#** reblogging on some of my blogs to pass it around but! applies across the board: you can find most of my blogs in my pinned post here! **

[stillcominback]

𝚆𝙴𝙻𝙻, 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚅𝙴𝚁𝙳𝙸𝙲𝚃'𝚂 𝙸𝙽: as a lot of you may know by know [ if you've caught any of my previous posts about it ], i'm moving with my parents back to california from texas -- where i've been for about 30 years -- because overall? it'll be good for me. i'm sick of texas for the most part, i literally can't afford to live on my own [ and honestly? i like being near my parents and would just have more security and better quality of life in CA ], and i just think sometimes a change is good!

i've been waiting to see if my job will let me keep my job [ and continue to pay me dirt, even! ] ... all i was asking is that i can live in california and work remote. well, the owner has decided he will not allow me to do that. is there a good reason? in my opinion: no. he's framing it [ in his conservative white man rich business owner brain ] that I'M the one making the choice to move because i could apparently just as easily stay in texas and get my own place etc etc etc. so it's on me! unfortunately, it's just not that simple, but i guess from a guy who runs a family business and has multiple homes, it's just hard to really grasp that concept.

i'm literally so furious and so heartbroken at the same time. i know it's not the best company, and yeah i guess, we can say this is for the best in the end? but that doesn't make it hurt less. i've been there for almost 11 fucking years. my ENTIRE career out of college. through ups and downs, i was always working my ass off and being a great employee ... shining reviews and reputation with literally everyone. it just hurts that that ultimately means nothing when i'm finally asking for something in return. i take the poverty wages, take the working in the office when i hate it for the most part, i've taken having to hear misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, every-phobic thing over the years ... then i ask for ONE thing in 11 years [ that's literally not even a big ask ] and it's a ✨no✨.

i feel so lost. like i don't even know how to be without this job, and as much as people tell me YOU'RE SO TALENTED! YOU'RE SO GREAT! YOU'LL FIND SOMETHING SOOOO MUCH BETTER! i wanna believe it, but my brain just ... doesn't. maybe it's imposter syndrome or just how fucking down on myself i feel right now. i still appreciate it because i literally don't know what i would do without my friends and family's support right now like ... even if i can't see it for myself, it means the literal world to me.

plus sides [ i guess ]: i should be able to keep my laptop [ but i'll lose adobe cc so ... i may need some recs or help on how to at least get photoshop cause idk how i'll carry on without it lmao ]; my manager who is a literal saint and one of the best people i know [ she actually pissed the owner off going to the mat for me lmao "he doesn't like to be questioned" ... insert the biggest eye-roll of my life ] ... but she said she would help me with literally everything from linkedin to my resume to a portfolio, and i know that'll be like everything to me while i just .... try to navigate all of this ON TOP OF trying to move.

ALSO: i think i can work until i leave, if that's what i want to do ... i'm still trying to figure all of this out because honestly? even though it's not much? i need the money. but then i'm also like i don't wanna do the owner any favors by having me work while they maybe start putting out feelers to replace me, yknow? BUT THEN AGAIN, i'm hurting my boss more than him [ and that's the twisted, frustrated thing about all of this ... it hurts us way more than it does anything to him but he still gets to make the choice for us ]. SO! i dunno! i may just use all my PTO and see how far that gets me lmao but i feel like at the end of the day, i have to look out for myself and maybe just trying to pull in as many paychecks as i can [ since we also don't have a hard 'we're moving!' date at the moment ] is the best idea ... even if the idea of going into the office and acting normal like literally makes me so ... 😤 but i dunno! my brain is a mess! afjhksdfda

SO YEAH. i just wanted to update you guys because i do consider you friends. whether we talk a little or a lot, i appreciate all of you so much and just wanted to keep folks in the loop with where my life and my head's at right now. not the best but ... just trying to keep it moving. honestly nooooo clue when writing is gonna happen here again??? i do miss / enjoy the distraction of plotting and talking about all this stuff so don't be shy, i just don't know when i'll have the time or capacity to just write here [ maybe once we move and stuff settles a little bit? ] -- but yeah, in the meantime, please come chat with me, let's plot dynamics and all that shit because it still makes me so happy and lets me take my mind on a little vacation lmao love you all, truly! ❤️

