33 | she/her | Drarry | Wolfstar 👏🏼🏳️🌈🔞 Fuck JKR | 18+ | I’m writing a Drarry fic on AO3 | just one right now because focusing is hard 😮💨 | Profile pic art by Ibuki Satsuki!
Hi friends! I’m trying not to panic over the loss of TikTok and the ramifications of the SC decision, but I am very worried about it all. I am losing one of my main sources of community (as a chronic lurker) and I don’t want to let myself get complacent and lonely again. I have been lucky enough to find a small community here of people who clearly share my values and I would love to make new friends and feel more grounded in this world that is becoming scarier by the moment. If you’re in the market for a new friend - I’m 33, pan, demi/gray ace, she/her, currently only writing one extremely long WIP Drarry fic, but have read probably thousands of fics. Sometimes read other pairings like Wolfstar and other fandoms like Star Trek and The Hobbit/LOTR, but I am really a Drarry girl at heart.
Working on getting better at mutual aid, interdependence (parentified eldest daughters, unite!), and taking care of myself while dealing with the US’s increasingly apparent descent into fascism.
I have a cute dog who might actually be more anxious than I am, into art, music, Ghibli movies, going to be taking a stained glass class soon that I would love to rant about, have way too many bees in my chest currently and really wish they would settle the hell down.
I’m terrified of what’s to come, but I know the answer is community. I want to keep writing my fic, reading all of yours, participating in fandom, loving people, connecting.
If you vibe with any of this, please feel free to follow me and I’ll follow you back if I don’t already, and I might bother you in messages sometimes.
The walkouts, which included about a dozen schools on U.S. military bases in Europe, Asia and at least one stateside, represent the biggest
Hundreds of military children who are students at Defense Department schools across the globe walked out of class Thursday to protest book bans, curriculum changes and restrictions on extracurricular activities that have resulted from the Trump administration's crackdown on diversity.
The walkouts, which included about a dozen schools on U.S. military bases in Europe, Asia and at least one stateside, represent the biggest collective action military children have taken since the start of the Trump administration to demand a voice in their own education after similar, smaller-scale walkouts in February and March.
from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.
This is important, people. Please don't scroll past this one.
While I don't think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:
Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW
Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW
Follow your moots at their places NOW
I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.
It's a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.
The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.
TUMBLR IS FANDOM. It's where we all are. Yes, many of us probably have random accounts here or there - a Pillowfort, a BlueSky, a website set up at some free, ad-supported place, etc - but if you are active on Tumblr, then this is where your people are. This is where your community is.
Just like my people and community were on LiveJournal. We lived through a lot of shit together (seriously, look up LiveJournal on Fanlore or Wikipedia sometime) but in the end we all ended up scrambling to try and find both a new place and each other too late.
And, when you find your 'backup places' don't just stick a link to your Carrd or Linktree in your Tumblr profile. Actively tell your moots in a post (reblog it occasionally, too) where they can find you, and encourage them to find and follow you there, too. They're not going to have that link in your profile if Tumblr suddenly shuts off the lights, so make sure you actively let people know where to find you elsewhere.
Some suggestions:
Pillowfort and/or BlueSky
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who is a 'thought-vomiter' (i.e., you post a LOT, and it's often random observations and brain farts, short quickfire stuff throughout your day) try either Pillowfort (which is still in open beta and currently has a rolling waitlist to join) or BlueSky. Both are Twitter/X type sites in their layout. (And avoid Twitter/X like the fucking plague. Just, seriously, don't go there.)
Dreamwidth
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who needs more than a couple of hundred characters for some (or many) of your posts, and you really relish community and interaction, head to Dreamwidth.
While I have accounts on all three of the platforms I've just linked you to, it'll be Dreamwidth where I make my home if Tumblr goes down the tubes. Yes, its backend user interface looks a bit late-2000s, but that's because it was built out of the LiveJournal diaspora, off the back of (and improved upon) the old open source LJ code, and it has all the incredible features that LJ had (and still has, if you don't mind accepting that hateful ToS and never mentioning anything to do with LGBTQ+ at all over there).
