red again.

☠️ ATTENTION ALL CREW MEMBERS ☠️ ‼️ BEASTLY now opens its donation form ‼️ Donating allows you to skip the wait and receive the books (SFW + NSFW) and merch. All details and instructions are found in the form below. ☠️🛒 forms.gle/hxsd1XPbMzzQ...

From Bluesky. I'm in this zine, as are a ton of other really wonderful writers and artists. Help make this beastly life a little better with an early donation :D

I ran this with the help of some amazing mods and a bunch of amazing writers and artists! It's going to be available for download free on Jan. 27th, but you can donate to charity to skip the wait and get it now!*

The whole project spans an incredibly wide spectrum from sweet and tender, to wacky andweird, to dark and sexy!!

This is also probably the zine I've crammed the most work into, topping Scarlet Letter (3 spot art gigs with multiple pieces per, 1 fic) and Rare Sweets (triple spreads, 1 spot art gig, two cover illustration contributions). I headed this as an organization mod (It was my first time modding AT ALL), briefly subbed for multiple positions, formatted the entire thing, and contributed 2 fics, 3 spot art gigs, 1 spread, a 2-page paper doll set, and a whole bloody emote set.

I have learned so goddamn much doing this, be it artistic or technical or in management. I'm horrifically burnt out right now, but GOD I'D DO IT AGAIN. (It's hubris. The Greeks would have a field day laughing at my ass.) And all that doesn't even begin to address all the awesome people I've gotten to work with and hang out with during this.

I LOVE YOU ALL, TEAM

EVERYONE ELSE COME SEE OUR COOL SHIT. I GOT TO WRITE A WEIRD COP-OUT FOOTJOB FIC WITH ZOANS.

There’s a lot of hate on widowers and I saw a woman say “You cannot compete with a dead woman.” which is perhaps a reasonable statement to say if he’s constantly comparing you to his dead partner but that wasn’t what the post was about. And I realized “Oh my God, these people genuinely feel like they’re constantly in competition with their spouse’s exes and the ex being dead makes them feel insecure that they cannot best her.”

1) I am widowed. my Beloved Wife of Blessed Memory(tm) died in 2019

2) I got together with my current partner about 18 months later

3) when I am committing acts of Foolishness my current partner loves to gesture at the sky to my dead wife, like "do you see this shit, my liege" and regularly says to me things like "[wife's name] was right about this" when my Foolishness inevitably comes back to bite me in the ass

4) this happens. all the time

more importantly:

5) my current partner is on tumblr

6) they love to incessantly send me posts

WHICH MEANS:

7) they just sent me this post with this commentary:

You've got a lot going on in this ask, anon, and it's obviously not asked in good faith. If I were a smarter human being, I'd delete it and move on with my life, but it's 9am on a Saturday morning and I'm still on my first cup of coffee so I'm just dumb enough to take the bait and respond.

Ship and let ship doesn't mean you need to approve of what other people are shipping. It doesn't mean you need to like what other people are shipping. It means that what other people ship is their business and what I ship is my business.

If I don't like a ship, I don't read it. I don't search out the tag. I don't try to find creators for it. I don't watch youtube compilations or stare at gifs or read meta analysis about how the ship is supported by canon.

If I don't like a ship, I just... don't think about it. It really is that easy. And when I do think about it, I might be annoyed for a moment, but then I move on with my life because guess what? Shipping is a meaningless hobby that I engage in during my free time and I don't want to waste my free time feeling pissed off.

I've seen a lot of bizarre definitions of "minor/adult" shipping, but even if we use the definition of an adult sexually abusing a child, it's still very easy for me not to read that story on AO3. I'm assuming this is all about AO3? It always seems to be in this kind of ask.

AO3 requires people to use one of two warnings in those cases. Either Underage or Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings - or both. I use the filter system to remove works with those warnings from my search results and guess what? Those works might as well not exist for me because I've never seen one. And I've been on AO3 since about 2013.

The thing about these kinds of opinions is that they only ever come up in relation to shipping. I never see these opinions related to violence or drugs or swearing or whatever else you might find morally repugnant. But the handy thing about "don't like, don't read" is that it applies across the board.

I don't think I'm going to like the new Jurassic Park movie, so I'm not going to go to a movie theatre, spend $15, and sit in a dark room with strangers for two hours to watch it. I'm not going to read reviews of it. I'm not going to watch the trailer. If a friend of mine invites me to go see it, I'll pass. I won't stop my friend from going to see it, though. If they're going to enjoy it then they should - and they're not going to fetishize dinosaurs or paleontologists or the tourism industry when they do.

"A grown ass adult shouldn't have anything in common with a teenager" okay so you're either operating off of an assumption that either teenagers don't have anything of worth to contribute to a conversation, or that adults aren't allowed to have fun hobbies.

I talked to my teenage cousin for like an hour the other day about character motivations and the core themes of one piece and had a blast talking to her! She had some real insightful things to say!

But anyways, loving plants 🙏

The four drawings below

now, instead of maintaining a comprehensive, nuanced, and human-maintained encyclopedia by which to check your document, they have switched to an AI that just compares what you’ve written to what other people write in, say, Google Docs, and use the most commonly used iteration.

ever have it change something like “all intents and purposes” to “all intensive purposes” or “should’ve” to “should of”? that’s why!

"How do I motivate myself to write through the boring part of my story?"

"How do I make this boring scene not boring?"

Don't write it.

Don't write boring things just because you think the structure of the story demands it. I promise it doesn't need to be there.

If your characters need to have gone shopping for a later part of the story to make sense you can just have a sentence about how they went shopping and move on.

You are not obligated to write the boring parts. No matter what those parts are.

You are not obligated to make the parts of your story that you're not excited to write interesting somehow.

You can just write the fun and interesting parts and gloss over and summarize boring things.

"YouTube used to be free." Youtube used to be funded by venture capitalists. It operated at a loss for many years, until it grew a dedicated enough customer base to start stage 2 of the enshittification process.

It's the same business model as Amazon or Uber. Venture capitalists pour money into a business, allowing it to operate at a loss and undersell its competition until all the competition dies out and it becomes a monopoly. Once that happens, the business can hike up prices as high as it wants, secure in the knowledge that customers have nowhere else to go.

These websites were never free. They were always accruing debt, with the intention of eventually coercing the public into paying off that debt a hundredfold.

AO3 is not a relic of the old internet. It is a new kind of website created specifically in reaction to the enshittification of the corporate internet, by a community of people who believed that creative works deserved to flourish on the internet, on a platform that was not subject to the whims of corporate oversight, so much so that they were willing to donate money and labor to create such a platform.

If you want to compare AO3 to something, compare it to a website like Bluesky, which was created in reaction to the enshittification of Twitter X.

(There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)

If a thing exists and it takes any kind of resource to make it or continue having it, someone is paying for it somehow. Every time.