#{{tw: negativity}}

[borathae]

My heart goes out to all the women who found escape and/or healing from abuse through BTS only to have this happen. This must feel like a triple stab in the stomach right now and I hope you are able to (at least a little bit) use today to be gentle with yourself 💜 I’m definitely rooting for you 💜

[the-moon-is-a-hoe]

Gonna be real with you. I HATE that abstraction is permanent.

It doesn't have to be permanent. Why should it be? If it's an allegory for suicide, the abstracted should be dead, not living creatures who apparently still have thoughts deep down. I'm sorry, I know Gooseworx loves bleak endings, but I despise them. I despise and spit on the notion that Jax or any of the others cannot be brought back from abstraction. They're corrupted files, not deleted! Corrupted files can be fixed, goddammit!

I get that it's Gooseworx's show, and it was her choice, and I think she's extremely talented, but holy shit... does that one creative decision of hers frustrate me! Jax deserves a happy ending, I don't care what anyone says!

I don't even hate Jax anymore, I just want her to be alive and happy for once!!!

[melissaduck]

Hot take, but I genuinely feel resentment towards the Resident Evil fandom for shitting on the Ethan Winters story arc. I had ZERO interest in Resident Evil prior to Biohazard's release. Ethan's story got me interested in the lore, and I thought it was brilliantly done. But then people bitched about how it wasn't a typical Resident Evil game and so it ended up with the Winters family storyline being cut short in the next game just to make fans happy.

I am so angry about that. Now I don't give a single shit about Resident Evil's other games out of pure spite towards the fandom. You wanna shit on Ethan because he's not a quip-slinging badass like Leon Kennedy? Or a bruiser like Chris Redfield? Congrats, you don't like realistically-written characters, you like caricatures of humans. You like comic book characters. And that's exactly why I never connected with those two characters: THEY ARE BOTH COMPLETELY LAUGHABLE because I can't take caricatures seriously. How am I supposed to be scared during a horror game when the protagonist is a fucking cartoon character with plot armor? EDIT: You're not looking to get scared, you're looking for a power fantasy.

[pedrospascaled]

Is it time yet to get a real life off Tumblr? Pedro, Jeffrey and Wolverine are not your real friends.

I'll give you the time of day for a second and then I'm done. I will block you from here on out and I'll have no problem doing it no matter how many burner accounts you get. You're not going to upset me because I don't take the internet seriously. You're a troll behind a screen where you feel miserable enough to have to bring someone else down because you're miserable. I have a personal life where I've put up with things way worse than you and I promise you, nothing you do or say is going to affect me. So you're going to fail and waste your time trying.

You also look incredibly ignorant saying these things as I've also stated today that I haven't been on the computer in over two weeks. Attacking someone for being on tumblr too much when they haven't actually been on it in over two weeks is kind of stupid?

Next? Wolverine isn't real. He can't be friends with anyone? Plus? I'm not a big Hugh Jackman or Wolverine fan. So? Uhm? Okay? lol

I hate to also point this out, but you're on tumblr. Lecturing me about being on tumblr. Isn't that kind of hypocritical?

And finally, leaving you with this, you really have no right to come at anyone and lecture them about what they are doing with their life. Everyone is going through something. You never know what. And if going on tumblr brings anyone a source of joy or happiness, you really have no right to tell them otherwise.

[fanaticallyfleeky]

I’m not gonna lie

Seeing all the hateful things being said in the comments on 911’s most recent instagram post is disheartening and it makes me so sad, like we’re screaming into a void

Being in this nice and friendly bucktommy corner of the internet is the best but it also makes me forget that there’s still so many toxic people in this fandom who are so much louder than we are 😔

Sometimes taking the highway is so frustrating

[cylunny]

It's time to stop trying

If you are not in the headspace for negativity please skip this one. You are totally valid to do so! Thank you <3 

That said. I am 30 today. For the past 2 months I have arguably been trying harder than before to get somewhere on many social media sites. I doubt many of you know because this blog is only active since September, but I have also been actively running art groups or communities since 7 years ago or so. Even back then I have often wondered what I will do once I reach this age. I thought I would have "made it" by then. Knowing this has not happened makes me quite melancholic, it is a harrowing admission to make to myself and past me. Which in turn leads me to believe that I have to make some changes. 

