Not sure if I shared this or not but after nearly two years of daily journals I stopped writing daily, it was like I felt I had written about my internal life so much, I didn't have anything to say, so instead I would just post photos suggested by iOs's Featured Photos, just as place holders, and not to mess up my streaks. A streak is when you consistently write in Journal. I have 598 entries and a 257 days streak, not quite a full year.
Currently my missives are driven by prompts, like my like Series Favorites essays, which are prompted by my own work and my wanting to talk about BTS a little more now that I have a clearer voice to do as much. Comment's y'all make also are good prompts, particular if you've said something off-color or something that resonates with me in a way that I feel a need to respond to it.
This essay isn't about what inspires my writing, it's about if I am accessible or not. Curiously the person who said I wasn't accessible wrote his comment on one of the images on my EroticTrevor blog. I mean right there he's disproving his theory. I mean, the comment was only like two posts down from the top of my recent post, not hard to find or see.
When I saw the notification of his comment, I was at first frustrated, because I don't like to sort through my ❤️s, comments or re-blogs until the end of the day, I like to see what the daily numbers of notes I get are, since for so long after the great migration my personal traffic dipped significantly. Overall I realize these numbers don't really mean anything, but I am still fascinated by how if a particular image gets re-blogged it might be a trend with other folks to do the same over the course of a few days, until there is the next new hotness.
By not meaning anything, it's not like any of this hooplah translates into sales, mind you I initially started social media in the hopes of promoting my art work, it was a suggestion by a friend. I left maybe a little over a decade later because social media just wasn't serving me socially or emotionally anymore. Like so many I got caught up in how other people's lives appeared, not how they really were. I felt severing the social media was a good thing for my mental health and well-being, and I haven't regretted it once.
Ergo, yes I am not available on any of the major social media platforms for anyone to contact, Facebook, Instagram and I was never on Twitter because it's primarily a text-based platform and I was a visual artist so it never made sense for me to be there. So yes, you couldn't contact me via any of those social media accounts, but does that make me difficult to reach? I guess it depends on who you are. If you're an old co-worker who never actually became my friend, maybe, but I am on LinkedIn, if a former co-worker was really looking for me they could find me there.
If you're an old school friend, and I was friends with folks from elementary, junior high, high school and college on Facebook, then it might be harder to get in touch with me, particularly once again if we weren't close. Because folks I was close to, would usually know my email address and could reach me on one of those. Now I did have a couple of domain-based email addresses which I let go years ago in favor of free email services like AOL's AIM emails, Gmail and I actually still have like three or four Yahoo Mail accounts. Truth be told, no one really contacts me via email anymore that stopped easily over ten years ago. I can remember a time when email was a go-to for chatting with my friends concurrently with AOL's instant messenger.
Before group chats were a thing I have done repeated group email threads, where I am sharing something I was struggling with with a select number of friends to get their feedback or comment on. Like I said the last time I was doing that kind of stuff was in the aughts. AIM shut down for good in 2017, but we know the advent of the iPhone which hit the world in 2007, by '10 I was pretty much done with instant messaging.
If I am remembering correctly, the next big thing I would talk with folks with was texting, and since I have never had a cellphone, there were two options for this with me, Google Voice which has been around since '09, I am pretty sure I got my number within a year or two of it's debut and have been on that ever since. The other is iMessage which was texting through Apple's SMS feature which allowed me to text directly with anyone else who had an Apple device. The odd thing was my SMS was tied to an email address not a phone number, since I as I said, I have never owned a cell phone. Usually I would have folks give me their number and I would text them to initiate the connection, and once they added me to their contacts there I resided until they deleted or blocked me.
Just to include all my means of communication there is my landline which I had since I moved into my forever-home in '97. In '05 I moved my service from Verizon to Vonage a VOIP phone service, that stands for voice over internet protocol. I had Vonage until '21 the year my last parent died, and so did my need for a phone. After sixteen years with Vonage and twenty-four years having the same number I couldn't see the point of paying any money for the pleasure of just having a consistent phone number. Culturally that stability wasn't a thing anymore, folks changed their numbers all the time, 'new number who dis?'.
For the years prior to my grandmother's death I had primarily used a phone to manage her aides, and anything else related to her care, doctor's appointments, lawyers, estate issues et al. Not a single person called me during this time or years prior. Folks knew the best ways to get in touch with me wasn't a phone, so why should I continue to pay for this out-dated form of communication that wasn't serving me anymore?
