~Searching my own path~

I do a lot of hobbies where I’m not great at them, but I don’t feel the need to be the best! Sometimes there’s no pressure to excel if you’re just enjoying the activity! 🙌

Hello Anon!! Huh! What kinda site is that even... ......oh wow. That's sad lol like the whole site feels AI "reviews" but it's especially sad they used my art for AI without asking, not that I'd have wanted my art to be fed to AI and "polished" to meet standards or whatever... but I would have allowed to be used on an article if they wanted.

It looks like it's just going to be the reality we live in from now on, where everything can and will be taken and fed to AI without our consent.

I volunteer for my local shelter and when the weather's good, we do a free vaccine clinic every Friday. Free distemper, free rabies, cats and dogs. We hand out free food from the pet pantry, we give people leashes and collars, we do whatever we can to keep people's animals at home and healthy. Every animal that can stay home and be fed and be vaccinated is an animal that we can keep out of the shelter.

We get all kinds of folks, sometimes we even get backyard breeders but we don't do any judgment, because we want people to come and get their dogs vaccinated, because one parvo case costs $7000+ and the whole year of Parvo vaccines for hundreds of dogs costs less. It's just harm reduction, everything we do is harm reduction.

So anyway, this one day this woman comes up to the vax clinic and she is high as fuckin' hell, just obliterated fucked up, smoking a joint in line, and she has this TINY pibble puppy with her, maaaaybe four weeks old. This thing is so fuckin tiny and wormy and lethargic, and she's like, "Hey I heard I can get her shots." and we're like, oh fuck this puppy is gonna die. Like straight up, we were all like, fuck that dog is gonna die. So we gave her wormer, we gave the first distemper shot, and I put together a whole care package: wormer to take home, puppy milk replacer, puppy wet food, a leash, a harness, some blankets, toys, we gave her instructions on how to get the puppy eating food, and we told her to come back in 3 weeks for the follow up vaccine. And we were all like, well fuck, that puppy's gonna die, goddamnit, that's so fucked up. But you know, we did our best, and we hoped we'd see her again.

And in three weeks, you guys, she showed up. And she was still high, but like, half-high this time. Smoking a cigartte in line but like, could focus, could ask and answer questions. And she'd taught that tiny puppy how to SIT and had her walking on a leash. We found out that it took her three buses to get to the clinic, and she told us all about how she got the puppy eating right, got her stool solid, she was taking her on walks... The puppy looked so good, you guys. I almost cried, it was so big. Really happy puppy. At the end of the visit, we were like, ok, see you in three more weeks for the next distemper.

So three weeks later, she shows up, and she's sober, and she told us, "You know, I was really fucked up the day I bought that puppy, I wasn't sure I was going to live, and I bought that puppy and she was too young, and I didn't know what I was doing but y'all were so nice to me, and you helped me so much, and I knew that I had to give this puppy the best life I could, so I moved back in with my grandma, and I'm getting clean, and I'm on methadone, and I'm going to rehab next week, and when I get back, I'll come back and visit you guys again."

Great dialogue can come from radical emotional honesty. But in most real conversations, people

dodge questions

answer indirectly

lie (badly)

change the subject

crack jokes to avoid serious answers

lie (convincingly)

say half of what they mean

tell the truth but get so anxious/angry/defensive others now think they're lying

If your dialogue feels unnatural, it might be because everyone is saying exactly what they think, or articulating their thoughts too well. Try letting characters hide things instead.

people don’t always speak in full sentences,

slang can change depending on age range, demographic, etc. &

here is all the reasons why you should use comicfury (if you aren't already) :

pretty much full control over your custom site design. if you're an HTML/CSS nerd you can go as crazy as you want with it. but for those who aren't so code-savvy, there are also simplified built-in design tools so you can create a unique site for yourself and your work. reject homogeneous minimalism design of bigger platforms, embrace tradition of mid-2000's kitchen sink site design (if that's what you want, that is).

the site demonstrates its own philosophies through its extremely charming vintage 2000's-era site design. it ain't broke so it doesn't need fixing. if it's too 'ugly' for you and wards you off from using the site, then it's succeeding at what it was designed to do.

forums! remember those??? CF sure does!

full view of your comic statistics over the past month, shown as delicious daily line graphs, separated by unique visitors, web page view, and scroll view.

hosting is free. don't want that pesky 'thecomicseries' or 'comicfury' add-on? all you gotta do is purchase your own domain name. contact kyo and they'll take care of the rest.

you can categorize your pages per chapter, making for an easier reading experience

you can include page transcripts for screen-readers as well as mouseover text

you can enable comments per upload and even manage them so that all comments have to be approved by you before they're shared publicly

archive tagging!!! i.e. you can tag uploads with relevant characters / locations / etc. so people can find specific pages easier on your site.

you can run a goddang BLOG on your comic site so that people can read what you've been up to! or don't, it's your choice!

clear filters for NSFW content. the filters do what they must to inform your audience as intended, outside of that, your comic will not be taken down, flagged, or suppressed in search results just because it contains violence or boobies.

they are strictly anti-AI

they do not make licensing deals with third-party companies, so the only 'competition' you have are other indie creators like you, no Marvel or DC nonsense

you're free to embed ads and/or donation buttons on your site and CF will not take off a single cent of it for themselves.

the front page goes to Recently Updated by default, all the other tabs are simply Popular Now and Popular Overall. there's also a Random button if you want to be surprised with something new. while this might seem like a bad thing for people who prefer custom filtering, this unbiased layout prevents the common visibility issues / favoritism / etc. that happen on other platforms.

but if you DO want to find something new that fits your specific tastes? just use their search bar, unlike on Webtoons it actually does what search bars are supposed to do! within the search page you can pick and choose whatever genre tags you want, and you can filter out major NSFW flags you're not comfortable with seeing.

