You Are Here

Here Being, of Course, Where You Are.

[katie-mcgrath]

Is it all right to hit a Nazi unprovoked?

[wilwheaton]

“So by any measure, the claim of an “unprecedented” mandate simply isn’t true. Trump won a very close election and will govern a country where a near majority of people have voted against him three times. Yes, his party won control of Congress as well. But in the House, the margin of Republican control (with three contests still undecided) is so small that Trump’s appointment of three representatives to Cabinet positions could make any controversial votes extremely difficult for House Speaker Mike Johnson until special elections are held, and very difficult even then.”

— Election Results Show Trump Has Lost Popular-Vote Majority

[jrmhmurphy]

This doesn't even come close to making me feel better. Do you think Trump or McConnell or Johnson or Roberts is going to see how close it came and decide not to turn this country into a fascist state? We were screwed, which is a feature, not a bug.

[wilwheaton]

frances farmer will have her revenge

Remember going to the record store, browsing for hours, listening to tons of recordings on headphones, soaking up the culture and that vibe we can all feel in our memories, but can’t describe with words? Remember getting the tape, even though you really wanted the record (that you could make into a tape), because you could listen to the tape in the car, right away? Remember getting home and…

frances farmer will have her revenge

[jrmhmurphy]

I know Wil Wheaton, nee Becky, is my age, but I keep forgetting he's my age.

[zizicat]

[laterovaries-deactivated2017022]

This will always be my favorite gifset. Ever.

[onceuponamirror]

im morally obligated to reblog this every time i see it

[wilwheaton]

“Less than 24 hours after the verdict, Trump’s campaign already boasted raising over $30 million from Republican supporters. Republican lawmakers have nearly universally condemned the verdict and presented it as a sign of a republic in crisis. Right-wing pundits are depicting the verdict as a sign of a deep-state conspiracy and impending civil war. Snap polling data shows a much higher proportion of Republicans saying they’re more likely to vote for Trump because of the verdict than the share who say they’re less likely to vote for him because of it.”

—

The Trump verdict isn’t a game-changer for the 2024 election

It’s a cult.

[jrmhmurphy]

I'm not trying to be a dick, but if this came as a surprise to you, you're Mr. Ma-fucking-goo. Nothing. Nothing will ever convince them he's wrong about anything. You can't get through to these people.

[cannibalchicken]

[jrmhmurphy]

Georgia Armstrong Custer.

[evviejo]

STAR TREK - S3E10 Plato's Stepchildren

[agincourtdb]

Once more for the right-wingers who don't understand Star Trek in the back

[wilwheaton]

Whenever I hear someone complain that Star Trek is suddenly woke I laugh and laugh and laugh and

[jrmhmurphy]

You mean someone like William Shatner?

[guerrillatech]

[broken-horn-of-equius]

This woman's past life reached through 3000 years to smack this dude

[strangegutz]

JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC

OOAK art doll

[jrmhmurphy]

Where do I get one of these?

[thedankmemes]

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

Won’t lie, if I were having a rough time and the office himbos brought me mac and cheese I would be cured.

[ramshacklefey]

Small, clumsy kindnesses, earnestly given, are more healing than you would believe. More adults should be willing to show the tender caring that a little kid expresses when they say, “You looked sad, so I brought you a rock.”

[jrmhmurphy]

A friend offered me a mint when I was having a meltdown, and my meltdown ground to a halt instantly.

[ao3commentoftheday]

any advice about how to deal with posting a fic and getting radio silence? I know ppl aren’t owed engagement ofc, but I feel embarrassed at having spent so long on something no one cares about, and although I liked thinking about the characters and fandom before (and was considering writing more about them), now I can’t think about it without feeling that overpowering embarrassment 😭 part of me wants to delete the fic, but that would mean having to open ao3 and look at it again LMAO

sorry for the venting, I know this is probably a me problem, but has anyone else felt this, and if so, is there any way to make this pervasive shame go away??

*hugs* This is a very painful thing to experience and there isn't really any way to make it just go away, unfortunately. However, you can reflect on it a bit, when you're ready to.

