chasing oblivion.

If at some point in the future you visit here looking for a specific post of mine and find yourself wondering why it is no longer there, please allow me to explain what happened over the last few days.

As you may or may not know, I have three blogs: This one, which has held my discussions of depression and dreams for the last 12 years; a witchcraft and folk magic blog; and a side blog where I posted / reblogged / commented on everything else. This is still my most personally-valued blog, even though I have posted less over the years because of cognitive issues due to a neurological illness.

Several days ago, some of my most meaningful posts here were flagged by the site's adult content bot. I have never, in my entire time on the site, posted adult content. Not once. I take no issue with it - in fact, I support its creation and existence enthusiastically - I'm just not personally interested.

So, naturally, I submitted an appeal so that a human being could review the bot's flag, but instantly received an email notifying me that the appeal was declined and those posts were now permanently invisible to other users. When I say instantly, I mean that I clicked "submit" and the email was there in my inbox before I took my next breath.

This was upsetting, of course. I spent several days attempting to get an actual human being to look at the flags. I kept getting form replies and bots instead. Unfortunately, when an actual human being finally looked at my tickets, the response was not to politely say "tough, the decision has been made," or even "fuck off into the sun;" what that human being did was completely remove the posts in question, notify me that all three of my accounts would be terminated in the event of any future violations (of which, remember, I have never made a single one to begin with), and then.

And then.

And then this person deleted hundreds of random posts from my blog without any emails notifying me that they were doing so. I wasn't even able to see the full extent of the deletions until I looked at the wayback machine. Very, very few of the posts on this blog are reblogs. The overwhelming majority of my posts have been entirely composed by me. So this individual effectively went through and burned a third of my depression diary that I'd been keeping for 12 years.

Here are two examples of posts they removed, just so you can see the degree of spite involved (CW for discussion of suicide prevention):

(These two posts aren't deeply valuable to me, I just want to illustrate that they went so far as to delete posts with Bob Ross gifs and suicide prevention talk just to spite me for daring to push back.)

This devastated me. If they'd done this to either of my other blogs, I would have been mad; but this blog has held such a precious record of my attempts to stay alive for over a decade. I took great pride in how I formatted the vast majority of my posts: pairing original writing with art and music, carefully chosen to communicate a specific emotion. So much of my writing and memory record is now gone because, apparently, whatever staff are left are unsupervised and allowed to act with utter spite because someone was urgently trying to get some emotionally important posts restored that a terribly designed bot flagged incorrectly.

I was only able to salvage 91 posts in a manual backup.

In short, I will no longer be posting here or on either of my other blogs. I will make one more update once I have figured out where I will be moving.

it's been a while since i dreamed this but even now, when asleep, i'll tread with care

Images via Apie vija and Vladas Balsys

“Klaipeda is a quaint seaside town in Lithuania and the country’s third largest city. Visitors flock here to enjoy its historical architecture dating back to the 13th century, Maritime Museum, and annual festivals. But it may be most known for a weird statue emerging from the water—The Black Ghost.

This immense bronze sculpture, known as the Juodasis Vaiduoklis in Lithuanian, is 2.4 meters (7.8 feet) in height and casts an eery vibe. Sculpted by Svajunas Jurkus and Sergejus Plotnikovas, the mysterious figure holds a lantern in one hand, as his long, sinister fingers grip the dock. As a man without a face, he slithers ominously.

The creepy statue, which is located near Memel Castle, actually has a historical precedent. Klaipeda, which was founded by Teutonic Kings as early as the 7th century, was saved from impending famine by a mysterious ghost. Legend has it that in 1595, a castle guard was walking by the docks when he saw a ghostly, hooded figure. This ‘black ghost’ asked about the town’s grain and timber supply, inquiring if what they had was sufficient. The guard replied that they did indeed have a good supply, but the figure issued a warning that their stocks would soon run low, and then vanished.”

Hello friends. I recently launched a witchcraft blog in case that might be of interest to anyone. It will mostly be academics about the history of American witchcraft and hedgewitchery, the role of sleep and writing in witchcraft, and of course, the occasional aesthetics post (because this is Tumblr, after all).

The scales that have come with age have made me colder, harder, less appealing to the dark-eyed princes with cloves and poetry on their breath. With each moulting I have grown closer to the creature from the stories that I always knew I would become. 

Hi there! I am glad you like that post. It is far and away my most popular one,and it makes me happy to know so many people connect with the philosophy in it.

Thank you for asking about the art. Would that I could paint that well! It is by a Polish artist named Mzag, and the original image is located here. I cannot speak for him, but since he does not appear to have any terms of use on his dA account it is probably okay to use it as a profile image so long as you provide credit, which you have already said you would do.