have bad intentions, but it's important to know: Stranger Danger aplies to your mutuals too.

[sh4tt3rg1rl]

Hey

It's been a while since you saw my face

I haven't been doing so great

So I took a little break

A lot of people are saying some things about me that aren't quite true

Doesn't matter if it's true, though

Just as long as it's entertaining to you, right?

You guys having fun?

All aboard the toxic gossip train

Chugging down the tracks of misinformation

The toxic gossip train

You got a one-way ticket to manipulation station

Toxic gossip train

Tie me to the tracks and harass me for my past

Those rumors look like facts if you don't mind the gaps

I won't survive in the crash, but hey

At least you're havin' fun

Uh, hi, everyone

I've been wanting to come online and talk to you about a few things

Um, even though my team has strongly advised me to not say what I want to say

I recently realized that they never said that I couldn't sing what I wanna say, so

Here I am, and, um, today I only wanna talk about the facts

So, I hope that you'll be willing to listen

Here we go

Many years ago, I used to message my fans

Uh, but not in a creepy way like a lot of you are trying to suggest

It was more of a loser kind of way

Where I was just trying to be besties with everybody

It was kinda like, uh, when you go to like a family gathering, you know?

And there's a weird aunt there who keeps coming up to you and going like "Hey, girl, what's the tea!"

And you're like "Ehhh"

Um, that was me, but in group chats with my fans, it was weird

I've been sharing my life online for over 15 years

I've poured my heart out to you and because of that I feel

Like I'm talking to my friends, but, in the beginning of my career

I didn't really understand that maybe there should be some boundaries there

There were times in the DMs when I would overshare

Details of my life, which was really weird of me

I haven't done that for years, you see

Because I changed my behavior, and I took accountability

But that's not very interesting, is it?

So let's go on the toxic gossip train

The locomotive's fueled with hateful accusations

The toxic gossip train

Steamroll over someone's reputation

Toxic gossip train

Hop on board, but close your eyes, otherwise you'll realize

That the train is made of lies and that person you despise

Maybe didn't deserve to die

But hey, at least you're havin' fun

In all seriousness, I do think it's really important to hold people accountable for their mistakes

Um, y'know, we should hope that everyone can learn from their mistakes

And grow, and change their behavior, and be a better person

This is something that I've always tried to do when I make mistakes

And is something that I will continue to try t- what?

Oh, you don't care? Oh, okay

I thought you wanted me to take accountability

But that's not the point of your mob mentality, is it? No

Your goal is to ruin the life of the person you despise

While you dramatize your lies and monetize their demise

Yeah, um, I feel like I can already hear the comments on this video

"She's gaslighting, manipulating!"

"Ugh, she's a narcissist and a rat!"

"I would never make a mistake like that."

Oh, I'm sorry I didn't realize

That all of you are perfect, so please, criticize me

Bring out the daggers made from your perfect past

And stab me repeatedly in my bony little back

I'm sure you're disappointed in my shitty little song

I know that you wanted me to say that I was 100% in the wrong

Well, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna take that route

Of admitting to lies and rumors that you made up for clout

"Hey everybody, I found someone new to harass

She did some things that I do not like, in her past

So everybody, gather 'round, 'cause we're about to attack"

But not based on facts, oh no

Your loaded lethal weapon is your fingers on the keys

You don't need any armor when you can hide behind a screen

So, shoot me down, quick, with a click, and bam

My reputation's deceased

Uh, I also wanted to take a minute to talk about that girl, Miranda Sings

You know the one, yeah her

Uh, she's PG-13, it says that on my website

And it's always been that way

And that's why you won't find my videos on the YouTube Kids app

Anyway, um, I didn't realize it was my responsibility

To decide what was appropriate for every kid to see

I've always relied on parents to decide if they're comfortable

With their families watching my YouTube videos or coming to my live shows

Now, have I made some jokes in poor taste? Yes

Have I made lots of dumb mistakes? Yes

Am I sad that there's some fans that feel betrayed? Yes

But was my intention to manipulate? No

It doesn't really matter what my intention was

'Cause it seems as though everyone's already decided on that

Let me tell you, it's not very fun to have millions of people all over the world

Call you the most vile, horrendous, disgusting, life-ruining words

That a person can be called, in my opinion

Um, it doesn't matter that these things aren't true

Uh, everyone just believes that you are the type of person who manipulates and abuses children

So, I just wanted to say that, um

The only thing that I've ever groomed is my two Persian cats

I'm not a groomer, I'm just a loser

Who didn't understand I shouldn't respond to fans

And I'm not a predator even though a lot of you think so

Because 5 years ago, I made a fart joke

So, even though I know this video won't change anyone's mind about me

I still felt it was important to come on here and defend myself a little

And take accountability

And I also wanted to say that

To anyone out there who has ever supported me in any capacity

I really, really appreciate you, thank you

For what it's worth, I never had any bad intentions

But I do feel like shit

The toxic gossip train

Chugging down the tracks of misinformation

Toxic gossip train

You got a one way ticket to manipulation station

Toxic gossip train

You tied me to the tracks and harassed me for my past

Rumors look like facts when you don't mind the gaps

I won't survive in the crash, but hey

Hope you had some fun

Actually, y'know, I feel like maybe I should let you guys know something, um

Seems like, maybe you're confused about something? I don't know

Let me try to help, um

Sometimes people make a mistake and it doesn't make them a horrible person, whoa

Sometimes people can make a mistake and they're still a good person

Crazy, I know

Sometimes people can make a mistake and you don't have to take that mistake, oh no

And twist it up, and grind it, and add some lies to it, and pulverize it

And stab it with knives, and ruin a life, and, oh no

Sometimes people can make a mistake, it doesn't mean you gotta send them hate, oh no

Sometimes people can make a mistake and you can kindly let them know, and help them to grow

Sometimes people make mistakes, simply because they made a mistake?

And that mistake doesn't make them a terrible human

It just makes them a human

But what do I know?

Fuck me, right?

WHY DID YOU SEND ME THSI LKFOSIDJFJ

[ivannmoreno]

ᕼey Ɩt’s been a while since you saw my face Ɩ haven’t been doing so great Տo Ɩ took a little break Տo a lot of people are saying some things about me that aren’t ǫuite true Ɗoesn’t matter if it’s true, though ᒍust as long as it’s entertaining to you, right? Ƴou guys having fun?

Ꭺll aboard the toxic gossip train Ꮯhugging down the tracks of misinformation Ƭhe toxic gossip train Ƴou got a one-way ticket to manipulation station Ƭoxic gossip train Ƭie me to the tracks and harass me for my past Ƭhose rumors look like facts if you don’t mind the gaps Ɩ won’t survive in the crash, but hey Ꭺt least you’re havin’ fun

ᑌh, hi, everyone Ɩ’ve been wanting to come online and talk to you about a few things ᑌm, even though my team has strongly advised me to not say what Ɩ want to say Ɩ recently realized that they never said that Ɩ couldn’t sing what Ɩ wanna say, so ᕼere Ɩ am, and, um, today Ɩ only wanna talk about the facts Տo, Ɩ hope that you’ll be willing to listen ᕼere we go

Ꮇany years ago, Ɩ used to message my fans ᑌh, but not in a creepy way like a lot of you are trying to suggest Ɩt was more of a loser kind of way Ꮃhere Ɩ was just trying to be besties with everybody Ɩt was kinda like, uh, when you go to like a family gathering, you know? Ꭺnd there’s a weird aunt there who keeps coming up to you and going like, “ᕼey, girl, what’s the tea?” Ꭺnd you’re like, “Ꭼh” ᑌm, that was me, but in group chats with my fans, it was weird

Ɩ’ve been sharing my life online for over 15 years Ɩ’ve poured my heart out to you, and because of that Ɩ feel Ꮮike Ɩ’m talking to my friends, but, in the beginning of my career Ɩ didn’t really understand that maybe there should be some boundaries there Ƭhere were times in the ƊᎷs when Ɩ would overshare Ɗetails of my life, which was really weird of me Ɩ haven’t done that for years, you see Ɓecause Ɩ changed my behavior, and Ɩ took accountability

Ɓut that’s not very interesting, is it?

Տo let’s go on the toxic gossip train Ƭhe locomotive’s fueled with hateful accusations Ƭhe toxic gossip train Տteamroll over someone’s reputation Ƭoxic gossip train ᕼop on board, but close your eyes, otherwise you’ll realize Ƭhat the train is made of lies and that person you despise Ꮇaybe didn’t deserve to die Ɓut hey, at least you’re havin’ fun

Ɩn all seriousness, Ɩ do think it’s really important to hold people accountable for their mistakes ᑌm, you know, we should hope that everyone can learn from their mistakes Ꭺnd grow and change their behavior and be a better person Ƭhis is something that Ɩ’ve always tried to do when Ɩ make mistakes Ꭺnd it’s something that Ɩ will continue to try to do—what? Ơh, you don’t care? Ơh, okay

Ɩ thought you wanted me to take accountability Ɓut that’s not the point of your mob mentality, is it? Ɲo Ƴour goal is to ruin the life of the person you despise Ꮃhile you dramatize your lies and monetize their demise

Ƴeah, um, Ɩ feel like Ɩ can already hear the comments on this  video “Տhe’s gaslighting, manipulating!” “ᑌgh, she’s a narcissist and a rat” “Ɩ would never make a mistake like that”

Ơh, Ɩ’m sorry, Ɩ didn’t realize Ƭhat all of you are perfect, so please, criticize me Ɓring out the daggers made from your perfect past Ꭺnd stab me repeatedly in my bony, little back Ɩ’m sure you’re disappointed in my shitty little song Ɩ know that you wanted me to say that Ɩ was 100% in the wrong Ꮃell, Ɩ’m sorry, Ɩ’m not gonna take that route Ơf admitting to lies and rumors that you made up for clout

“ᕼey, everybody, Ɩ found someone new to harass Տhe did some things that Ɩ do not like in her past Տo everybody, gather round, ‘cause we’re about to attack” Ɓut not based on facts, oh, no Ƴour loaded lethal weapon is your fingers on the keys Ƴou don’t need any armor when you can hide behind a screen Տo shoot me down ǫuick with a click, and bam Ꮇy reputation’s deceased

ᑌh, Ɩ also wanted to take a minute to talk about that girl, Ꮇiranda Տings Ƴou know the one, yeah, her? ᑌh, she’s ᏢƓ-13, it says that on my website

Ꭺnd it’s always been that way Ꭺnd that’s why you won’t find my  videos on the ƳouƬube Ꮶids app Ꭺnyway, um, Ɩ didn’t realize it was my responsibility Ƭo decide what was appropriate for every kid to see Ɩ’ve always relied on parents to decide if they’re comfortable Ꮃith their families watching my ƳouƬube  videos or coming to my live shows Ɲow, have Ɩ made some jokes in poor taste? Ƴes ᕼave Ɩ made lots of dumb mistakes? Ƴes Ꭺm Ɩ sad that there’s some fans that feel betrayed? Ƴes Ɓut was my intention to manipulate? Ɲo

Ɩt doesn’t really matter what my intention was ‘Ꮯause it seems as though everyone’s already decided on that Ꮮet me tell you, it’s not very fun to have millions of people all over the world Ꮯall you the most vile, horrendous, disgusting, life-ruining words Ƭhat a person can be called, in my opinion ᑌm, it doesn’t matter that these things aren’t true ᑌh, everyone just believes that you are the type of person who manipulates and abuses children Տo, Ɩ just wanted to say that, um Ƭhe only thing that Ɩ’ve ever groomed is my two Ꮲersian cats Ɩ’m not a groomer, Ɩ’m just a loser

Ꮃho didn’t understand Ɩ shouldn’t respond to fans Ꭺnd Ɩ’m not a predator even though a lot of you think so Ɓecause 5 years ago, Ɩ made a fart joke Տo, even though Ɩ know this  video won’t change anyone’s mind about me Ɩ still felt it was important to come on here and defend myself a little Ꭺnd take accountability Ꭺnd Ɩ also wanted to say that Ƭo anyone out there who has ever supported me in any capacity

Ɩ really, really appreciate you, thank you ᖴor what it’s worth, Ɩ never had any bad intentions Ɓut Ɩ do feel like shit

Ƭhe toxic gossip train Ƴou’re chugging down the tracks of misinformation Ƭoxic gossip train Ƴou got a one-way ticket to manipulation station Ƭoxic gossip train Ƴou tied me to the tracks and harassed me for my past ᖇumors look like facts when you don’t mind the gaps Ɩ won’t survive in the crash, but hey Ɩ hope you had some fun

Ꭺctually, you know, Ɩ feel like maybe Ɩ should let you guys know something, um Տeems like maybe you’re confused about something? Ɩ don’t know Ꮮet me try to help, um

Տometimes people make a mistake and it doesn’t make them a horrible person, whoa Տometimes people can make a mistake and they’re still a good person Ꮯrazy, Ɩ know Տometimes people can make a mistake and you don’t have to take that mistake, oh, no Ꭺnd twist it up and grind it and add some lies to it and pulverize it Ꭺnd stab it with knives and ruin a life, and, oh, no Տometimes people can make a mistake, it doesn’t mean you gotta send them hate, oh, no Տometimes people can make a mistake and you can kindly let them know and help them to grow Տometimes people make mistakes simply because they made a mistake Ꭺnd that mistake doesn’t make them a terrible human Ɩt just makes them a human

Ɓut what do Ɩ know? ᖴuck me, right?

Wow, hello!

So, I was actually feeling pretty motivated to write this post yesterday. But things have gotten exponentially worse, and I admit the pressure is getting to me. There seem to be a ton of expectations surrounding what I should be saying here, in order to… I guess, absolve myself? As if there’s a checklist people want me to go through to perform the “perfect” creator apology. But, I don’t see the point. I care a lot about this community and I think you deserve something a lot more sincere than some hollow chat-gpt apology. I understand that that’s foolish, on my part. Things are done that way so often because they work. But what you’ll find throughout this post, is that I’m kind of an idiot about some things. I’m stubborn and hard-headed and a little bit pretentious. And so, what I’m planning to do here is to simply tell you the truth about what happened. No cherry picking. All my mistakes, but also the context that goes with them. And at the end, my formal apology. This is a long and winding tale with a lot of characters. I’m going to be sharing some usernames as we go, in the interest of clarity and transparency. You’ll understand why with the context. But please do not seek these people out. Don’t pick fights with them. It will only make everything worse, for all involved.

Cool? Cool. But first I need to address the elephant in the room. This will probably seem like irrelevant drama at first, but this is the nuance and background that I wasn’t adequately able to articulate the night before last. In more ways than one, this is a story told in twos. The first set of twos is you, the readers. Who you are, and what you’re hoping to find out in this post.

1.      The overwhelming majority of you, are earnestly wanting to understand what has happened in the Nevermore Discord. You are concerned that I am not who you hoped I was. You are disappointed, and I understand why. To you, I am so sorry. I want to say that things are not as bad as they seem, but that is not for me to decide. You will need to draw your own conclusions from the words I write. And I understand, whatever you choose to do next.

2.      And there is a small, but incredibly vocal minority of people who are absolutely living for this. They are spreading complete fabrications with no screenshots to speak of. Horrible, horrible accusations. People who are more excited about watching a dumpsterfire than they are about the series that brought them here in the first place. I’m not going to attempt to cater to those people in this post. Because nothing will ever be good enough. Everything that can be taken in bad faith will be taken in bad faith. It would be pointless. But you’ll see them in the comments and reblogs. This is a known group to not only myself, but many others. I will share some of their names in a later section so you know who to watch for. They will make a lot of noise around this post because they’ve been trying to make something like this happen for actual years. And now that I had a genuinely concerning response that good people reasonably want me to explain, they’re lunging at the chance to throw absolutely anything at the wall. It’s parasocial levels of hatred. This is some deep and horrible lore.

The next set of twos is how two things can be true at the same time. And that is exactly what is going on here, in this situation. Let me be really clear, because I don’t want either truth to be lost in my explanation as they are intrinsically linked to one another.

1.      I did a downright terrible job explaining myself in the Discord when people started asking about crimson. I can give you all kinds of contributing factors for this, and I might later. But none of them really matter. It was incredibly careless of me to use “egging them on” and “cried wolf”  to describe what I understood. At the time I was really laser-focused on expressing what happened as simply and quickly as possible because the channel replies were paused and I felt like everyone was just waiting for me to be finished with my message. But after stepping back, I immediately understood how badly I messed up, because of course these idioms are routinely weaponized against survivors of SA and CSA. That is not how I intended to use them. It was an unfortunate case of one thing looking and sounding like another thing. Incredibly ham-fisted and irresponsible on my part. To the survivors who read my words and felt that it echoed their past experiences, I’m heartbroken that I did that to you. That lapse of judgement was a betrayal to both you and me. I don’t know where my head went, and I’m just blown away by my own lack of awareness in that message. So for that I am and will continue to be sorry.