Crucially, Dreamwidth is committed to remaining ad-free, and it is incredibly easy to find your fandom/people over there (as long as they are over there) using the interests search. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's well worth it for the incredibly customisable reading list, which acts like the Tumblr dashboard, and the granularity with which you can set your posts. It's had communities since the very start, and you can even set up custom filters for different groups of people you want to post to, so your Marvel-loving moots can see your Marvel stuff, your Minecraft-loving moots can see your Minecraft stuff, and your closest friends who you trust with anything are the only people who can see the deeply personal stuff you've posted to the group you've set up just for them. Want to post with different icons? You've got 15 of them completely free. There is so much to Dreamwidth, and I wish more people knew about it and used it.
But what about Discord?
By all means find and join Discord servers for your fandom, but please do not let fandom disappear into thousands of completely separate, unsearchable, unfindable Discord servers. Find a place where people can find you easily, and where you can find other people easily if/when you leave your current fandom for whatever reason at some point in the future and get into a new fandom.
Imagine if there was no Tumblr right now. It's just gone. Poufs overnight. And you've just got into an incredibly good new TV show/movie/book/etc., and you need to find your people for it. How would you do that, if they're all sitting in their own private Discord servers, possibly invite-only and not listed anywhere like Disboard? You can't.
So - while Discord is great if you already have that all-important URL to join the server - it's a lot harder to find your people if you've no idea where to get that URL.
Image hosting
It's important to note that none of the sites I've linked to have native image-hosting (as yet - that's why Tumblr is ad-supported, because image hosting costs a shit ton of money), so you'll need to find some kind of image-hosting site out there if you're someone who posts a lot of visuals. Fandom artists will likely already have their spaces for that, but there are plenty of free image hosts out there.
Closing thoughts
Did this post (and the linked article - if you even read it rather than just glancing at the headline) alarm you? Make you feel anxious? Well, I'm sorry for that, but honestly? It should. Anxious is how I felt, as well as completely lost and cast adrift, when I lost my online home and my fandom peeps all those years ago. And this long-arsed post is my way of trying to help you prevent those feelings for yourself if this latest round of layoffs at Tumblr and other places owned by Automattic eventually leads to our current fandom home shutting down.
Do I think that Tumblr will close anytime soon? No, I don't. I think it would continue limping along until it came to the point where it's making too much of a loss to make any kind of business sense for it to be kept on life support any longer. After all, fanfction.net is still struggling along - riddled with bot and scam comments and with absolutely no support for any of its users who are enduring them - to this day. But is it a home? Hell no.
Don't let apathy take the wheel for you over this. Don't think, "I'll get around to doing that later. Tumblr's not going anywhere soon," and then forget about it until that point where you wish you had done it all that time ago. It takes a handful of minutes to secure an account (or, in the case of Pillowfort, to get on the waitlist) so get your accounts set up now, even if you never use them afterwards.
If you do, then you may be very grateful to your current self sometime in your future.
Better to have them now, with all your friends and moots already following you and knowing where to find you, than to be left standing there like Confused Travolta with your coat over your arm and wondering where the fuck you find your fandom home again as it once again enters a new diaspora.
To my own moots who may be reading this, look out for a post from me shortly, where I'll let you know my other online locations.
"How do you write such realistic dialogue-" I TALK TO MYSELF. I TALK TO MYSELF AND I PRETEND I AM THE ONE SAYING THE LINE. LIKE SANITY IS SLOWLY SLIPPING FROM BETWEEN MY FINGERS WITH EVERY MEASLY WORD THEY TYPE OUT. THAT IS HOW.
Choke. Just think about it, seriously. Think about what choking is and imagine speaking while it’s happening. That would fuckin’ hurt, man.
Hiss. Look, it’s just not possible, okay? No matter how “evil” you want your character to seem.
Snarl. Animals snarls. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast snarls. The Hulk snarls. You know who doesn’t snarl? PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING.
Shriek. Come on, 99% of the time, “shriek” is not the word you want.Let’s face it: if you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, your reader gets the picture. Don’t bring to mind banshees and screaming toddlers.
Sneer. I’m not even going to bother explaining this one. “SNEER” ISN’T EVEN A SOUND.
Choked is not meant to be taken literally, an obstruction in the throat. It means they’re having difficultly speaking, they’re forcing the words out with difficulty. Often used when the character is convulsed in tears or laughter.