Writing and posting are separate activities. If you've enjoyed writing the story but you haven't enjoyed posting it to the Archive, you can always continue writing just for yourself. This may or may not be something you'd enjoy - you know better than I do whether some of your enjoyment came from the anticipation of a reaction to your work.

Try to analyze where your embarrassment is coming from. Is it worrying that your story was poorly written? A lack of a reaction doesn't mean that the story is bad. Being unpopular doesn't mean it's bad, either. If your story is good to you, then it's a good story.

Is your embarrassment from feeling like you were "caught trying." Is it a cringe at the idea that you put effort into something that someone else doesn't (appear to) find valuable?

Is it actually embarrassment at all? Are you feeling a different kind of hurt instead? Did you hope that someone in particular would read your story and now you feel ignored? Did you hope to be embraced by your community and now you feel shunned?

These are difficult questions that I'm asking and you might not want to think about them right now. That's okay. You don't need to if you don't want to. You can definitely delete the fic and pretend it never happened. Or you can log out of that AO3 account and create a new one and never look back. Maybe you just need to take a week or a month off for a hiatus of sorts and when the ache isn't as bad, you'll be able to face it all again.

When I felt this way, it was because I felt like I'd put something into my community and that I'd been ignored. But since that time, I've found one person who gives me all of the community support I used to get from an entire fandom, and now when I post something on AO3 I don't actually need a response anymore. I get all of the fun and excitement and validation etc from my conversations and RP threads with my best friend.

Once you've got a little distance from the pain of this moment, try to figure out what it is that you were hoping to get and then figure out how you can get it. Maybe it's through posting fic to AO3, but maybe it's not.

Let's see what others can suggest. This is not something you're experiencing alone, anon. So very many of your fellow fan writers have experienced this too ❤️

[urwendii]

Oh I'm adding to this because I went through this a few months back.

After knowing rather good engagement on my first fics, I was hit by a sudden drop for the Sequel and all others recent works.

And i kept comparing myself to the other works in the fandom and mostly some fics i really liked who still showed strong engagement by the fandom, while my kudos had plateaued and i was getting comments by 2 or 3 people max. If any.

It hurt a lot and it brought a lot of jealously and envy bc damn it I was there too and it seemed the fandom were now only focusing on these 5 or 6 authors.

I took down my fic in the end, then another and another and in the end, it killed all joy to write about that specific ship. All in all, it poisoned a lot of my happiness in the fandom in general.

It's a complicated situation when you are part of a fandom that is proficient in writing fanfics, and is also subjected to the short attention span of some casual watchers. Aka my first fics were written a couple months after the show and therefore enjoyed more exposure (even if I never managed to hit the popular threshold I was nonetheless extremely happy with the response.) So it becomes hard when half of the readers move on, I was struggling with writing in general and then posted a couple of chapters that got no immediate attention.

It's heartbreaking and as I said I was in direct view of the fact it was not the case for others. Fandoms are like that. It's a brutal reminder that it's all about finding a community you can exchange motivation with, uplifting you.

Sadly for me in that particular fandom I never got that. (I will now confess that A lot of this is also self perception and RSD. I did interact with a few persons, but I never was part of the big communities that flourished and therefore remained apart.)

Looking back, I should have done things differently, I should not have looked up that much to others that are more successful/popular because it's the only road to self disappointment where you forget about your own accomplishment.

Write for yourself they say. OK so I do that now. I am completely rewriting the fic I deleted and will not post it until I am sure I am ready to deal with whatever the answer is going to be.

Comparing yourself with others is natural there's no shame in that. But it should not come at the cost of your self love and confidence. And definitely not let it poison your interest for the topic you used to write.

It came to the point (and I have never said it to anyone before) where I was getting panic attacks just thinking of opening ao3, seeing others chapters getting more kudos, seeing people who used to interact on my fics commenting on others but not mine. I cried more than once. I hated half the fandom. I hit rock bottom.

It's a hard battle. And I think some of us are less equipped to deal with that than others.

