queer people of all kinds. i am looking you in the eyes. do not fucking kill yourself. are you listening to me it will be okay. it will get better. i am shaking you by the shoulders do. not. fucking. do. it. you have so much to keep going for and so many people who love you. the cost of the present will not outweigh the life ahead of you. i love you. chin up or down keep walking you'll get there. we will pull you back up onto your feet should you fall. i love you
starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don’t know what reading is
I know I just reblogged this but I think the really important takeaway here is that this techbro is not genuinely asking “how can we improve fanfiction?” What he’s asking is “how can we tap into this massive market?”
I keep thinking about how many of these chat bots are free—for now. And of course they are! It’s a classic marketing technique when you’re trying to get your foot in the door with a novel product: let folks use it, let them get used to it, then start charging for it. You don’t have to look any further than streaming to see a very recent example of how this happens.
And it’s going to happen with AI.
There’s nothing these assholes love more than making money off of other people’s hard work. But you can’t legally charge for fanfic! So how do you get around that? You charge for a chat bot (which you trained on other people’s fanfic). You can’t charge for the content, but you can charge for the thing that produces the content.
AI is theft, and there are a whooooole lot of people gleefully looking to make a buck off of our hard work.
Don’t use AI, don’t feed AI your favorite fic writers’ and artists’ work, don’t read AI fic, don’t engage with it. And if you do, well, I can’t force you to give a shit about other people, but AI is a paywall being built, brick by brick, between you and the things you love. Stop slathering on the mortar.
👆👆👆
making a compilation of text posts that knocked sense straight into me
“Do it scared” but please realize that, if you Do It Scared too much and don’t let yourself rest + relax + have fun in between, you will fuck yourself up. If you “do it scared” all day every day, you will burn out badly and quickly. Sometimes this is temporarily necessary but please keep this in mind.
The worst period of my life was when I was a self hating teenager in denial about being transgender. I grew up in a deeply abusive household and my father expected me to be his manly son and I tried to conform despite it driving me insane, I fell down many nasty rabbitholes because of my insecurities rooted in deep hatred of my body and deep hatred of what I should be, I have always felt uneasy looking at men in cartoons and movies thinking to myself how much I don't want to become that, always envying the girls and always dreaming about waking up as a girl. This all lead me online because I felt so isolated from the world and I couldn't relate to anybody. Of course an unmedicated self hating teenager, with grand delusions about being god's little special soldier, seeking ANY validation is bound to fall into some horrible places, i am one of the victims of the alt right pipeline, and it did drive me into suicidal spirals many times over how much I hated myself for being transgender. Eventually I snapped out of it and grew out of it but the taste in my mouth of ever associating myself with that kind of community is really disgusting and never seems to wash off from my tongue, which I suppose is good since I never want to be back there mentally. I despise the right wingers, seeing and experiencing their beliefs first hand, it's all just driven by hate and insecurity, the only reason why it's so popular is because these people prey on lack of knowledge and insecurity of any kind, offering easy solutions and quick fixes, putting an easy target to direct your hate towards just to deflect the hate away from yourself. It is not a valid or real solution or even political ideology, it's a grift and a worldview sold to people who know their future is uncertain, it's harnessing the societal instability and crisis for political and financial gain, and I was a sucker for it in my teenage years for which I apologize. Nowadays I am unapologetically a leftist, with flaws and gaps in knowledge, like any other human on this earth but fundamentally different and changed from when I was a kid, and I am proud of myself and I am proud to be the bad transgender bitch that I am. It took so much effort, medicine, therapy, help from my family, help from my friends for me to realize that I was wrong and that I need to change. I did not do it alone. And I'm glad I did it, and I'm happy to ve fortunate enough to receive help and support despite being a toxic unpleasant person to be around. All so I can just be Wis in peace a weird transgender woman on the internet, drawing trans women who despise the fascists and nazis. It's also why I so deeply believe in people changing and why I am so adamantly against harassing people for their mistakes for years, it just doesn't help, all it does is makes one ashamed and all shame does is drive one further into the abyss of self hatred. As corny as it sounds love has saved me and it is love and patience that helps people change
Change and rebirth is a core theme in my art, almost every oc of mine has died in some sense and was reborn as a different person, drastically changing in the process.
Can't express how stress free being open minded is.
