Tag: inspo

shelbycragg:

This mix is eight years in the making.

Back in 2010, I was a young college student. I was massively depressed and confused about my identity.  My mental illness had isolated from me from my friends and family, and my life felt hopeless. So, as many young people do, I channeled all of my heart and soul into creating fanart, fanmixes, cosplay, fan fiction, and meta posts about my favorite webcomic: /Homestuck/, by Andrew Hussie. I was SO prolific in the fandom that in 2012, Andrew asked me to do the canon art for a fangirl parody character, “Calliope”. Of course, I accepted right away! It was so much fun getting to put a lot of myself into this character through her art.

Calliope is an alien character that shares a body with her “brother”, Caliborn. Together they live in complete isolation, chained up and only allowed to talk to people on their computers. Caliborn is a raging misogynist who is determined to break down Calliope’s will to live and ultimately kill her. Calliope’s goal was to reform her brother, to make him more like her, so that their personalities could integrate into one powerful being, with her as the dominate force.

Throughout 2012 and 2013, my popularity and following in the fandom grew due to my insanely prolific nature. (Seriously, my mental health was so bad that Homestuck was the ONLY thing I let myself think about. I lived my entire life in a dissociative haze.) I became, as they are called, a “big name fan”, and as such, I started to receive a hell of a lot of harassment. A lot of it was misogynist in nature, and a lot of it came from my own blunders and mistakes as I tried to figure out my identity and sexuality while in the public eye. (I made a lot of mistakes in my early 20s, as pretty much everyone does!)

Online fame has a way of making you lose yourself in the hatred. I related more and more to Calliope, and grew increasingly attached to her character and fictional plight as a coping mechanism to deal with all the abuse and isolation. The more I isolated myself, the less people online treated me like a real person. It was a vicious cycle!

At some point though, the constant harassment became  too much to bear. I stopped allowing myself to enjoy my hobbies, and I focused hard on building my life again. I started writing original fiction! I killed the part of myself that enjoyed fanwork, because at a certain point, she was bringing me nothing but misery. I became afraid and ashamed of how deep I was into my coping mechanisms, and several toxic people around me just reinforced this view over and over again. I retreated into obscurity, leaving my fandom days behind me and trying desperately not to think about the kind of person I was in those days.

I never left Homestuck behind, though! I continued to do freelance work for the comic, and became increasingly involved in What Pumpkin Games, where I now work full time on the Hiveswap series. But I told myself over and over again that this was just a job, that I had left behind my embarrassing fandom days that in my mind, had brought me nothing but misery.

But… here’s the thing: I was lying to myself.

Through the Homestuck fandom, I met my amazing wife! I had so many opportunities to share myself with an audience, I found inspiration and meaning in my life, and it launched me into a promising artistic career! A LOT of good things have blossomed from that strange coping mechanism. to think that it brought me nothing but pain was nothing but my distorted, PTSD-addled brain telling me that I was garbage.

So, why did I let myself stop enjoying something I loved SO MUCH? I don’t have any one good answer, but I do know one thing now: I’m done living like that! I am a queer person, I’m an abuse survivor, and I am a writer and an artist and a cosplayer and god dammit, I fucking love Calliope and Caliborn. So, this mix is for them, but it’s also for everyone out there in this awful culture that makes women feel like shit for daring to speak, for daring to like things and have opinions, and for being weird fangirls.

I have news for everyone, though. Weird fangirls are amazing, and we are going to win!

Please, enjoy the mix! ^u^

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Liner notes behind the cut!

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How do you do it? How do you ooze compassion and kindness in every word you write? Were you always like this? Is it a skill you learned and then how?

theunitofcaring:

I think I’ve gotten nicer and better at communicating over the course of the last few years. It’s a skill, like most things, and responsive to trying, like most things, but really I suspect that a lot of it is being in a situation where you can sustainedly try; most people who are jerks on the internet are not trying to be kind and failing, they’re trying to do something else, and unless being kind meets their needs they won’t do it. 

For me, a situation where I can sustainedly try to be kind means having social support and affirmation that I am safe, that I have interesting things to say, that I can do independent moral reasoning, and act on it, and this isn’t presumptuous or selfish but is an essential skill for everybody. I think that people who find themselves being meaner than they intend to on the internet often don’t have that, or don’t have enough of it.

 If that’s you, prioritize being equipped to be nice, instead of trying to already be nice when you’re scared and hurting. Prioritize finding people and ideas and inspirations that make you feel good about who you are and what you have to say and about your right to engage in internet discourse as much or as little as you please. When you feel secure, and assured in your right to think and express yourself, when being wrong wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world because you know yourself to be valuable in many ways, then you’re equipped to be nice, and it’ll come much easier.