There was still in my head the need to be consistent to be there for my siblings children, but even these kids used everything else for communication other than dialing a phone. My niece informed me of my youngest brother's death via a DM on IG. We then had a video chat via FaceTime. I had created a SnapChat just to make myself available to these children, but these children could care less, which is why I shut down all of the social media, I wasn't going to hang on to these accounts just so I could be available for children who weren't actually checking for me.
A few days ago I got a comment on one of my old remaining Flickr accounts. I think I had like three accounts, and after my main one was deleted I still kept the other two. The message was from one of my old Flickr friends who like so many others had found this account which I can't post anything to or get direct messages at. He did more or less what @alexiscambremer did, he commented on a post, one from fifteen years ago, which was when I first actually met him when I attended the opening of the exhibition he had helped me get into in Bologna, Italy. I still haven't responded, because I am not really sure what to say, my relationship to him is tied up in the major trauma I felt when SmugMug deleted my nearly two decade old account with no notice, deleting all the friendships, messages, arguments, and communities I had started on that platform.
I would like to say that that extremely hurtful deletion lead me to step away from any attempts at connects, and this may be possibly true, the downfall of Ello, the social media for creatives, and even my indefinite suspension on Deviant Art left me feeling like, why do I keep trying? When I put myself out there folks don't want the me that I am offering. I can recall that I fought with VSCO an app which started to position itself as a platform. They didn't want me to post nudes or let's say they discouraged the kind of nudes I was posting. I think the remnants of my VSCO grid are still up, but I haven't been able to access that account in years.
Lastly let's get into Tumblr, my primary blog EroticTrevor I finally shut down the ability to DM me after getting numerous messages from potential doms, folks who didn't seem remotely interested in me or my work, just attempting to gratify their sexual proclivities or more than likely were attempting to scam me in some way. Now if I follow you or you follow me, I can't remember which, than you can DM me. This has bought my DMs to a halt because folks usually show up in my DMs to be inappropriate.
I never shut down the ability for folks to comment on my post, and since I have interconnected my main blog with my side blog, you can always DM me on my side blog. Now am I leaving the draw bridge down like I did previously? No. But I am not difficult to reach, I mean I have lived in the same building for nearly thirty years, I am sure it wouldn't take too much effort to actually find my snail-mail address and send me a letter.
Mr. Cambremer did bring up one thing that I haven't addressed, and that being that English isn't his native language, to which I say that should be moot. I literally shared a recent essay about how I commissioned a painting from a French artist in the late aughts and we used translation sites to communicate just fine. I can't believe in the twenties with all the tech we have now that Mr. Cambremer doesn't have any options to communicate with another person in a language that isn't his own. I cry bullshit! Not to sound ageist, but it's possibly he may be having some technology challenges, but then ask a friend if it's really that important to you.
You can't turn it around on me and say I am hard too reach because we don't speak the same tongue, that's still bullshit. I have interfaced with many a non-native English speakers over the decades. Some I have had playful sexual interactions, friendships and even pseudo-collaborations like with Mr. Litt who has a giantess fetish, and I think his native tongue is one of the Asian languages.
I am on this platform, and I am very active on this platform. As I said most of the comments folks leave for me are inappropriate in one way or another, so I actually spend a lot of time attempting to ignore the comments. Mr. Cambremer clearly has other issues which frankly have nothing to do with me. The piece of mine he is looking for can simply be searched for, which is exactly what I am going to do to find it. I was considering for a moment having it translated and sending it to me, but I feel that would be over-indulgent based on everything I have already said about the technology right now. I will search for the link, and reply to his message, which is actually more than he actually deserves.
Addendum: I just took a quick review of post I made in the last few months. Mr. Cambremer may or may not have commented or ❤️ some work of mine. But as I sought to find something specific he had said, I found an overwhelming number of shenanigans of some sort in the comments folks have left regarding my work. Nine out of ten of the comments folks leave for me are mis-informed, disingenuous or sexually inappropriate.
The one thing I can tell you about Mr. Cambremer is he's not one of my most devoted followers as he would like to lead me to believe, if this was the case, I would be familiar with his name because it would be popping up often in my notifications. I assure you it does not. I would like to say that he's attempting to gaslight me, but I don't think he's really that vested in my work, because those who are truly serious about my work and writings, put their money where their mouth is, and buy it. He has never made any overture about buying anything of mine, ergo his comment falls into one of the buckets I have already defined, disingenuous.