2.      The second thing that can be true is that, while you are all absolutely owed an explanation and an apology, there are also some people amongst you who are using this fuck-up on my part as a springboard to take me down.  These people have been trying to get a call out post to pop off about me for at least a year, and they have been very quick to jump into the reblogs and comments about this very serious topic with complete lies and slander. Just, anything that might stick to the wall. We’ll address this later on as well. But please understand that me discussing the harassment I’ve faced from these groups is not at the expense of me also owning up to my faults and taking the proper accountability.

And the last set of twos is one I’ve alluded to in the first sets, concerning a pair of toxic side-servers that ran adjacent to the main Nevermore Discord. Completely unofficial cliques. And invisible to myself and Flynn and our mod team. We were eventually made aware that both of them were breaking laws and Discord ToS in ways that leaked into our server and affected our members negatively. As such, both groups were mass-banned. And the cliques are the ones running a majority of the discourse you’ve been seeing here, because while they are formally banned from the discord, we have absolutely no say in their participation on Tumblr. Now, keep in mind. Both of these groups were uncovered after crimson was banned the first time. That’s important later.

Clique #1

My understanding of the first group is that it started as a gaming server for people who met one another through the Nevermore Discord. I don’t know when or why it started being used to talk shit about other readers, but I do know that it got really vicious. And it was sort of an open secret for long before I knew anything about it. I found out after that there were a lot of people passively in this server, just observing. It was that much of a spectacle.

Now, this clique had been pretty rude. Like they’d try to start fights with me in the discord fairly often, both in the Patreon and free spaces. But it wasn’t grounds for dismissal until we found out about the baiting and the alts.  These people had a lot of grievances, but one really united them: they were extremely upset about anyone who would ship Prospero.

Many of you know, that Prospero is an aromantic character, canonically. And you may notice that canonically, he has no apparent love interest. But this group wanted to make sure other readers were not thinking about Prospero in relationships, or creating ship content of him for any reason on the grounds that it would be considered a “proship.” I told them (and I stand on this) that it’s not up to them to police the thoughts of other readers, and that aromantic people have widely varying lifestyles and experiences and do not need to be infantilized that way.

This turned out to be a bad move on my part, because it brought with it an onslaught of alt accounts coming in and "innocently" kicking up what I now refer to as the “prosp-aro” debate every time they had the chance. But because of this and what a common occurrence it was, we started being able to pick out the alts. And we realized that this group of people had been using the same alt accounts with different names to antagonize certain readers they’d decided they hated, and it had gone on for a long time.

I did a lot of investigative work in dms trying to figure out who all was responsible for the harassment, and settled on a list that was vetted by three different people who knew about the clique. And all three of these people insisted that, while Laci was in the group and in a lot of the screencaps saying pretty dubious things, that she was good people. So I believe them, and let Laci stay. This group was banned on April 3, 2024, and contained the following users:

-          lilnatx (nat)

-          suitino (sushi)

-          jj_the_jet_plane (layden)

-          rivsticks (jasper)

-          atheimee (athena)

-          jinxs.com (lanx/jinx)

-          smartestginger (nico)

-          thereallandofbugs (bugs)

-          rosienemui (rosie)

These were the names they were known by on the Discord. I don’t have the Tumblr accounts tied to these identities. But some might be the same. I know a lot of them are here.  It should be noted that jinx was later unbanned due to pressure from Laci that they had been banned in error, after the fact. We allowed them back in after a few days as a favor to Laci since the situation seemed like it was very stressful for her. This would prove to be yet another a mistake since, as you have probably seen in the screenshots from the night before last, jinx rapidly escalated things to another level while I was trying to figure out how to handle crimson’s unbanning and subsequent rebanning an hour later.

Clique #2

Phew. Still with me? Great. The second group we needed to ban was one that actually started long before the first one, but was a lot smaller and comparatively more subtle. This group, to my knowledge, cropped up around the time that ep. 39 of Nevermore was released. (11/10/22) We knew about this group but not who all was involved in it or in what capacity for a very long time. They would consistently post things on Tumblr trying to start a scandal. I recall posts alleging that we were racists, or SA apologists, or that we were sending death threats to a random confessions account.

To be clear, these allegations are completely false. This clique will say anything. Like a recent post one of them put up during this discourse said that hiwi (our mod) is both a r*pe apologist and a childhood friend of mine and that’s the only reason she hasn’t been banned. Hiwi is absolutely nothing of the sort, and I have never met her in person. In fact, she lives on the other side of the continent.

Now, this clique is a little different than the first. The first, to my knowledge, was a group of friends that got toxic and felt morally superior about their opinions and it all kind of got away from them. The vibe was a little catty, I guess. Gossipy. But this clique has more of a stalker vibe. It’s dark.

They’ve had it out specifically for me for as long as I can remember. And some of them (at least one, at all times) would subscribe to our patreon, both to sow dissent in our stream chats and also to leak literally all the content back to the others, including me talking about random shit like what I ate for lunch. Just so they could like. Laugh about it, I guess. I’ll never understand why. [Editing note: because in the final moments of proofreading this post I see one of these people has made some master post about what a terrible person I am? A lot of those screenshots are from Patreon channels and the guy STILL has them laying around. I’m telling you, they stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.] 

The biggest grievance this clique had is that any ship with Montresor is an “SA fetish ship” because to them he is a r*pist because of how he made Ada bark (?) and since Montrada is canon, that means we are supporters of SA, and that Morella and Ada should be together instead. Listen, I’ll level with you, this one baffles me. I don’t even know how to begin to untangle it. But if you see a lot of vitriol about us being SA apologists from these users, it’s because Montresor exists. That’s pretty much it.

You can ask them for screencaps ‘til you’re blue in the face, but unless they build fake ones from the ground up, they’re never going to be able to back up their wild claims. Simply put, they’re provocateurs, and they use the scariest words they can to whip people up into a panic.

We became aware that they were leaking patreon content when one of them was caught publicly referring to things that were being said behind a paywall when we knew they weren’t a patron. It unraveled from there.  People who knew about their antics shared screenshots and information with us, and we finally realized the scope of the clique’s hatred and banned whoever was even left in the Nevermore Discord. But they continue to be active in the community on tumblr. You’ll have seen them around. They were banned on 5/11/2024 and the names involved are as follows (again, a mishmash of discord names, nicknames, and tumblr accounts):

- percy (gremlinguy145 on tumblr)

- queenmorningrose (annabel-lee-nevermore on tumblr)

- spoopycactus630 (spoopy-nevermore-dump on tumblr)

- grif/horrorshow (conscience-grim on tumblr)

- unreqiknizd

- duke aralt (westofthestyx)

- eden (sapphic-mad-scientist on tumblr)

- priemium

Again I’d like to reiterate. The point in sharing these names is not to incite any sort of response against these people. But they are folding themselves into the fray and doing what they can to whip everyone else up into a mob, and all as we’re talking about a discord server that they have been banned from for months now. The above context is also relevant for the next section, which is why you’re all here in the first place.

What the hell happened with Crimson?

I hope it’s not confusing, but now we’re going back to 3/14/2024, before anything I just outlined above had come to light. The cliques were quietly doing their harassment and baiting and raiding and whatever-the-hell behind the scenes, but Flynn and I and the mods were blissfully unaware of how bad it was getting. We get a dm from Laci. The same Laci who was part of Clique #1 and was rescued from being banned with the others by her friends outside the group. Jinx’s friend, who managed to get them unbanned as well. You have probably seen these screencaps already, but I will show them to you again, just in case.

Sufficed to say, we were immediately alarmed by the information Laci shared in her DM with us. Now, I want to be very clear about this because it’s been lost in the game of telephone. What Laci outlines in her dm to me, were the events that occurred between six users (including crimson) in a group chat with minors. Everyone in the evidence was censored (pfp and username), as was the image that crimson showed them. When I asked, Laci agreed to give me one name of one of the minors in the dm. I’ll call them Alice, but that is not their real name. I asked if I could talk to Alice about this, I was told by Laci, no. Alice doesn’t want to talk. I was like, ok I understand, that’s fine. 

I hope it makes sense when I say that it is not feasible for us to moderate the things that happen in peoples’ dms. As you’ve seen above, the mod team doesn’t usually get involved with drama unless whatever is happening is directly affecting the experience people are having in the Nevermore Discord because that is all we can see and the only place we have any real authority.  But this was obviously a special case. We banned crimson very quickly without asking any follow-up questions, because of course we did!? I’ve seen people say I’m harboring or defending crimson or that we’re buddies but we barely spoke, ever. They were a stranger to me then, and they still are now.

But something about the entire situation wasn’t adding up to me. And I want to be clear that none of this is in any way meant to discredit csa survivors, I’m really just trying to put you in my headspace and walk you through my thought process. But I found that the evidence was just, sort of strange. Laci started her dm explaining that she found this information out because she and a group of people were investigating crimson for ‘art tracing’ which felt, to me, like a bizarre non-sequitur and totally irrelevant next to the evidence of them showing nsfw content to minors. Petty, kind of. Like I wanted to ask – why were you doing that in the first place? People trace Flynn’s art all the time. As long as they’re not selling it, it’s not a big deal.

Most of the crops are from a PC but the windows are oddly small, and only contain a couple messages at a time. Some have American formatted time and some have European formatted time. So different users, I assume? The names were blotted out, which I would understand for a public call-out but not for a private report to the mod team. Laci was not in this gc at any point in time, despite being the one to report. 

One of the users was apparently 12, to which I ask – what is a 12-year-old doing on discord at all? If we knew who they were, we would have reported the account. Discord is not a safe place for a child that age, let alone a small group chat. Along with 18-year-old Crimson, there was also a 22- and 17-year-old in the chat, which left us wondering – why hadn’t anything been done?

I had no evidence that anyone ever told crimson they were minors, and I feel if it existed, it would have been in the screencap dump (I find that sometimes a noticeable lack of key evidence is evidence in itself). No one seems to have tried to kick crimson from the group chat or report their account for inappropriate behavior. Then there’s the fact that this is a group chat. Anyone in it can leave at any time. 

Then I came across the messages that started this whole gc, and it only got stranger when I realized Alice started it, called it “Women Lovers” and created it “so we can talk about Nevermore women without having to filter ourselves” after they all reacted to a sultry but sfw drawing of Lenore that crimson had made and posted in our hideout channel. And all that made me wonder why Alice didn’t just kick crimson, if she had admin power?  Do you see what I mean? It’s just all a bit head tilty. I noticed it at the time. But I said nothing. Because it didn’t matter. Crimson, no matter what happened, exposed minors to nsfw content. And that’s on them. And I’ve never in my life defended it. We banned them.

Crimson was beside herself. She came off humiliated and apologetic, and insisted she had no idea and begged to come back to a community she said she loved. But we told her no, there’s no coming back from doing what she did.

Time passes and we uncover Clique #1. And while we figured out who the main players were, I dmed with Laci. And it was Laci herself, who tells me that it was Alice who made most of Clique #1’s alt accounts, and that it was Alice who used those alt accounts to harass people and try to get them to start fights or say something that might get them in trouble. 

And I’ll be honest with you, the mod team still didn’t think much of it, outside of – we need to figure out which accounts were the alts. So we did. We had several confirmed to us.  And those accounts were zeroing in on certain users that the clique didn’t like. At the time we noticed two notable targets in addition to the mod team. I won’t name them, it’s their business if they want to weigh in about all that. But in screencaps, they’ll be labeled Target #1 and Target #2.

More time passes and Clique #2 comes to light. As you can imagine, by now we’re feeling disillusioned, and very tired of trying to moderate shit we cannot see for ourselves. And that’s when crimson comes back to very hesitantly ask if they might be able to appeal their ban. It wasn’t until then that it occurred to us that Laci (on behalf of Alice) was the only one who ever reported anything to us about Crimson. 

And I want to just say that again. Because it’s gotten lost too. Laci was the only person who ever reported Crimson. There was not one single other person who ever sent a modmail or a dm or even a ping to anybody on the mod team. I have since (only yesterday) seen some screencaps that are rather skin crawly, but even those happened in yet another side server. Thinking on this, the mods went back through the known alt accounts Alice had used. And they found that Alice harassed crimson both on her main account and on the same alt accounts that she used to harass the other targets.

By now, Alice is banned for completely unrelated reasons. Not because of what happened with Crimson. I’ve seen that one flying around and I’m sorry it’s just not true. It’s because she was relentlessly harassing and cyberbullying people in the discord we moderate. Laci is still there, but had lost my trust, for being involved with both the drama I’ve mentioned here and more that I don’t care to dip into. It’s ultimately irrelevant. But what am I going to say to Laci? “Hey, did you and Alice, by any chance, coordinate some kind of bizarre trap together to get crimson banned from the discord because you suspected them of tracing their art?” And once again. Because I want to keep this top of mind. Even if that were the case, it doesn’t make what Crimson did alright, and it never will. Sharing nsfw content in front of minors is a disgusting thing to do. And one that we frankly are really irritating about in the moderation of the discord. I’ve heard people say that we over-moderate when it comes to art. 

But all this stuff about a “known pedophile?” If it was known, then we were on the outs. And to even this minute right now, I don’t have any conclusive evidence that Crimson is a pedophile. The evidence I have is that Crimson shared nsfw with a group of people whose ages they did not know. Which is fucking gross. It’s an adult’s responsibility to make sure they’re speaking with other adults before posting things of that nature. 

But at the time, the way I read the situation is that Crimson had only just stopped being a minor and was egregiously negligent in how they were speaking and what they were posting, likely in part due to them not being aware enough of their adult responsibilities.  And hey. I know some of you are chomping at the bit. You can call me naïve for this! This is what I’m referring to when I say that I can be a real idiot. But I feel everyone has been very quick to call Crimson a pedophile. I know this is pedantic to say, but the prerequisite for being a pedophile is “being attracted to minors.” Based on the information I had at my fingertips, I did not think Crimson sought out these minors. Crimson was invited to the gc, they did not ask to join. 

I have seen discussions about all the things crimson did to their victims since we unbanned them but I have not seen screencaps to support that whole ‘marriage proposal’ thing, and again I think it sounds a bit odd coming as a pedophilia accusation from someone only one year younger than crimson.  

But you know what? I don’t know crimson. Maybe we were wrong. But even if we weren’t, I realize in hindsight that it was a stupid decision for the mod team to give them a second chance. We didn’t have anyone to consult about what happened because all the other people in the chat had been obscured from me and I didn’t feel like Laci would give me a straight answer. 

The mods and I felt at the time that crimson, like the other targets of Clique #1, had been singled out and that they deserved another very closely monitored chance in the discord, which they said they still missed dearly. I’m a bleeding heart, alright? A total sap. I know that. But being honest with you, I felt bad. It feels horrible to be singled out and targeted. And I was probably too close to that feeling at the time, seeing as we were on the tail end of finding out the Clique #2 had pursued me so relentlessly for so long. 

So for my part, I’m sorry. I made a rash decision that was influenced by some very personal circumstances. And we should have left it alone. Based on the evidence I've seen, I don’t know if I personally would call crimson a pedophile and certainly I wouldn't call them a known pedophile, but I am regretful that we risked it either way.

When I was trying to explain all of this in the west common room channel two nights back, things had boiled over and were already getting out of hand very quickly. A lot of brand new accounts were joining the discord with one word intros just to start conflicts in the public server with crimson. Alts. Either from banned users or burner accounts. And I got panicky. One of the mods paused the messages in west common room but no one besides me was available to handle the situation at that moment. Reacts about being silenced were pouring in and I felt pressured to quickly take over and try to explain. 

In my rush, I stupidly didn’t backread more than a quick skim. And I ate shit, y’all. You saw. One thing I want to state outright. I’m talking a lot about my thoughts and my feelings and it’s because I don’t wanna speak for Flynn or for the mods. But I didn’t make this decision alone. In fact, I was dragging my feet and being really lazy about okaying the whole thing. Just because I was busy, not because I was fretting over it or anything. But I had to be pinged and then literally tapped on the shoulder by Flynn, asking me to respond to mod chat when this was being discussed earlier that day. That doesn’t change the fact that I was part of the decision. I agreed to unban crimson. Foolishly. I understand that, now. 