Some lesbians use he/him? Oh cool.
Some people have people inside their head and sometimes it's fictional chars? Sick your brains like a pirate ship they're all working to run.
Some people like being treated like a pet dog? Bark bark bro.
Being fat isn't unhealthy but a perfectly normal type of body to have? Kinda beautiful how different we can all be.
Something doesn't make any fucking sense? Cool an opportunity to learn. And even if I can't figure it out it's cool we still have mysteries today.
It's just... idk man. People are weird. Being a person is weird. Society is weird. The universe is weird. Rather than having to "normalize" everything, just accept that some people are weird. So are you. Nothing is normal. the rules are all made up. I once saw a Klingon pushing a baby stroller down the street in toronto. The world is a weird place, man. Just roll with it.
[“I want to give people some tips on what the cold cut-off is like.
First, you gotta stay cold. The whining will go on FOREVER. They will call you directly. They will email you. They will put EMERGENCY in the email subject, and you will find the EMERGENCY is Why Are You Doing This To Me, You Selfish Brat. They will leave messages. They will call you at work, because they are just so worried, are you okay? If you respond to any of this, even just to say “I AM NOT TALKING TO YOU,” all you have done is show them exactly how often and in what ways they have to harass you until you respond.
After the harassment, there will be niceness. Honeymoon. You will get gifts. Concern troll gifts. My dad, he wanted to buy me a coat. It’s so cold out there, I don’t know if you know that. I am worried about your health YOU STUPID BITCH here I don’t want you to get sick now I AM GOING TO PUT YOU IN A MENTAL WARD. These will be patronizing gifts meant to guilt you about how much they love you and how you are unable to care for yourself properly. Also, there will be checks. With the checks will be little check-ins. Did you cash the check yet? I see you didn’t cash the check yet. Did you get it? Could you just tell me if you got it? I know you don’t want to talk right now and that’s fine, you need space, but just let me know if you got the check? Or when you’re going to cash it? That’s all. Can you not even do that? Really? Are you that immature? Do you need help getting to the bank? Because I can drive you. It’s just a check, for chrissakes, you can’t even take free money?
After that phase passes, there will be a period of radio silence. It’s not over. It’s just a break. When it revs up again, it’ll be through third parties. My coworker saw you at the cafe. I hope you’re not drinking too much coffee. Here, your mother asked me to give you this trinket from your childhood. She seems really upset. I don’t know what happened between you, but I think she’s been through enough, don’t you?
If you can chop your way through that, there will be mostly silence. Except on birthdays, or Christmas. Then there will be passive-aggressive cards and gifts and FUCKING CHECKS.
Let’s shoot forward a few years. Let’s assume the cut-off has worked and they’ve stopped trying to drag you back. Here’s some shit you’ll have to put up with:
You Should Really Forgive and Forget
Strangers, friends, acquaintances, anybody who hears that you have an estranged family member will tell you to forgive and forget. They will tell you that family is wonderful and really more meaningful than whatever you’re going through. Also, bonus round, but WHEN YOU GET OLDER YOU’LL UNDERSTAND, double bonus round, BUT BY THEN THEY’LL BE DEAD AND YOU’LL REGRET IT. After dealing with this shit for years, I’ve found it’s best, for me, to not respond. Maybe give them an mmm, oh, that’s interesting, but it’s not worth it to explain my circumstances or refute their assumption of my personal feelings. If they cared about my circumstances, or my personal feelings, they would have asked.
What people are telling you when they have this round-up toy spiel is what they are capable of. They are not capable of cutting off their family. They are not capable of imagining a life without forgiveness. They are not capable, perhaps, of imagining your life. They are not capable of separating the word “family” from “blood relations.” They are not capable of conceiving of happiness without traditions. These are not bad things. It’s just them, the way they prefer to live. You live differently. The only thing is, you probably don’t go around accosting strangers and advising them to cut off their family, and if they don’t, they’ll grow old and regret all their years wasted placating and living in fear. So, stay that way. Don’t be that asshole. Just understand that other people don’t have the strength to live as you do, and you do not have the strength to live as they do, and that is all okay, as long as they shut up sometime goddamn soon.
