you know the one.

the guy who sits with strangers outside the starbucks down the street, striking up a conversation whether they want to participate or not. he’ll take a long drag from his eighteen dollar vape pen and breathe it out in his company’s face without thinking, talking idly about his ‘batshit ex’ and how he’s ‘working on a novel.’

if they bring up things about themselves, he’ll one up them -- mentioning cooking will earn a talk about his award-winning puttanesca, while exercise will remind him of the fact that he can bench well over 300. 

they’re obviously uncomfortable with his company, with the way he takes up over half of the table with the way his elbow rests on it. he’s close enough to them that, between the cheap potpourri-smelling vape juice and the reek of axe bodyspray he applied far too liberally, his presence is damn near suffocating. 

for the price of one emote i will complain  |  open.

this isn’t exactly a single complaint, but i want to take a second to talk about icon etiquette and the rph community’s entitlement when it comes to fanart.

ever since icons became a big thing, people have used both materials from the source (official show/film/comic/manga caps) and supplemental icons from fanart. the former is generally fine, yeah, since most people know the source material and can track it to there. 

the latter, however, is… really not okay at all. 

a quick search on google of “[character name] icon,” will give you dozens upon dozens of masterposts full of icons cropped from fanart (generally from pixiv), made by people asking for credit to them, but who neither credit nor get permission from the original creators, like this one (x) or this one (x). hell, there are entire blogs dedicated to effectively stealing fanart for icons, banners, and even transparent sidebars, and that’s not acceptable!

when using others’ art, crediting isn’t really good enough. lots of people have voiced a displeasure with having their art used, with credit or not, and since they are the creators of that content, their wishes deserve to be respected and their voices heard. artists cannot track down everybody who uses their art and state how they feel about it, bud. it is your responsibility as somebody using a service they offer to make sure they are okay with it.  permission is required when using art from others, and feeling the lack of need to get permission implies an entitlement to the fan content people produce on their own time, generally for themselves or friends.

this isn’t even an issue in just the rph fandom, though – people will use others’ art for blog icons, sidebars, banners, edits, etc without permission as well, and even rplayers will get their stuff stolen from time to time, like icons, themes, and headcanons. it stings when things you’ve put thought and effort into are stolen, but people will go through great lengths to protect their edited content without even asking if they can edit the content to begin with! it’s just wild and upsetting how convoluted these things are and how much people take fan content for granted.

it’s time for salt  |  open.

     you don’t see it much in the jjbarp scene,     but  i  remember  in  my  old fandoms you      weren’t even  worth  the dirt people stood      on if you didn’t format like this at  the very      l e a s t.

     i remember saying --

                    “i don’t really want to do                     that.  it’s  hard  to read.”

     --  and   seeing   that   get     treated  as   a           controversial  statement  was wild.  it  was       at about that time i realised that in the rph       community   there  was   a  severe  lack of       accessibility,  with themes  that  went  as       small as 200px wide  while  custom  fonts       were  at  an  all  time  high.  i took a break     after that, and i’m glad to  see  that  many     of  those fads  have  since  died  out,  but      others   still   seem   to   have  taken  their      p l a c e, especially in exclusive indie rph      communities. 

the big posts

the advantages of reinforced self isolation on the streets

mark, what he stands for, and what he meant to caesar’s character

personal headcanons on the zeppeli family’s status and relation

a dime-store diagnosis of caesar a zeppeli

the smaller things

caesar’s relationship with dio and speedwagon

on caesar if he hadn’t been crushed

did he hurt animals?

textbook expressions of trauma and connectivity issues (he’s not tsundere pt1)

cz loves his friends, is loud about that, and it’s important (he’s not tsundere pt2)

restating the above first point with reference to his father and hatred (1, 2)

some headcanon on his laugh

i don’t blame wham for caesar’s death

and the meta i’ve made that’s not on this blog

caesar’s speech patterns