I hope that now it makes some more sense though, how it came to happen. I never meant to hurt anyone. My own past and present feelings got in the way, and I own that. But in the moment, my personal intention was to give crimson a second chance because I felt that they’d been targeted by Clique #1. Not to ignore anyone’s concerns or make them feel unsafe, even if those were the ultimate outcome.  

So, completely underprepared and defensive, I jumped into west common room and I just. Blew it. Totally fucking blew it. I knew it instantly but it’s hard to stay logical when people are telling you you’re vile and evil and they’re sick that they ever thought you were a good person and that they’ll never see you the same way again. My mind went blank and I don’t really remember much of what happened next. But I said what I said, and I should have done better. 

I wish there was a word bigger than sorry. I’m beside myself. I know there was probably a way to make everyone happy. To make everything okay. But I wasn't clever enough to figure it out in the moment, and it eats at me. So it’s like I’m sorry for my poor judgment and my terrible choice of words, but there’s another layer where I’m also sorry for not matching how wonderful this community is with how wonderful (or well, unwonderful) I was two nights ago. I promise I am going to work harder to be better for you all.

Again, to every victim of SA and CSA, my heart is with you, more personally than you might realize. I don’t think I could have handled my explanation in a worse way. And I’m so so sorry.

Moving forward, I am also going to take an enormous step back from moderating and participating in the discord in general. I feel like a lot of this happened because I was still treating it like it belonged to a smaller fandom, like Shiloh’s. But realistically, I don’t have time to both moderate and make the series itself, and I really dragged my feet on being honest with myself about that. And for that too, I apologize. We’re going to get more mods, they’re going to have full control of the moderation, and Flynn and I are going to do what we love more than anything in the world and just make Nevermore.

I understand if you won’t be there for it. This is not a flattering picture I’ve painted for you. And you’d be well within your rights, to decide not to give us another chance. But it's been a pleasure to lurk here in this wildly talented corner of tumblr. And I’ll never forget it. <3 Yours truly, -Kit Trace

[harpywritesficreduction]

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Everything you need to know is (hopefully) beneath the readmore!

A bit about me: I use she/her pronouns, but if you ever forget, any pronouns are fine. It's all good. I’m an atheist and whenever I say god, you can replace ‘god’ with ‘Andrew John Hozier-Byrne’ and it will work as intended. I’m always tired and I like to spend my free time in bed or on my computer.

Policies (harpy's house rules):

18+: I do post about smut and make some truly awful dirty jokes. Not that I’m really bothered if minors follow me, it’s more of a, yknow, do what you want just don’t tell me sort of thing. Curate your own online experience.

Tagging (@-ing me): go for it! I oscillate between seeing every post on the dash and not being active for days or weeks. If you want me to see something, tag me! I’d appreciate it. I'll reply from my main blog, @harpywritesfic.

Related works: I welcome fanart, podfics, playlists, anything inspired by my fics! Yes, even other fics! Just please, please, PLEASE tell me so I can see it, because I can guarantee you it would get me higher than a line of coke. I don't even need to try coke to know it would, because the fact that someone would be that inspired by my writing is just insane.

Constructive criticism: If you ask first and word your criticism politely, I'm open to receiving it. Otherwise, no thank you! Writing fanfic is a hobby, whether I'm enjoying myself is more important than making a masterpiece.

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You can also reblog anything I post. I say things because they’re funny, it’s all fair game. If I don’t want it reblogged I’ll turn off reblogs.

Messaging: feel free! I don’t bite :) tumblr messaging sucks, so if we're mutuals, we can move to discord instead!

Please know that I’m neurodivergent and my brain works in mysterious ways. You might have to tell me if I’m being annoying or if I’ve said something that bothered you. I’m not so good at reading social situations, and I would rather you say something than not! You won’t hurt my feelings, and I’d hate to upset someone by accident.

Requests are currently closed!

The requests in my wips are from October 2022 and I have yet to write them, so I'm not taking any more at this time. I have a dreadful time working on anything that I'm not really excited about (damn my dopamine deficient brain) and I'd rather not disappoint when your request becomes one of my fifty unfinished wips.

I’m not comfortable writing (subject to change):

character death

nsfw

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Updated 11/1/24

[queenoffantasyland]

So about whatshisname…

First off, I will admit this is kind of an intense overshare to just dump onto Tumblr, but I’m a millennial with a lot of emotions and this is what we do. In order to protect a semblance of anonymity, I have changed names and kept locations vague. But I am pouring this all into a Google Doc because I have still been processing how in less than a year a person went from a mild acquaintance to one of the most important people in my life and then it only took another year for him to become somebody that I used to know. They say hindsight is 20/20, but it still feels like I can see the traffic light but the blurred sunbursts of colored lights obscure the path ahead of me necessitating another lens to see things clearly.

So as the dulcet tones of Julie Andrews remind me: the beginning is a very good place to start. Being social has not been my strong suit. From about 2nd grade to my early 20s I straight-up didn’t have friends. On multiple occasions I was told I was “too much” and between repeated rejection from friendships, a cross-country move, and 4 middle schools later I understood that there were people that would allow me to sit at their table for lunch but did not want to engage with me socially once the final bell rang. No sleepovers, no birthday parties, no “let’s go to the movies and then get Taco Bell.” Likewise, if making friends was this unattainable– dating or flirting with guys in my teen years was completely off the table. But I had given myself the hope that I just needed to move back to California and go to college, where I’d find my sitcom-like circle of friends and the perfect guy and be happy.

College at first gave me hope but it was very clear, very soon, that I was the seventh wheel in the group. I had social engagements that I went to now but I was only included as the roommate of the effervescent Vocal Performance major that could flirt with the best of ‘em. Fortunately, my roommate's shitty boyfriend went to church with Daphne, who ran in different social circles but also liked talking about pop culture and wasn’t put off by the intensity of receiving a Powerpoint of TV recommendations. We stayed “periodically texting each other” friends even as I left the university I was attending. Being away from family and in an environment where my worst impulses were fully unregulated, and my deep loneliness had not been solved by leaving my small town prompted my mental health to spiral downward. So my parents had me transfer to a college on the East Coast to live with my sister as a hail mary attempt getting me to fit the plan every boomer parent sets out for their daughter: focus on your grades, go to college, meet someone to marry, get a good job, get a house, etc. It was at this new college that I entered a deep depression that was truly the darkest time of my life. It became clear that higher education was not for me, and I moved back to California to live with my parents and work full-time.

The only thing keeping me from my darkest thoughts and helping me hold on during this period was finding my people in online fandom communities. Finding other women out there who thought about fictional characters as often and as in-depth as me was a lifeline. I found people just as moved by the power of stories and a good romance. We were of varying ages and lived in various time zones, but we were kindred spirits. People who didn’t just tolerate me talking about Felicity Smoak or Elizabeth Swann for hours on end, but found enjoyment from it. People who didn’t think I was “too intense” for saying that our friendship meant so much to me a few weeks into knowing each other. It was in this safe space, that I brought Daphne,my one sorta-kinda friend from college, into fandom and bonded to where she is now one of my very best friends. To this day, I have women that I meant through tumblr or Twitter that are my lifeline that make all the out-of-pocket nonsense that fandom brings worth it.

Now I have friends for the first time since I was ten. Awesome! Shouldn't I be dating though too? I should’ve had a kiss that was not a part of a high school play with a closted gay kid by now, right? And even that kiss I had to be the initiator. That’s what women in their early 20s do. Get on those apps, go on dates, have some epic first love or a string of comically regrettable boyfriends to laugh about when you are older. I guess. So I hop onto OkCupid and play the swiping game during my breaks at my mall retail job, and find a guy that is Christian, into movies, and cute enough. We message for about a week and he says we should go on a date: a movie and dinner. I’m about to get my “has gone on an actual date and isn’t a prudish spinster” badge! I drive an hour to a strip mall by where he lives and we see The Big Short and eat overpriced burgers at a nearby gastropub. It’s all going perfect. He walks me to my car after dinner and when I think he’s going in for a hug he kisses me. My cheeks are inflamed with an immediate blush. He’s going in for a second kiss, but I have no idea what to do so I hug him and give a cute little wave as I flee into my car to drive to Daphne’s apartment to freak out over the whole thing over a cup of Coldstone. This should be magical, right? Why does the feeling of his lips on mine feel about the same as the high school theater kiss? I wrote it off in my head that I wasn’t expecting the kiss and that’s why it had no spark. Fast forward to the end of the second date, watching Creed and dinner at PF Chang’s, that I realized while this guy was nice enough I wasn’t actually interested in him. I was interested in fitting in and not being the weirdo that’s never had a guy kiss them even into my twenties. Neither of those things are reason enough to keep dating a guy that is essentially a prop in my coming-of-age checklist, so I texted him that I didn’t think things were going to work out for a third date. After those two dates, I put dating on the backburner and prioritized other aspects of my life: mental health, repairing family relationships, trying to achieve a semblance of financial independence, etc. Granted there were enough fictional or celebrity crushes over the years that in addition to the purchase of my first vibrator, did confirm that I was indeed attracted to guys; but dating was never a focus.

So in building my career and being closer to family, I move back to Texas in fall of 2017 and start a new job. This is where I meet Jared. To paint a picture,my sports-averse self was attracted to him even when he was discussing football. One of my fandom friends asked if there were cute guys at the new job that caught my fancy, to which I replied “The only dude remotely attractive is my freaking trainer and that’s not an option.” Since I’ve valued building a reputation of professionalism, his role as a trainer and later to a manager precluded any of that initial attraction from growing into anything else (as if I could flirt or be confident to act on it at the time but that’s not the point). I packed those butterflies into a box and shoved that box into the attic– to the point that I’d forget that box existed. There was the time when he was back in my department and noted that he saw my Bumble profile, didn’t swipe right because he didn’t want to cross those lines, but commented that I have a nice profile. His respectfulness and professionalism mixed with a bit of a compliment made me remember that box of butterflies in the attic, and then promptly shoved it back in the rafters. Reign it in, girl.

Fast forward a few years and he’s back in the department I work in again as an interim while they look for a new person to fill the manager role. I’m in the interview process to potentially get that role, which means I can relax a little in my current position and not be laser-focused on making sales every second I’m at work and actually talk to people. It’s at this time that one of my coworkers gives me the 411 on Jared. You know those coworkers who have the magical ability to get everyone they talk to to divulge their entire life story? This was her. So it’s at this time that I learn that he’s a lot closer to my age than I thought he was, that he also had family in church leadership like me, we both like nerdy pop culture shit, and that he’s tired of “dating around” and “wants to find a wife”. Keep in mind that the company where I work is kinda weird in how they sorta encourage people to date, married couples to both work there, etc. With all this in mind, I decided to take my mind off of the job interview I did for the manager role by chatting with Jared. As we both look out the window I comment on the sunset, and he responds with an anecdote of how during the last time he worked in this department he’d take a picture of the sunset every evening and send it to his girlfriend at the time “This sunset is almost as beautiful as you.” Externally, I tease him about how corny but smooth that line is. Inside, I’m melting. It’s such a sweet little romantic gesture that I have never gotten to experience, I’ve just read it in fanfic. I excuse myself to go cry in the bathroom as the realization of just how much I’d love to experience something like that, and potentially experience that with Jared. And thus the rafters give way, the box falls down from the attic and breaks open to release those 4 year old butterflies.

So I got the manager job the next day, and have about 2 weeks before I start my new role giving me very little to do at work except chat with Jared on the days we are scheduled together. He gives me his phone number in case I need his help as I adjust to the new role. After a few strictly work related texts, an actual friendship begins to form as text conversations stray to movie trailer reactions and other light but fun topics. He finds reasons to pop by my department’s office to say hi even though we work nowhere near each other. It is in one of those chats that we talk and I see that his smile doesn’t reach his eyes, his normal charismatic and jovial demeanor is dimmed in a way that only someone also good at veiling sadness with a happy face can tell. The middle of shift is not the time or place to call him out on it, but that evening I texted Jared to check in and let him know I am here for him for more than reacting to the latest episode of Moon Knight. He opens up to me about things he’s been struggling with and we proceed to have a text conversation for the next four and a half hours– topics ranging from mental health struggles and past traumas to the “three fictional characters to describe me” meme and comedians we enjoyed.It was definitely a turning point, where I truly felt we were getting to know each other and really connect. The fact that my deepest friendships were made in text conversations or DMs on Twitter made it easy for me to open up and be my most authentic self. And as these Sunday night text conversations continued, I knew that my crush was moving beyond infatuation.

At the end of that summer, I went on vacation: a day at Disneyland and then a girls’ trip in Lake Tahoe with some of my closest friends made through the Olicity fandom. I was in my favorite place in the entire world, and I still couldn’t stop thinking of him. In the hundreds of times I've been to Disneyland I’ve looked at the couples holding hands, wearing coordinating outfits, or kissing during World of Color and wistfully thought “One day.” And now as I walked through the Happiest Place on Earth, I couldn’t help but think of what it would be like to share it with Jared. I wasn’t able to help myself from texting throughout the day sharing pics of Avengers Campus and Galaxy’s Edge. At the end of the day, I saw a Chewbacca pen in one of the shops on Main Street USA and just had to buy it for him. I gave a teaser text with the gift and he freaked out a little that I’d get him something because apparently he’s extraordinarily bad at receiving gifts which I just found even more endearing. Once in Tahoe, I had the opportunity to catch my ladies up with the whole situation. They totally shipped us and encouraged me to be bold and make a move– sometimes guys are dumb and you have to say you like them with a neon sign. I thought my particular brand of nerd flirting was not that subtle. I mean in the “three fictional characters to describe me” meme discussion I told him he was a mixture of Nick Miller, Han Solo, and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man, but I trusted my friends that were either married or had a serious boyfriend since this all was still very much uncharted waters for me. So while I knew I needed to be bold I wanted to invite him to a group setting where we could spend more time together outside of work before going on an outright date. When I got back from the girls’ trip, I invited him to my family’s Labor Day barbecue where he would basically meet my whole family and some of my sister’s friends from church to keep the whole thing still fairly lowkey. He was super stoked at the invite, since living hours away from family is rough on big holidays. He was a perfect gentleman and offered to pick me up to drive to my parents’ house together and offered to bring a bottle of wine to be a good guest. I informed neither me or my family drink (this will come up later) but that his presence was a gift unto itself. Before we walked into my parents’ house, I gave him the Chewbacca pen I got for him at Disneyland. His delighted laughter made my impulse buy totally worth it.

It was an amazing day. Good food, lots of laughter, and he fit in with my family so well. I had even warned my crazy aunt that I was bringing a guy that I was just friends with and to please be chill in hopes things could one day be more. Even she was on her best behavior, which made my mom joke if I could bring him every major holiday. It went literally perfectly. When it was time for him to go I had him drive me back to my apartment, even though as soon as he left I got in my car to go back to my parent’s house to gush about him with my mom and sister. Everyone loved him. He even texted a nice thank you for inviting him and that my family was so welcoming and he had a great time. I made the (only kind of a) joke with him about me separating my work and personal personas by being Maddison at work and Maddie with those who know and care about me, and that I enjoyed getting to be Maddie with him for a full day. To which he replied, he can see the difference and he really liked getting to know Maddie (with a blushing emoji at the end). At that point, I was far past a crush and this was becoming real feelings.

The following week, I was scrolling through Instagram and I got an ad for a string quartet concert playing movie scores from SciFi and Fantasy films being played in a candlelit venue. This was it. I literally couldn’t imagine a better first date for us. I talked about it with my friend in LA and she mentioned that these events sell out quickly so I should go ahead and get the tickets since they were relatively inexpensive. So with tickets already bought and after drafting the invite text and focus grouping it with like 8 different women to make sure I had the right levels of flirty but casual, I sent him an invite to the concert. He had the valid excuse of family being in town but in a second text asked if there were other dates. So hope was not lost yet at this point. I texted him the other dates but left the ball in his court. No word on the concert, but then he came over to my apartment to binge watch Andor. I ordered his favorite red velvet cake on DoorDash and as coached by my married friends I made the effort to gradually sit close together on the couch as each episode moved along. I distinctly remember being so frustrated that I couldn’t skip over the feelings confession part so we could just fast forward to cuddling on the couch watching this show because it just felt so right. Another night he texts me out of the blue that he’s taking stock of what’s good in his life and getting to know me and become friends with me is one of the best parts of his year. The happy tears come and it takes everything in me to not gush about how important he is to me and how much I care about him. We’re getting closer to the breaking point of my chill.