You Are Capable of Leaving Me and I Am Terrified
You will get this from partners and from friends. They know you are capable of cutting off people you love very much, people you are supposed to be with forever. There is a line and it can be crossed, and after that, you are gone from their lives forever. They never seem to hear the, “You could always make amends,” part. Just the, “I am not speaking to you anymore,” part. Some people can’t handle that. A surprising amount of people can’t handle that. They can’t handle the fact that if they were to call you on your birthday you would not be pleasantly surprised and decide that it was really all so long ago anyway. They can’t handle the fact that if they blew into town you wouldn’t have an obligatory cup of coffee, or if they got married you wouldn’t call just to say congratulations. They can’t handle the fact that you wouldn’t friend them on Facebook, or ask other friends how they’re doing.
They can’t stand the fact that you could erase them and still manage to exist in the world, without them.
A friend of mine from college had cut off her family, too. She told me about an argument she had with an insecure, needy, hurtful boyfriend. He was pretty much entirely in the wrong, and when he had run out of arguments, he lashed out using her family. “I guess I just get scared,” he wheedled, “Because you cut off your family, I feel like you could cut me off, too.” She didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah,” she said. “I could. If that bothers you, we shouldn’t be dating.” She and I laughed about it later. As if it was supposed to hurt us, the idea that we could protect ourselves, that we could cut out the riffraff. I mean, she had cut off her ENTIRE family — a boyfriend was supposed to get her shaking now? Get a better ultimatum, man.
Flint tried to use this, too. So did an ex-girlfriend. During fights, they’d spit out something about how I can’t deal with family since I don’t have one. The truth was, I couldn’t deal with abuse if I wasn’t having it. If family meant what they were doing to me right then, then yes, I could not understand, would not understand, and would not participate. And that was fucking unacceptable to somebody who needed me to collude in their madness. They knew that if I made the choice to cut them off, it would be complete. We wouldn’t fight. They wouldn’t have any access to my feelings, my thoughts, my experiences, anything they could use to hurt me or know me.
When people say these things, try to cut me down for exercising my ability to define my boundaries, they are letting me know that they want to reserve the right to hurt me in specific ways. They are letting me know that if I stopped being a part of their life, they would lash out and refuse to let me go. They are telling me they expect this of me, they need this in place if they are to continue being my friend. They need to know that I will let them hurt me as a price for any love we shared. They are telling me that this is what they think love is.”]
Hey do your future self a favour and do your stretches kids…
Okay so I’m expanding upon this because it’s not useful in itself.
I have recently been diagnosed with Osteoarthritis. I am 33 years old.
I have drawn pretty much every day since I was 11 years old, often I’ve drawn for hours and hours without a break, and the main reason I have this really shitty condition now which may very well rob me of my dream job (I have been told by my doctor that my ability to tattoo is on a very short ticking time limit) is because of overuse. It’s not just because of lack of stretching, in fact I could have stretched every day and still ended up like this because I pushed myself too hard.
your body needs rest, it needs breaks, you can’t just draw and draw and draw non stop every day, I know that’s expected in a lot of art professions and even held up as a virtue I see “Never stop drawing!” Passed around as an ideal a lot. But this grindset will break you down eventually. This is why most professional athletes need to retire in their 30s, if you are an artist who has been practicing all your life, you are like a professional athlete of art except most of us aren't even required or taught proper physical conditioning and health practices to maintain our bodies.
Rest is vital, mentally and physically, please. Please rest, please look into proper body safe drawing techniques and posture. You don’t want to be staring down this barrel in ten years, the time will pass and I promise you, it’s a nightmare.
Please. Take care of yourself now.
You own the home you live in. The last owners painted the walls of your bedroom a horrible off white.
You fucking hate it. Every day you wake up to off-white walls and off-white ceilings and pass through your off-white door to get to the rest of the house. You feel like you've been locked up in a padded room. It makes you want to die.
So what is there to do? Well, you own the home. Go out and get some paint, a roller or two, and a drop cloth. If the color makes you want to kill yourself, you should obviously change it.
But what if you didn't hate it. What if it just mildly perturbed you? Or maybe what if you didn't, like, reeeeeally mind it all that much, but you knew that another color would make you a lot happier? Does the decision that you come to change?
Sure, it's work moving the furniture out, setting up, painting, making sure you get the edges, cleaning up, letting it all dry, etc, but isn't adding joy to your life worth the effort? Don't you owe it to yourself to subtract mediocrity and add happiness? Do you need to be miserable to envision a better life?