This sounds more negative than it is. But when setting up an event for my ARPG yesterday, which took 4 hours out of an already busy day, leaving me with little time to do what I actually want on weekend, I realized this can't go on. There are some key things in my mind that just do not work together.

Art is not and will never be my job

My goal was never to make a living off of my art. I have already accepted it as unrealistic before I even went to university years ago. I enjoy programming, and it lets me work from home, so I am fine with this. I also didn't want to be forced to work on art projects I do not care for, I wanted to preserve it as a hobby I can dab into whenever and however I want. (And here is already where one issue lies..)

I have been pouring my soul into this for years, here is how

It sounds abstract if I say I worked so hard for 7 years, and certainly not all of them had the same effort put into them. There were lulls, of course. But the past 3 years were especially heavy on my input. Here are some of work I have done for this "hobby" of mine:

Posting my art consistently across different social media, and with consistent I mean at least every 2-3 days there is something. 

I created my first "Closed Species" in 2017(?) and made a group for it, the same as I saw some of my then rolemodels do. 

Started my first adoptables at low prices, only after 5-6 years could I EVER sell one for 100USD or more, and it still is VERY rare to happen

Created a discord server for that species, which later was replaced by the one for my ARPG community.

Created a lorekeeper website 

with a LOT of custom code. Hours and hours and hours of coding for that, outside of my work.

all art assests on site done by me

all lore/writing done by me except for very few cases that a friend wrote prompts for me

regular adoptable batches done by me

raffles done by me

at first monthly AND seasonal events ran by me with all assets and code by me, later bimonthly events with seasonals

at first I even approved all MYOs and prompt entries myself, but I am thankful I found amazing people that do this for me now

the site contains a little RPG game of itself where you can battle with characters. There is so much more that shows how much time went into this.

Helped other people code for LK too.

Took commissions throughout these 7 years, started out at 5USD ones. Slowly grinded my way up.

Drew fanart I didn't care for much for my experiments.

All of this while holding a 39h/week regular job. Suffice to say, my free time pretty much exclusively went into this. I don't care what anyone says but I know no one else that has put this amount of effort in on the side of a irl job, and I will wear at least that with pride. And this is also why I do not believe in the feel-good hopium posts about just keep posting and being consistent. I have been, and it didn't do anything for me. It's better to be upfront and say with that alone it's all luck, if you want to influence it more you have to do other strategies. But alas...

What I get out of it no longer balances out the effort put in

My brain is not made for this. As long as I try so hard, I will always be a million times more disappointed with the perceived lack of success and constant comparisons. I have been unable to follow anyone with big numbers or who posts certain things that trigger my brain negatively for years. I used to be able to, but somehow I lost the ability along the way. Now, I know one might say "Why, someone elses success does not decided your worth" or "Just be happy for your fellow artist" but honestly? Unless you put in all the work I listed above for this many years, I think you can't in good faith say you understand how it feels to be in my position. I am also not saying that my mental is good, because it eats me up from the inside and makes me bitter and negative. But there is a good reason why I feel that way, and I won't have my feelings invalidated. So, what now?

I won't say I haven't had some success. I am eternally grateful that people buy my designs or commissions for example, even if they don't sell like hotcakes. But I feel like I could be doing these things when I feel like it rather than because I need to keep momentum or hype up. I feel like I don't need to spend hours of my life forcing myself to do all of the above things for something that is a tiny side hustle at best. I feel like I need to go back to doing art for me. No chasing numbers. No deadlines aside from paid commissions.

I am not sure how to really go about doing this. Part of me is afraid to lose the little support I have. Especially with my ARPG, I would have to figure out a way to do it without me having to pump content every 2 months and every season. Somehow get rid of the deadlines and only work on it when I want to, even if it loses me the support I have. I will have to mull over this in a quiet moment though which I likely won't be having the next couple of weeks. I do know it'd be a shame to throw those 3 years of work away.

I will keep posting stuff and tracking numbers for the experiment. Because at worst you will see by the end of it that the truth about todays social media is that consistency means fuck all. At best there is still some chance with it. In 10 months I will try to do an update on that anyhow.

I won't be forcing myself to draw things I don't care for. I will try find a way to remove the deadlines, and the internal pressure I have. The fear of losing all relevancy. Somehow, I will make it. I want to create as I did when I was 17, without worry or comparison.

Thank you for reading.