Shortly thereafter, our workplace is throwing this big annual party. My social battery was running low, so I left pretty early but as is our Sunday night tradition at this point I still text Jared before going to bed. He says the party was fun until it wasn't. His heart took a beating, but he’ll survive… he always does. I had never heard him sound this defeated and hurt before. My emotions are bubbling to the surface, but I have the good sense to text Daphne since she’s on the west coast time zone to figure out how to respond. I send her a truly embarrassing voice note of me sobbing and talking about how I hurt when he hurts and want to tell him how much I care about him and how he deserves so much better than people who would treat him poorly. And before I could truly embarrass myself and text all of this to him, Daphne tells me “Bitch, it’s 1am. Go to bed.” In the sanity of the morning, I can send a much more reserved “I’m so sorry. Sending hugs.” text instead of a geyser of emotion at, in hindsight, the worst timing possible. Things fall back into their rhythm, until one day I am in my car on my lunch break with my music library on shuffle and “Wrapped in Red” by Kelly Clarkson comes on. It’s October so arguably too soon for Christmas music, but I let it play because 1) that song is a bop and 2) the lyrics really start hitting.

I’ll never feel you

If I don’t tell you

This Christmas, I’m gonna risk it all

This Christmas, I’m not afraid to fall

So I’m at your door with nothing more

Than words I’ve never said

It’s at this point that I realize I am well past the point where I need to tell Jared how I feel so we both know where we stand. It’s no longer healthy for me to keep harboring these feelings to myself, and the next time there’s an emotional conversation I won’t have the restraint to keep it to myself. However, I don’t want to have this conversation at work and this is too big to have over text message even though that’d be infinitely easier. So conveniently another Marvel movie is coming out in theaters the following week. I ask him to the movie with a hint of flirtation but with platonic plausible deniability. He says yes. I get a little bolder and ask him to dinner beforehand, which he agrees and offers to pick me up from my apartment. Another good sign. One week, dozens of text conversations with friends talking through all the possibilities, and a hundred anxiety spirals later, and Monday night comes around. My outfit was meticulously planned– casual and in character with what I wear normally but the turtleneck has a cleavage cutout to bring a tasteful amount of “va va voom” . We keep mostly to small talk on the ride to the restaurant, and once we are seated the conversation deepens. I mention my limited dating history and get into topics previously mentioned in this essay. Jared opens up and reveals he was in a relationship that ended a few months ago abruptly with his girlfriend cheating on him with his close friend at the time. My heart sinks. I’m hurt he had to go through that, but I also know the result of the conversation I was planning for the car ride home is not going to have the result I want it to have. Fortunately, Wakanda Forever gave me plenty of excuses to cry in the theater. Regardless, the conversation still needs to be had so I start with confirming that the invite to the concert was me asking him out, and from there it all spills forth. The crush and friendship that developed to infatuation, that developed to real feelings, that I could see us being compatible and really working together, that he had everything I was looking for in a partner with the added bonus of majestic hair and being taller than me. I continued that even though he’s been dealing with a lot, it’s still my choice if I want to be there alongside him to shoulder those burdens. We are now pulled into the parking garage for my apartment. He reiterates that he is still processing all that he’s had to go through this year and that (this is a direct quote still seared into my soul) “if there’s a 5% chance that my baggage and what I’m going through could hurt you, I can’t take that risk.” I am doing all that I can not to burst into tears, and so to lighten the mood I say “Don’t read into the fact I got you a Christmas present, Etsy doesn’t do returns.” Which is a silly way to say I’ve been so head over heels for you I bought your Christmas present in fucking August, but I digress. He opens the car door, gives me a hug, and the thought isn’t lost on me that the first time I touch him is an ending not a beginning. And thus began my first true heartbreak.

Naturally, the following days made things worse somehow. I woke up feeling miserable and aching all over. At first I thought it was just a physical manifestation of my emotional turmoil, and forced myself to get out of bed with a pep talk of “You are a freaking professional and you’re not going to call out of work because a boy made you sad. Take a hot bath and pull yourself together.” Then after I proceeded to projectile vomit in the bathtub, I realized I actually had some kind of flu and did actually need to stay home. So I slept through most of Tuesday but was crying for most of the time I was awake. Of course this meant Wednesday was when I started my period, because adding period symptoms on to all of this is exactly what I need. Thus in a moment where I curled up on the floor, nose bleeding from blowing my nose too much, still crying, headache from all the crying, aches everywhere from the flu and Aunt Flo, and wallowing in self-pity that I got a little messy and made a “fishing for attention” post on my Close Friends instagram story. Just a quick slide with text about how I was sick of being sick and sick of crying all the fucking time. I’m not going to lie, I was (admittedly irrationally) irritated that I was feeling this miserable and he’s just getting to have a Wednesday. Lo and behold, I get a text from Jared: “Saw your IG story. How can I help?” – a level of obliviousness which nearly made me throw my phone across the room. At this point, I knew subtlety was not an option. I acknowledged that I had to stop reading between the lines and that he saw me as just a friend and that broke my heart–something I needed to process and he couldn’t help with.

I want to stress that I did not then nor do I now begrudge him for not returning romantic feelings towards me. He was not obligated to feel the same way. However, the bordering on overshare of feelings that I expressed made things abundantly clear where I stood on things and anything said or done at this point was regarded considering that mutual knowledge.

So here’s where the mixed signals began. He responds that he currently sees me as a friend and also he wasn’t ready for a relationship yet. Would he maybe see me differently when he is ready for a relationship? Who knows, it’s possible. And then some more stuff about how he’s sorry he caused me pain, blah blah blah. But my deluded hopeless romantic self still took the dangled maybe of who knows what will happen in the future and ran with it. “This is us at just six months of friendship, stay friends with him and we can be even closer once he heals from his cheating whore of an ex. Maybe if you get back on the bandwagon and lose weight you’ll look more like the girls he usually dates when he’s ready. This is all just bad timing, but maybe your story together isn’t done yet.” The last sentence was the only part of that spiral that was true. This is just a story that doesn’t have the original happy ending anticipated.

Meanwhile, our work Christmas party comes along and I have him pick me up because I’m a passenger princess who doesn’t like to drive outside of my 10 mile bubble but also to still keep the spark going and see where our friendship is at now. It’s a fun night of games and getting to know some of the other managers. There’s a solid group of friends in a similar age range as me that are actually really fun to hang out with. On the ride home, Jared talks about how it’s fun to see me come out of my shell and some of the others get to see me be “not as innocent as I appear”. He also talks about how the group of managers usually hang out on Sunday nights after work and that he’ll talk to the group to see if they’re cool with me joining the next time they go out. I’m honestly so excited at the prospect of a group of friends, I forget to spiral (at least until much later) about how that means our usual 9pm-1am Sunday night text convos must have been when he was out at a bar with friends and all that that implies.

Christmas comes along and he appreciates the thoughtful present I gave him of a coaster laser engraved with the design of his favorite football stadium and a homemade rice krispie treat. And since I gave him the heads up towards the end of Car Ride of Pain that I was getting him something, he had texted me earlier in December that after the hardest time searching he found the perfect present. On Christmas Eve, he shows up at my department on his day of PTO to give me my present. My coworkers are nosy so I wait until my lunch break to open it, which was smart because I teared up when I opened it. And it’s so thoughtful and sweet that I would’ve LOVED this gift as the first Christmas present from a boyfriend. I still love the gift but I’m also confused. So were my Twitter friends.

After Christmas I started hanging out with the group of managers and they were super chill and really welcoming. Towards the latter part of our first hang out there’s the round table topic of “what celebrity would want to have sex with? Man and woman.” One of the guys was debating between Henry Cavill and Jason Momoa and ended up picking Momoa. I joked “Solid pick. Momoa has more grabbable hair.” Jared and his stupid long hair turns to me and loudly says “Hmmmm. I’m learning some things about you.” I go red and my brain short circuits and I can’t think of a response beyond “Yep.” so that’s how I respond and leave it at that. AND THEN, he brings the topic back up after the “Made it home safe?” text, saying that he’s still thinking about my comment on grabbable hair. I quickly respond “So we’re going there?” trying to clarify what we are doing because this is decidedly not platonic. To which he replies, “I guess we are.” This time I did throw my phone across the room. Luckily, it landed in a to-be-folded pile of laundry. I typed and retyped a reply five times. Once my west coast friends got back to me that my idea to respond with “Everyone likes a hair grab. Why do you think I wear a high ponytail so often?” was too dirty, I decided to leave him “on read” and go to bed.

Meanwhile we still have long text conversations with serious topics like being broke af, and silly things like memes about Formula One racing (which I admittedly did get into to impress him but still legitimately enjoy it and have another friend to talk about it with). But now mixed with weirdly flirty stuff like “With the length of my hair right now, I look like Loki in Thor: Ragnarok when I get out of the shower”. Nerd flirting, but definitely flirting. Especially when I have admitted in a conversation when out with friends that I’ve read Tom Hiddleston/Reader fanfiction.

Then one day, I have a truly shitty and overwhelmingly stressful day at work. My parents were on vacation and my sister was on a work trip, so even after everything he was still next in line for who I wanted to talk to to process this. He talked me through the issue and how to best cope with it and then the conversation strayed. It was the first time since Car Ride of Pain that we actually acknowledged what was discussed. He was curious why I spoke to my feelings then. I discussed the times I wanted to bring it up earlier and he confirmed it was for the best that I did not then (especially the night of the big work party). He gave me advice about flirting on apps like Hinge and Bumble, it was kinda weird but I could use all the advice I could get. And then he offered another piece of “friendly advice”. To paraphrase, he recommended that I reconsider my decision not to drink alcohol and make sure I am doing it for me and not because of my upbringing; because guys on dates will worry that I don’t know how to relax and be loose around them if I do not have at least one drink on a date. He even admitted that he thought about what it would be like to date me but the fact that neither me or my family drinks was a problem because he could not see our lifestyles being compatible. Admittedly, my family does not drink for religious reasons. However, when I was old enough I knew I did not want to drink alcohol because of my poor impulse control regarding food and drink (even if that drink is Diet Dr Pepper). When I got to a restaurant, I don’t have a soda, I have seven. Consequently, I made the decision to not even open the door to drinking alcohol.

However, in a series of decisions I am embarrassed and genuinely not proud of, I took his words to heart and decided to experiment with alcohol. I framed it as wanting to build some confidence before I put myself back out there in the dating world, but really I wanted to show that I was fun and cool, and could live in his world. Had some spiked Simply Lemonade to test the waters which was not great but fine. Daphne recommended a rum and coke as a starter drink but when I tried it at home it was so gross that I had to brush my teeth three times after. And then when my friend group went out to our usual bar on Sunday night, I ordered the fruity drink the 22 year old in the group usually orders and inhaled it in about thirty seconds. So I got another. Trying to see what the buzz was really like, when really the biggest rush was the pleased look on his face when I ordered the second drink. In reality, alcohol just makes me sleepy (and want to cuddle but not exactly the venue for that). There was another work party that was BYOB and I brought some fruity Seagrams and when my boss commented this was the first of the parties that I drank at he joked that our friend group was corrupting me. Nearly a hundred bucks later, and the only thing close to a buzz was wanting to go to bed at 11pm one time, and I calculated that I didn’t actually enjoy alcohol at all. It finally dawned on me just how stupid drinking to impress a guy is, and just how terrible Jared’s advice was. That’s not the kind of advice you want from a potential romantic partner, and even more that’s not the kind of advice a good friend would give. In hindsight, I should’ve seen this straight away as a sign that this is not the kind of person to pursue nor the kind of person I should be friends with.

A while after the drinking debacle, Jared has been radio silent for a long time. When we interact at work on occasion, he’s noticeably distant and acting kind of weird. My instinct was telling me to reach out to him just to check that everything’s ok given his previous mental health struggles and also that he still has me (at this point in time) as a friend. Then he shows up to the Sunday night hangout for the first time in forever. A decent chunk of my friend group is chronically and comically late, so it’s me, Jared, and one of the managers with his girlfriend. Jared had stepped away for a phone call earlier in the evening for a while which was… weird, but I still ignored instincts. Then all of a sudden, I look in Jared’s direction and can’t help but see he has a picture of a girl on his lockscreen that is usually some car-related pic. At this point, I really thought I had fully moved on and was okay with being just friends. Even to the point that I was comfortable being frank with him in talking about the time period where I was halfway in love with him. But seeing the photo of the girl, and the fact that he never even dropped a text to make me aware he was dating somebody, made old wounds fresh again. I waved for the waitress to get my check and then it was a race against the clock to not start sobbing in the middle of this bar in front of my friends who know nothing about my history with Jared at this point. Literally as soon as I get my debit card back and sign the receipt, I walk as fast as I can without running to get out of my car and the tears come the instant I make it through the door. It really is a less than pleasant experience to finally be able to relate to Taylor Swift lyrics but he wasn't mine to lose and I really had been living the past several months for the hope of it all. And now that hope is shattered. He was ready to date again, and once again it was not me that he wanted. My romantic dream had always been that I would find someone that really got to know me, and would then decide that they wanted more of me in their life. Once again that did not happen. I opened myself to him in so many ways: the dark thoughts, the imperfections, my hyperfixations and the weird sense of humor that follows, and it was not a package he was interested in. So I cried and I cried that night and mourned the hope of what could have been because it wasn’t going to happen.

So let's see how being 1000% platonic friends with Jared goes. I’m at over 6,000 words in this saga and it’s 2am so I’m going to be more concise in this part. I get an awesome career opportunity to take more responsibility and have a chance to develop a team and demonstrate my leadership skills to senior management. My family and the majority of my friends were super excited for me. I explain the change to Jared and he goes “Huh. That’s an interesting choice.” And in that moment I couldn’t tell which hurt more: him not thinking that I’m going to be great at this and expressing that he’s excited for me or the fact that apparently I still value his opinion of me so damn much. Then it’s July and I’m making plans to celebrate my 30th birthday. In one of our many long text conversations, I had opened up to him about not have friends growing up and then even when I made friends they were long distance, so I was so excited to not just enjoy the festivities of a milestone birthday but be able to have a birthday with friends present that care about me and are happy to celebrate me. So I send the text to the group chat 3 weeks in advance (enough time to make plans around but not so far ahead people forget) with info for a birthday dinner at a nearby restaurant and then potentially seeing Barbie. I even made sure to schedule it after everyone’s shift would be over to ensure as many people as possible could come. Everyone begins to reply that they are coming, including Jared, and then two days later I get a “sorry I can’t go” text without further explanation. And from that point he basically dropped out of my life.

It was then the realization that I had avoided for a while hit. Some of my friends had said throughout all of this that he was putting me on a shelf but being nice enough about so he could always come back later when he needed the ego boost. I didn’t want to believe it and rationalized that couldn’t be the case because my long distance friends never met him and only knew half of the equation. But I now realize how right they were. Jared was going through a shitty time in his life when he got close to me, and in every conversation I complimented him.This made the pattern for him to talk to me when he was feeling down and my unconditional support and adoration made him feel better, and even after the feelings conversation that occurred in the Car Ride of Pain he could keep this pattern going with the tiniest bit of flirting. Then his life got better from the previous year, he’s no longer experiencing professional burnout and got himself a girlfriend again– making no need to go through the effort of maintaining a friendship with me.

So why write nearly 7000 words about this now? Well, it's definitely been a catharsis to be able to let this all out. But the catharsis was mainly needed, because I have been able to ignore all the hurt from July and the 18 months prior by simply not being around him and now I have a mandatory meeting where I see him once a week and have to act all cheery and professional.

On its own a birthday party does seem like a silly thing to end a friendship over, but it really was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was now clear, especially after writing all of this out, that as much as I had thought about him, paid attention to every detail of every conversation, etc. that he did not hold our conversations and our friendship in a remotely similar level of regard. Plainly, I deserve better from people I consider a friend. But in order to heal from the end of a friendship, I have to acknowledge that this all happened and it was a very important part of my life for some time.

Now that it’s written down, he can be just a story. An anecdote to note the end of my twenties. He can be one of the managers that works on the first floor and is neighbors with my boss and one of my friends. That’s it and that’s okay.

The End

[ausetkmt]

In the early days of the internet, a hater was the worst thing you could be. Spite and sarcasm had no place in a sea of people who watched videos of babies laughing or tended to their virtual farms. Thankfully, as time passed, we as a society have learned to stop lying to ourselves. No one is ever truly out of sight and out of mind today, which is why we shamelessly send bad posts of people we don’t like to our friends or have entire group chats dedicated to gathering receipts. Over 70,000 people have uploaded their confessions on TikTok to the tune of the catchy “Hater’s Anthem” because, as the song itself says, we love the way it feels to be a hater.

