Tria; they/them; polyfannish polyam ace-sapphic enby multishipper, 40. British Unitarian. Alto, writer, poet, gamer. AuDHD wheeling left-wing activist. Cat staff to Magnus "Crime Paws" MacPuss (header boy). Fluttering between fandoms (& hobbies), as per usual. No feminism-appropriating reactionaries of any type here, please, & no antis.
Look... people... I am seriously about to start screaming at the next randomer who chooses to use my ask function TO ASK FOR MONEY.
Like... do you just pick random usernames and totally fail to pay attention to their profiles or anything they say?
Really now? I hardly have money for groceries half the time!
I'm already donating to the charities I can just about afford. I cannot give money to randomers who don't even have any mutual followers with me, yet somehow decide my Tumblr asks the best way to go about such things.
Please don't get me wrong, none of this means that I don't have any sympathy with your cause. I probably do. But I cannot keep giving money I struggle to manage to people who don't want anything from me but that money, ever.
Please, stop asking. Anybody who genuinely knows me knows Tumblr isn't the best place to ask me for financial help. If you have a petition you'd like me to sign or signal boost, let me know about it. But please quit asking me for money.
I just can't do it. Living alone is expensive, and living alone as a disabled adult who cannot work is even more expensive.
My partner made this comic, and it is beautiful and amazing, and you’re all missing out by not seeing the original on paper because it’s even prettier there!
My response became a lot longer than I'd been planning, so it's probably a good plan to pop a read more on it. But this, as with others, may well be a blast from the past for those who are my age or older. I hope it can be a bit more than that for anybody else.
I am 40, for reference.
My family's first home connection was 512mb dial-up. I remember the tones. Our first PC was a secondhand Amstrad PCW from my favourite uncle (he was a programmer for the British branch of IBM), with green text on black, that we got years before we could afford an internet connection at home. (We were never well off, but it became important, so we got a bit of help on that front, and it let us learn at home, me, my sister and Mum. My late father stayed wilfully techno-illiterate for most of his life.)
I can never forget the sheer racket our daisywheel printer made when it ran - louder even than my mum's ancient, extremely heavy Olivetti typewriter, on which I'd learned to type.
(I still have that typewriter here in its carrying case, but I can barely lift its weight anymore.)
When we visited my aunt and uncle I used to chat through AOL, back when it was very nearly its own closed ecosystem. I still remember the username of the first person I really befriended online - a slightly older teenager who called herself Komikitty. (I have no idea where in the worlds she is now, but it would be nice to be sure she's okay. She had family problems, as I did.)
I began to use the internet more widely when I started secondary school, aged 11.
My first email account was registered on Yahoo, and my second on Hotmail, long before they had .co.uk as an option. My sister still uses her original Hotmail address, as a tribute to the sweet rescue kitten after whom she named it on first registering (he died at a painfully young age).
I can't remember what either of my own first emails were, but I have them written down somewhere. My mum, who passed away in 2002, had registered her Yahoo email as cavymadlynanha - she used to breed cavies, or guinea pigs, for show, and most of the rest is an abbreviated form of her name. I remember using Trillian to consolidate all my chat options - not only did I use IRC every year for Yuletide Treasure when I started taking part in that, I also used AIM, MSN Messenger and, very rarely, Yahoo's messenger option to boot. (I also used ICQ, though I can't remember my number now, except that it began with 15 and that the last three digits were all the same.)
Mostly, though, I used to chat on a closed-system Final Fantasy website called FF Allegiance, where users got pseudo-military ranks related to the game series, and were promoted over time and for helping others. I remember running a birthdays page on the site by the time I was 15, to celebrate all our users on their special days. That's how comparatively small our network was, back then.
Incidentally, it was through the FFA I got into my first serious relationship offline - I dated a fellow member of the site, a couple of years older than myself, for three years after I turned 16, with train travel back and forth for us to visit each other. We're still friendly to this day.
I taught myself to build websites while my classmates spent our after-school computer club playing LAN games like Doom and Counter-Strike. First I used Geocities, and Angelfire, then later, I moved on to learning by copying code from other sites and adjusting it to fit my needs.
My first sites outside the free-hosting options were hosted by friends who had more access and finances, on subdomains of their personal domains. When I was 16, a younger American friend, whose parents let her use their credit card pretty freely for her web hobbies, was kind enough to make me a present of a domain she no longer wanted, knowing I would have to wait till I turned 18 to pick one of my own and register it. That was sweetaurora.net.
I used Sweet Aurora for dozens of small sites, mostly shrines and fanlistings, and hosted other people on subdomains as my friends had hosted me.
The summer I turned 18, 2004, I registered the first of my own, unfaithful-mirror.net - and that domain is still up and running even in 2026.
I kept my video game character shrines there running for years longer than most stayed online, and only lost them after a major server crash in 2020; I hadn't the health or heart to rebuild in full. But I still have a personal site at the above domain years after most people moved to use only social media. I like to have a little more control over my own ecosystem, as it were.
I used a lot of the old journalling sites, like EasyJournal and InsaneJournal, with their differing standards and offers for what you could do with them for free. I joined LiveJournal in the days when you still needed an invitation from an existing user to be part of it, in 2003, when I was seventeen.
My friend Yayie was the one to invite me - just as she later invited me to Gmail in its early days. I still have my original Gmail account too, more than twenty years old as it is.
I've incorporated fandom stuff in this because we get the same sort of ageist silliness in fandom at times, too.
I began to write fanfiction when I was nine years old, in 1995. I didn't know it even had a name back then. The first fandom in which I posted my writing online was the Matrix series, first on the Hardline forums (constructfic.org, which was where I met my best friend, @templedragon, and which still exists even now), and later on Fanfiction.net - the story I first posted there, Faith, is still on my original (albeit renamed) FFnet profile, and has also been imported to Archive of Our Own. I was around for Strikethrough, and remember frantically trying to back up reviews and stories before they went down. I was a tag wrangler on AO3 for several years, soon after it began taking volunteers for that.
So you see, we "40 and 50-year-olds" have been here much, much longer than the youngsters who now question our presence... but I have friends online - not least of them @dduane, @vr-trakowski and @cincoflex - who have been part of both fandom and various kinds of social media for 20+ years longer than even I have.
We elder millennials may have been there at the beginning of social media, but the two generations before ours were the ones who helped make social media, online fandom, and convention gatherings what they had already been becoming by then. They're the ones who created and used IRC, Usenet, CompuServe... and so many more names you might not recognise out of context.
Try to respect the people who made things possible for you. Most of them will be willing to respect you, too.
I already shared about this on Facebook, but yeah, should probably spread the awful word of it over here, too. Paid and privatised prisons should really be considered a crime against humanity in themselves, frankly.
From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
Tumblr users really see a cat biting another cat’s butt on an enamel pin and immediately think “yeah I need that on my bag.” Honestly… same. (GET YOURS HERE)
