what sound does a sneeze make when it nuts

I say this as someone who sells pottery, and many people who see my art assume I am using art as an outlet to “express myself.”

I am not.

I use art to challenge myself. A lot of what I do is the equivalent of doing a hard sudoko or a half marathon, answering the question of “can I do this?”

I use art to question things and explore ideas. Finding physical synthesis between concepts and working out a design to its end state.

I use art to make money. I make some things just because I suspect they’ll sell well, and I keep making them when they do.

This idea that an artist is “putting themselves out there” every time they create is not only stupid, but harmful, and it kills critique and analysis.

Yes every creative work is influenced by its creator, but the most preliminary step of analysis is to define the purpose of a work of art (functional, narrative, entertainment, persuasive, decorative, ceremonial, etc.) and a vanishingly small percentage of that is self-expression. Even then, it’s generally tied to the self’s relationship with something else—perception, society, etc.

It’s very tiresome to have people assume they know you because they like (or dislike) your art, to make assumptions about who you are and how you approach the world. It’s nothing new— people called the Impressionists insane and the Fauvists degenerate. And now people are expected to hand out their identities and traumas to prove they have the right to explore certain subjects.

not sure if it’s “new” but in the past couple days, my friends and I have each been receiving about dozens of this exact message with the exact same script from various random blogs.

but instead of empty blogs that are very obviously bots, these blogs all have profile pictures and reblogs on their blogs like any other normal blogs. although if you scroll down far enough, most of them are very recently created, with the first ever reblogs from their blogs being from less than a week ago — which makes me think they’re newly created blogs with reblogs and profile pictures, so that they’re not very obviously bots anymore. but they all use the same script.

obviously I did not contact them, and I have all of them blocked and reported. because I know if I did contact them, they would try and convince me that my blog was somehow “compromised” one way or another, and then they’d say I’d have to contact this random guy on discord (instead of tumblr support) and then I’d have to change the email I associated my blog with to their new email that they gave me. then boom. the second my blog was registered with their email, they had control of everything, and chances were that I’d never be able to get my blog back. or worse, they had access to my personal information too. it’s all the same scam tactics.

do NOT fall for them. do NOT contact any shady, random person on discord or any other platform. the ONLY way you contact support when you have an issue with your blog is directly through tumblr support. not a random guy on discord.

I’m not disclosing their url because even though I’m 90% sure it’s a bot, I don’t want to accidentally send people to harass an innocent person in case of the blog having originally belonged to an innocent person before they were hacked. because when these scammers/bots hack someone’s blog, they use the blog to further scam other people, since the blog was originally a legit blog, it won’t look “empty and obviously a bot”.

It was flagged as "Eksplicit", shadowbanned, and every reblog turned invisible. The flagging is also unappealable.

Happy Trans Day of Invisibility from your tumblr mods!

Only found out because I tried to reblog with an update from your local trans unicorn siblings!

I cannot even LINK to my old comic without every new post getting deleted.