Anyway all that to say go start those hormones. You don't have to hate yourself to think of a happier life
"A cishet person must have made this, no queer person would ever portray queerness in this way."
"This artist must be white."
"No SA victim would ever handle the subject in this way."
"No woman would ever write women like this."
"This creator is obviously neurotypical. Everyone with autism/ADHD/depression understands-"
Nope.
People who make these blanket statements are very frequently proven wrong when the creator comes out as a member of that group. And even when they aren't proven wrong, even in cases where the creator isn't from the group in question, actual members of the group who don't fit whatever arbitrary criteria are being expressed will see these statements and feel excluded and erased.
Not everyone in your group is going to share your experiences. No single individual gets to personally decide what does or doesn't count as a "valid" expression of trauma or being part of a particular group, and creators are also not obligated to out themselves in order to "prove" their validity.
If something doesn't resonate with you, all that means is that it doesn't resonate with you. You don't have to like it. But you don't get to decide what it means to someone else.
this is so important
a weird thing is that we got waves of people going "who cares if its cringe or youre annoying! have fun!" but no one really learned how to accept the fact that some people will find you annoying or think your art or your work or posts or anyrhing sucks and thats ok. rather it just became a weird "if people think youre annoying theyre just morally bad. let people enjoy things!". like no i think this yes man only biome sucks and people are allowed to not like artstyles and shows and media and other things
if youre an artist, a creator, or just someone whos involved in hobbies: learning that no matter what you do, some people will find you annoying is extremely important for your mental health, just as learning that not liking things is normal and youre allowed to do it
you've probably heard it before, but half-assed is better than no-assed. don't let perfect stand in the way of done. a 0 on your report card is worse than a 50. do it scared. do it wrong. do it ugly, just do it. do not wait for the perfect day to have your little treat. make a day better with the treat. life is for the living. make outsider art
Try.
btw the majority of your life will be lived as a adult. yeah i don't make the rules. go have fun in your 40s or 70s or whatever. no one expects you to accomplish everything at 17 or 27. you've got time and in the meantime get some life experience, it will pay off
I started using Head and Shoulders ten years ago for itchy scalp and dandruff, and then for ten years I have not had itchy scalp and dandruff, so I thought “why do I still buy shampoo to combat itchy scalp and dandruff when I do not have itchy scalp and dandruff,” so I stopped buying the shampoo for itchy scalp and dandruff and can you guess I have now? Can you predict what currently afflicts me? It’s alright if you can’t because apparently I fuckin couldn’t either
Cutting something out of your life because you think you don’t need it any more only to realize that it was in fact working as intended and preventing a problem that will return should you stop doing this is a good experiment to run periodically with something small like dandruff shampoo, lest you start to think it would be a good idea to do this with like let’s say public health and the social safety net and vaccines
I had a liver transplant when I was 14 and like six months later I was chatting with my surgeon and he said “there’s gonna come a time, probably when you’re a teenager, where you’re gonna think, ‘I feel great, why am I still taking all this medication? I haven’t needed it in years.’ and you’re gonna want to stop taking all this medication. Guess what’s gonna happen then? You’re gonna go into rejection and your liver is gonna start failing, and you’re gonna be dying again, and we’re gonna have to find you another liver. So don’t do that.” And I said “why the fuck would anyone do that?” and he said “people are stupid.”
every once in a while when I get annoyed by a pharmacy or don’t wanna get out of bed to do my drugs I think “ugh, this is dumb, why do I do this?” and that conversation slams into me like a truck and I remember that I am, in fact, stupid
look, guys, this may seem ironic coming from a person with Verbose Disease, but I'm about to tell you the secret to winning social media: shutting the fuck up. you have a controversial discourse opinion? shut the fuck up and no one will know. can't participate in a boycott for various reasons? shut the fuck up and no one will know. you think or do something Problematic that has no bearing on anyone but yourself? shut the fuck up and no one will know. you haven't been keeping up on a pressing social issue? shut the fuck up and no one will know. your mind is a wonderful place where you can have all the bad takes in the world and they're all perfectly insulated from everyone and everything unless you try to excise them on a grand scale. you can take the mental L all by yourself without using a public platform as a confession booth and face zero repercussions and it'll be just fine. open up a damn diary and explain yourself there.