#** reblogging on some of my blogs to pass it around but! applies across the board: you can find most of my blogs in my pinned post here! ** #been on and off crying since like 4PM yesterday so it's been a ride lemme tell ya! #nothing like feeling like you wasted over a decade of your life at a job that never really cared about you #like MY boss does but stupidly she doesn't get to make all the decisions for HER own team #even though the owner is barely present and doesn't really know anything about us or the day to day so ... very cool of him #to make big decisions that can hurt a lot of people (and don't affect him one bit either way) #he just really doesn't seem to give a shit at all that it makes our lives so much harder for NO reason #it's just that he literally doesn't “like” remote working and doesn't want to set some kind of company-wide precedent #even tho i'm like moving isn't THAT easy lmao people aren't all just gonna mass exodus out my guy #(also we have a C-level employee who lives / works from new york but ... apparently that's SUUUUPER different because she lived there when #she was hired ........ *stares into camera*) #anyway!!! i'm just really frustrated and hurt and fucking terrified #and i appreciate literally anyone who bothered to read all this! lmao #i'll be around on mobile as per usual ❤️❤️❤️ #00. // OUT OF AMMO ( OOC POST. )

[honeylikewords]

why don’t you take your old posts down if you don’t want people liking them?? not being rude just curious.

Well, I actually have considered that. And, in some cases, it does seem like the best option, specifically regarding the old Grady posts, which I am sincerely considering taking down, and because of that, I answered a similar question to this one back when I was explaining why I don’t write for Grady anymore. 

The thing is, there’s also a couple of reasons not to do that for other cases. For example:

1. I don’t want to just get rid of my old work; I sometimes actually like the things I used to write, so on a certain level, I like being able to look back and see them and remember the pieces and enjoy them again. I guess I could just copy-paste them into a Google doc and archive them for myself that way, but it’s nice to have this blog in its entirety for me to look through on my own.

2. Some of these old posts seem to be the way people find my blog and then get interested in other things. I sincerely doubt I’d have any followers at all if I hadn’t posted Frank stuff, and if I didn’t still have it up now. While I’m not at all caught up about having a droves of followers, what I do care about is still getting interaction on this blog-- meaning people talk to me, I talk to them, I get anons that give me fun ideas to write and exercise with-- and it seems that one of the ways that people get interested in my blog and, by extension, the newer work I’m making is through these old posts.

3. I don’t necessarily hate or despise Frank Castle or Jim Hopper or even Shane Walsh (though out of the three, he’s the one I have the hardest time finding any remaining love for), nor hate the content I made for them. 

When I made that content, they were still good, rich, interesting characters with loveable sides to them (and, for Shane, I hadn’t watched every single one of his episodes, knowing full well that he only got worse with time, so I quit while I was ahead), and I know that, for many people, they’re only invested in that good side that we knew before they got progressively worse through their shows. 

I still hold nostalgia for early seasons Frank and actually do still like Hopper on some levels, and, heck, when Shane made that return on TWD, I was incredibly excited and it did re-light a small candle in my heart for the work that Jon did on that show, so I also understand that, for some people, they’re still running on those early-season-mindsets, the mindsets where they loved that character, and they don’t want to let that go. And I also understand that it’s a scale of badness and that these characters are not necessarily “entirely canceled”, and that there’s a lot of nuance in my opinions on these characters, and nuance in how other people look at them or try to reconcile early incarnations of them with their later downfalls (a la Daredevil season 2 Frank versus Literal Friend To A N*zi In Punisher season 2 Frank).

But the problem is that I get frustrated by the fact that A) people seem only interested in content for aggressive white men, B) people continue to seek out content for these aggressive white men after they have done incredibly reprehensible things within the most recent incarnations of their stories (for example, getting a huge influx of Frank fans immediately after season 2, meaning these people SAW him do all the horrible, horrible things he did in season 2 and still found him attractive and fetishized him for those self-same horrible things) and C) my very vanilla, SFW, loving, gentleness-focused posts for these characters get reblogged onto violence fetishizing blogs, serial killer blogs, IRL shooter blogs, etc, which violates not only the site policies, but also violates my work and my own feelings, horrifying me to think that my art is being consumed for its adjacency to sexualized violence. 

4. I actually still like Frank. I do. And I wish I could still write for him. But when I step back and look at the whole picture, I realize that if I did continue to, it would just be ignoring the problems created by his story and adjacent fandom, willfully ignoring the worst realities of this media and its biases, and what I want now is for people to be able to critically engage with that and know that it’s wrong to continue glorifying the violence and excusing the bigotry embalmed into the corpse of what used to be a good show and character. 

So I leave up my kinder, gentler posts to hopefully combat the masses upon masses of other posts that sensationalize, glorify, and deify his violence and aggression, hoping that maybe it’ll draw people into the conversation we need to collectively be having about the way we look at male characters, the way we look at violence, and the permissions we give to white (or white-passing) characters regarding violence and abuse that we don’t give to non-white characters.