That was barely two months ago.

Now I have found my little corner, with a small rarepair and a small handful of people who enjoy it as well. One day I might come back to the big ocean but for now I'm happy to be back swimming in a pond.

My only advice to this is such: if you're feeling wronged or you think it's unfair your fic is not getting recognition. It's NORMAL. you created something and you are in the rights to expect a response.

BUT. If it becomes something that impact your creativity or life in general then it is time to take a step back. Allow yourself this. Its self care. Don't do like me and try and try until it all falls apart and you end up having to move on from something that brought you a lot of joy last year because the mere thought of facing self perceived failure/embarrassment gives you anxiety.

Take a step back. Allow yourself one day to be angry/sad/ashamed. It's healthy. But the next day? You take a deep breath, go outside a bit, hug a tree then refocus on the joy of creating for yourself. It's not easy. It's darn hard. I know. But it's worth doing this.

One last thing, i am fairly competitive so online creations are already a double edged sword for me. And along the way I think I got used to having attention and took for granted the ones I always had by my side.

And to echo OP, now I have relearn this and I am so grateful for my best friend who is always supporting and reading me (despite not even being in the fandom. Seriously Aryn, real MVP ❤️) and I have a couple of other friends with who I love sharing silly niche headcanons.

Having a rarepair reset your need for online clout.

Now I'm happier. Far happier. Actually, I felt blown away that 5 whole people left kudos on a fic that was the 1st of its ao3 tag.

I don't really have a miracle solution. I think in the end, when things get bad for you (aka negative emotions toward your published writing) the only answer is this one:

Sadly you can't force people to care and pay attention to you. Life is unfair. Your work is as good as the ones getting popularity. Find a handful of people who will support you (perhaps offline even - not necessarily irl but friends outside your fandom?), relearn to find joy in little things and don't underestimate the benefit of going offline for a while.

[jrmhmurphy]

I just want to add, I’m a pretty decent writer (I’m published, and I have great reviews on Amazon and Goodreads from people I don’t know), and I’ve posted a fic and a half on ao3, and I have never gotten more than 1 kudo on any chapter. It’s hard to motivate myself to post, but I have a unique perspective on this fandom, and I think it should be out there.

I have a friend who has thousands of kudos every time they posts, but they inherited those fans from another writer. Popularity is only barely tied into skill.

Write for yourself.

[creativepromptsforwriting]

Googling a word as a writer that you've always assumed has one meaning is so stupid because, on one hand, why doubt yourself? You used that word before, it's a normal word, and it will mean what you think it meant. You're just wasting time that you could use for actually writing.

But on the other hand, what if you find out that it's not what you always thought it is? What now? Now you question your whole existence, and there is no time left for writing anymore.

[jrmhmurphy]

I felt this way when I found out the correct way to pronounce John Constantine.

[rosalarian]

I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

[rosalarian]

So there’s been a bunch of replies to this to the effect of “Boo hoo you can’t draw porn anymore, cry me a river.” They’re so perfectly proving the points I wanna make that I couldn’t possibly try to invent a strawman argument more perfect than the real people in the replies.

Here’s the thing: censorship always starts with a group of people whose ideas make others uncomfortable in some way. Sluts are an easy target. It’s the kind of censorship you can easily sell to middle America. It’s sinful, dangerous, harmful. You get to frame it as “for the children’s sake!!!” (as if our government cares about protecting children when it lets the police murder them on the reg). Even people who don’t see sexual content as bad per se still don’t see it as worthy of defending. It’s frivolous, rude, unnecessary, silly.

So the censorship laws pass. Two things happen. First, we discover that these laws are targeting people with a very broad brush. The laws never tend to define pornography, as Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” statement shows. It’s up to others’ discretion, with many people getting swept up in it who tried to follow the rules, or who even undeniably did follow the rules, but with little to no appeals process, the accusation, even if mistaken, might as well be a guilty verdict.

