I wish depression were an emergency. I wish someone could take one look at how sick I am and go “oh my god, we need to get you to a hospital!” and then when we get there I get rushed into surgery and the surgeons say “it’s a good thing you brought her here when you did, this is a seriously advanced case” and then they put me under and spend the next ten hours pulling metres of long, sticky black strands of gunk out of my body, throwing it immediately into an incinerator so that it can’t infect anyone else. And then they could stitch me back up and I could rest a few days, and when I leave the hospital everyone can see how much better I am and they congratulate me saying “well done, you’ve been so brave, I’m so glad you’re ok. I love you.”
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I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
“In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend with cancer.
During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.
On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.
In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”
Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.
“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.
Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him
and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.
After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.
After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.
Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.
Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.
For this, Ruth has been nicknamed the ‘Cemetery Angel’.”— by Ra-Ey Saley
General reminder that it's against AO3's TOS to mention making money on your fanfics. Don't advertise on AO3 at all.
Did you write a fic as a commission? Don't mention it on AO3.
Do you have a ko-fi/patreon/other site that lets people give you money? On AO3, you don't.
I think at best, you can mention you have social media platforms and you can mention money links on the other platform (but you can't say that your money links are on your other platofrms, just say you have other the platform).
It's a bummer that it's hard to make money with fanfics vs fanart but this rule on AO3 protects AO3 and all the works on there. "Nobody makes money on here!" is a defense. Don't ruin the defense.
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It's available from bookshop.org and Barnes & Noble in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. It's on the front page of the B&N website and they're advertising $5 currently.
Also request it at your local library if they don't already have a copy!
growing up being autistic but not knowing is just *hiding in room while people are over* *getting tired and needing to recharge after the smallest chores* *getting called a gifted kid* *knowing that you’re “weird” because people are making fun of you but not knowing how to stop being weird* *having adults tell you how “mature” you are* *getting in trouble for not doing work* *convincing yourself that you’re just lazy and stupid because you can’t make yourself do work* *getting really invested in “weird” media*
from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.
This is important, people. Please don't scroll past this one.
While I don't think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:
Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW
Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW
Follow your moots at their places NOW
I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.
It's a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.
The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.
TUMBLR IS FANDOM. It's where we all are. Yes, many of us probably have random accounts here or there - a Pillowfort, a BlueSky, a website set up at some free, ad-supported place, etc - but if you are active on Tumblr, then this is where your people are. This is where your community is.
Just like my people and community were on LiveJournal. We lived through a lot of shit together (seriously, look up LiveJournal on Fanlore or Wikipedia sometime) but in the end we all ended up scrambling to try and find both a new place and each other too late.
And, when you find your 'backup places' don't just stick a link to your Carrd or Linktree in your Tumblr profile. Actively tell your moots in a post (reblog it occasionally, too) where they can find you, and encourage them to find and follow you there, too. They're not going to have that link in your profile if Tumblr suddenly shuts off the lights, so make sure you actively let people know where to find you elsewhere.
Some suggestions:
Pillowfort and/or BlueSky
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who is a 'thought-vomiter' (i.e., you post a LOT, and it's often random observations and brain farts, short quickfire stuff throughout your day) try either Pillowfort (which is still in open beta and currently has a rolling waitlist to join) or BlueSky. Both are Twitter/X type sites in their layout. (And avoid Twitter/X like the fucking plague. Just, seriously, don't go there.)
Dreamwidth
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who needs more than a couple of hundred characters for some (or many) of your posts, and you really relish community and interaction, head to Dreamwidth.
While I have accounts on all three of the platforms I've just linked you to, it'll be Dreamwidth where I make my home if Tumblr goes down the tubes. Yes, its backend user interface looks a bit late-2000s, but that's because it was built out of the LiveJournal diaspora, off the back of (and improved upon) the old open source LJ code, and it has all the incredible features that LJ had (and still has, if you don't mind accepting that hateful ToS and never mentioning anything to do with LGBTQ+ at all over there).
Crucially, Dreamwidth is committed to remaining ad-free, and it is incredibly easy to find your fandom/people over there (as long as they are over there) using the interests search. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's well worth it for the incredibly customisable reading list, which acts like the Tumblr dashboard, and the granularity with which you can set your posts. It's had communities since the very start, and you can even set up custom filters for different groups of people you want to post to, so your Marvel-loving moots can see your Marvel stuff, your Minecraft-loving moots can see your Minecraft stuff, and your closest friends who you trust with anything are the only people who can see the deeply personal stuff you've posted to the group you've set up just for them. Want to post with different icons? You've got 15 of them completely free. There is so much to Dreamwidth, and I wish more people knew about it and used it.
But what about Discord?
By all means find and join Discord servers for your fandom, but please do not let fandom disappear into thousands of completely separate, unsearchable, unfindable Discord servers. Find a place where people can find you easily, and where you can find other people easily if/when you leave your current fandom for whatever reason at some point in the future and get into a new fandom.
Imagine if there was no Tumblr right now. It's just gone. Poufs overnight. And you've just got into an incredibly good new TV show/movie/book/etc., and you need to find your people for it. How would you do that, if they're all sitting in their own private Discord servers, possibly invite-only and not listed anywhere like Disboard? You can't.
So - while Discord is great if you already have that all-important URL to join the server - it's a lot harder to find your people if you've no idea where to get that URL.
Image hosting
It's important to note that none of the sites I've linked to have native image-hosting (as yet - that's why Tumblr is ad-supported, because image hosting costs a shit ton of money), so you'll need to find some kind of image-hosting site out there if you're someone who posts a lot of visuals. Fandom artists will likely already have their spaces for that, but there are plenty of free image hosts out there.
Closing thoughts
Did this post (and the linked article - if you even read it rather than just glancing at the headline) alarm you? Make you feel anxious? Well, I'm sorry for that, but honestly? It should. Anxious is how I felt, as well as completely lost and cast adrift, when I lost my online home and my fandom peeps all those years ago. And this long-arsed post is my way of trying to help you prevent those feelings for yourself if this latest round of layoffs at Tumblr and other places owned by Automattic eventually leads to our current fandom home shutting down.
Do I think that Tumblr will close anytime soon? No, I don't. I think it would continue limping along until it came to the point where it's making too much of a loss to make any kind of business sense for it to be kept on life support any longer. After all, fanfction.net is still struggling along - riddled with bot and scam comments and with absolutely no support for any of its users who are enduring them - to this day. But is it a home? Hell no.
Don't let apathy take the wheel for you over this. Don't think, "I'll get around to doing that later. Tumblr's not going anywhere soon," and then forget about it until that point where you wish you had done it all that time ago. It takes a handful of minutes to secure an account (or, in the case of Pillowfort, to get on the waitlist) so get your accounts set up now, even if you never use them afterwards.
If you do, then you may be very grateful to your current self sometime in your future.
Better to have them now, with all your friends and moots already following you and knowing where to find you, than to be left standing there like Confused Travolta with your coat over your arm and wondering where the fuck you find your fandom home again as it once again enters a new diaspora.
To my own moots who may be reading this, look out for a post from me shortly, where I'll let you know my other online locations.
I’ve become obsessed with Slow Horses and after also reading the novels I have an unpopular opinion. The TV writers made substantial changes from the books to make the stories work better for TV and not only do I like how they’ve expanded the characters, I’ve also agreed with what they left out. That said, I hope they don’t bring back Sid. Give the story space that would be taken by her to the existing cast. I don’t want Louisa or Shirley sidelined just to give River a love interest.
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