That mentality is applied across the board to all the other characters.

5. Honestly? One day, I could come back around to these characters. Right now I’m at a stage in my life where I find it too difficult to reconcile the badness of the most recent incarnation with the good parts I saw earlier, and I also am trying to avoid seeming like I condone, excuse or turn a blind eye to these bad things by continuing to apologize for a character. But I might not always be in that stage, and may be able to someday articulate a more complex and nuanced understanding of media consumption and creation, and so I want to have these pieces of what I used to love about them still available to me if I ever change my mind. 

And what bothers me isn’t necessarily that people enjoy those old works-- they’re left up for that reason, so people (myself included) can enjoy them-- but rather that people engage with them uncritically, or without a conscientiousness about what it is, exactly, that they’re consuming. When I see people reblogging my old Shane posts, ones about family and healing and kindness, and then see on their blog that the other things they’ve reblogged are about him being brutal, violent, aggressively sexual, or demeaning towards women, it makes me aware that, in some way, people consider my content complicit with and equitable to content that allows for, excuses, or even adores and romanticizes the worst, most vile parts of characters like Shane or Frank or whomever. 

I know there are good fans out there. Good, critical, thoughtful fans who have been able to think about what it is they’re consuming and like parts of it anyway while simultaneously denouncing the bad parts. That’s what media consumption is, a lot of the time: balancing what we love about it with calling out what we hate about it. So I leave my posts up, hoping to find those thoughtful people who love what I love about it but also understand what there is to hate about it, too. But it worries me over and over that people continue to just glorify and digest abuse and violence as if it’s good, sexy, enticing, complex, or passionate, and that these people find my works and think that my work is aligning itself with these glorifications and digestions of wickedness.

[Obligatory line break!]

At the end of the day, though, I keep the posts up because they used to make me happy and they seem to continue to make other people happy. They get people to engage with this blog and hopefully find other, healthier things to enjoy. They’re not really even necessarily bad posts, sometimes, but when I post about being frustrated that these old posts are the only ones getting attention, what I’m frustrated with is the online cultural fixations on characters who seem to be nothing but aggressive white men. I’m frustrated not by my work, nor by people enjoying it, but by the awareness I have that this enjoyment can be connected to a tacit (or even outright) endorsement of white male violence. 

So I don’t take them down in the hopes that people will find my blog and engage with me about stuff I care about, stuff that I like to write nowadays instead of from however many years ago. I don’t take them down in the hopes that people will read them and be happy, or read them and see a more nuanced perspective on what makes a man attractive (which, 100% of the time on this blog, is gentleness, sensitivity, protectiveness, and kindness). And I like having these old pieces of my work to reflect on and learn from, and hopefully do better in future.

It’s a little like preserving a time capsule, in a sense: I may not like or need the things that were originally put into the capsule, but it’s sometimes nice to remember what they meant to me back then, and what they could mean to me some other day.

I know this response got ungodly long, so please don’t think of it as me roasting you; I promise, it’s not. It’s just me trying to articulate and explain how complicated it can be to negotiate the space between loving something-- for example, the work Jon did as an actor who I like and appreciate-- and the things there are to hate about it-- such as the detrimental portrayals of and subscription to hypermasculinity, violence, and white supremacy that can be found in this most recent Frank Castle iteration-- and why I have such a complicated, frustrated relationship with my old posts.

#long post #messages #anonymous #sorry this got so long and complicated! it's just a long and complicated problem in and of itself

[mattved]

On blogging, again

Everybody makes a mistake from time to time, and the junction came where I gotta admit belonging to that exact domain. My blog went through about as many changes in platform as it had posts. (Everybody sometimes exaggerates, right?)

So I am here today to give an account on journey of my content across individual platforms, outlining their upsides and downsides and ranting about my fuckups leading to choosing them.

The Beginnings: Blogger

One of the most popular blogging platforms of the 90s offered two gates of entrance to your Google-hosted website: Hitting an URL, either name.blogger.com or your own domain, and being discovered through hub of all Blogger articles, featuring the most popular favorite-tag-relevant along a fulltext search. Both obviously played role in googlability and building an on-line brand.

It seemed to work for a while. I was getting units of traffic from people and crawler hits every now and then. With keywords including my name and username, I slowly made it to the first page of results in Search and DuckDuckGo, pushing the pamphlet article about a person of my name dying at the age to the second, and enabling to compete with identically named photographer for #1. The latter, I unfortunalely did not make. And am obviously mad about it.