[thefvrious]

going to hide in my (massive) drafts so i don't have an absolute fucking crashout

[thenexusofsouls]

{i am the caretaker of souls} Hey guys. I got some really bad news today that has my creativity wrecked and my focus is on things other than being here on this site. (More below the cut, if you want to know. If not, that's totally fine too.) I'm trying to calm down and listen to music to try to like... at least get some things done because I don't want to disappoint you all, but honestly this may end up affecting my activity going forward for more reasons than one. I hope to be on a little bit later, and I'll do my best to get done what I can. As always, thanks for your patience with my spotty activity. You guys are awesome. <3

So... I was told this evening that I am, indeed, getting laid off as of the end of my current job, which ends in three weeks. My health benefits are also being terminated. To get around any kind of seniority I might have built up, extra benefits I would have earned, and having to pay me full time, my University requires me to apply for my own job each semester as if i was a new employee and tells me my job is part-time (it's not) and how many hours a week I work (they say no more than 20, the reality is more like 40+), instead of having me log the actual hours I work. This ensures that they aren't "laying me off" so much as they are "not hiring me as a new employee in the Fall because my services are no longer needed." The reason they say they don't need me is because they've decided to raise student tuition, lay off adjunct faculty, and increase class sizes "as part of our new fiscal year 2026-2027 budget plan decisions." Basically, they're doing it for the money and don't care about the students or the teachers. Fewer teachers, more students, higher tuition... means they get more money for providing less and poorer quality education. Great job. Very thorough. *Pelosi clap*

That nuance of being a new employee each semester costs me a lot of things, such as a grace period to deal with how I'm going to pay for my bills after being laid off. As a contract employee who "has only been with the University for one semester" because I'm considered new each time (I have actually been working for this University in one job or another since 1999, btw), they aren't required to give me any termination notice or any kind of a grace period with pay or health insurance. That means that, as of 9/1, I will suddenly be unemployed and all of my health insurance benefits will terminate at the same time, effective immediately.

I don't have a backup plan as to what other job I might get because I needed this one. I have been trying to think of what other kind of job I could get right now, or even if I could create my own by going into some kind of creative job (selling jewelry I make, etc.), but those jobs don't pay enough to live on. My options are extremely limited, which is why I've kept this job so long despite really not liking it at all. My physical and mental health have declined greatly in the past few years, and I help my 75-year-old father take care of my 96-year-old grandmother at home. I relied on this job for the ability to work from home, the nonexistent physicality of an online job (I have RA, which makes standing, sitting, walking for long periods of time not feasible), and the ability to set my own work schedule to work around my grandmother's very demanding and difficult self as well as my own doctor appointments and health issues. Losing this job means I will probably not be able to get another one for a long time, as the majority of jobs I would be qualified for on paper have requirements I just can't meet right now.

I have a B.S. in biological sciences, a M.S. in "fate and effects of pollutants in soil and water," and a Ph.D. in environmental microbiology, but unfortunately they are as good as useless to me now. With the brain fog caused by one of my medications, I have developed memory and concentration issues that prevent me from being around dangerous microbes, superheated autoclaves, and explosive gas tanks as my research jobs in the past have entailed. (I worked with BSL-2 organisms, not the worst but not fully safe either, and anaerobic microbiology requires the use of sulfide, argon, hydrogen, and/or methane gasses to prepare media and experiments.) I forget what I'm doing, what needs to be done at what time, I make stupid mistakes, etc., and that can be very dangerous in a lab setting. Plus I haven't worked in a lab since 2019, which is the kiss of death in academic research, because they will want to know why there is a gap in my employment and why I haven't been publishing research papers, and no answer I could give would be acceptable to them. I also have other strikes against me that will probably prevent me from getting another job like my current online teaching one, such as having a weird phobia about being in video, live or not, and thus being unable to use Zoom or Skype because of that. 99% of online jobs require this, so that... does not help me at all.

Add that to the fact that I've developed something like chronic fatigue since the second time I had covid, and I'm not even sure I could stay awake long enough to successfully do a 9-to-5 in-person job. I usually take naps once or twice during the day, which I can't do if I have an in-person job. Not to mention how far the covid lockdowns and then working from home have caused the social skills I had to fight really hard all my life to make even halfway "normal" to regress in recent years to the point of me not really being able to behave to an adequate "professional" or "normal" degree in in-person job environments. In short, I'm very weird, awkward, I say and do strange things sometimes, I get embarrassed and flustered easily, and have trouble relating to other humans sometimes, and that doesn't get you hired.