Hiss is a low, threatening whisper. Raw, guttural, vicious. It is NOT a literal hiss like an animal, it is a tone of voice that serves the same function. Someone will hiss that they’re going to cut your throat- a message from one person to the other.
Snarl is the same kind of thing. Not literal, it’s a tone of voice that serves the same function. It’s raw and gutteral like a hiss, but more savage than vicious. It’s loud, it’s showy, it’s intimidating. It’s very alpha male, big man, look at how fucking dangerous I am. I’ll take ALL of you on. Even if they’re snarling at one person in particular, nobody better back them up or they’re gonna get fucked up too.
Shriek. Come on, seriously? We’ve all heard people shriek either in fear or outrage. High pitched, loud, out of control, feminine. Men can shriek, but it’s funny and emasculating. Think angry italian women throwing pots and pans or ladies on tables who just saw a mouse.
Sneering is contempt whether it’s a facial expression or a tone of voice or both. There are a hundred different ways to sneer with your voice, but it all adds up to the same thing.
people who dont experience it cannot comprehend how awful executive dysfunction is. I WANT to do the task, i have the resources TO do the task, i will feel better having DONE the task
i think one of the reasons i get mildly annoyed about worldbuilding threads that are 200 tweets of why you should care about where blue dye comes from in your world before saying someone is wearing blue is that so few of them go up to the second level of "and that should impact your characters somehow" - i don't care that blue dye comes from pressing berries that only grow in one kingdom a thousand miles away if people are casually wearing blue
a couple of people reblogged this so i was thinking about it again (ok i'm almost always thinking about material culture worldbuilding tbh) & a lot of my problem is that these kinds of worldbuilding threads and posts treat it like an obligation and not an oppurtunity --
"blue dye is rare" is a world fact that could be a plot obstacle (character is a dyer and needs blue cloth, of the right shade, for a festival); a clue (main character notices someone wearing blue and realizes that they're in disguise); a way to inform character (main character sees a blue banner and thinks its owner is showing off); and any number of other things, from small to large.
and if the rarity doesn't serve any of those functions in your story, then the existence of blue dye is not important enough that you, as the author, need to consider it.
i'm a trends and forces guy - i believe any given worldstate is created by billions of coinflips leading up to that moment, some random (the sun rose on the day of the battle and gave one side victory) and some more directed (a law was enacted with a specific intent). expecting, as an author, to have generated a worldstate that coheres and connects in the same way and with the same complexity as ours is going to lead to paralysis more often than it is to interesting worldbuilding, or worldbuilding that supports the story you're trying to tell.
Yeah you don't need to know where everything comes from. What you need, which I think a lot of these demands are actually angling for, is a good intuitive sense of where your setting differs from your present reality.
I don't care where they get their common blue dyes if it's not relevant to the story, but I do care if the narrative's handling of clothes and their color reflects a 'pick out entire readymades from the mall' relationship to wardrobe in a technological and social milieu where that is not logically an option, and there's no sign they're going for one of those surreal modern-pop fantasy settings.
You really do see this quite regularly, coming from writers who just haven't thought about it; they haven't noticed their own cultural framework is historically contingent and actually super abnormal.
'Who domesticated wheat' and 'where does the blue come from' are very handy as sort of shortcut checkpoints to make sure you're making regular contact with material worldbuilding at all--if you know where the blue is from you don't need to decide where the red is from also; you've done the important bit of aligning your thoughts about clothing color with premodern dyeing practices. Other details will tend to accrete on that surface now as they arise.
But yeah if these are approached as literal dictums you just overbuild to no purpose.
#my current textile bugbear is rags#we've basically abandoned them as a society#and now you routinely get people who *have* done some worldbuilding thinking and are doing okay with the period content#but don't really grasp where rags come from or what they're good for#apart from labeling The Poors#and will say things like the torn and bloodstained garments had been thrown out#as they were no longer even fit for rags#how so????#what do you imagine the minimum qualifications of a rag are??#kakl;jdkdfa
#look rags are kinda the plastic bag full of plastic bags of the premodern era#only they're useful in a much wider variety of ways#and much more expensive#i threw out the rags because they were stained is like. i threw out your socks because they were stinky.#normal people don't *do* that#disposable fabric has made us insane
Just to give you some idea of why even rags were very valuable in any pre-industrial setting, here are some facts about fabric production throughout history.
