I have no clue what my life is

despite being a child of the 80s whose parents, understandably, had no experiential basis for teaching internet safety, i knew internet safety. no real name, no real location, don't share your age more than a rough range if at all, etc. why did i know those things? because adults in my first fandom communities taught me and other kids who showed up in those forum and chat spaces. they moderated or deleted messages that shared too much, laid ground rules, shepherded us. i knew those people in community, not in isolation (another tip the forum babies were given).

when my parents tried to ban me from all fandom internet-- a thing that was 80% of my social experience, as a rural, autistic, homeschooled teenager-- i posted a farewell in the forum (after a whole day of angry crying and arguing). one sweet member of the forum was a 20-something mom with two toddlers, and she wrote a lovely letter for me to print for my parents explaining how the community was moderated and what a benefit it could be and offered her own email and phone number if they wanted to chat.

they didn't reach out to her, but that letter is why i was allowed to stay online. just having the offer and the explanation was enough to reassure my parents. i wasn't besties with this woman, just a casual friend in the same space, but we stayed in touch. i respected her and the advice she and other adults in that community gave and it kept me safe in other interactions going forward

i'm friends with many of the people from that community on facebook now. they're still friends with each other. that kind woman? i watched via internet as her kids graduated. she watched me get married and have my own kids.

one of my older friends in another fandom was in her thirties when i got my driver's license as a teen. she celebrated with me. she sent my oldest kids a baby shower box that contained blankets that became their special blankies they still have saved somewhere as teens.

those relationships have been some of the most important ones of my teen years. they were people who enjoyed fandom chats with me, but also invested in me as a PERSON and not just as a kid they were tolerating. in the right context of healthy friendship, their advice and perspective kept me safe and helped me grow.

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!

Like the one that stuck with me was this one:

"when a person dies and no one will miss them, the mourning is assigned to a random human. This is why sometimes you just feel sad."

Page 1: I am a child soldier. My every waking moment is defined by fear and paranoia. My dreams are full of unprocessed trauma. The fate of the entire world rests on me and my friends. I failed my geography test because I do not know the difference between Equator and Ecuador. Also, I'm really hazy on the difference between geography and geology. Again, the fate of the world rests on my shoulders.

Page 13: <Now THAT is a sexy monkey>

Page 26: *The dopest animal fact you've ever heard*

Page 27: Do you know about thermals? You do? Too bad, I'm going to explain them again.

Page 36: *fart joke fart joke 90's pop culture reference barf joke*

Page 40: Rachel kills someone with her bear hands. Not a typo.

Pages 3,15,16,25,26,30,33,37,40,44,46,50,55,56,57,60: TSEEEEEEEEEEEER!

Page 47: I willed my bones to melt faster. If there was a single bone in my body in the next ten seconds, everyone I ever loved of cared about would die an excruciating death.

Page 50: Funny alien thinks he's people.

"No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.

"What? No, I mean-"

Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.

"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"

Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?

Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?

How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.

Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?

People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.

"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"

That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.

Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.

is to accept every

life as worth saving.

Also, Raccoon Park is in the middle of community consultation about phase 2 of its expansion.