(There is a kind of niceness that comes from being scared that ever disagreeing with anyone makes you bad, or that to be worthy of participation in the world you have to be perfect, or that you should keep trying interactions that make you miserable because prioritizing yourself would be selfish. This is lousy cut-rate niceness. Reject it. Reject it by ceasing to care about being nice, if you need to do that.)

And from that point then I think it’s practice. Some specific things that help me: 

1) When i write, I try to have a wide audience of people in mind. I try to imagine someone who has done the thing I’m condemning; someone who has been hurt by it, someone who thinks it’s bad but is in an environment where that’s unacceptable to say out loud, someone who thinks they’d be a bad person to have an opinion about it… When I write a sentence that is going to make one of those people stop reading, I try to rewrite it. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I could but it’s too much effort and I want to actually get this post out. But when I can, I think it makes my writing kinder.

2) When someone is a dick, you can actually just pretend they weren’t. 

The rationalist community periodically has fights over steel manning, which is where you try, when you encounter an argument, to think about and develop the version of the argument most compelling to you. (Advantages: you can end up understanding ideas you hadn’t really understood, and being better able to imagine why you might hold them. Disadvantages: if you are talking to someone, you are suddenly talking about ‘the version of your position that makes sense to me’ which is often not their actual position, which is extremely frustrating.)

So steelmanning has problems, but I’ve had great luck with nicemanning, which is where you just respond to exactly what someone said but ignore the thing where they’re being an asshole. I think at least some people on tumblr are jerks to get attention, and if it doesn’t work they stop. Some others are jerks because they’re upset, and when they’re calmer, rereading what they said will probably bother them more than a scolding from you about it. I delete a lot of obnoxious anons and I’m much more likely to delete anons if they’re obnoxious, but if I decide to answer one I try to answer it exactly like I’d answer if someone asked that question without being rude. They usually stop being rude, if they continue the interaction. 

And often people weren’t trying to be a jerk, and interacting with them like they were nice and reasonable turns out to be 100% correct because they were trying to be nice and reasonable and just miscommunicated. And on those occasions I always feel really glad that I treated them that way.

(There are lots of problems with this if you would feel obliged to answer an ask if it were polite, instead of feeling free to answer whatever asks you please. Or if you feel miserable when you get anon hate and it’s painful and stifling not to call them on it, or if you will beat yourself up for being even the tiniest bit rude to someone who just was horrible to you. Like I said earlier, lots of being nice is about having the sources of support and confidence which you need. If trying to be nice is making you miserable then something has gone wrong somewhere.)

3) Vary topics a lot. I think there are a few things you’ll have to say on any given topic, and then all the discussion that follows will get steadily more about social/cultural/tribal stuff, and it’s so much harder to be nice when you’re doing that. Say those first few things. Then leave that topic until you have more new things to say, and talk about something completely different. If your blog is mostly about your ideas, then it’s much much easier for it to be a kind blog than if it’s mostly about people, who are not always possible to consistently be kind about. I suspect that this also changes the tenor of your audience – you attract people who are there for the ideas, and they will ask you questions about ideas and help you refine your ideas, and the community will be pleasanter, and this will make it easier to be kind.

golbatgender:

Avoid framing your activism as destruction. There is already plenty of destruction. Someone else will always already be doing more than enough of it.

Try nurturing. Healing. Caring. Listening. Giving. Feeding. Loving. These are not defanged platitudes but ways of transforming the world for the better, if you commit to acting within them. They are far less easy than they seem, and often there is so little you will be able to do, but it is not nothing.

And often you can build yourself up along with the world. Destruction is breaking yourself again and again in hopes that what you’re throwing yourself against will crack, or manipulating others into doing the same (and possibly standing back and letting them take all the damage without doing anything to offset the situation, in which case go to hell). And then who heals the broken? No one, usually, because that is considered feminine and therefore unworthy, because sexism runs deep in the core of our language, below the level at which most of us think. Heal yourself, heal others; heal the world. There are enough people breaking themselves against the walls of the oppressors, there will always be more than enough; and growing tree roots can bring down a wall as easily as a battering ram.

Know this: if the only thought and only respected way is fighting, as soon as you break down a wall, you will believe it is necessary to build it up again. You will build barriers of pain and fear because that is considered more noble than healing or accepting, because building weapons and repairing the infrastructure of war is the only kind of creation and healing that is respected or considered acceptable. It is much more difficult, conceptually, to stop fighting and plant crops and feed refugees, or to try not to escalate situations, but generally a better idea. It is easy to fight. It is easy to want to fight. It is much harder, in a society already full of constant violence, to realize that there should be more, and commit to doing anything to that end. But it needs to be done. You can’t exist just to fight.

sollay-b:

Hi guys, I’m Sollay! Still here!