You, too, might find yourself looking at the social media feeds of people you don’t like and getting joy out of that experience. It’s a common habit, an often harmless way to let off some steam, but continually hate-stalking others’ accounts can keep us trapped in a cycle of unproductive negativity.

Since prehistoric times, humans have thrived on seeking out and obtaining information about the world around us, especially as it pertains to other people. It doesn’t matter whether we love or hate them; these emotions activate some of the same circuits in the brain and consequently release the same rush of rewarding feelings. Often, we’re drawn to dislike those who we feel violate social norms — like that annoying microinfluencer who overshares every single detail of their deep-seated trauma — because we’re intrigued by why and how they’re able to do what they do. These reasons could be even more complicated and varied if we personally know those we keep tabs on.

Of course, this kind of social media lurking is completely different from actualbehaviors of criminal stalking and acts of hate. There’s a serious distinction between quietly sending a friend someone’s weird Instagram story and actual bullying and harassment, which should never be condoned. But no matter how harmless this common version of social media stalking could seem at the onset, it can still be detrimental. When we’re feeling particularly down in the dumps, it’s hard to see that what we’re looking at is just a deluge of highly curated information that may not serve our better interests to engage with. The feeling of social comparison that follows forces us to keep up with appearances and overcompensate for what we lack.

Despite these real effects, it can be hard to admit that it’s a problem that needs to be addressed, mostly because of how easy it is to hide. “Think about other behaviors like smoking, drinking alcohol, or compulsive shopping. There are often witnesses to this or a trail of evidence, which makes us feel more accountable to other people,” explained Georgina Sturmer, an integrative counselor who has worked with women struggling with addiction. “[Hate-stalking] can be done in private, without fear of being caught or questioned, making it much easier for us to go down a rabbit hole.”

As a result, we tend to go down these spirals alone and leave social media stalking sessions feeling ashamed or embarrassed, wondering how we got so invested in others’ digital lives in the first place. It’s a complicated behavior that brings up a lot of conflicting emotions. With that in mind, the names of some of the people interviewed for this article have been changed to protect their identities.

Recognize the behavior and understand what’s driving it

Like any other addictive behavior, hate-stalking can be a habit we develop to address an unmet need. “It’s easy to go online in an attempt to tackle underlying feelings of loneliness or boredom. Once we’re there, social media contains built-in features that keep us on the hook,” Sturmer said.

When we acknowledge that our social media lurking can hinder our happiness, it’s important to get to the root of this behavior. Take Annie, who still keeps tabs on the former bullies who made her high school life a living hell. “I’ve kept up with their lives for so long to see if they’ve peaked in high school,” the 29-year-old creative told me in an interview. “Sadly, hate-stalking has only made me more self-conscious, especially when I see a former bully thriving. I tend to talk to myself from a place of shame whenever I don’t achieve something like them.”

Sometimes, there can also be an element of seeking karmic justice, of wanting to know whether someone is suffering as punishment for hurting us in the past. Take Rica’s former coworker, who Rica said was so threatened by her that she tried to derail her career. “[This person] moved to another company, and I started hate-stalking to see if she would make something of herself after leaving,” the 42-year-old salesperson shared. “I just didn’t want to believe that she could ruin my career and not face any consequences. I’d like to think that the universe is fair.”

Coming to terms with our reasons for lurking will require asking and answering some pretty uncomfortable questions. “Examples of this could include: What are you seeking in this encounter? Are you going [to this person’s account] to torture yourself? Is this a manifestation of feelings of loneliness or anger or envy? Or are we curious what other people are doing without us?” said Jaimie Krems, a social psychologist and professor at the University of California Los Angeles.

Consider, too, the role social media may have previously played in your relationship with this person: Maybe you were “liking” and commenting on their posts, or your catch-up lunches or birthday parties were featured on their feeds a lot. These interactions may have brought the distinct kind of validation that serves as online currency, which might be a reason why we keep coming back to some people’s accounts.

Limit your exposure

At the end of any relationship, we’re often told to unfollow or even block the other person on all social media platforms. But for those who find it hard to cut them off immediately and completely, detaching from a stalkee and their daily activity is nonetheless necessary.

Lily, a 22-year-old writer, admitted that checking up on her ex-boyfriend and his new partner two years after the breakup just adds salt to her emotional wounds. “Even if the intention behind it was to feel better about myself, it would always make me feel like shit because, at the end of the day, I used to be that girl beside him, making plans of growing old together,” she said. Seeing anniversary and milestone posts on her feed from her ex is particularly difficult for her: “It would remind me of how things were like when the breakup was still fresh: crying nonstop, screaming my lungs out in pain, and feeling all this anger and frustration and grief.”

It’s important to track moments when you feel the need to social stalk and assess what factors those instances may have in common. Were you in a specific place that reminded you of them, hanging out with certain people, or doing a particular activity? Maybe this could also be indicative of a larger personal issue we have, like in Annie’s case. “Now, I’m trying to see if my hate-stalking is a manifestation of my demand avoidance: if I’m doing this just to ignore what I know I should be doing to make my life better,” she said.

Put a plan in motion

If we’re not careful, social media stalking can go from a harmless little treat to a negative reflex that bleeds into our daily routines. “Acknowledging the urge as it creeps up on us and giving ourselves a few minutes to pause before acting on it could be helpful,” said Krems. Exercising this self-restraint, even in small increments, can help us think about whether it’s something we really want to do or just a habit our brains and thumbs have grown accustomed to.

Other long-term examples that could help kill this habit include losing ourselves in something else — maybe a hobby, a piece of media, or even another person. “Lately, I’ve found that crocheting and going on TikTok instead helps me,” Lily said. It can also help to open up to someone we trust so we can process what we feel rather than forcing ourselves to seek out information that confirms our destructive beliefs.

In extreme cases, like those that require a total digital detox, we could find ourselves making excuses instead of taking steps to curb our behavior. In this case, Sturmer invites us to examine why this may be the case: “Perhaps you don’t want to put boundaries in place because you say you really need social media for other purposes. Ask yourself if this is really true, and try to seek out ways to get only the information that you needelsewhere.”

Accept that it’s a normal part of life

Contrary to popular belief, keeping tabs on the social media of people you don’t like isn’t always this shameful activity that signals the beginning of a depressive episode or unhealthy obsession; when taken at face value, it’s just another means to acquire new knowledge — and if we find exactly what we’re looking for, it could significantly improve our outlook. “I found out that my former coworker didn’t get into the company she wanted and was forced into retirement,” Rica said. “It’s amusing to see her trying to convince everyone that she’s happy with how her life looks now.”

On other occasions, it can even serve as a means to strengthen or start relationships. “There’s a possibility that shared hate might actually bring us together more than shared love. If we both hate the same person, perhaps we have underlying similarities that could make us great cooperators,” said Krems. “This coalitional hate-stalking can feel good because we’re both discovering information and bonding together, which could have great payoffs for our well-being.”

While this may seem like a reach to some, let’s face it: No matter how much we claim to have moved on, the right mixture of boredom and curiosity could compel us to check up on a certain person. The schadenfreude that can come with that doesn’t mean we’re irredeemable or evil human beings. Our feelings toward the events in our lives, and the people we meet, are valid and varied. As long as our social media check-ins aren’t an obsessive and organized effort to ruin someone else’s life or to hurt ourselves, we don’t need to beat ourselves up when we go down the same ol’ spiral.

“Not liking someone and wishing them ill, should we be doing that? That’s a question that depends on our morality,” Krems said. “But does almost everyone do that? I think the answer is yes.”

[mychaoticcryhole]

hi tumblr.

Hello again to my old friend. I used to blog all the time when I was in high school. Freshman, sophomore year my blog was the most perfectly curated version of myself. Always with a perfect layout and fun little things that made me feel special online. I overshared, of course. I showed myself, my friends, told everything. I cried writing my posts, I smiled, and I look back on those posts now so thankful that all those years ago I had nothing better to do than sit around and just throw all my thoughts into the universe and hope someone gave a shit to read them. I felt alone. I had one place to put everything and just leave it. Whether I was just sharing pictures that displayed words I couldn't think of or I was actively pouring out my soul and using my own words, my blog was a safe space. A true reflection of myself. And I really believe that outlet helped me in a time when I needed it most. So again I am here. Desperate to find a way to get back to me. Or to whatever me looks like these days.

Now I am 29. I began my last blog at 14 or 15. Things have changed so much, obviously. And I often think about what that 14 or 15 year old me would think about where I am today. As much as this is the life I would've wanted, it doesn't feel like that at all. I have a "good" job. I own my own house, own car. I am married to a wonderful man, my absolute best friend. I inherited his family and I have my family. There aren't many of us, but I have a relationship with them. I have a solid relationship with my very best friend and I get to watch her raise her own family (which is so crazy because looking back on my old blog, we never even imagined babies) and I am surrounded by so much love all the time.

But also nothing feels that good. At all. Everything kinda sucks. I have a lot on my plate. My "good" job feels like a lot more responsibility than I want. I know that I am overworked and underpaid. I feel invisible although I know the work that I do is important. I push myself so ridiculously hard to be the best because I know I can. And I know I can always do better. And my job takes full advantage of that. I am stressed all the time and feel like theres no rest. Ever. That place has taken a complete hold over what feels like every part of my mind. My family is dealing with their own shit. I feel like we are the perfect example of putting on a front for the world and just being the biggest shit show under the surface. I love my parents, and as I continue to get older I see them for what they are - just normal people who had kids and now just kind of have to figure it out. I see them move like normal people. Like I would move with my friends or in my relationship. And I see where things are hard. And I can see why things are falling apart in the way that they are. But I also wish they could just find a way to be done and both thrive. And I don't know how we do that. And I also don't know why I have allowed this to be such a large stressor on myself.

I think at this time I'm in a weird transitionary period of my life where I am ready to let everything go. I want to ditch every half-assed friendship that doesn't feel right to me. I want to surround myself with people on my same wavelength. I want people in my circle with my same energy, who think highly of me, like real, unconditional love. I don't have much faith in people anymore. And maybe I am just meant to be that person that only has the one best friend alongside my husband. And I am getting to a place where I am finding that to be okay. But I will need somewhere to dump all my shit. And this is that place.

[asnjwnrjfw]

Being a Good Listener and an Effective Speaker – In-Person or Online Conversation

Connection with people either it flows or it goes.

Starting a conversation is easier than you think and making it flow is harder the way it is. Conversations, for starters, are part of our daily habits as humans living in a world full of conscious minds. Having to communicate your feelings, sharing your ideas, and telling your friends awesome stories are the objectives of knowing how to communicate well.

The simplest way of conversing is to introduce yourself and let the other know you, seems easy right? Do not get me wrong but sometimes there are too many words to say that you cannot even think how to start.  The real catch is, what happens after? Yes, you have already started the conversation but how can you hold it on? Lucky for you, that is what this blog is about.

The best tip is not to pressure yourself. Engaging in conversation is easy-peasy if you know what you are doing.

How to Achieve Free-flowing Conversations?

Best conversation experiences don’t just go around giving unending stories and being comprehensive. You also need to assert where your conversation is going without worrying too much. Practice these tips for better conversations.

1. Be interested and invested.

Having a conversation with someone that listens attentively and shows interest in your stories is the best one to talk with. It takes a good listener to have an effective communication. When you are the one listening, it should not just be sitting with the person you are talking to but also understanding the emotions and energy they are giving. Avoid interrupting someone’s talking and then sharing your own. Rather, let the person finish talking before you speak so it will not be rude to others. Also, you can show interest by responding or nodding just to let the person know that you are listening attentively.

2. Observing body language.

Body language during conversations also conveys messages to the person you are talking to. It is what we know the non-verbal communication. This includes your posture, gestures, facial expressions, and eye movement. You should also notice the body language of the person you are talking to make sure that they are still comfortable to continue. Also, make eye contact with the person you are talking to but not too much as this can be embarrassing and will make the other person uncomfortable with the situation.

3. Do not force the connection.

If you feel that a person is not interested in talking, do not force it because the person will feel pressured and more likely not to talk to you again. So, better to give them time and end the conversation politely to avoid unwanted feelings.

4. Enjoy the moment.

There is a lot to learn in a single conversation and to think that you are knowing other people while imagining a glimpse of their lives is very fun. You can only make the conversation work if both of you are enjoying the company of each other.

 5. Ask questions related to the ongoing conversation.

This will help you to have more understanding and additional knowledge that you did not expect. Plus, adding questions to a conversation can keep it flowing easily with the fact that you are both engaging.

 6. Avoid oversharing.

Too much information can lead to sharing inappropriate and unusual words that are that sometimes make the conversation awkward. Sometimes, we subconsciously do this so it is important to keep in mind the stories that are for yourself only. Also, you can set barriers for people to avoid these such things to happen.

7. Maintain a positive attitude.

You can be lively with your voice and keep your face with a smile to maintain positive energy during the conversation. This will make you sound friendly and approachable.

There are no rules in making conversations but these are the list of tips you can use as a guide to be a good listener and an effective speaker during conversations. Also, remember to take the moment and let yourself have valuable insights on it.

Engaging in Online Conversation

People are deemed to social media more than ever and because of this, online conversations are becoming more vital and common. Communication is more accessible and open to everyone and even the best conversations happen to people you have not met in person. Having this broad opportunity to have conversations also comes with its bad side so we need to be extra careful about sharing certain things that are personal for you.

From posting, commenting, and chatting, you are interacting with a large audience online.  Since you are not meeting them in person, it is important to make a first impression and introduce yourself properly but without too much information. Keep the internet a safe space for you, especially during conversations online.

[just-a-little-unionoid]

babe me ironically telling you that I "sadly can't kill myself like you told me to do because some people care about me" isn't trauma dumping, implying I'm suicidal isn't trauma dumping, telling you "I have plenty of occasions to kill myself" isn't trauma dumping. I live near a train track, a cliff, a tumultuous river, and work with dangerous machines, those are the "occasions". don't use terms you don't understand you're just making yourself looks stupid.

"trauma dumping" would be to tell you (oversharing) about traumatic experiences. which I will not do. but learn the vocab.

again I'm not defending anyone and it's sad that you can't understand that giving some nuance to a situation or even explaining some context isn't "defending", or I guess what you mean is more likely "excusing". context is important, understanding complexity is important, you can't change things if you don't understand why they happen, stop with the black and white mentality. fucking WHY are you even watching the show at this point?

anyway, want honesty? okay, I can do that. it's not even 8am on a non working day, I must admit that reading your message first thing in the morning piss me off, and I've yet to activate my social filters, so that should be easy.

you're right, I do care what you think of me. not that it matters at the end of the day, but it pisses me off that someone can put so much effort into misreading someone, into twisting or ignoring all of their words. I can't even begin to understand how your mind works. why you would hate so much someone you know nothing about. it does actually worry me tho, because I've seen your other posts. you seem to dedicate half of you blog to hating on Alastor specifically, and his fans, picking fight against people who don't care what you think of them if not downright trolls. I care about you, that other person with the Homelander (or whoever the fuck this character is) memes was absolutely trolling you and was delighted by your angry reblogs. gosh how old are you even? (don't answer that) back in my days "don't feed the troll" was common knowledge. stop giving them what they fucking want.

I do honestly care about you. why is it that? because I'm a proud member of a social species and when I see my kin hurting themselves, I find it very unpleasant. also because I tried to emphasize with you so I could get under you skin. I'm stupid so it backfired and now I see you as a person instead of a concept without shape behind a screen. now I can't hate you, the joke's on me.

I've been there, like I said I know anger feels right, but it's also intoxicating. quite literally I mean, anger prepare your body to fight, it releases chemicals, hormones, to do so. it feels great but too much of it will hurt you. I know it's not easy but keep that anger for what you can actually fight. anger is a useful tool but you're misusing it. stop exposing yourself to online content that distress you like that. yes, I know, it's an addictive feeling. stop it anyway.

[this is where I take a pause so I can do things irl, idk what mood I'll be in when I start writing again, so the tone can shift]

you want to have the last word, I want it too, we're kind of in a situation here.