In the Viking era, when drop spindles and vertical looms were the height of technology and every step had to be done by hand, it too about seven hundred hours to make a blanket big enough for one person. First you had to harvest the fiber that you were going to use, then you had to clean it and prepare it, then you had to spin it, then you had to weave it and then you had to finish it.
To support a household of five, and keep them supplied with a bare-minimum of fabric needs (so they weren't naked or cold), took approximately 40 hours of work per week just on textile production. In a reasonably prosperous family, everyone would have two outfits (one for every day work, and one nice one, and when the nice one became too worn or stained to be "nice" it would be your everyday outfit and (if you were lucky) you would make a new one to be nice, and your old everyday outfit would be either passed on to someone or (if it was in too bad a shape for that) would be cut up for various other uses.
As technology progressed, all of the steps in fabric production ended up taking less time; for example, the spinning wheel spins thread much more quickly than the drop spindle does. But it was still a hell of a lot of work.
In the 18th Century, here's the life cycle of bed sheets:
They start out as sheets (flat, both top and bottom) and are needed because they are MUCH easier to wash than your sheets than a blanket. As sheets get used, they develop worn patches to the middle. Those get darned. When even darning is not enough to save them, you cut them in half down the middle, flip the pieces, and sew the edges together so that what had been the edge is now a seam down the middle and the worn parts are on the edges (where the fact that they're worn doesn't matter much). When the new center gets worn out, you cut the fabric apart and turn the usable bits of fabric into pillow cases. When the pillowcases get worn out you turn the usable bits of fabric into handkerchiefs.
And the pieces of fabric that are truly too worn to be used any longer were not thrown out: they were sold. To a ragpicker. Someone whose entire job was buying rags and scraps from households and then selling them on to merchants and tradesmen who could use them. Rags too worn to be used as fabric any longer could be made into paper, for example. Or used as stuffing padded/quilted garments or cushions.
And there wasn't any level of wealth at which that wasn't true. Being rich didn't mean treating textiles (and most other goods) as disposable--it meant hiring more servants to do the mending and remaking and repurposing for you.
Because it was always going to be cheaper to pay for the human labor to eke every bit life out of those textiles than to pay for new textiles.
Keep a close eye on biases in yourself and others that might differentiate between folks with low and high support needs or over emphasize contributions by low support needs disabled folks to academia and/or production.
People with high support needs are just as deserving of life and respect. And no one should have their right to life determined by their "productivity" or "contributions to society" (both in quotes because of the emphasis by society on capitalism-serving contributions only)
If you're worried about this and care about combatting eugenics, you should be wearing a high-quality mask in public. A recent statistical analysis found that covid and long covid affect all the aforementioned groups at 2-6 times the average. Don't just reblog this post and move on: find a KN95 or better and wear it. Keep yourself and others safe from viral eugenics.
BREAKING: The 7,000 IRS agents fired by Trump and DOGE appear to have mainly been employees who worked in the Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals.
Weird, right? It’s almost as if they are trying to help Billionaires and cut the revenue of the US, meaning that the middle class will suffer.
Something I don't think we talk enough about in discussions surrounding AI is the loss of perseverance.
I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.
Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.
Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.
Idk I'm just really worried about kids having to grow up in a world where (for a variety of reasons beyond just AI) they're not given the chance to struggle through new and challenging things like we used to.
I think this is an incredibly important post for a lot of reasons. You have to write a bad book in order to learn how to do something. You have to suck at playing an instrument before you can improve.
Struggling is part of the process, and I've had a lot of people argue with me that it shouldn't be who fail to see the point. When you replace an composer with an AI music generator, an artist with an AI-generated image, or an author with an AI-generated fanfic, you are missing out on the critical, fundamental experiences humans need to learn and grow. You are robbing yourself of essential skills you need as a person.
AI is not like a calculator, or a synthesizer, or a prompt generator. It's not a tool to aid in your process of understanding or creating something. It is replacing your ability to learn things, and that is going to do so much damage if you let it.