If you don’t recognize me, this is some of my most reblogged art. 

I accidentally deleted my main blog earlier (which happened to be my art blog) and I’m a pretty upset about that, because since I have a very bad memory I’m having a hard time getting back to all the people I followed… and well because I deleted everything, including sideblogs and likes lol. I really want to get back to everybody and build back my blog and keep posting art, and maybe reposting some of my old stuff? And I really to let everyone know I’m still here in this URL if they were following me n_n; if you’d please spread this it would probably help me find some people back either following me or that I followed! Thanks!

I’m putting this in the HS tag because of the art and for promo reasons, too.

Hey Sollay’s an unfathomably wonderful artist and friend and we are all blessed by their magic every day of our lives, it’d be cool of ya to help them build back up if you like their work! :B

what-the-fuck-is-homestuck:

what-the-fuck-is-homestuck:

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…comic by tazzypillarrainbows

I finally met the artist of this comic! He was even more fun than I always wanted!

@revolutionaryduelist is a fun bud and after nearly seven years I finally got to strike one more thing off my bucket list

😀 It was a goddamn blast and I’m so happy we got to meet finally!!! I can’t wait to do it again!!!!

nonbinarypastels:

It’s so strange how many young people on this website there are who would probably consider themselves to be progressive/liberal but who are constantly touting very conservative, reactionary, and reductive rhetoric, who balk when they’re called out on it and react violently when anyone disagrees with it.

There are so many young people who are pro-censorship to a frightening degree, happy to shame people for not meeting their impossible and subjective standards of morality, who seem to be almost incapable of thinking critically rather than in black and white, emotionally rather than factually based terms, who consider thought-crimes worse than actual actions that people take against others, and who—quite frankly—seem like they’d be absolutely thrilled to live in an Orwellian dystopia because they’re under the ironic belief that if everyone around them is corralled and controlled and forced to live lives based on what they think is pure and wholesome and good then the world will be a perfect place.

There’s such a lack of critical thinking, unwillingness to see nuance in any argument, and just a lack of the basic human understanding that people are different from one another and that one individual experience is not the end all/be all of all experiences on this site that it’s just honestly disturbing and, in many cases, basically cult-like.

And I get that this is a positivity blog and this post might not ‘fit’ here but positivity isn’t just “uwu you’re valid” text set against a pastel pink background, it’s also encouraging people to think and to act and to live in a way that is understanding of other people, to be an open-minded observer to the world and to think critically and be willing to listen and to learn, and there are many, many people on tumblr who not only do not want to do that but who happily embrace their ignorance, their hate, and their refusal to even consider that they could ever be wrong about anything even when the facts are shoved directly under their nose and…that is seriously not a good way to live as an individual and it’s an absolutely harmful impediment to any kind of community or society that people may try to build.

If you want to do something positive in your life and the lives of others and you take any piece of advice from this blog then take this: listen more and talk less, think before you react, try to understand other people and where they’re coming from even in cases where you feel like you’d rather bash your head against the wall than put yourself in their shoes, and try your absolute hardest to unlearn your black and white/all good or all evil thinking (or at least learn how to recognize it and think past it) because I promise you that it’s going to be complete poison to every single aspect of your life if you don’t.

And more than anything don’t be so utterly obsessed with yourself and your opinions and your own certainty that you’re right that you’re unable to ever listen to anyone else or even consider that you might be wrong. Everyone is wrong about something, is ignorant about someone, is an asshole at some time of the day, and you’ve absolutely fucked up the second you think you’re an exception to that.

morphodyke:

morphodyke:

hot take: the capitalist cultural construction of “humans are naturally greedy and self-centered” is just an attenuated version of the feudal christian construction of “humans are inherently sinful”; both are designed to make people internalize cultural problems and externalize morality.

wait, what was that? creepy men are saying rape culture is natural? white ethno-nationalists are saying humans naturally organize into ethnic identity groups hostile to those unlike them? abled people are saying that humans naturally ‘abandon the weak to die’? what could it all possibly mean?

patrexes:

tussive:

patrexes:

2018 let’s all be kinder and more understanding and willing to accept mistakes in both ourselves and others. agree?

If I make a mistake it’s because I am a bad person.

untrue!! if you make a mistake it’s because you’re a human being and it’s completely unreasonable to expect perfection from a bundle of monkey impulses!! we’re all here to learn and grow and every day we disseminate new information and expand our worldviews!! even the universe is expanding!! we’re all in this together, so don’t decry yourself or anyone else as Bad and Beyond Help ❤️