anavkour

[anavkour]

it's been a bit! turns out undergoing surgery makes you really tired all the time and you don't have any energy to have thoughts.

however, i've been slowly writing things. nothing specific or that i could call a "project." I got the game bundle for palestine and it had a solo-rpg called A Familiar Witch (it's a supplement of A Village Witch, which I've wanted to play), and it led to some really fun storycrafting! I hadn't considered solo rpgs as a way to just have fun writing something, but now I'm definitely going to use them to keep my writing muscles limber.

I'm also knee deep in rp-server plots + some of us just finished watching tbskyen's The Boss Designs of Bloodborne and we're having Thoughts about it, so again, no specific projects as of late. It feels weird to be trying to resurrect a writeblr and being like "yeah I'm not really like, working on a story or a novel or anything." Still waiting for inspiration to strike, or something. I'm having fun with what I'm doing anyway, which is the important part.

#nova.txt

[anavkour]

gonna open scrivener and try and freewrite some stuff because i'm too tired to learn twine right now

#nova.txt #having formatting thoughts but i have to figure out exactly what the story's about first

[anavkour]

a writeblr kinda-reintro

hey gang. are we so back? perhaps we are so back.

tl;dr, i had a really rough year and a half (probably one of the worst years i've had) and due to a variety of health things, was dealing with brain fog that made it hard to focus on anything. also i changed my writeblr name again so if you don't recognise me, it's gone anavkour -> twentythreecrows -> twentythreecrowswrites -> anavkour again.

i'm trying to get back into ofic again, trying to remember how to make stuff and write stories again, trying to like...live my life again? which feels so weird to say. but i haven't been very creative until recently and i miss it. and i'm about to have an extended break from working because of even more health stuff, so i'll have time and need a routine.

my WIPs have changed a little. i've still got combustion in slow motion going in my head, but i've been doing more worldbuilding for it than anything else. my missing homeworld guys are currently hanging out in a rp server, and i've had some very vague sci-fi thoughts about them. eventually i'll probably find a new, main project, or do some smaller stuff in the meantime, but right now i'm gently getting my very fatigued writing muscles back into gear. most of my stuff is probably going to be in a non-narrative format, at least for a little while, but i want to get back to writing The Rift at some point too, with some big worldbuilding changes re: the factions. man, now i'm thinking about the rift again.....

i'll do a better re-intro later when i have the brain for it but for now, i'm gonna try my damndest to keep up with things here and catalogue my process and stuff. i miss writing and having a creative routine, so hopefully i'll be able to get that back while i'm not working

#nova.txt

[anavkour]

posts that aged like milk

after a very long absence i may be active again

#dealing with life has been a lot lately but i've missed ofic #<- a constant in my life #anyway. getting into writing again but more transformative in style/format #trying my best #my posts

[anavkour]

after a very long absence i may be active again

#we shall see #dealing with life has been a lot lately but i've missed ofic #lee.txt

[anavkour]

hello friends i am not dead i am just burned out [again]. i’ve moved the url @twentythreecrows to my studyblr and this blog is now @twentythreecrowswrites

#i need a new name tag since that's changing again as well waah

[anavkour]

Some day I want to see a show that does the “no filler episodes” thing from the opposite direction. Just a whole season worth of low-stakes character pieces that seem to move the overall story absolutely nowhere, then episode 26 pulls all the triggers at once and this massive Rube Goldberg machine of a plot the show’s been quietly setting up in the background the whole time hits you like a truck.

#inspiration

[anavkour]

never underestimate the power of telling yourself ‘woah calm down there edge lord’ every once in a while

#ch: micah #clay to micah actually

[anavkour]

"why does your demon boyfriend never wear a shirt?" well it's very hot in hell and they get stuck on his horns. no one tell him about button up shirts btw or i'll fucking kill you.

#ch: kuda

[anavkour]

If u want to write a story about a character that's just you but hotter with a dark twisted backstory and magical powers and a pet falcon or something, I think u should just go ahead and do that. Who's gonna stop you? The government?? Fuck the police.

