general_radix

A rough timeline of events (screencaps here):

* predstrogen, a trans woman, gets harassed by transphobes for months on end while the mods (many of whom are also transphobes) do nothing. The final straw: her entirely SFW transition timeline post gets reported.

* predstrogen vents about how the CEO, photomatt, should die in a "hammer car explosion"--something which any rational person can understand is too cartoonish to be an actionable threat. photomatt immediately permabans her and REPORTS HER TO THE FBI.

* Everyone calls out photomatt. He ends his insanely pissy response with an implied threat to delete the entire platform if the userbase doesn't back off.


Things are not going great.

Maybe this latest PR shitshow will encourage people to come back to DW, but I'm not counting on it. I'm at least on some of the places folks are fleeing to, like Pillowfort and Mastodon (dot-art in my case).

Currently contemplating what to do beyond cross-posting my amigurumi patterns (of which I have quite a few now).

Oh dear.

So, uh. Not much of note has been going on, besides me working on various things and checking out the comic convention at Lowe Mill's earlier this month. Also, I dusted off my long-disused tumblog and made it not be an eyestrain nightmare; success in getting people to look at my art has been about as limited as it's always been.

I kinda dropped off on keeping this journal updated semi-regularly because it felt like no one was around to read it anymore. Which could continue to be the case after I post this. :U

Once again, I find myself pacing up and down my ADHD train, waiting for it to get unstuck from a particular station--and that station looks a lot like highly-specific early '00s nostalgia. Sort of.

The problem is that I'm having a very hard time visualizing what very late 1999-2002 felt like to me; it's a haze of symbols, locations, and old sketchbooks. I don't know if everyone has this problem, or if ADHD just rendered my memory unto swiss cheese.


An attempt at sorting some of it out:

* Stylized cartoon flowers, especially in rainbow colours. Probably on a lot of the stuff I was using at the time; speaking of--

* All things shiny, be they foil-wrapped pencils or holofoil Pokémon cards.

* Sailor Moon, Pokémon, and Cartoon Network; while there were other things I liked, these three currently stick out the most. Especially the Powerpuff Girls, which I actually tried making illustrated "stories" about (in sarcasm-quotes because I was six).

* The days when our living room was relatively clean and we could actually sit on the damn couch.

* A particular set of lights I had, mostly to help me sleep: two rotating lamps (one a projection of cartoon fish, the other a disco ball), a lamp with a carving of an angel, and a light-up scallop shell/accessories case that came with one of my Barbies. When we first moved in, I was also given a radio clock that only ever stayed on for an hour at a time--bit of a problem when it takes you longer than that to fall asleep.

* DC's Looney Tunes and Animaniacs comics, along with all their adverts that were not always aimed at my age group (GTA London, anyone?).

* My elementary school, or at least the parts that didn't contribute to lasting psychological issues.

* That period of about a week or so one summer when my extended family from Texas stayed over; not only was I excited to hang out with them again (we'd stayed at their house during the move from California to Pratville), it was one of the few times we had other kids over, period. They brought their N46, and we played a bit of Ocarina of Time and PPG: Chemical X-Traction.

* All the random stuff I would draw at the time, including but not limited to truly amateur Fakemon, Sailor Moon OCs, SM/Pokémon crossover stuff in both directions, and random original characters. All rendered with about the amount of finesse you'd expect from a kid who thought they could skip the guidelines phase of art.

* My GameBoy Color and the handful of games I had for it, including the GameBoy Camera and its terrifying error screens (and, to be fair, some very old, irreplaceable photos).

* Some strange dreams that formed the basis of what I'd call "my Pokémon AU" if I knew what an AU was.


And that's still not even a fourth of it. :U

There's still some work left to do, but the important thing is that the shelves are up and I can sort of access the window again.

( click thee here )

A follow-up to my previous entry.

( More gross shit )

It's also likely that RedArcanine stole the UI code (and project money) from the cancelled ArtRise to make Buzzly...after the two other devs DIED. "Scummy" doesn't even begin to cover it.