I could just stop responding to you but I don't want to, because I am indeed arrogant and believe I am right, you are wrong, and I want to convince you of my point of view. don't think you're better than me tho, you're also arrogant and think you are right, and me wrong. the main difference being that you're not trying to convince me, you're just getting mad at me. I don't think that makes me better than you but I do think screaming at me is useless. or well again I guess it can let you lose some stream if you need to, I don't really care. but anyway you're not going to convince me without using arguments (again not that I think you're trying to convince me, I'm just pointing at our differences)

my point of view is that having a morally complex character isn't a writing flaw. exploring said characters limites and empathising with them isn't a flaw either. some people use fiction to safely explore subjects that would be dangerous to explore irl. we've done that for literal thousands of years, maybe there is a reason for that, don't you think so?

you won't find characters being punished by death (and it being shown as a good thing, I mean) in Hazbin Hotel. it's a show about redemption and a metaphor for criticizing the prison system (as well as imperialism but that's not really the subject here). I'm sorry but it you expect Alastor (or others) to be killed for their crime it will not happen. will he suffer consequences? I do believe or at least hope so. this guy is an absolute moron who's incredibly bad at dealing with his own emotions and he will hurt others and himself over it, and it will likely come to slap him back in the face at some point, it's pretty much inevitable. but see, this is the difference between consequences and punishment. when you say "consequences" what you actually mean "punishment". you expect the character to suffer because you believe he deserves it, not just because it's the logical consequences of his actions. that's very different. the narrative of Hazbin Hotel (likely, if it stick to its current morality) won't approve of punishment. again it's a show about redemption, about trying to find alternatives to punishment, so it can't present it as an acceptable option.

I'm telling you that because it seems that you decided to keep watching it and I don't want you to get your hope crushed, y'know, prepare yourself for disappointment because what you wish would happen is the polar opposite of the show current morality

I mean like, I can be wrong, I've been wrong about fiction analysis before, I could be wrong again, but think yourself about it, okay? take a few minutes to analyse the show morality and purpose and draw your own conclusions, I'd be happy to hear about them if they end up being different of mines, always useful to get different pov on a subject

as for our emotions, I think that yours are raw. you feel a lot and let yourself feels, that's good but it doesn't mean you're being honest with them. maybe you think you are, and maybe you are indeed, I'm not in your head. but listen. just because you feel a lot doesn't mean you know why you feel so much or that you choose a good target to express it. emotions are just hormones, it's logical, your body (and so all thoughts, emotions or feelings it can produce) is just a complex biological machine and there is no such thing as chance in it. everything that you do, feels or think is the logical result of past and current experiences. but while it's logical it doesn't mean it's rational. us humans are still animals, even if we're able to talk we're not rational beings, we think and feels things by instinct and then we try to rationalize and justify them. that's how it works. most of the time it's bullshit tho, just because we feel something doesn't mean we have a "good" reason to do so. we have reasons, causes for it, but there's no morality behind, "good" and "bad" are concepts created by humain but biology and physics don't give a shit about those concepts. we have to try to follow them but they're not at the core of our decisions, that's what I meant.

so like, idk try to find why you're angry, what exactly makes you angry in what I'm telling you. don't answer "you're excusing the actions of a terrible person/character" again because you already said that multiple time but it doesn't say much. WHY does it makes you angry? (I'll save you some time: the answer is likely that you believe punishment to be an acceptable consequence, and it displease you that I think differently. but don't hesitate to tell me if you think I'm wrong, I actually quite enjoy to question my certitudes) then you have to ask yourself whether or not it is justified. from a moral standpoint I mean. are you right to be angry at me, at my opinion? and finally you can ask yourself if it's useful to be angry at me, like, whether you are right or not, does that change anything? (that's the part where I'm telling you being angry at me doesn't affect me that much, but that can affect you, do your choice)

hum... I think I covered pretty much all I wanted to cover 🤔

oh right! I said I was trying to be honest so there you go:

the reasons I keep talking to you (and caring despite of everything, and notably of what I keep saying) is because 1) like I said I'm arrogant, think I'm right and want to prove you wrong, but also 2) because I like conflict, it makes my brain happy because it force me to think of arguments, of how I should build my sentences, and there's probably also the part where English isn't my main language so it demands a little more efforts too. in resume, I crave stimulation and this exchange provide that, speaking of which 3) I'm desperate for human connection, I don't care if it's a positive interaction or not, I just fucking need to connect to other people, I'm aware that it's quite pathetic but you more or less asked for me to be honest so that's on you 🤷

yeah yeah I'm an arrogant bastard, I know, you keep telling me

I’m afraid he’s contracting babygirl disease :(

[harpywritesfic]

Writing Sideblog AO3 Twitter

I write Ironstrange fics. Current wips, request info, my tag system and more are below the cut!

A bit about me: I'm chronically online because I have no job. I'm twenty, just sort of pathetic. I’m an atheist and whenever I say god, you can replace ‘god’ with ‘Andrew John Hozier-Byrne’ and it will work as intended. I’m always tired and I like to spend my free time in bed or on my computer.

Policies (harpy's house rules):

18+: I do post about smut and make some truly awful dirty jokes. Not that I’m really bothered if minors follow me, it’s more of a, yknow, do what you want just don’t tell me sort of thing. Curate your own online experience.

Tagging (@-ing me): go for it! I oscillate between seeing every post on the dash and not being active for days or weeks. If you want me to see something, tag me! I’d appreciate it.

Related works: I welcome fanart, podfics, playlists, anything inspired by my fics! Yes, even other fics! Just please, please, PLEASE tell me so I can see it, because I can guarantee you it would get me higher than a line of coke. I don't even need to try coke to know it would, because the fact that someone would be that inspired by my writing is just insane.

Constructive criticism: If you ask first and word your criticism politely, I'm open to receiving it. Otherwise, no thank you! Writing fanfic is a hobby, whether I'm enjoying myself is more important than making a masterpiece.

Spam-liking: go for it! Reblogs are much appreciated but I won't be offended if you don't!

You can also reblog anything I post. I say things because they’re funny, it’s all fair game. If I don’t want it reblogged I’ll turn off reblogs.

Messaging: feel free! I don’t bite :) tumblr messaging sucks, so if we're mutuals, we can move to discord instead!

Please know that I’m neurodivergent and my brain works in mysterious ways. You might have to tell me if I’m being annoying or if I’ve said something that bothered you. I’m not so good at reading social situations, and I would rather you say something than not! You won’t hurt my feelings, and I’d hate to upset someone by accident.

Requests are currently closed!

The requests in my wips are from October 2022 and I have yet to write them, so I'm not taking any more at this time. I have a dreadful time working on anything that I'm not really excited about (damn my dopamine deficient brain) and I'd rather not disappoint when your request becomes one of my fifty unfinished wips.

I’m not comfortable writing (subject to change):

character death

nsfw

AUs (mostly)

Tags I use: 

#harpy's fics (my fics)

#harpy's wips (snippets and progress updates)

#harpy overshares (personal life, shitposts, that sort of thing)

#harpy's storytime (funny stories i have)

#source: me (memes and such made by yours truly)

#nsfw and/or #mdni (anything I’m not comfy w minors interacting with)

#fanart, #fanfic, #gif, #comic panels, #prompts, #reference, #events, etc. These are just here for me to remember tbh.

At some point I need to go through and tag all my pet-related posts. I love my pets.

Updated 5/15/24

[portias-husband]

Hello and welcome to me oversharing on the internet because I want to be paired with a fictional character! Could I please request a romantic matchup for the Arcana?

I am a 5,3 woman with grey eyes, long wavy brown hair and ridiculously pale skin. I am greysexual and panromantic. I am a March Pisces and an INFP. I enjoy drawing, writing and reading. Considering the feedback others give me, I'd say I'm a pretty good cook despite never following recipes and just going with whatever feels right. Singing and dancing are things I indulge in privately (I have never shared my interest in those with anyone before). I don't mind being active; in fact, I do enjoy it, I just can never motivate myself to do it. I believe that every couple consists of the person who likes to have their hair played with and the person who likes to play with hair, I am the latter.

I am extremely touch starved and I lack confidence. I am very much introverted but I don't mind being in public so long as I'm there with someone I know and trust. I have a tendency to ignore my own feelings and emotions because I feel as though they aren't important. I also have a tendency to overthink everything and then end up going with what my feelings are telling me anyway. I also get anxiety shivers which are seemingly triggered by absolutely noting. I'll just find myself shanking for absolutely no reason which is f u n.

If you're still here and avidly reading, I'm sorry. I may have slightly misunderstood what you meant by 'a bit'.

Don't worry I tend to overshare online too! And the more info the better since I have more to base my match up on!

I match you with

~

~

~

~

Muriel!

- He loves the touch starved side of you since he’s touch starved too and so cuddles are an hourly occurence, and when he’s gone for some reason, Inanna fills in and cuddles you loads

- Good at knowing how to calm you down from anxiety shivers and he’s quite warm so he can usually make sure that you calm down quickly

- He’s introverted too and needs to have someone with him in public too and so you two are always there for each other in public

- Loves to play with your hair when he easily picks you up since you are a lot shorter than him

[optimismrpt]

HOW RIGBY RUNS A ROLEPLAY : A VERY SPECIFIC GUIDE ( OF SORTS )

BONUS CONTENT: ACCEPTANCE DAY

I think it’s essentially to start with this disclaimer: This is merely how I run a rp and I’m not saying by any means it is how a rp should be run. I have found success through these methods all in combination and I can’t promise that they work all the time.

IMPORTANT ! if you use this guide as a basis for your rp please credit back to me somewhere on your front page, rules, or plot! this is a very specific type of rp (small limited run plot heavy skeleton rp) that i have worked very hard to develop over the past five years. i want you to learn from my successes and failures, and please give credit where it is due!

It is a lot of work! Like A LOT! And if you don’t have time to admin with full commitment this is not the right type of rp to attempt.

With that in mind, let’s go!

FULL GUIDE IN THE SOURCE LINK! 

BEFORE THE ACTUAL DAY

First of all, getting apps is fun and it’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement and want to move things forward as soon as possible. However, I recommend you don’t rush! Do not move up your acceptance date or the date that you close the inbox! This isn’t fair to the people who were planning on finishing up their apps before the original deadline who now have to crunch to meet the new deadline or may not be able to make the new deadline at all because of irl responsibilities. It’s always good to give lots of warning for the inbox closing and stick to it! 

I also recommend that you do not lower the threshold of people needed to open. Sometimes it can be disheartening to set an app threshold at ten and then only get six apps, even if the days grind on with no new apps, stick it out and keep promoting! Opening with less than eight characters (and for apples I’d say 15 characters) is going to make activity lackluster. It’s better to delay opening for the sake of having a grand first day than to jump the gun and end up making the rp fizzle before it can even start. 

About 52 hours before acceptances are set to take place I like to write out a to-do list and put it in my drafts. It usually involves ‘write acceptance posts, update skeletons, update main, post acceptances, post follows, post opening note’. Just having everything you need to do between then and opening written out in order is so helpful. And being able to check things off the list creates both a feeling of relief and excitement. So make a plan, determine how soon everything needs to be done, and work through it meticulously. In the rush of opening day it can be easy to forget important things like updating the triggers page.

If I have time I try to write everything hours in advance. When it comes to things like opening announcements and plot drops I try to write those at least 24 hours of their release time. And this is why I like, for competitive rps, to close the inbox and then give myself at least two hours to deliberate. But I’d even encourage giving yourself 6 hours between the inbox closing and posting acceptances. I know that’s a while to make people wait but apps can get pretty long and reading them all (and probably rereading a few of them multiple times) can be a lengthy process! 

I always try not to read the apps at all before the deliberation time. I find that if I read an app when it comes in that gives the first person an advantage because they have more time for me to adapt to their vision and start to assimilate it and get attached. And that’s not fair to the people who may have stumbled upon the rp later. So I just read the app far enough to get the info for the app count.

Just as a general rule I like to post important dates and times in at least two different timezones. For example ‘Acceptances are at 6am GMT / 1pm EST / 10pm PST ’. That way you can show that you are keeping other timezones in mind. And plus it’s nice to just to the conversion work so your applicants don’t have to. 

DELIBERATION TIME

Start by reading the apps which don’t have competition. These ones are easiest because it’s not a matter of determining whether they are the best of the bunch, it’s just deciding whether or not they are are passable. So I always read those first and then write their acceptance post immediately after I make my decision so that at least I’ll have that to post at the set acceptance date. That way, even if I haven’t made a decision on all the apps I’ll have something to post to show that I am reading apps and trying to stick to schedule! 

When your are dealing with competitive apps there are a few things I look for in an application: 

The most important is that the applicant seems willing to talk to you. This could be asks, ims, or even a little note in the app! Writers who want to make it clear what their intentions/desires/goals are ooc are going to be the easiest to work with! Plus it gives you an idea of how flexible they are! Those who dig their heels in when you offer up alternative suggestions are probably not good to work with. You want to find someone who has direction, intention, and ideas but don’t treat your ideas (or anyone else’s) as lesser than their own. 

Call for humor! I’ve found that I have trouble with people who take themselves and their characters too seriously. This means that they often won’t be up for plotting since they don’t want their character to be anything less than graceful. Humor is a really good sign that a writer is fun, creative, and understands their character. 

I also get wary of people who overhype the rp. Making edits/adding memes in the talk tag is all very nice, but when it looks like an rpt is promoting my rp just to give themselves an advantage over other applicants I tend to count that against them. I don’t like the idea of an rpt trying to use their signal boosting and popularity in the rpc as leverage over me. 

One of the biggest red flags is someone not sticking to the skeleton! If someone blatantly disregards one or more aspects of the skeleton that is an instant strike against them. I don’t like it when people have ocs that they adapt to fit a skeleton because most of the time that means that they don’t really care about the skeleton and your ideas. However, if they contact me about changes to the skeleton in advance and ask if some edits are alright then that’s actually a really good sign! I want people to play a character that they are happy about and I’m willing to change up any skeleton. I just need to know the applicant is willing to work with me instead of against me. 

Do not be afraid to deny applications. I used to never do this because I felt it was too mean and judgmental but now I realize I reserve the right as an admin to deny any app or character that I don’t vibe with. Go with your gut, and if the application is making you uncomfortable or nervous in any way, do not accept them. Sometimes it’s better to have one role go unwritten than to have someone who isn’t good for the group. Because both ic and ooc dynamics contribute to the effectiveness and survival of the group, you need to be excited to work with everyone and their characters. 

One of the ways that I protect myself from muns who may not be right for the rp is by putting a password in the rules. Often the apps that make me uncomfortable are the ones that disregard or contradict the skeleton or plot. It’s clear that the mun either wasn’t paying attention, reading the pages carefully, or just chose to ignore what they read. It’s often That the apps that I don’t vibe with end up being the ones that don’t read the rules and therefor don’t put the password. So not only is it a good indicator to me that the mun might not be very considerate but it’s also a great default reason to deny an app without having to tell the mun directly that you didn’t like other aspects of their app. Most often I allow them to reapply if they’d like to but their acceptance won’t be immediate, so that there’s a chance someone else might apply for the same role with an application than doesn’t skeeve me out.

ONCE YOU’VE MADE THE DECISION

Write out your acceptance notes. I try to write a full paragraph for everyone when I am accepting for a skeleton rp. If there’s more than 20 characters being accepted then obviously don’t, since that’s way too much to ask of you. But if it’s a small group I always endorse writing a little welcome the chosen mun saying what ti was about their appt hat you gravitated towards. It’s kind of a way to also provide feedback to those who were denied as to what their app might have been missing. Plus, it’s just a good way to get the right vibes going for the ooc portion of the rp. Muns need to feel appreciated! After all they put in the work to get there! 

I also like to offer feedback to those who were denied but with a disclaimer that most apps are chosen based on how they mesh with the other apps, since that’s something no one can anticipate. Usually the quality of the writing isn’t as big of a factor as how the character plays into dynamics with the others and whether or not their desired plots and connections with your vision and everyone else’s. Most of the time people won’t take you up on it, but be kind and thoughtful to those who do. However, if they are aggressive towards you in any way because they are upset about being denied block them immediately. Just trust me on that one. 

Keep everyone updated as to your progress! Just telling everyone where you are at (in the process of reading apps, writing the acceptance notes, or taking a break) is a good way to put everyone’s minds at ease. It’s especially important to let people know if you are logging off for a while on acceptance day.  That way people aren’t stuck refreshing the page and dreading that you might be ignoring them. On acceptance day I like to make a post every time I come online or go offline. It may seem like oversharing but it’s honestly so helpful to both you and the applicants. 

POST-ACCEPTANCES

Once you are about to start posting acceptance notes, turn off anon. I know that anon can be very useful for those shy and curious folks that don’t want to im you directly, but this is another case where you’re just gonna have to trust me. For your mental health turn off anon and keep it off for at least 48 hours. I usually keep it off permanently unless there are more roles that need to be filled in a second round of acceptances. There aren’t really any questions that should need to be asked anonymously once you have a full roster of muns and this is a good way to get people used to asking you questions via discord, im, or dm. To prevent nasties from bullying you and to open the line of communication between you and your members, turn off anon! 

