I am invincible! Hollysummit extreme poverty hobo era will end!! Subscribe to me on Patreon!!!
i. Tumblr's freeze on my DMs
Something pretty scary happened to me the other day. I'd taken a break of a week or so from actively promoting this fundraiser, which I mostly do via tumblr. Reddit lacks long-term infrastructure, Facebook is full of people who make my life difficult. Twitter has its own set of problems. Tumblr is my financial hub. But the other day, after messaging only a handful of people, I found my DM functionality on tumblr disabled.
I went to pray on the matter and made a post about it from a new account. After I started that new account, I saw that all the posts being recommended to me were in Turkish. I began to suspect that tumblr had placed additional limitations on Turkish accounts, especially after I got errors when trying to message people from the new account.
If tumblr were to start throttling an restricting me, that would be against the clear expectations and hopes of the userbase. Tumblr users want to support victims of capitalism. Nobody has been rude to me after I messaged them asking to share my post in years, not a single person. I've had two or three who were confused about what I was doing, but not mean. Two or three, out of probably thousands.
A website that was known in the past for some pretty confused politics has one thing right. The users want to be a sort of underground railroad for the victims of capitalism. If no one else got me, I know tumblr's users got me.
Tumblr's staff is more of a wildcard. Tumblr's staff, I fully expect to declare open war on me and the rest of the tumblr ebeggaratti at some point in the future.
But that post, although I have not been able to directly message it to anyone, currently has about 1600 notes. Â The voice of the userbase fills my bank account with the rejection not just in words but in deeds of any possible aggression that the staff might meet me with. As long as that continues, I am invincible. The staff will never defeat its users.
This time, it was a false alarm. Tumblr staff messaged me the next morning answering my complaint to tell me it was a glitch on their end, and they'd fixed it. I posted an update on my main about it. But really what the situation did was highlight a particular vulnerability of mine, a vulnerability that the users of tumblr have a clear dislike for.
Although this particular goal has been reached, I will not be closing donations. I will continue to encourage them, because not only is this actually how I've paid rent since 2014, but I also need to get myself back on HRT, as well as ADHD medication, and I will be pursuing long-term dental treatment for the fact that I have no back teeth at all, and also treatment for some early childhood brain injuries. If anything, these are even more ambitious goals.
As for the immigration expense itself, $1800 in my bank account puts me in a position of having to renew my residence every 3 months. I can expand it by another month for every $600. I think that due to a particularly generous donation last night, it might actually be more practical (!) to aim for a fourth month -- either way, more is better. In my wildest fantasies, I like to think about it being more months every time.
iii. Support me on Patreon to end my reliance on the continued begrudging tolerance of tumblr staff.
Something I'm trying to get off the ground is my patreon. If you want to help me in the long term, sign up there. You'll get exclusive commentary on my writing. You'll get exclusive journal entries. I make it worth your time, and since the audience is people who are invested in me as a person, rather than people who share a particular interest, I have crazy freedom in what I write about. I get to write about niche stuff nobody else is writing about. I have a lot of fun on there.
https://www.patreon.com/hollysummit
Hollysummit extreme poverty hobo era ends within the next few months. I'll consider it over when 1. I have a steady income to be expected month to month which covers rent and basic living expenses and no longer have to spam individuals, and 2. I am no longer dependant on the continued begrudging tolerance of a website that I fully expect may unceremoniously declare open war on me.
Can't do it without you guys. I hope everyone will support me.
