Blaugust 02

I had some very negative interactions on Mastodon in the last couple of weeks, courtesy of making posts about the adult art bans by payment processors. It's easy to blame the negativity on the Mastodon culture of middle class white nerds. But honestly, I have gotten worse heat from twitter, bsky, tumblr, instagram… Basically every other social media! It's just a different type of heat.

The type of shitty ass comments you'll get on each socmed:

• Mastodon/fedi: Middle class white nerds, often men who work in tech, and are ignorant of working conditions of every single other person but themselves. Who knows how they even found your post??? They will talk down to you and act like you're stupid about any topic you talk about. They will probably tell you to use FOSS shit when the conversation is not even about that. They will not read your original post, and respond to it to say something about themselves. Verdict: use the mute button to allow them to talk to themselves, or block if they're particularly annoying, or block their whole server if the whole server and friend group seems to be annoying. I do like the nuclear “block server” option on fedi very much.
• Twitter: The bottom-feeding coprophiliac scum of the pond. Racists, transphobes, homophobes, sexists, anti semites, conspiracy theory podcasters, self-professed “leftists” that still want a police state, the works. The QRT function seems to exist solely to enable dogpiles. Verdict: Don't even use this site dawg. Please use anything else, even Bluesky.
• Bluesky: Twitter-lite, because it doesn't yet have the critical mass of Twitter, but everyone moved over from twitter. The block function removes QRT-ers and stupid commentors from your replies and from other people seeing them, which is fine. But the very public nature of all your information, including your follows, followers, and blocklists, seems to actively enable stalkers and dogpiles as well. Yeah the blocklists allows you to block “a bunch of racists” at once, but they also allow other people to make lists of “a bunch of wokelets I don't like and you should call them predators”. They don't allow you to make private posts either :P the “protected logged-in only” option is totally visible if you just copy/paste the link in Discord! Verdict: At least it's not twitter. I'm glad to just be crossposting my public posts from fedi and not actively on there. Maybe a twitter and twitter-lite NEEDS to exist as containment.
• Instagram: I've gotten the most insipid “uhhhh stop posting gay stuff” comments from Instagram, or people being like “i saw this from the explore page randomly and I hate you for putting this on my timeline”. Ok. Everything is so algorithm-brained, not even your own friends will see your posts, but somehow random strangers who hate you will see it. Verdict: There is an option to restrict all comments on even public posts to followers-only, which I wish other socmeds had! But I feel like doing that tanked the visibility of my posts to my followers LMAO. I'm only on here cuz local artists and events are ONLY on here.
• Tiktok: These is probably even worse than Instagram, and that's why I'm not on here. The algorithm viral-ness level is very high, which gets artists addicted to gambling on the gacha machine of mass comments by making mind-numbing videos like “POV you can't draw hands” or “Top 10 tricks to work the algorithm” or something. And the comments I see on other artists' videos are just awful. It's people complaining about the way you drew a cartoon character, accusing you of IRL crimes because you said you like toast, starting 50-comment long threads with their own friends, and dogpiles of course. All that and you have to work a 2nd job making video shorts! Wow! What a deal. Verdict: Sorry I'm never using this even if it increases my engagement by 10000% and drives sales by 10000% because I don't want to advertise/cater to gacha-brained children and boomers.
• Tumblr: You can't talk about shitty comments without talking about Tumblr. This is the home of “piss on the poor”, where I feel like I can trace the origin so much shitty behavior like “not reading the original post” or “accusing people of IRL crimes because you said you like toast”. It's not just fandom-flavored stuff too, though the anon asks suibaiting you because you ship Spongebob x Squidward are an eternal part of the site culture. Tumblr is still a huge hangout for TERVes¹⁾, and they go on mass-report sessions on random trans people, just like the dickhead shippers that mass-report people for shipping Caillou x Thomas the Tank Engine. People get banned for absolutely no reason just because of mass-reports, with no ability to appeal, because nobody works on the site because Matt Mullenburg²⁾ is constantly crashing out on main and ranting about how he hates wokelets and uhhh people who use his software?? Verdict: I have 10+ years of tagged art and writing on here, and I really need to re-export all of it and make a -booru to re-upload my art with sufficient tags lmao. I don't even talk to people on here anymore, I'm just still on here because it's good for mid-length blogging with insertable images and an easy lazy text editor, AND searchable tags with 10+ years of art and text to read from other people. Dreamwidth's text editor makes me want to type on another software or site, which makes me not use Dreamwidth, and the image uploading is never going to be up to my standards because the site was meant for writers. And microblogging on fedi/masto is just.. well, microblogging.