As for ChStark, he's busy banning people who answer his second asinine poll 'wrong', when he isn't changing the results in his favour. It's pathetic. (EDIT: Even more so when it turns out he can't even do IP bans right.)

DigitalOcean has opened an investigation into Buzzly, presumably not just for the evidence against RedArcanine but for the site not allowing users to deactivate and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions. We'll see how it goes.


Tangential, but one last thing that's been pissing me off: imagine following this shitstorm from minute one until now and not only thinking that this is still primarily an "antis versus pro-shippers" thing (when other, far more serious issues have engulfed that), but that the "antis" are in the wrong and need to be lectured about fiction. When one of the devs turned out to be a textbook case of "predators are attracted to The Bad Shit". The users and staff having to fight the devs for the same minimum content standards as any reputable community made Buzzly "a platform for young antis", did it? Get your head out of your ass.

ETA: Some new info regarding the accusations under the cut. While I guess that's not as bad, it still says a lot about RedArcanine that he allowed that relationship to keep going a while after learning the truth.

I mentioned wanting to revamp one corner of my room. Well, right now it's looking like yet another situation where I'd have to single-handedly unfuck our basement first, and we don't have enough shelves to do that.

(If my TV table can't be moved where I want it, the TV and my consoles would have to be taken and re-set up downstairs. Our basement is STILL a disaster area, and I suspect that this idea that we have to donate/throw things out before we organize it is why it remains so. To pick out stuff to donate, we need to be able to get to the bins; if we can't get to the bins, then that's step one completely stalled out.)

Right now, the only area in my room that I feel I can really tackle is the space under my bed, and I'm not sure that's gonna help much--and I definitely don't wanna stick my bigger plushes in a spot from which I've flushed many a spider.


--

Other things: dA has improved the new notifs since last I wrote about them--"select/remove all" is back and it won't make you confirm every individual message removal even after hitting "mark all read". It still bothers me that they plowed ahead with an (AFAIK) unnecessary UI change against overwhelming user protest (at least Eclipse came with a critical code refresh).

That sinking feeling of how, unless you can revamp one corner of your room, you've pretty much hit maximum capacity... and yet I still had another Build-a-Bear Eeveelution ordered the other day. :U

* Still working on Deus Vocatus; I finished Thema's side of chapter 1-4 recently (give or take some editing) and am writing Pavo's.

* There's some art projects I want to start on after we tick over to 2022, namely a series of alternate forms for the Sailor Guardians. Given that the main group numbers at ten (eleven if you count Tuxedo Mask) and there's three forms each involved, it's gonna take a while. :U

* I think my collection focus has currently shifted to Pokemon plushes and whatever Sailor Moon things were recently announced that are part of ranges I go for (Figuarts + Mini and Q Posket, more or less). Not really sure where I'm gonna share collection talk, though, because I don't want my journal to be nothing but that AND MyFigureCollection's policy on l*li/sh*ta shit pissed me off enough to not want to interact with that community anymore.

(Short version: "we aren't doing anything about it, something something 'letter of the law' that never gets invoked for anything else, run along uwu" Fuck you and your site that you can't even keep running consistently.)

* Speaking of Pokemon, though: after being stymied by XY's Mystery Gift servers not running anymore, I hacked my 3DS (well, 2DS) and gave myself the Shiny Gengar I had a card for, along with some other download-only Pokes. And I don't feel particularly bad about it, because that isn't the only useless download code I've got lying around and it's MY legally-acquired copy of Pokemon X, dammit.

* 'twas hunting down some very old art of mine (long story short: I found most of it, but not that one Pokemon colouring book) and was reminded that Kid RADIX, around 2000, crossed over Pokemon and Sailor Moon. And I was thinking, "there's no way that could actually work, right?".. until I figured out a way that it could, starting with shifting the theme from "planets" to "cities in the Pokemon world". The benefits of coming back to childhood ideas with the skills of an adult, I guess.


