depression is wack

This will visually remove your deadname from any webpage. Obviously switch it off if your parents wanna check up on your work, but yee here's the link below fam!!!! BOOST THIS!!! SEND THIS TO ANY TRANS PERSON YOU KNOW WHO WILL NEED THIS

EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that this will not work if you have an online school program/assigned laptop that blocks you from using extensions. Please check with your own situations b4 you get your hopes too high up, and I apologise and feel for those who already were.

…”Will you tag (something that is not a common phobia or trauma trigger)?” is always an appropriate request.  Even if you’re asking “will you tag for the letter ‘e’,” you’re not crossing boundaries unless the person you’ve asking has already said, clearly, that they will not tag for a thing.

However, “no,” is an equally appropriate reply.  It’s nice to have reasons (no I will not tag frogs because I post too many frogs and I forget, meaning that the tag will not protect you; no, I will not tag Disney princesses because it says “Disney princesses” in my blog description and you knew this was a dead dove before you took a bite), but they are absolutely not required.

For example, Seanan posts a lot of frogs. Pics and vids of frogs squick me, and are related to some personal triggers, so if I’m already having a bad mental health moment seeing those can make it much worse. I love everything else she posts about and would be sad if I had to unfollow her just for the frogs. So instead, I have the name of the blog she usually reblogs frogs from as a blacklisted tag on xkit, and that knocks my chances of seeing frogs on her blog down to like, 5%. Doing that keeps my dash a safe space for me to relax and have fun, without asking her to second guess posting the things she relaxes and has fun with.

Like, I’m REALLY glad that collections exist, and I’ve put my work into some collections when I made those things specifically for those collectuons. Collections are a useful tool for things like bangs, where the stories need to be hidden until the reveal….. but that also means that the person in charge has the ability to hide your works from the public. Like, without you agreeing, because you already “agreed” to that by submitting to the collection. Which means works you previously had available suddenly disappear from where people can find them.

What I’m saying is please stop random requests to random people to be in your random collections. I know you probably don’t have ill intentions, but there’s no way to tell. And if you’re getting requests to be part of random collections, please be aware that if you approve them, you won’t be the only one in control of some elements of your posted stories, including whether or not they “exist” to the average reader. If they mark the collection as “unrevealed,” you story stops being accessible to the public. And they have the option to mark the collection “anonymous” which I’m pretty sure turns the author from being You to being Anonymous.

And I say all of this because I have seen this happen to people. I have had friends whose stories “disappeared” because they approved a random collection invite and the collection owner turned everything “unrevealed” (likely without even knowing or understanding that it would hide it for EVERYONE not just hide the collection so no one would see they had it, it’s not like a private bookmark). And while I haven’t seen anyone do this maliciously (at least none I can prove) I can see where it could be USED maliciously. So please, just be careful out there.

Copy and past the following link, and where it says “yourusernamehere” type in your AO3 pseud.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourusernamehere/collection_items?approved=true

This should take you to a page where your works that have been approved for collections resides. You can remove your works from collections by selecting “rejected” instead from the drop down menus.

want to add a fic you love to that super-specific collection you made for Fics With Werewolves Set In London? bookmark it and add the bookmark to your collection! 

So please, as readers, this is a MUCH BETTER option!!

And in the notes I have found several other things:

Some people have wondered why this is a thing, or if it’s a bug. This is a FEATURE not a bug. The collections feature is often used for things like big/mini/reverse bangs, fic exchanges, challenges etc where authors and/or artists and/or other fannish content creators submit their work early to the collection and the collection is left unrevealed until the set public reveal date of the event.

This is a GREAT feature. We LIKE this feature A LOT. It’s just that if you aren’t aware of this feature and what it can do, it can negatively affect you outside of those purposeful situations.

Someone confirmed that the “mark collection anonymous” feature does turn the story from being written by you to being written by anonymous

You can also remove your work from a collection if you go to the “edit” page of the story (not edit chapter, but the main edit), scrolling to where it says “post to collections/challenges” and clicking the (x) by the collection you want to remove the work from. If you only have one or two stories in collections this is fine; if you have a lot, the manage collections page will let you do them all at once.

You can check if your story has been affected by logging out and going to your works page. If your work in the collection is not visible (and you have not marked it as “must be logged in to see”) then it may be that the collection is unrevealed.

Someone suggested that the bookmark collection feature would be a great way to make a private collection, since you can make bookmarks private.