[anavkour]

Concrete, 100% effective way to tell if someone doesn’t belong in a LGBT+/queer space:

They openly and actively hate/ want to hurt the people in that space

[anavkour]

Tumblr,

Earlier today we announced to the press that we are running a beta test program for Post+, Tumblr’s newest add-on subscription tool. Post+ is a completely optional tool that will allow creators to make some of their posts exclusive to their paid subscribers. You can read more about it right over here on our @postplus Tumblr. This feature is being tested by a small group of incredible creators on Tumblr.

We want to hear about what you like, what you love, and what concerns you. Even if it’s not very nice. Tell us. We can take it. We WANT that feedback. It helps us make Tumblr better.

What we won’t ever accept is the targeted harassment and threats these creators have endured since this afternoon. These creators are some of the most talented people around, and all they’re doing is testing out a feature. These are the people who graciously agreed to pilot a program to help us discover bugs before we open it up to all creators. These are the humans who are testing a feature that we hope will soon help thousands of Tumblr creators feel empowered, get rewarded for their efforts, and find support within their community.

Our Community Guidelines are clear: Don’t engage in targeted abuse, bullying, or harassment.

Anyone in violation of these guidelines will be dealt with swiftly and will be forced to contend with the appropriate consequences. It’s okay to tell us how you feel. It’s not okay to bully someone because you disagree with their choices.

[anavkour]

So Tumblr apparently has a subscription now called Post Plus. Soon you and others will be able to charge for posts... What do you think of that?

Conveniently, I'd actually reblogged a post about this on the non-writing reblog sideblog, where I wrote a brief response in the tags, but I'mma gonna write it here and expand on it further, just because lol.

The tags (cleaned up): You know, I have to hand it to Tumblr staff. On no other website have I found staff so massively out of touch with its userbase to create nothing but extremely unhelpful updates, one after another. It's incredible, really.

The expanded commentary ... is behind a cut because I kinda went off.

What I mean is nobody asked for this, and let's be real, the only reason why Tumblr's doing this is because subscription-based content is becoming the new thing. The second Twitter announced that it was going to do subscribed content, it was really only a matter of time before Tumblr's staff tried to mimic it. (Side point about Twitter's subscription model: Given that Twitter is marketed as specifically a microblogging site rather than a Pateron-esque content creation platform, subscribed content makes even less sense for that platform compared to Tumblr, but the difference is that Twitter users would actually pay for that, so it's not like it wouldn't have been a lucrative business model, if we're frank. Tumblr, on the other hand...)

Anyway, tangents aside, in theory, subscribed content makes sense for Tumblr. Unlike Twitter, Tumblr is billed as a content platform. It's basically Free Patreon, where creators can post and share their work for supportive viewers. From a business perspective, it just makes perfect sense to slap a money sticker on that—thus in a way (again, in theory) cutting out the middlemen that are Patreon and Ko-Fi. It's not just a lucrative arrangement for content creators, either. Like any subscription-based service, Tumblr will take a little bit of that $3.99/$5.99/$9.99 a month your friends will be paying you for content—5%, to be exact. And from a purely capitalistic standpoint, that makes sense too. As a creator, you're essentially paying Tumblr for the ability to use their money-making machine to do all that number-crunching and money shuffling for you, while at the same time contributing to the possibility of keeping Tumblr's supplies full of the duct tape and hope it uses to hold the website together. And to be fair, at least Tumblr isn't gouging you as much as Patreon with its plethora of tiered rates does. (Ko-Fi beats them both, though, but it has its disadvantages that I won't get into because we're not talking about Ko-Fi right now.)

I keep saying "in theory" because here's the other thing about Tumblr: It thinks it knows what their audience is like, but nine times out of ten, if they do any sort of market research, they don't show their work, so to speak. Or putting it another way: who is the primary audience of Tumblr?

Well, according to the WSJ, that'd be you, Gen Z.

(Speaking of, source for a lot of my info on the new update actually comes from there instead of Tumblr itself, lmao. Read the article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tumblr-introduces-paid-subscription-tool-to-woo-younger-bloggers-11626872401?mod=pls_whats_news_us_business_f )

Now, that in mind, if you don't mind a dirty millennial making generalizations, lemme group you into two categories:

1. The Gen Zs who are probably too young to subscribe to a lot of content.

2. The Gen Zs who are probably too poor to subscribe to a lot of content.

Like, how many times have you seen GoFundMes floating around on this hellsite? Patreons with an attached note that says "by the way I'm a poor artist please consider subscribing so I can eat this month"? No offense, Gen Z, but why the fuck is anyone thinking you'd be willing to cough up $10 a month to see content on a website that barely works?