/end ramble

Not sure I want to go on a big "actual reasons to dislike tumblr" tear just yet, in part because there's no way to do so without directly addressing a certain bear that I try not to poke. But I've had a related thought looping around me head that I want to get down somewhere.

Back in 2018, I got about halfway through a long, angry post by a bitter ex-LiveJournaler (as in, this person was literally a long-time LJ user before LJ became non-viable). This person described the problems with LJ's culture circa the mid-late '00s and came thiiiiiiis close to admitting that its culture was toxic as hell and not something we should try to revive...before pulling a one-eighty into "BUT AT LEAST IT WAS STABLE!" and whining about the "chaos" of tumblr. At which point I noped out, because no one who can outline that many problems with LJ's culture from the time and still not admit that it was terrible has anything worthwhile to say.

What insights have a few years of separation from tumblr given me, in light of that? Well, I still think that rant was stupid and in bad faith (IIRC it tied back into "survivors don't want me reducing their trauma to a fun kink, WAAAAAAH"), but tumblr does have serious issues with its semi-permeability and lack of stable community spaces. Not that LJ and DW are water-tight, but on tumblr, you're getting exposed to shitstorms whether you like it or not--the only way to visibly reply to someone is through reblogs, and there's no way to effectively "contain" anything (as many a roleplayer on tumblr discovered the hard way, I bet).

Plus, well...it's hard to have decent fan communities when the prevailing discourse is "all fandom is bad, fuck you".

One of the nice things about Pillowfort is that it was designed from the start to combat this: posts have actual dedicated comments sections, making it a little easier for things to stay put. Proper communities (and not "here's a normal tumblog that mimics a community") help, too. And DW is still here, though as bemoaned several times here already, activity dropped back to pre-Botched Porn Purge levels--goddamn impatient social media users, grumble curse mutter...

I think Bitter Ex-LJ User blew past a lot of valid concerns and landed right in "it's a moral failure on the part of The Damn Kids(TM) that social media platforms that they didn't create and have no control over are designed to be hostile to privacy and stability, and we should all return to the platform that I explained right in this very post was a toxic drama magnet". Shit like this is why I was so hesitant to move to DW until I had to.

The side-effects have not been fun, but that particular protective measure/social duty is taken care of.

(Also, I got Jazware's new Greninja figure the same day we got vax'd. :P)

I've been slacking off on these.


* I think everyone who follows me outside of DW is already aware of this, but: I made an original fork on Inmortalitas, titled Deus Vocatus, and have been working on that for a few months now along with a few other original settings.

One of the benefits of expanding Marathon's canon by about 80% is that a lot of stuff transferred over cleanly. XD;

* Also started looking into Monolith Production's Blood (1997, with a couple of expansions and a contentious '98 sequel) and got invested enough to do AU stuff. I'm guessing that its fandom doesn't have much of a presence on DW...

* We all got the first half of our vaccinations yesterday! I was expecting that needle to hurt a lot worse than it did (though the injection site is still pretty sore). The second half will get done in October.

* Jazwares/Wicked Cool Toys recently put out figures of Glaceon and Leafeon, the two 'eons missing from Tomy USA's set. Multiple in-store searches turned up nada, and eBay was (still is) full of rotten scalpers; eventually, though, the two appeared on Amazon for non-highway robbery prices, and now both of them are home. Albeit, I could only pay for Glaceon right away.

(I also found a Riolu + Ultra Ball at Barnes 'n Noble today, also Christmas stash-bound)

* Before Dad, one of my siblings, and I went out today, I spotted a wasp in our garage and hurriedly opened the door to let it out. I watched it crawl over...and then two big, friendly black dogs came trotting by, with one of them coming into the garage to sniff me. Luckily, it didn't try to get into the house, but "got visited by dogs" was pretty low on the list of things I expected to happen. :U

(The wasp flew out of the garage, if you're wondering)