Secondly, we have just moved the goalposts from “the government must not censor freedom of speech or expression” to “the government can sometimes censor freedom of speech or expression.” Now the precedent of censorship has been introduced and accepted. Now it’s easier to censor other things. Things that you may hold dear.

Because again, these sites aren’t just banning sexual content because they want to. They’re not just doing it because of advertiser pressure or app store pressure or financial company pressure (although we must also assign some of the blame there). This stuff started really ramping up after the government passed FOSTA/SESTA, barely over 3 years ago. These laws, under the guise of stopping sex trafficking, harmed sex workers in countless ways while driving actual sex trafficking deeper underground where it’s harder to find now. There have been so many studies about how FOSTA/SESTA had the opposite impact on helping trafficking victims, but again, this was never about protecting people. This was about introducing censorship in a palatable way.

“But there’s still porn on the internet. Just go there.” Ah, yes. There is still porn on the internet. As someone making adult content, who knows more sex workers than most people, these giant corporate megasites are a very similar experience to working for Wal-Mart or Amazon. They take a huge cut of your earnings, upwards of half. Onlyfans “only” taking 20% is pretty low, but again, in the wild west early days of the internet, you could have your own site and keep 100%. And yeah, there’s free porn everywhere. Fuck you for not paying the sex workers who get you off. Pay sex workers and tip them well!

It also means porn becomes more homogenized. It’s marginalized people who have the hardest time competing within/against big porn companies, and marginalized people deserve to see their sexuality portrayed the way cis, het, white, able bodied, fit people get to see theirs. Tumblr was host to a lot of queer, trans, poc, disabled, and fat people making erotic content featuring people like themselves. It was host to a large audience of people grateful to see people like themselves. It is so much harder to find that now. Nobody cares about protecting marginalized people, and nobody cares about defending porn. That combination means the sexualities of marginalized people gets even more stigmatized, secretive, fetishized, demonized. TERFs are usually SWERFs, and both have a lot more in common with the far right than they do with feminism or progressive justice.

You’ve been duped good and hard if you get up here in 2021 on Al Gore’s internet defending censorship when it’s a steamroller two inches away from your own heels. You’re can’t wait until your life gets fucked up by it to say something. The sluts have long been the canaries in the coal mine.

If you enjoyed my words and want to support my adult work, I am on a shadowbanned Patreon at patreon.com/RosalarianXXX and a pretty decent OnlyFans at Onlyfans.com/RosalarianXXX. I post 3 different adult comic series on Patreon, and I post both comics and surreal nudes on OF.

[quickienewyork]

The combination of frustration and exhaustion is this post feels so familiar. I can’t count the number of platforms I’ve through or the number of policy changes that have made it more and more difficult to actually make money as an artist. It’s a constant onslaught that’s numbing in nature when it doesn’t make me cry. 

And honestly? Sometimes, we just need to fucking complain for a moment. We just need to sigh and say this sucks. And it doesn’t have to be this way. And I’m so so tired. 

Anyway, thanks for writing this. I’m sorry it’s so damn hard. It’s not fair, it’s not fun, and it didn’t have to go this way. 

[jrmhmurphy]

I don't even write porn. I don't even want to monetize my writing and art--I just want people to see it. And it's impossible. Twitter is all noise, and the FB algorithm actively stifles creative content. I feel these posts so hard.

[rejectingrepublicans]

[jrmhmurphy]

Mom Kamph

[90scully]

BATTLE ROYALE (2000) dir. Kinji Fukasaku

[wilwheaton]

I devoured the manga series and loved it, but still haven't seen the movie.

[jrmhmurphy]

There's a manga?

[sapphic-sith]

Been wanting to draw again and whenever I don't know what to draw I always go to one of my oldest and most favorite OCs to draw.

[magicalgirlmindcrank]

Hello welcome my ADHD themed gameshow, "So you were holding it literally moments ago but now it's gone" the where YOU look for whatever you were just holding while going increasingly mad

[magicalgirlmindcrank]

I'm just trying to get the mood right

[firetinasty]

Reblog if you didn't notice the missing words

[jrmhmurphy]

I only saw them because I was told to look for them.