I am a social worker. I have worked in community mental health and in home-based healthcare. And it is much, much easier for me to help you when the situation you're in is not yet a full-blown crisis.

"I'm out of money and have been for a while and now I haven't eaten for three days." This is a crisis. A crisis where I'm likely going to have to put you in the car and take you to the nearest food bank--except food banks require appointments now, and the next opening is in four days, so you're staring down the barrel of a week with no food. That's obviously not going to work, so, let's call eight different food banks until we've found one that has an appointment the next day...except it's in the neighboring county and you can't drive. So now I'm calling your doctor to try and brow beat an emergency plan of care update out of him so I can come back the next day and drive you to the food bank. And we haven't even started on the "constantly broke" part of the problem.

"I don't think I have enough food to make it to my next paycheck. I have (xyz) in my house and that will only last until (date)." This is bad, but not a crisis. We have a few days. We make you an appointment at the food bank and contact your brother to make sure you have a ride there. Now we can spend our visit talking about what bills are causing you the most problems and make a jump on a long-term solution, like looping in a community action agency to cover your utilities and getting you an OTC card from Medicaid to cover some of your groceries every month.

"I'm ten months behind on rent, and my landlord said I have a week to get out, or the cops will throw me out. I don't have the money, and if I get evicted, I have nowhere to go." This is a crisis. Every single thing we do here is going to be some version of a Hail Mary. In Michigan, we have the state emergency relief fund for rent issues, but process time is well over one week. There are community action agencies that we can call to assist you with payment, but they are unlikely to have sufficient funds to cover nearly a year of back rent. We can contact legal aid clinics to try and prevent your landlord from evicting you, but they may look at your case and determine that too much "fault" lies with you. Most likely, I'm going to have to put you in touch with homeless shelters and the public housing office.

"I'm two months behind on rent and I don't think I'll be able to pay next month either." This is bad, but not a crisis. This is solvable. We have time to apply for SER, or put you in contact with community action agencies. We have time to review your finances and see if you qualify for a public housing wait list or other forms of ongoing rental assistance. We have time to talk about a million possible adjustments to try and ease the burden of your rent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my elderly parent who has dementia and is emotionally volatile and fully dependent on me. I have not slept through the night in weeks and I have not had an actual break for over a year. I am having screaming meltdowns multiple times a week and I am threatening self-harm unless someone comes to collect my parent and take over all caregiver duties." This is a crisis. This is a crisis where the ethical code of my profession demands that I call 911 and report the conversation to them. They will likely come to the house and interview you. If they determine your threats were serious, they will have you forcibly committed to a psych ward. Your parent will either be dumped into a random hospital or rehab center, or left in the house on their own. Upon release from your psych hold, you will be expected to resume caregiving duties as though nothing happened. Except, now, adult protective services is actively investigating you, because it was determined you may be an ongoing danger to your parent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my demented parent, and I have not had a break in a couple of weeks, and I feel angry and weepy most of the time." This is bad, but not a crisis. We can get you in touch with volunteer groups for respite, and apply for state funded programs to get more day-to-day help, and talk about long-term planning for when the dementia symptoms get worse. We can get you the phone numbers for crisis lines and enroll you in a support group.

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.