If your works are in collections currently with no problems, there’s no reason to panic. You don’t have to remove your works unless you want to. Most people really are just grouping up works with no ill intent. I just wanted folks to be aware of what it means for you to be in a collection, and give anyone that needs it the tools to fix it if it does become a problem. And also to make folks who DO make collections aware that they should not be marking those collections unrevealed or anon because it screws with the writers.

After some people asked, we checked and found that authors cannot remove a bookmarked story from a collection. This makes sense, as bookmarks are not FOR the author, they’re for the reader. They are reader spaces.

We also found that you do not have to own a collection to add a bookmark to it. If you, as a writer, have your story in a collection currently and you would like your story to still be able to be found in that collection without the risk of your story “disappearing” if the collection is made private, you can create a bookmark of your own story, and add it to the collection before removing your actual story from the collection (providing the collection is not closed). If you want, you can link to the collections your story belongs to in the notes of your story (beginning or end notes) if you’d like to foster folks in the community being able to find similar stories easily. Slightly more work on your part, BUT a boon to fandom community as a whole because it will allow for readers and writers to collaborate and maintain networks of stories. Adding your story as a bookmark is also something you can do if someone requests that you add your story to their collection- if you want to reject the request to add the story, you can then add a bookmark for them after, and a link to the collection in your story notes.

You, as a collection owner, should get an email when bookmarks are added to your collections that you didn’t add (providing you have selected the option “Send a message to the collection email when a work is added” in the collection settings). If someone adds a bookmark to your collection that you do not want them to add, you can just go to the manage collection items page and reject it, which will remove it from your collection. You can also switch your collection to “moderated” instead, and it will cause your collection to require you to approve additions BEFORE they are added, so you can still monitor what goes into your collection. You can also prevent anyone from having the option to add anything to your collection by selecting the “collection is closed” option in the collection settings.

For example, Adam Ellis drew a pretty good horror comic about the ghost of a creepy nurse (it was not graphic in any way, and was fairly tame) and posted this DM he received about it on his Twitter:

For any concerned, Adam Ellis put absolutely no id’ing info on this post, so the person who sent it is safely anonymous. But I honestly hate this so much. If you are THIS afraid of a drawing of a creepy ghost, you should not engage with media that is LABELLED AS A HORROR COMIC! Many people with anxiety (including myself) create horror as an outlet for our own fears–Ellis even discussed the fact that his comic was tied to his very real fears of doxxing and harassment by certain fans/enemies online. Do you have any idea how genuinely horrible it feels to be told “this thing you created for fun/to vent caused me direct and terrible mental damage?” 

People Matching Artworks: An Unusual Photo Series By Stefan Draschan

like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.

but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror. 

it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”

or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”

like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:

“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.

and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.

anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.

The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.

I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.

Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit. Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.

Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.

Nobody wants to be a fuckin picky eater and a lot of the time adults who are severely avoidant of a ton of foods are autistic! And a lot of them don’t even know!

I started to wonder if I was autistic when I was 25 and doing research about my eating disorder (ARFID). I got diagnosed at 27. My whole fucking life has been spent being miserable about my diet, how unable I am to control what my mind will accept as edible or not, having to deal with shame from family, friends, and ex partners, and the health repercussions of it all. 

I can assure you no human is thrilled or proud that their diet is extremely limited and that they can’t eat a lot of healthy shit. I PROMISE you. So stop being fucking awful to us. 

The Three

Designed Jay, Lion, and Holly as per my friend’s request

(Actually spent a good few months thinking I was genetically unlucky and researching ancient family curses with my grandma.) 

So today I don’t know what I was hoping for - nothing, really?

(I mean, that part of me that’s still twelve was probably expecting this sweet old woman to have a set of glitter stickers in her purse and just go ‘You know what, you’re right - I’ve been saving this one for you all these years, here you go’ but I’m a solidly rational person and I know that’s stupid.)

No, I thought we’d just laugh and it would be a good shared memory and that would be it. Instead, my teacher got flustered and a bit embarrassed and explained the game was rigged. It was never about learning French at all. She’d just noticed some kids couldn’t afford even basic stationery, so she’d buy a few half-fancy items every month with her own money just for them. She didn’t want them to feel different or left out. And obviously the way she used to walk around in the classroom, looking over our shoulders - it wasn’t to prevent cheating. It was because she was cheating herself, wanting to see which number a particular child needed to get a Minnie Mouse pencil case.

Guys - the world is fucked up, but so many people out there are just good and kind and humbly heroic it honestly gives me hope.