Saltine Stars

if I make these links clickable they'll get deleted so please copy and paste them:

Livestream: https://www.twitch.tv/enderempress

this is the most tumblrified man to have ever existed

It's just sad to see so many people being attacked and harassed out of the fandom right now even while they acknowledge and fully respect Jax being trans just because they have a different interpretation of him

i wish i could call this "a tale from my youth" but i don't think i ever really stopped doing it, i think churches just tend to have particularly interesting ceilings/rafters. it was usually this or the hookshot/clawshots from zelda.

The bad news is that there is no way to avoid that.

The ideas out of your mind will collide with the biases, expectations, experiences and limitations of someone else's mind and they will completely get you wrong. Sometimes people will get you so wrong that you'll half wonder if you accidentally shifted sideways into an alternate dimension where every day is opposite day.

And the people who are wrong about you will be wrong about you at other people, whose first impression of your work will in turn be informed by people who don't have the first idea what any of it is about, and there is, quite literally, not a goddamn single fucking thing you can do about it.

There is no amount of explaining yourself, there is no amount of laying out your reasoning step-by-step, there is no flowchart diagram so detailed, no series of disclaimers so comprehensive that they will prevent this from happening.

Which is not to say that explaining yourself is pointless, not at all, it can be very helpful to do at times. Sometimes a little clarification goes a long way. It's just to say that the misunderstanding is table stakes. It is part and parcel, it is built in. You are going to get some amount of that literally no matter what you do, and the larger your audience grows, the more misunderstood you will become, as you are made subject to an expanding game of telephone that has absolutely no filters against misinformation.

This has been true since the dawn of our species, and it will remain true until the day we finally die from the universe. What is unique about our digital age is that it used to be, once upon a time, that if someone horribly misunderstood your work, you would rarely had to hear about it. Most people on Earth had no earthly way to reach you. Social media and digital communication has changed that, making us all subject to the unfiltered firehose of the human id at all times; and the absolutely horrid and toxic way that social media platforms are designed and optimized to boost all the worst, most base and inflammatory human modes of interaction acts as a massive amplifier for it all, and the worst people in the world have figured out how to very effectively weaponize it.

This is what we all saw happen to Gooseworx, and what happens every single day to tons of creators, and much more frequently and viciously along axes of oppression.

I say this to recognize and validate your fear. It is not irrational, it doesn't come from nowhere, and yes there are absolutely risks to publishing your work in the digital age.

However, I think you should do it anyway.

The worst people in the world, those people who have found a way to weaponize mass media and digital communication, their goal is silence. The whole point of mobilizing these harassment campaigns, the whole point of weaponizing social media, is to make you shut up and keep their views and opinions dominant and unchallenged. And, frankly, fuck that and fuck them. Your work has value and deserves to be seen.

Still, you don't have to jump into it with both feet and no safety gear, you can mitigate the risks and maximize the joys. Publishing your work to smaller audiences deliberately is an option—posting to a small fandom, or on a private forum or discord server. Physical zines are another option; they are very easy to make and fairly easy to distribute if you have a venue. A local music scene you're a part of, a local convention that relates to your interests or subject. Hell, ask around at local coffee shops if you can leave a few of them on their counter, that sort of thing. Put them somewhere eye-catching with the words "free zine" visible. You won't reach very many people, but you'll reach them in a very different and more physical way than you can with posts on a website.

Publishing under a pen name using accounts that aren't connected directly to you can also help. Deliberately and carefully maintaining your anonymity can help, and establishing good privacy habits and information hygiene can help a lot. Being deliberate and specific about where and when and how you make yourself reachable helps a lot.

Again, these are all things that come with challenges and can limit your audience, and it is ontologically unjust that any of it can even be necessary just to share your work, but the options are available should you want to use them.

There's a video of yours that I can't find at the moment, it might've been a Q&A, but in it you said something to the effect of "shame is a widely useless emotion" and I found it really helpful at the time what you said. Would you mind expounding on that sentiment, if it is one you still hold, that I and others might have it for reference in times where it is needed?

Oh sure, ask the guy with ADHD to remember anything he's said! Ableist!

(this is a joke. I am joking about my disability.)

What I mean when I say something like that, though, is that I believe that shame is an extremely limited instrument. The only thing it is really good at is causing a kind of mental pain that prevents you from repeating a behaviour.

This is useful for some things—one should generally feel ashamed of harming other people, for example. But the trouble with shame is that, once it has provided the pain of itself, it doesn't really have anything else to offer.

If you harm someone and you feel ashamed of it, while that feeling is appropriate, the shame doesn't really offer you any useful way to address the harm you have done. At most, shame has a tendency to prompt us to seek punishment for our misdeeds (or, more commonly, prompt us to hide our misdeeds for fear of punishment), but there is nothing in that emotion that offers a way to make actual amends, limit or undo your harm, or even learn to do better in the future. All the feeling tells you is "THAT WAS BAD AND YOU ARE BAD BECAUSE YOU DID IT!", which, even if it is accurate, is not constructive or especially useful. Making amends, addressing your harm and learning to do better, these things all require many different tools and feelings, like empathy and care and responsibility and self-respect. Shame alone teaches you almost nothing.

Thus, shame is an absolutely dogshit motivator for getting in shape or taking care of your health, for example. If the reason you are exercising or eating better is because you feel intense shame about your weight or your body shape, then 1) exercising is going to be absolutely miserable because all you are doing is running away from a horrible painful feeling you can't deal with and 2) any "failure" to exercise (skipping a day, being too tired, not doing enough reps, not hitting step counts, whatever) becomes yet another source of shame which just makes you feel even more miserable, and the cycle compounds.

Compare and contrast with exercising out of an earnest love for your body, and a desire to nurture and strengthen it, out of curiosity to find out how you can change it or the desire to learn a new physical skill or sport, or just out of a neutral, practical acceptance that you have some condition or need that requires exercise as part of the treatment.

Shame is similarly absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel shitfucking garbage at motivating people to express themselves. Shame will drive you away from art, away from poetry, away from literature and song and, oh my god, especially from dance. It will drive you away from anything that requires you to in any way make yourself vulnerable, because the fear of shame and the pain that comes with it makes vulnerability even more terrifying.

Shame, generally, is a feeling that wants you to shrink into yourself and disappear forever. It's a feeling that wants you to be less in the world.

Shame has a place and a use, it exists in us for several evolutionary reasons, same as anything, it has a function in our social structures. But it is a limited instrument. It is good for a very, very small number of things, and when it is misapplied to almost literally anything else, all it does it make everything worse and everyone more miserable.