And finally, once you have posted acceptances, close your laptop or turn off your monitor and don’t come back to it for at least an hour. I like to give myself two hours to go on a walk, eat some food, and just do non-rp things for a while. Acceptances are stressful and it’s important not to get swept up in it and feel overwhelmed. Taking a step back and remembering you exist outside of rp and outside of being an admin is so important. It’s hard to resist temptation, but if you have anon off really the only thing that’ll come into your inbox are follow messages and those can wait for two hours (or more)! But like I said above, keep everyone updated that you are going to log off for a bit and you’ll be back. Just so no one assumes the worst. 

Just remember to be kind to your applicants and to yourself! It’s a stressful time for everyone! 

[micoz-field-of-dreamz]

Hey

It's been a while since you saw my face

I haven't been doing so great

So I took a little break

A lot of people are saying some things about me that aren't quite true

Doesn't matter if it's true, though

Just as long as it's entertaining to you, right?

You guys having fun?

All aboard the toxic muppet train

Chugging down the tracks of misinformation

The toxic autism train

You got a one-way ticket to fixation station

Toxic gossip train

Tie me to the tracks and harass me for my tism..

Those rumors look like facts if you don't mind the gaps

I won't survive in the crash, but hey

At least you're havin' fun

Uh, hi, everyone

I've been wanting to come online and talk to you about a few things

Um, even though my team has strongly advised me to not say what I want to say

I recently realized that they never said that I couldn't sing what I wanna say, so

Here I am, and, um, today I only wanna talk about the facts

So, I hope that you'll be willing to listen

Here we go

Many minutes ago, I had a big bird meltdown

Uh, but not in a weird way like a lot of you are trying to suggest

It was more of a autism kind of way

Where I was just trying to be fixated on my silly bird thiing

It was kinda like, uh, when you go to like a family gathering, you know?

And there's a weird cousin there who keeps coming up to you and going like "HEY LOOK AT MY NEW HYPERFIXATION."

And you're like "Ehhh"

Um, that was me, but on tumblr. it was weird

I've been sharing my life online for over 7 years

I've poured my heart out to you and because of that I feel

Like I'm talking to my friends, but, in the beginning of my tumblr

I didn't really understand that maybe there should be some boundaries there

There were times in the posts when I would overshare

Details of my fixations, which was really cringe of me

I (have)n’t done that for minutes, you see

Because I changed my behavior, and I took accountability

But that's not very interesting, is it?

So let's go on the toxic tism train

The locomotive's fueled with hateful ableism

The toxic interest train

Steamroll over someone's reputation

Toxic interest trainnn

Hop on board, but close your eyes, otherwise you'll realize

That the train is made of tism and that person you despise

Maybe didn't deserve to die

But hey, at least you're havin' fun

In all seriousness, I do think it's really important to hold people accountable for their mistakes

Um, y'know, we should hope that everyone can learn from their mistakes

And grow, and change their behavior, and be a better person

This is something that I've always tried to do when I make mistakes

And is something that I will continue to try t- what?

Oh, you don't care? Oh, okay

I thought you wanted me to take accountability

But that's not the point of your mob mentality, is it? No

Your goal is to ruin the life of the person you despise

While you dramatize your lies and monetize their divergence

Yeah, um, I feel like I can already hear the comments on this post

"xer gaslighting, manipulating!"

"Ugh, xer a r(slur) and cringe!"

"I would never make a mistake like that."

Oh, I'm sorry I didn't realize

That all of you are perfect, so please, criticize me

Bring out the daggers made from your perfect past

And stab me repeatedly in my bony little back

I'm sure you're disappointed in my shitty little song

I know that you wanted me to say that I was 100% in the wrong

Well, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna take that route

Of admitting to lies and rumors that you made up for clout

"Hey everybody, I found someone new to harass

Xe did some things that I do not like, on xer account

So everybody, gather 'round, 'cause we're about to attack"

But not based on facts, oh no

Your loaded lethal weapon is your fingers on the keys

You don't need any armor when you can hide behind a screen

So, shoot me down, quick, with a click, and bam

My reputation's deceased

Uh, I also wanted to take a minute to talk about that bird, Big Nird

You know the one, yeah him

Uh, hes so silly

And it's always been that way

And that's why you won't find my recent posts about anything wlse

Anyway, um, I didn't realize it was my responsibility

To decide what was appropriate for everyone to see

I've always relied on you to decide if your comfortable

With watching an autistic person post about xer fixations

Now, have I made some jokes in poor taste? Yes

Have I made lots of dumb mistakes? Yes

Am I sad that there's some people that feel like im cringe? Yes (no)

But was my intention to manipulate? No

It doesn't really matter what my intention was

'Cause it seems as though everyone's already decided on that

Let me tell you, it's not very fun to have millions of people all over the world

Call you the most vile, horrendous, disgusting, life-ruining words

That a person can be called, in my opinion

Um, it doesn't matter that these things aren't true

Uh, everyone just believes that you are the type of person whos cringe

So, I just wanted to say that, um

The only thing that I've ever rambled about is things ive made.

I'm not a r(slur), I'm just a loser

Who didn't understand I shouldn't post my thoughts

And I'm not cringe even though a lot of you think so

Because 1 minute ago, I made a dumb joke

So, even though I know this posr won't change anyone's mind about me

I still felt it was important to come on here and defend myself a little

And take accountability

And I also wanted to say that

To anyone out there who has ever supported me in any capacity

I really, really appreciate you, thank you

For what it's worth, I never had any bad intentions

But I do feel like shit

The toxic interest train

Chugging down the tracks of hateful language

Toxic autism train

You got a one way ticket to ableism station

Toxic willow train

You tied me to the tracks and harassed me for my divergence

Rumors look like facts when you don't mind the gaps

I won't survive in the crash, but hey

Hope you had some fun

Actually, y'know, I feel like maybe I should let you guys know something, um

Seems like, maybe you're confused about something? I don't know

Let me try to help, um

Sometimes people make a mistake and it doesn't make them a horrible person, whoa

Sometimes people can make a mistake and they're still a good person

Crazy, I know

Sometimes people can make a mistake and you don't have to take that mistake, oh no

And twist it up, and grind it, and add some lies to it, and pulverize it

And stab it with knives, and ruin a life, and, oh no

Sometimes people can make a mistake, it doesn't mean you gotta send them hate, oh no

Sometimes people can make a mistake and you can kindly let them know, and help them to grow

Sometimes people make mistakes, simply because they made a mistake?

And that mistake doesn't make them a terrible human

It just makes them a human

But what do I know?

Fuck me, right?

sorry to everyone witnessing my big bird meltdown. im going thru it. apology video coming soon.

[paullicino]

On the Internet

Taken from, and thus generously funded by, my Patreon. The above image via ExtraFabulousComics.

Do you have a flashlight nearby? A lamp, or other light source? Keep it to hand, it might become relevant for something, something I’d like to demonstrate later. The demonstration is simple and entirely voluntary, the flashlight is not essential. It works just as well as a thought experiment in your head.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write about the internet on the internet. Because that’s what we all do these days, isn’t it?

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. It was a kind of hidden, secret space of unknown dimensions when we found it as young adults. A weird sort of Narnia. A modem meant you could open this door to an entirely different place full of entirely different people obeying entirely different rules. You had to find ways of telling one another about what you’d found this week, either the next time you were together in person, via an email or, God forbid, by printing out a webpage. Twenty-five years ago, the internet was a collection of imperfect search engines (crawlers) taking you to out-of-the-way websites that were as likely to have been made by someone just like you as they were to belong to some major company or organisation. Its mess was egalitarian. It was a decentralised place full of curious corners and sudden surprises. It wasn’t somewhere we logged on to with an expectation of finding the familiar. It was a place of discovery.

It wasn’t simply that the tech wasn’t as good as it is nowadays. That much is obvious. It was the fumbling newness of the place. It was a primordial soup, we were all blobs and we blobbed around together, testing out the water.

It was a tremendously international space. It was easy to stumble across websites in other languages, to find places that weren’t for you, that were never created with you in mind, and at the very edges of these places their owners and their users might just blend together. Spill over, even. Everyone was from everywhere and they were all mingling, uncontrolled. It was liberating. It was mind-expanding.

The internet was exciting, it was new, it was unfamiliar. It was a place to learn. It was a place without an agenda.

It was also a place to be different. Niche interests found their audiences and young people could be united by what they enjoyed, not marginalised. There was no need to fit in when the place didn’t even fit together properly. For those of us bullied, bored, or worse in tiny homogenous hometowns, isolated or upset by the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school can create, it offered little judgement about what you should want or who you should be. It was a place to be genuine. 

I still remember the end of the 1990s, too. It was a decade of growth and change not just for a young generation, but for the wider world we were learning about. There was a peace deal in Northern Ireland, there was optimism in the media and there was a coming millennium that was supposed to be defined by technology and communication, the internet at its forefront. I was not a young man who could identify with very much of this optimism, but I was at least a young man looking forward to change, who could be accepted as who I was on the internet and who could be excited about what it represented. I’d never tried to be anyone else, even though being different rarely works out when you’re young, but now I knew for sure that I didn’t need to.

As my friends and I grew, so did the internet, and it became a place where we could share more about ourselves, where we could play together and where we found a bunch of ways of keeping in touch whenever we were apart. It became a tool to help me work, that kickstarted my career as a writer, as well as an ever-widening window on the world. It wasn’t yet too corporate, its websites and its tools not yet too monolithic.

I remember some of that early sharing. I remember talking to total strangers, a world away, about some part of my life or theirs. I remember talking to one internet friend of many years, who I never met, about British and American spelling. And about spelling in general. I remember they told me they weren’t sure how to spell a particular word and I said they could look it up in but a moment, since they were online there and then. “I can’t be bothered,” they replied, and that frustrated me so much.

The 90s passed and on September 11th 2001 whatever vision there was for the coming century was erased. The course of world events shifted immediately and dramatically. Never before had mass murder been so visible and so immediate. I remember talking not about how different the world was going to be, but that we had no idea how big a difference this would even make. In a very short space of time, it felt as if the world became not only so much more cruel and so much more cynical, but also so much more divided. I remember the weeks and months after those terror attacks as being my first experience of seeing people sharply divided in their politics, divided enough to be extremely angry, extremely offended, by the many suggestions of what should be done next. It set the scene.

As the decade continued, technology and communication certainly did change us. More of us were using the internet not only to talk, but for more and more of our everyday tasks. We were also sharing ourselves, too, in ways more personal and profound, and there was so much to know. I read a blog post by a Black woman from the American South describing the ways she had to bring up her son to interact with the wider world, how angry he was about it, how unfair it all was. I read updates from those caught in the civil war in Myanmar, talking about what they claimed the news didn’t show. I read about the realities of the rapid growth in Dubai, the working conditions and pollution. I read diary entries by people surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, weeks without power and wondering when help would come. I read about the world in a way I’d never been able to before.

More than ever, the internet was a library of lives.

The first trip overseas I took by myself was all planned, booked and executed with the help of the internet. I flew to Chicago, in the United States, and I stayed in the most average hotel in the most average neighbourhood and it was wonderful. I heard real cicadas for the first time and walked through concrete valleys between towering skyscrapers that my tiny mind couldn’t process. In the evenings, I watched a plethora of American news, which was only ever about America, and that frustrated me so much.

The first interview I ever conducted with someone who wasn’t making a video game was with the writer Mil Millington. The interviews I really wanted to do were about people, their experiences, what they liked and why they do the things they do. Mil Millington was the perfect subject because we had both written about games, we both understood the reach of the internet and we were both interested in what the future of this medium would be. He had recently scored a book deal and written his first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, based on his semi-autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek blog of the same name, listing comic domestic disagreements. I asked him what it was like to share all of his personal life online and he told me that, actually, he didn’t:

“I'm, honestly, almost obsessively private. It's just the way I write that, for some reason, if I say, 'Margret won't let me watch a film in peace,' causes people to think, 'My God! Mil's laying his whole life bare!'”

And then I realised that he had, of course, chosen to share all the things that he had. And carefully. It didn’t mean that those things were less honest, less real or less interesting, but he had been doing what all of us writers do: picking his words and his moments. We should all get to share on our own terms.

I liked his honesty. He wasn’t trying to prop up any persona.

---

A little after this time, I was asked on a date by a conservative American woman who I met in my first year at university in London. We saw each other a few times and stayed in touch when she returned to California. A couple of years later, the American Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin spoke about “death panels” run by Britain’s National Health Service. Online, I expressed my annoyance and anger both at Palin just making things up, as well as at the volume of people who seemed to simply accept her words. My former date said that Palin was allowed to “express her opinion” and I didn’t know how to begin to explain, to an adult in her mid 20s, the difference between fact and opinion, or that she could check such things in a moment, since she was online. That frustrated me so much.

This discussion played out over a relatively new website called Facebook, which had become an invaluable way to connect with my fellow students. I had feared being alone at university, lost in a big city, but the opposite had happened. As soon as we all finished our first year of studies and were hurried out of our student residences, we scattered across the capital and the closeness I had taken for granted was suddenly lost. But Facebook became a directory of friendship, another library of lives. In its early days, I made jokes about people oversharing, or using the site to attract attention, but this wasn’t any different to how some of us might behave anywhere else. It wasn’t such a big deal. That’s just humans.

And anyway, I like to share. My whole life, I’ve enjoyed sharing things I think are important because I feel like it helps me make genuine connections, express myself and feel useful. I saw the internet becoming another way of doing this, another way to be genuine. The younger me had played in bands and held dreams of reaching other people through music, in awe of those moments when an audience sings an artist’s lyrics back to them. I still wanted that, that connection, or some version of it.

On the ever-growing internet, we could all share ourselves more. It could become a new medium for acceptance and understanding. What a glorious future it promised.

---

In time, I adopted all of the social media platforms that I use because I enjoy human connection and I think one of the fundamental traits of people is that they can be so interesting. They do stuff, they make things, they go places, they inspire and they pull humour out of the most difficult of situations like a conjurer tugging an elephant from a beanie. I’d like to be able to do those things. Some days I can barely make a pancake.

Social media allowed me to make and share even more, and now I was sharing things with two people at dinner, ten people at a party or a hundred people online. The number mattered less than the creation’s ability to connect, because it all helped me figure people out and it helped me figure myself out. It helped me figure everything out so that, perhaps one day, I might also learn the trick that lets you tug an elephant out of a beanie. I would be able to say to people “Ah yes, you start with the trunk,” or “Surprisingly, you pull from the tail.” Then they could pass that on. Social media seemed particularly good for this, a way for us to all enrich one another.

In 2008, a series of devastating terrorist attacks erupted across Mumbai. Many of the events were documented in real-time by both journalists and locals using Twitter, which made the site seem to me to be an invaluable new perspective on current events. By the start of the next decade, the Arab Spring saw a broad uprising across North Africa, with thousands of people united in protest by the unifying power of social media. It felt like these tools could change our world forever.

Some other things happened as that decade wound down.

A woman on Twitter made a poor joke about AIDS and Africa before boarding a flight, only to find that, by the time she had landed, her words had been shared around the world many millions of times. A woman in England was caught on camera putting a cat in a bin, the footage of which went viral and received such an overwhelmingly furious reaction that one national newspaper asked, only half-joking, if she was the most evil woman in Britain. These events were shared, discussed and dissected with a comparable passion and level of investment as the terrorist attacks and the Arab Spring. On the internet, a cat in a bin was becoming as important as terrorists in a hotel.

I flexed some cynical opinions. We all had opinions by then (though still not the same as facts), because it was increasingly difficult not to get swept up in things like these as and when they happened. They were everywhere, echoed and repeated, with a kind of mentality of momentum. Countless people changed their profile pictures to something green in support of protesters in Iran, or added a flag to support victims of terror in France. They signed internet petitions demanding Something Be Done, though it wasn’t always clear where these petitions would be delivered or how they would compel someone to act. None of these protesters or victims were in any way saved, protected or enabled by a person on the other side of the planet clicking their mouse like this, but if a million other people did it, those metrics created a validity of their own.

I think I remember the late 2000s as the time that I really began to feel different about these things. But by then, I was too bought in. It had already gone from a habit to a dependency.

Year by year, the internet had become less egalitarian. Monolithic sites and spaces were increasingly the center of the experience, whether hubs like MSN and Yahoo, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or popular news outlets. We found ourselves in the same places, over and over, and we relied on these for our new discoveries. While social media in particular pitched itself as something that put us all on the same level, behind the scenes levers were already being pulled to shape and to manipulate what was shown and shared.