This has been a problem all my life, I've always been this way, but I used to be much better at faking it enough to seem passable to normal people. In recent years, depression and other mental health factors as well as physical exhaustion and chronic pain have caused me to just give up on trying to be normal and embrace who I am, which sounds positive on the surface, but again, it doesn't get you hired in the extremely competitive current job market in the U.S..

I am not legally disabled, I do not have autism or ADHD (that I know of???), I do not have cognitive issues like brain damage or other debilitating mental disorders aside from an anxiety disorder, (but let's be real, that's not really respected by most health care professionals enough to be considered a problem... they just say, you're stressed out, take a vacation and get some therapy), and my depression and chronic fatigue has never been formally diagnosed, so really I can't say I have them. So on paper I have no medical or legal reason why I can't work or why I would need any kind of special accommodations for any job I would hold. In reality, I am very much not "normal," but on paper, I am, and will be expected to function that way. What do I do with that?

So I'm faced now with very quickly having no income or health insurance coverage in 6 weeks, which is not a lot of time to save money to afford my own health insurance premiums on a private plan, especially with no income, and not really having a viable plan for what happens next. My medications alone are over $2K per month without insurance, and purchasing my own health insurance plan in my area, age bracket, current health, etc. would be about as much per month as well (most sites are quoting me in the $1700 to $1900 range. I can't afford that for very long before I would just... run out of money, let alone have money for other health expenses and things like food, gas, etc. You know, living, and stuff. Without my medications, I would lose mobility and likely be in a wheelchair within 12-18 months because of my RA, so not having them isn't an option either. I am planning to skip doses here and there to try and stretch out what I already have so it will last a bit longer if I can't afford to buy more in the immediate future, but that's not a long-term solution to the problem.

And the only reason I will have health insurance for 6 more weeks instead of only 3 at the end of my class on August 12th is because today I got an email with a hefty bill that needs to be paid "ASAP" if I want to maintain my coverage through the end of the Summer. So. I guess I will be mailing that tomorrow because 6 weeks to freak out and come up with a plan is better than 3. But this... this is not the "adequate amount of notice" my boss promised me I would have when he first warned me that I may be laid off due to changes in the University's budget plan. 6 months is adequate notice, not 6 weeks, bruh.

So... that's where I'm at right now, and I'm feeling very inadequate because of all the strikes against me that will not look attractive to prospective employers, and feeling terrible about myself doesn't lend itself to creativity. My anxiety disorder is also telling me right now that "you should not be here writing stupid fictional bullshit on a social media site, you should be looking for jobs and health insurance plans like a normal, functional adult human would." I fully recognize that that's just negative thoughts being their usual pervasive selves and that being here does not mean I will not get those other tasks done, but it's... hard to ignore once your mind starts on those negative paths, you know? I also just feel very sad, because I've done a lot for this University, and I have just as many good memories as bad ones, and to be treated like unimportant garbage and let go so easily after 27 years of working for them really doesn't feel good at all.

I will have to spend a decent amount of time looking for jobs and figuring out my life in the next couple months, though, so... that might mean some reduction in my presence on this site. I'm really not sure how things are going to go, but I'm thinking of visiting some recruiting agencies that can help to match me with jobs that meet my requirements as well as ones that I meet their requirements for.

I'm just... going back and forth between numbness and denial, and crying like a two-year-old over spilled milk. I'm sure I'll be fine... somehow... but it just came as a shock. I was really hoping that I would not be one of the people laid off, first of all, and second of all, if I was, I thought I would have at least a month's grace period after my termination date before I lost health benefits. Knowing that both are happening in 6 weeks has been a shock I'm still trying to process. I'm running low on hope and optimism, to be honest, but that's something I just have to get over in the next few weeks. Time to put on my big girl pants and handle my shit, you know? All these excuses/obstacles I've listed are, at the end of the day, irrelevant, and this just has to get done somehow. That's what I need to tell myself going forward. Time for some tough self-discipline.

If you read this far, I'm sorry for the um... TMI, I guess, but thank you for caring enough to take time out of your day to do so. It means more than you know. <3 Even just writing all of this out has helped me to calm down a little, though I am sorry for the oversharing. But that's why I always put these sorts of things below a cut, so that no one has to see it unless they want to. Alright... I will try to work on some things here in a little bit. Bear with me while I sort out my pile of scrambled eggs for a brain.