All this complaining, but I feel a little better having done a hashtag vent I guess? At least I can post female presenting nipples on my fedi server, and not have to censor the word MURDER or SUICIDE or GENOCIDE. Whereas almost every other social media bans boobs and saying certain words. Yeah the UK child safety age verification act is coming for us all… I'm still interested to see how Newground's compliance methods will work out. They're a small indie site that runs at a loss and can't afford the facial scan ID shit, and KNOW that face scan ID doxxing shit is stupid. So they're doing a verifications via a small purchase.

Because lawmakers ignored device-level verification, they have put the onus on millions of websites to do it instead.

Yeah they already track so much shit on smartphones already, why not track our age in addition to our gender and shit? Don't they already track your age? Like google thinks I'm a 45 year old white male interested in cars and shit. IDK. We know. It's cuz they³⁾ want MORE info on us, not to use old existing info. IDK!

I'd apologize for my current thoughts being on politics and laws and shit but uhh sorry that politics and laws affect me. My hobbies are gardening and art. Gardening is hard with global warming. Art is hard when you're worrying about bills and whether you can even post art. I don't like just ignoring things, I like to talk about them and feel better after talking out loud. It doesn't work for me to “stay positive” or “be the better man”. I have oppositional defiance disorder or something. I feel like my kuso-power, my GREAT POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY, is not being afraid to talk shit and be ostracized by JOKER SOCIETY when everyone else is worried about their boss or landlord kicking them. It's not a great personality trait to have, but I'd rather have it than pretend everything is sunshine and happiness.

There is still room to have fun and try to find pleasure in small things even in times of GREAT SHIT. I mean, that's why it's cool to look at art, play games, watch movies, even if they're not explicitly political activist works and just entertainment or personal stories. Even if they're 13 free porn games on GOG, and one of them is apparently full of demon rape torture murder or whatever. And demon hell boobies (REAL SEXUAL ASSAULT IN GAMES!!!) is worse than shooting games full of murder (that's just cartoon violence!!). I guess. Whatever! I'll play Postal 2 and Agony later and stream for friends.

I'm always obsessed with the Voros twins being wrestlers before they were internet comedians. Cuz they're strangely swole for tiktokkers, but in wrestling contexts they're kinda skinny and twinky?? DA TWINKY??? And they're lowkey woke they/them allies. Next time an event asks me for my pronouns I'm putting they/them cuz I'm always with Shane.

Got in a Da Vinki mood cuz Shane demanded that I watch this video. I feel like this is what Spongebob gijinkas would actually look and act like, not cute little babbys with gooey eyes. Weird strange square tall yellow hair, staring at you with them big ol' eyes, don't cuss or say bad words, actively avoids sexual innuendo, overtly positive. And Da Vinkis are also RED and BLU scouts… phrasing everything as a question and color coding themselves. The Venn Diagram of 5 balls touching and they're Scouts and Joey Wheeler and Spongebob and Da Vinkis. And they're all wrestlers. Is the red one always on the left?!

Oh yeah I drew some little pictures for my blog. You can see them below. It's a Diglett sign you can click to go back to my blog index, and a big sign to tell you that you can comment below. I think drawing site assets is fun!

Ok bye.

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