(That’s okay, people told me. Turn on this feature, or adjust these options, and you get to pull your own levers. That’ll undo everything. You still get to share on your own terms.)

These sites had swelled to envelop us, going from making themselves exciting to making themselves essential. We no longer went online, we were online, always, and we left more and more of ourselves there even when we were away from our screens. Social media allowed you to collect everything together, becoming a place where you could simultaneously read updates from your friends, your parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, your favourite newspaper and your favourite sports team. All in a moment and all competing for your attention. Sites like Google and YouTube started to track and understand the preferences of their users, delivering to them more of what they wanted, working hard to grab and to keep their attention. You liked that dog, that topic, that politician? Here’s another.

Here’s another, again.

I was pulling levers all the time, frantically now, like someone operating locks and gates to try and dam an ever more overwhelming flow. My social media sites had changed from something that I used to something I had to manage. Not only were we all carefully curating who we broadcast to and when, lest we offend an employer or shock a relative, we also found ourselves trying to coordinate and customise them, because if we didn’t they would do this for us. They began to choose what to show us, based on what they believed we cared about, they began to offer us things, based on who they believed we were. They even began to mess with time, giving us information and updates out of chronological order. All of these were changes we often had to undo or at least be mindful of, if we even knew about them. If we wanted to. And if we knew how.

If we didn’t, our reality might shift.

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. My first favourite website was Snopes, which was then a collection of myths and urban legends, most of them debunked. In the late 90s, bullshit chainletter emails would bounce around the internet with stories about how some Russian scientists had drilled their way to hell, or how a new computer virus had come out, or how Coca Cola dissolved human teeth. Sometimes, the strangest of stories really were true, or at least partially so, but most of them were trash. Thanks to Snopes, you could check such things in a moment. I loved that about the internet.

On September 11th 2001, almost twenty years ago now, it was difficult to disagree about what we saw happening right in front of our eyes. Nevertheless, there were a few people afterward who insisted that a plane had not hit the Pentagon, that the towers had been deliberately demolished, that some more mysterious sequence of events had transpired. They lurked in the darkest corners of the internet, much as they had always existed on any other margins in any other mediums. The rest of us could get on with our lives.

I grew up playing games and then, later, I became someone who analysed, critiqued and even designed them. One of the most powerful and important things I learned through games is that so much in life is based around systems and the longer a system is around for, the better we become at manipulating it. When a game has been around for a long time, we find many different ways to play it and sometimes we have to adjust the rules of the game to account for this. The rules for chess that we have today have seen many adjustments and revisions. The same is true for football. It is also true for our laws and for our systems of government. We have to modify these things in part because times change, but also in part because they are being abused and exploited, subverted in ways their designers never imagined.

Or simply used as optimally as possible.

It’s 2021 and the internet monoliths that we have begun to take for granted, that have surged like the rising oceans to engulf our lives and to carry us along their currents, are constantly being used in ways their designers never imagined. Two years ago, we thought the biggest problem we had with social media and internet monoliths was their subversion to manipulate elections, with great armies of bots and fake profiles being created and directed faster than the people who owned social media sites being able to prevent this. This presence could bring amplification and validity to anyone or to anything. “Learn the algorithm,” was the key to success online. Use a site or social media platform in a particular way and it will elevate you further. Elevate your work. Or your truth. Or just you.

Now, more than a year and a half into a pandemic that defines our generation, the areas of the internet with which we’ve become most familiar and most comfortable, those which we began to pour our lives and identity into, are not only places where elections were subverted, they’re places where the difference between life and death are considered a matter of opinion, where science and fact can be openly ridiculed, where conspiracies about September 11th are tiny in comparison. For some time now they’ve already been well-worn battlefields, public arenas within which opinion and force of will often carry more weight than evidence and reason, but now the consequences of doubling down on a belief are undeniably the difference between living and dying.

More important, for some people, is the difference between right and wrong. Not so much being right, but being seen being right, can give you validity, clout, value. I think we’ve reached the point where dying while being seen as right can matter more than living and admitting a mistake.

The flow of the internet, all those locks and gates opened by algorithms or AI or other people’s decisions that may simply have been motivated by a desire to give us what we like, have made it more difficult than ever to find things that go against the current, or to grasp something we can be sure is objective or straightforward.

One part of me believes that we can no longer look things up in a moment any more, because we have to second-guess every other thing we find. As a journalist and researcher, I never feel secure with what I find on the internet now and I dig, I verify and I compare, still coming away unsure, often worried I will publish something glaringly incorrect. A different part of me, a more dramatic part, sometimes wonders which things are even real.

I suppose anything is real if you can get away with it. If nobody ever notices.

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There’s another aspect to all this, the aspect that makes me the most uncomfortable. The aspect I least enjoy discussing, but which I have to if I can fully explain myself.

Living alongside the internet, I’ve watched as some of us pull all those levers simply to control the flow as best we can, to keep ourselves afloat, but others have viewed this experience differently. They’ve seen it as a challenge, as another system they can manipulate. It’s an opportunity for them to choose how they present themselves. The more levers they pull, the greater their ability to do so. The more time they invest, the greater the result.

If you take your flashlight, lamp or light source and point it toward an object, you can easily affect the size and the shape of the shadows it will cast. Under your control, those shadows can lengthen or deepen, they can sweep and distort. A light up close can cast a gigantic shadow across a far wall, perhaps a sharp one or perhaps one fuzzy and undefined. Try it. See what you can make. The more you do it, the more tricks you can learn.

All of us try to present our best selves and all of us have our different selves, too. Forty years before I ever went online, the sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a book about how we behave differently in different contexts. It’s natural for us to speak to our family in a different way to how we speak to our best friend, or to our colleagues, or to a crowd we might be addressing in a speech. It’s not necessarily disingenuous, it’s merely a part of the human experience. But impression management, as Goffman called it, is also a matter of degrees. Some people are more invested than others. If given the tools to perform more effective impression management, more levers they can pull, they will engage even further.

I have flexed a few cynical opinions in my life (at least as many as three, the stats suggest) but, at the same time, I think I have to admit that I have also been very naïve about people. I tend to take many of them on face value and assume they are genuine. Many of us are, perhaps even most of us. But I’ve come to know both that this isn’t always the case and that, given the opportunity, some people will use every tool at their disposal to shape a false version of themselves. We’ve found ourselves in an era where this is more possible than ever. It’s no longer simply within the purview of politicians and PR firms, it’s within reach of every one of us and all we need to do is put in the time and energy. The reward can be ever greater popularity, ever more validation

And I’m so tired of seeing this.

Over the past half decade or so, I have seen the internet and its many systems gamed more than ever. Gamed for political gain, gamed for personal gain and gamed to create images, personalities and that god-awful golem of hollow and lifeless artifice that is brand. Now a person can be a product, a new kind of commodity in this ever more opaque ecosystem.

The nausea and unhappiness I feel from all this is more than the simple declaration that I’m not a brand, I’m a person. It’s the discovery that other people, sometimes people I’ve known, really are a brand now. Their time, their energy, their life is now invested in shaping and maintaining that image, that brand, perhaps even at the expense of other pursuits. And with the right manipulations, the right tugging of the correct levers, they can perpetuate that, build that and further gain the affirmations and validations they need to prove to themselves that what they have created is as solid and as true and as real as anything else. And how would we know any different?

The ocean is not so far from my home. It’s not unusual to walk the beach or the seawall and see people engaged in impromptu photoshoots, dressed in their very best, expertly presented and shot with long lenses. A friend told me that most of these shoots are for the purpose of enriching dating profiles, that there’s an increasing feeling of expectation, a sense that everyone must present their very best selves, simply because everyone else now does so. To be on a dating site is to feel engaged in an ever-escalating competition for time and attention, to need to package oneself as the best possible product.

I don’t at all object to the idea of dating sites, but I could never get comfortable with them and I used to feel like I was browsing a human meat market, that it was all too easy for me to make judgements about people I didn’t know and then cast them aside. I felt, again, like people had become products and this was a system and a process I did not want to be part of. You can game it, people tried to tell me. There are ways to make it work better for you, it just takes a little time. I didn’t want to know.

The more time you spend trying to engage with things that aren’t genuine, the less you have for what is real.

When I use the internet these days it’s with an increasing sense of discomfort and disquiet. I find myself already on the lookout for the artificial. I second-guess people as much as I do information. I’m all too aware of the constructed persona and the deliberate framing, of that angling of a light to cast a particular shadow. In a few cases, this isn’t an abstract concern and social media in particular can be a place where I watch people I know are starkly different to the image they project be celebrated for the false façade they maintain, a façade that can be further reinforced by popularity and prominence. I see harmful and unhealthy people championed even in spite of their actions, because they have managed to engineer support and validation, or using the popularity and affirmation they have gained to push opinion over fact. The disingenuous and the distorted tie together like a greasy braid, each one reinforcing the other, and it’s no wonder falsehoods can spread so far, whether false representations or false information. I would say that sometimes I almost feel like I’m back at school, amongst the same gossip and garbage, but this is far worse than any of the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school ever created, and now it comes with measurable metrics in the form of likes, follows, retweets or subscriptions.

I’m sure, at this point, this is a common experience and common concern for most of us, and we are each finding our own ways to handle it.

Or not. For me, the experience is deeply unpleasant.

While drafting this I idly wondered if we could somehow develop a new version of Snopes for human beings. A demystifier of people, something that reveals each person’s private Picture of Dorian Gray, which grows ever more warped as they reinforce their persona ever more. But I’m sure even that would be gamed and subverted before too long.

I'm so, so tired of trying to work out who is real.

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The internet monoliths I move between in my daily life all have one thing in common. Google, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Patreon and so many others are all based in the same place: the United States. They are towering. They overwhelm the rest of the internet. The levers that many of these pull, controlling currents and flow, are being operated in the United States. The politics, existential crises and cultural interests of that country are disproportionately represented and, while I care very much about the United States, I also want to hear about the rest of the world. I want to hear about where I live, and yet even that feels like it comes second. Yes, I am pulling all the levers that are supposed to make this happen. No, it isn’t entirely successful. I am using a paddle against a tsunami.

Once the bias is there, the snowball effect perpetuates. So often, whether I choose to or not, I am in that motel room watching a plethora of American news again, or its modern equivalent. It frustrates me so much. Most of us Westerners essentially live in America some of the time now, if we spend any period online. That’s where our presence and our attention are pointed.

Before publishing this essay, I changed every mention of “torch” to “flashlight” because I felt I had to cater to an internet that sees the first word only as a burning chunk of wood, not as a British battery-powered light source.

The internet doesn’t feel like the world any more. It hasn’t for a long time.

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I can’t abandon the internet of today. I need it for work. I need it to promote the things I create. I need it to keep in touch with people. I’m not different or special, only someone too bought in as well, my use also going from a habit to a dependency. But it has almost entirely stopped being a place of delight and discovery. It has lost any sense of being egalitarian. So much less is new, so much less is unfamiliar. So much more has an agenda.

Algorithms, metrics and social media have quantified and gamified everything, encouraging competitiveness and narcissism. Public spaces have become arenas and arenas encourage performance. In an attention economy, the outrageous and the overblown mean a cat in a bin can have the same profile and presence as terrorists in a hotel. In spaces that now mix our friends, our parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, our favourite newspapers and our favourite sports teams, people we know and love are elevated or relegated according to how interesting an algorithm has decided they are, pushing them to the fore or pulling them from your view. “People on Twitter are the first to know,” says the social network that prides itself on immediacy more than integrity or fact-checking. Misinformation abounds. As the line between person and brand has smudged between all recognition, corporations insert themselves into and between everything else we try to examine. Surrounded by banner ads, the conflicts of polarised culture generate enormous revenue for monolithic American tech companies. As we fight, push our narratives, construct our personas or compete in the race to prove we are the most woke, we all make @Jack richer, or provide Zuck with more of our personal data.

I also find myself reminded of what Octavia Butler called “simple peck-order bullying,” the hierarchical behaviour where people want to, and now can, elevate themselves above others, according to identities they've built for themselves, to push their ideas, push their image, push their sense of superiority or push their opinions so hard that they can reshape them into facts. Anything is possible with enough pulling of enough levers. And now more people have more of those levers. And some of them love to pull and then push, pull and then push.

I don’t like what the internet has turned into, nor what it has turned people into.

So what now?

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This was an essay inspired by an essay, inspired by an essay, which is always how it goes. Creativity is theft and anyone who says otherwise is only trying to distract you as they secretly shake you down. The eternal question that writers (or anyone creative) is supposed to dread is “Where do you get your ideas?” Because we aren’t supposed to know. But we do know. We get them from everyone else. We thieve them.

Ideas are pickpocketed from the people we pass in twisting evening alleyways, during the briefest moments of darkness and distraction. They’re caught with nets as they flutter with all the freedom of sweet springtime naivete. They’re spied upon from tremendous distances through the jealous lenses of sparkling telescopes. Nothing is truly ours and anyone wringing their words into a desperate defence of some unique capacity for originality ex nihilo is either deceptive or deluded.

(Avoid them. You’re likely their next target.)

This essay was heavily inspired by Lucy Bellwood reflecting on Nicole Brinkley. Both have written nuanced examinations of social media (focusing on Twitter) that I think you should make the time to read, but I’ll try and sum up the main thing I have taken from their writing in one line:

Social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it.

This is in so small part my interpretation, coloured by a particular belief I hold, that being that social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it. You can probably see why I approve.

There’s more to it than that. Brinkley talks about Twitter essentially breaking the way the Young Adult literature scene works, which to me is one facet of a dangerously seductive diamond that repeats many different stories of damage done by how we’ve used and gamed the internet. Her wonderful conclusion is that “These days it’s okay to not be sure what Twitter is for. We can stop going there until we figure it out.” And I so desperately wish I could stop going on the internet until I could figure out what it is for now, too. I wish it wasn’t essential. But it is, broken as it may be, breaking things as it may be.

While I don’t think leaving it is an option for me, I am using so much of it less. I have to. Social media, a place where I am shown arguments and controversy over the lives of people I care about, has become somewhere for me to hurriedly hurl out a quick update or two before I flee, escaping before I come across something, or even someone, that will make me sad. Any search box is a cause for scepticism, prompting me to analyse the results it gives and try a dozen different ways to find the same thing, just in case. Even Snopes is now a running commentary on the (American) news cycle. The best I can do whenever I think something fundamental to our society is unhealthy is to participate in that thing as little as possible. I know this limits my reach, limits my relevance and limits my success, but I also know that this makes me less unhappy and allows me to continue to feel genuine. Like I am still myself. Like I am still real. It may be apparent that my mental health has taken a few hits over the last couple of years. It doesn’t need to take any more.

I am not only unsure what Twitter is for, I am unsure what the whole internet is for.

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There is no conclusion to this essay. It is supposed to be six thousand words of open-ended reflection. The past year or so has sometimes been a huge struggle for me and it really is true that some days I can barely make a pancake. Work has been difficult, writing has been difficult and maintaining regular Patreon updates has been difficult, with this piece being a huge challenge to finish. I think I’ve tried to make the best of things, as well as present an honest but still positive face to the world. I have piles of tasks to get through and I tackle what I can, with what feels like so much competing for my attention. At the same time, I can’t opt out of the systems I live and work inside of, much as I can’t stop paying rent or putting food in my mouth, because individuals can't kick a habit society has become dependent upon. I think the best thing I can do right now is be truthful about all that, try to remain as genuine as I can and continue to step away from what makes me uncomfortable, giving myself some distance from the things that make me unhappy.

That doesn’t mean I’m disappearing (I’m still checking in on social media, streaming on Twitch and so on), nor does it mean this change or this philosophy is forever, nor does it mean that things can’t improve. But it does mean I’m changing a few things about myself, my habits and my preferences. And it does mean I have a working, temporary, if unsatisfactory answer to the question “So what now?”

It is: “We’ll see.”

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A big thanks to my Patreon community for the links I’m adding here, post-publication.

The first is How sex censorship killed the internet we love, on Endgadget, about controlling the internet in all sorts of ways and about what might be considered explicit (apparently a condom might be explicit).

Then there’s The internet Is Rotting, from the Atlantic, about bits of the internet that are disappearing and the loss of information that comes with it, as well as information that is overwritten and altered. We are keeping less than you might think.

Finally, The web began dying in 2014, here’s how, by André Staltz, talks about the growing prominence of big corporations (all American), what their priorities are, and what online things (services) they may bring to you.