COMICFURY HAS A SCROLL VIEW SETTING THAT YOU CAN ADJUST IN YOUR SETTINGS. THE PLATFORM IS ALREADY DESIGNED TO BE CONSUMABLE ON YOUR PHONE. IT DOESN'T NEED AN APP.

ugh man i'm so sorry for popping off on this very innocent and well-meaning bystander but what did i JUST say

when i say it's a webcomic platform that knows it's a webcomic platform

that's it. no asterisk. that's the POINT OF THE MEME.

it is a website for reading and hosting webcomics. there is no app. and that is why it works.

i realize this might just be a consequence of me being Old™️ compared to the average webcomic consumer / artist, but do y'all know how destructive phone apps have been and still are to webcomic culture? because not only is developing a phone app EXPENSIVE AND TIME-CONSUMING, but it's pretty much impossible to have phone apps now that aren't managed and funnelled through Google and Apple.

that means CENSORSHIP. and CORPORATE INTERFERENCE. and FINANCIAL INVOLVEMENT. which is entirely opposing to WHAT WEBCOMICS ARE.

as soon as indie sites based around free content develop apps, there's a very clear shift in how that site continues to operate, prioritizing corporate standards and profit over usability and community. because otherwise, they can't justify the creation of the app in the first place, and they can't very well maintain that app on account of how expensive it is to do so.

in fact, i can even attest to this from experience! y'know Tapas? the friendly competitor to Webtoons?

this platform used to FUCKING SLAP and then guess what? they released their phone app. and in doing so, they immediately lost the entire fucking plot. their ad revenue program turned to shit, they started prioritizing their advertising and growth towards paywalled comics over the free to read ones, they started restricting the content that was allowed on the platform for the sake of 'brand friendliness' and most of all, they started caring more about what INVESTORS saw rather than what the average user experienced.

and i'm sure that's a heavily biased opinion in which i'm choosing to cast blame on one specific thing instead of all the various things that led to the downfall of this fuckass platform (and i could talk about all those things at length too) but guess what? i don't give a fuck if it IS biased, because i've been there and back and lived to tell the tale and the common denominator in the enshittification of all these major platforms i'm goddamn MEME'ING ON was the phone apps. and most of all, the normalization of corporate involvement which happens the MOMENT you build an app for the Google and/or Apple store.

modern phone apps are NOT about accessibility, they're about money and metrics. that's it.

again, big apologies to the person who left these tags in the reblogs because i know they didn't mean any ill will of it.

but EVERY FUCKING DAY i see y'all complaining that webtoons and tapas are garbage, that they don't let you consume NSFW content without censoring the fuck out of it or removing titles entirely from their platforms, how they progressively tighten paywalls and increase ads to force every last cent out of you, but never ONCE do y'all realize THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

comicfury doesn't have or need a phone app for the same reason that AO3 doesn't have or need a phone app. to put it simply - because it's pointless, a waste of money and effort, and it would just destroy everything that's great about the thing that i'm trying to promote to you in the first place.

via @corazondebeskar

About 7 years ago I started doing a thing where I wouldn't overcorrect into super positive when my bully started talking.

What I did was I reframed and said something aloud (if possible) that was neutral and true. If I would drop something, I'd call myself stupid or a fuck up, instead of allowing myself to take that, OR go "nothing is wrong, I'm doing great!" (Which felt dishonest and sarcastic) what I would do is say "no, I'm not stupid, I dropped the bowl" it started out small like that and then it became-

"no I'm not worthless, I forgot an appointment" and I would allow myself to reschedule it. Not make myself, but frame it as giving myself the opportunity to make the mistake and correct it completely neutrally. This didn't always work but it was a step in the right direction.

I slowly started allowing myself room to make mistakes, and mistakes felt like they happened a lot less. Maybe they didn't but I sure felt a lot more stable while making them.

7 years later, the bully is really quiet, not gone but I have a much kinder voice that has come out that tells me I do a good job, or that Im proud of myself. And the thing is, it came almost as naturally as the bully, it took a long time but I started when I was 22, so this is happening before my thirties. And I didn't even choose to be positive! I chose to be absolutely neutral, and to look at things as they were not as I FELT they were. Because my feelings were trying to protect me in a maladaptive way. To scold me into being "correct" or "better" when I just needed space to be without constant criticism. I didn't have a therapist at the time but I knew something needed to change about the way I spoke to myself.