The problem was that Blogger lacks some cool features of the modern web. To this day, you are limited to a raw/wysiwyg HTML editor, forced to do more clicking than real writing. Uploading images was a completely separate activity from the writing process and involved browsing filesystems three times before inserting one into the article.

Besides, people no longer visit the article hub, making it useless for anything than that SEO aspect mentioned earlier, and professing the site's backend obsolescence with the a searchbar included along the top edge by default. Of course you can hide it through creation of custom theme including a CSS tweak, but that is just more hassle. Besides, you are not really allowed to do much other than raw CSS to manipulate the site's looks. And the loading times of some articles were just horrible, especially when the engine attempted to apply analytics tools on embeded content, often causing its failures to even load.

And even though Blogger was my big love for the early posts and I stayed for almost 9 months with it, these aspects had driven me elsewhere. Somewhere I was in control of both my content, looks, and structure of the homepage.

The Techie Period: Webhosting

I had rented a cheapo webhost my friend and I had been using for ages as a platform for our various PHP projects the history of which ran all the way to our sweet boarding school development sessions, which were known throughout the staff hierarchy and occassionaly lifted the curfew imposed on us by the system.

Since I was now able to do whatever I wanted with the whole base, many experiments were done and a lot learned in the process. I even made a switch to self-hosting everything on my very own BananaPi webserver, gaining a lot of sysadmin skills.

May I write, please? Wordpress

So many people love wordpress, since there is a massive ecosystem around it, with so many commercially available themes, wonderful plugins, and an open-source base. But I was not overly excited about having somebody else's work showed off on my little personal site. I wanted to build my personal brand and allow myself to be actually proud of it.

But the time it takes even a fairly skilled webbie to get into the zipped-theme format with about as many files as a fresh core linux installation has is not the shortest. And the tweaks always seemed to break whatever I was trying to customize. I sure could've had a blog in no time, but getting to something I'd be happy with was a question of becoming fairly expert in the wordpress ecosystem, which is honestly not worth it, unless you wanna capitalize on it as soon as you can. Besides, there is no certainty in how long such profession would remain relevant. And there is all the Filipinos beating you in sales.

Wordpress is really not for you if you want to give individualist impression. After about a month, I deleted the folder.

This is actually fun! Anchor CMS

Real perfection for those who know pure PHP and want to build a unique site really quickly. It is also where I first encountered markdown outside of GitHub. And it had been my platform for over a good year and a half.

But my audience disappeared entirely. The search engine performance remained, true that, but that was about it and it seemed that some social network marketing was necessary. And even though I do have some outreach on Facebook and Instagram, I consider these to be purely personal devices, that I give public limited access to. So in spite of my general satisfaction with the workings of my wonderful brown colored design featuring many elements enriching the text, I now understand that this alone just won't cut it. And maintaining the website along with a different platform is just not something I have time to do.

So long, my love. I'll pull you out once I'm famous enough. I'll rebuild you on something less outdated than Anchor.

Taking it seriously: Medium

The problem here is that I rarely react to immediate news. Because I am long-term oriented individual aware of the self-adjusting nature of running averages of almost anything. And it doesn't even need to be on index-based variables. Because yes, I do believe that all functional relationships have some sort of equilibrium. Logical or strictly endogenous.

Besides, Medium is filled with... well, media. Wide-readership accounts shitposting five times a day in order to maintain audience, especially of those behind the paywall, who may even consider that the media they are paying for through means other than advertizing are more reliable as a source of infromation.

Yes, I went through the grind of migrating my entire blog to this site, copy-pasting almost everything and adhering to that non-markdown article editor, which made me feel well in the very beginning. It made it a no-bullshit platform after all.

I even wrote one medium-exclusive post, which is never gonna be on Tumblr as I managed to delete it along with my entire account days after doing all the hard work.

Medium is a great concept badly executed. Adios.

Terminal station: Tumblr

At least so far. I may be giving up on fully custom theme for a short time or I may be on a retreat. I may have decided to use an exclusively ad-based platform (at least I can remove ads on my personal tumblr, if not in the feed.

I don't like that there is very little original content on here, but I might soon benefit from reblogs. I don't plan to reblog a lot myself, unless I find a post to be five-star. But I will always like whatever feels appropriate and amazing. And I am always happy to stay in touch with any number of followers. Because some audience is better than massive audience. And I can get at least some feedback here. Hit me, guys. I'm posting for my own benefit and hope somebody will take time to read and reflect on what I am about to post here.

I even plan to switch back to the slightly more interesting topics, showing off my knowledge and passing it on.

Wish me luck ^^

#blogging #tech #platforms #blogger #wordpress #medium #tumblr #upsides #reflection