i’m really frustrated with social media rn. in general, & on a personal level. i’ve been getting less & less engagement on my posts, even tho i know my skills have been improving, and i’ve so little time to draw for myself as of late that every piece seems to take so long and makes it even more disheartening when it inevitably flops on social media. it’s hard to know where to post right now, everyone is so fractured in the social media space right now and it seems like there’s not really a “right” choice. i like tumblr the best, and it’s also where i find my art to be most successful. maybe the two things are related. maybe not. but even for as big as tumblr is, i know it’s nowhere near its peak popularity & never will be. so where is everyone on social media? are they still on twitter? should i still be on twitter? but i revolt against the “A/I remix” button they’ve forced below every post, i can’t post there anymore because even tho yeah it’s likely that someone, somewhere, has fed my art to the ai slop machine, and that pisses me off badly enough as it is, posting on twitter in 2025 essentially takes that possibility and turns it into a guarantee. and i just refuse to knowingly aid in the devaluation of art and the active theft from creatives. and twitter continues to find new and horrifying ways to force ai integration, down to the upcoming “ai algorithm” that will feed every single post to an ai bot for it to determine if it’s even “worth” showing to other ppl!!
so where, then? instagram? other ppl still post on insta. but did we all just collectively forget that insta ALSO forced every user to opt-in to its ai training?? with the only option to opt out, maybe, (and i say that because according to a whole slew of users who reported this at the time, the opt-out form didn’t even appear for them even when all the conditions should have been met), was locked behind connecting one’s insta account to a facebook account? which, by virtue of facebook’s horrid policy of requiring the use of one’s legal name, would tie the affected user’s insta account to their government legal name. and as far as i know, the window to opt out of insta’s ai training has long since passed; leaving users with presumably no choice but to have all their images fed to the slop machine. (and as an aside, most insta users don’t even use the site for art, but for PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHS. i’m not here to say whether the theft of one type of image is better or worse, but to instead stress that artists are not the only affected group.)
okay, so what about bsky? well i’m on bsky. and even after several mass exoduses from twt, it’s still a tiny platform by comparison. posts stay relevant for about the same amount of time as on twt. it’s still missing a bunch of basic functions. and if i’m being honest, on a personal level, it’s immeasurably disheartening to have to keep starting over from scratch on every new social media platform. and since it’s such a tiny platform, yeah, ppl get smaller amounts of likes & retweets by comparison. is it a valid metric to judge the measure of your worth as an artist? no. should it matter? no. ………….but does it matter? yeah. kinda. i’m an entitled whiny baby who feels like a failure if my art gets 100 likes on social media. yeah. i hate it. it’s stupid. it sucks and it’s my own fault for judging my worth on stupid metrics but i’ll own up to it because i know it’s dumb. but it still hurts.
and i’ll be honest yeah i’ll still keep using bsky because it’s the only “new” social media that really seems to have any traction or staying power, and it’s the closest thing to twitter that we really have anymore.
and i guess the last major platform is tiktok, right? because no one in their right mind would post art to facebook for ai addled conservative dipshits to see; it’s a cesspit for horrible awful out of touch people to yell into an echo chamber about their horrible awful viewpoints— even more than current era twitter is— and to somehow not receive any backlash whatsoever for being terrible people.
so tiktok then. well they banned my account anywhere from 1 day to 3 weeks after i created it. why? i dont know. genuinely, i made the account, watched maybe 5 videos, then closed the app and didn’t open it again for like 3 weeks because i don’t have time for short-form videos. unsurprisingly, they never responded to my appeal to unban my account. and of course the account was made in my username, under my email. so i can either make a new account, using a different username (making it harder of course for people to find me on the app), under a different email (i would probably even have to open a new burner email for it too bc i already made a new tiktok acct just for personal use under my burner email), OR i just continue to ignore the app i dont ever use. but there’s an audience there. a huge one. and i’ve heard ppl say that they’ve seen my art on tiktok. which is great, except i didn’t post it there. and honestly, that’s not even to factor in the video format that tiktoks use. i hate the idea of having to make my process itself be aesthetic and palateable to watch. i already work so hard to create the art, now i need to put in more work to edit it into a video so that some people on a video-oriented social media app might see it? do i even have time to do it even if i wanted to? it seems to me that it would just eat into the (already limited) time i have to create new art. which— woag— would lead to less art overall and less posts on the platforms i already use.
idek anymore. it’s exhausting & infuriating and i feel stupid for worrying about it so much. but what else am i supposed to do? if no one can see my art, how do i make a living? all i want is just to draw and create and learn so i can improve myself and my craft. i want to share my art with people because i enjoy doing it. but it just constantly seems like things are getting worse and worse in all facets of life, online and off, and it leaves people feeling overwhelmed and weathered and stretched way too thin. seems like everyone, everywhere is just fucking going through it right now and all i can do is make silly pictures to post on the internet, and maybe hope it means something to someone, somewhere.
anyways i guess that’s all i really want to say. realistically nothing will change in the way i post here, i’m working on the last linktober piece for this year and a personal piece for my cycle of the stars au, so hopefully if i can lock the fuck in i will have new art up this weekend.
thanks to everyone who sticks around this account lol, just needed to vent for a moment. regular posting resumes from here~
Good timezone, I am once again thinking about Gerard Way and Party Poison existing as separate entities inside a single mind-body situation.
In particular I'm thinking about G going out into the desert with Lyndsey post-Conventional Weapons, and while they're out there taking mescaline or DMT or some other psychedelic and, uh, whoops.
Rather than getting the inspiration they were hoping for, they lived a whole other life in post-apocalyptic California, side by side with people who looked identical to the people they love (but weren't the same, not at all, except for the echoes that neither time nor space could erase). And now they're in a middle aged body when they were nineteen a moment ago, half exhausted and defeated and half spitting mad and ready to fight the world.
when i say ralsusie is yuri, i'm not saying they're yuri in vibes or in spirit or "if you believe it in your heart, it can be yuri". no, they're just plain yuri.
"but ralsei is a boy-" he/him lesbians. he's boygirl and girlboy. he can be transfem, genderqueer/fluid, nonbinary. ergo, they're queer af and they are sapphic. ergo, they are yuri. end of story.