Also, even though I'm old enough to fondly remember the colorful TV advertisements aimed directly at kids (and wise enough to understand that a lot of the media I had consumed until giving up fandom altogether often came in the form of animated advertisements for video games and collectible merchandise from Japan), I still find something nefarious about advertising monthly subscriptions to a userbase that's got a huge amount of minors on it. It feels like a double-standard, really. You make a slip-shod attempt at nuking the porn to protect the children, but asking for their money is perfectly okay.

Speaking of the fact that this website is a dumpster fire, there's also the question of how the fuck it actually works. Like, don't get me wrong. I'm sure it literally works, but I also caught wind that creators can't block people who also subscribe to them. (That's the post I'd reblogged because I was just flabbergasted by that entire concept.) Given the fact that a lot of folks on Tumblr are victims of one trauma or another, people dealing with mental health issues, or a plethora of other things, why would you build and market a service that ... takes control of how a blog's content can and will be distributed from the person who runs that blog?

(Honestly, though, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Tumblr doesn't understand how blocking and filtering content works to begin with. One of the great things about Tumblr's predecessors like LiveJournal was that you actually had the ability to determine who got to see your content. You could build filters and choose which specific users could read your posts. On Tumblr, there are only two ways of guaranteeing that only certain people can see your content, and that's by either password-protecting your blog or making it only visible on your dash and then blocking everyone you want to keep off your blog. Both of these methods have the potential of keeping your actual followers from being able to interact with your content. It's so much more inefficient and risky, and it's really frustrating. And never mind the filtering system. Oh, sure, you can filter posts right on Tumblr now. But every time a word you've filtered pops up, a huge fuckin' block that says "HEY BY THE WAY THIS INCLUDES THE THING YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE" pops up where the post is instead of, you know, something subtler. Like a small bar that doesn't stop your scrolling as if there's a post there for you to see.)

Tangents aside again, the point to that whole "you can't block subscribers" thing is that it's terrible execution. I can't say for certain how bad Tumblr's overall execution of this will be (I don't know anyone who's been able and willing to experiment with it), but Tumblr's notorious for terrible execution, so the fact that they already have plain proof of it is ... not encouraging, no. No doubt, knowing Tumblr, the feature will be littered with blog-breaking bugs and fun things that are actually intentional but make a blog horrendously inaccessible (also a thing Tumblr likes to do).

So yeah, subscriptions initially make sense, but the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. It really comes off as a scheme cooked up by job-secure millennials who think they're savvy with the kids ... which, honestly? Automattic kinda is.

(I might have some personal beef with Automattic, but that's neither here nor there. Series of long stories.)

Tl;dr, Tumblr came up with yet another feature that sounds like it'd be a good idea on the surface but is actually not at all useful to its userbase and probably would be executed extremely poorly anyway.

Also, social media outlets are a capitalistic echo of what blogging and content creation/sharing used to be, and therefore, I believe them to be the death of the free internet, but that's for another rant (that people are free to ask me about).

#very very good points

[anavkour]

to anyone who follows me and cares:  i won’t be using tumblr+ or whatever it’s called, none of my tumblr content will be behind a paywall, if i wanted money i’d set up a kofi or a patreon instead of trusting the site where sometimes the basic functionality breaks and attempted moderation only leads to the existence of more of the thing they’re trying to ban

#they're trying to reinvent the wheel but the new wheel they're making is made out of sand and crumbles under the slightest pressure #sigh

[anavkour]

Hey Neil, due to a certain British author saying some stupid things again... Could you please quickly say something supportive for trans people? Would be really comforting right now

I’ve missed this (I’ve been taking a Twitter holiday for the last month, for my own mental health), but I can imagine. I’m sorry. 

Trans women are women. Trans men are men.  Trans rights are human rights. I’m sorry that some people have such a hard time getting their heads around that. But the world is changing, and history is with you.

[anavkour]

Me, when I find a new and exciting way to make my protagonist's life a little more miserable:

[anavkour]

which character from my wip, the wicked within, are you?

wip intro

#eden! #other writers #w: 47crayons