#content creator problems

Hi! Yes I’m aware that I have been consistently starting up then leaving this page which is also the only thing I’ve been consistent with :P

However, this post is rather important.

Jay, a content creator who talks comics and is better known as ThePandaRedd, his partner Scarlett, TheActorBat, and their friend were sideswiped last night on their way to Rose City Comic Con.

BEFORE PEOPLE START FREAKING OUT, EVERYONE IS OKAY. Jay has confirmed that on their TikTok.

But while Panda & Co. are fine, his car unfortunately is not. In fact, it’s actually likely the thing’s been totaled. He and Scarlett have set up a GoFundMe to help pay for all the mega fuckery that’s occurred in the past 24 hours. If you can, please donate. If you’re like me and Jay where money is fucking nonexistent because the government and capitalism as a whole is a bitch, even something as simple as a reblog or a posted link on your other socials would help. Anything y’all can do is greatly appreciated.

Donate if you can. Spread the word. Help a comic nerd out so they can go back to being, well, a nerd.

Your tags! Oh but so much, now you have to watch the film/series in a day and quickly make parallels or create the important scenes. Otherwise we will say that you have plagiarized someone who did it before. While you can't do anything about it. If you too, you had the idea and have a life.

It is truly so frustrating!! Fandom's ever shrinking attention span combined with the dearth of content that is IMMEDIATELY available in full HD has made it so much harder to stay sane as someone who likes making gifs. I got into gifmaking because there were things I wanted to see for characters I love that weren't getting made by other people. And, despite the extremely specific suffering that our current media/fandom landscape has created, I truly do enjoy giffing. Studying the things that my faves have appeared in on a frame-by-frame level has helped me notice new things about them and their projects, it's made the gaps between appearances (or since their final appearances) more bearable, and has served as an outlet for my own creativity. 

Yet, all that said, it is still frustrating and somewhat demoralizing to know that while gif making hasn’t really gotten any easier or faster, the amount of fandom engagement you’re likely to get has drastically decreased, especially on anything made outside the increasingly small Peak Engagement Window™. (Which, for whatever small number of non-gifmakers might actually be reading this, can be as small as a few hours and is rarely longer than 48 hours).

I don’t want my gifmaking to turn into an endless quest for notes, so I try to ignore this and just make things when I make them. But, at the same time, it is a super weird feeling to know that, due to occasionally having an offline life not always compatible with concentrating my Photoshop based OMG NEW STUFF behaviors into a very small, almost always middle of the night, window of time, the external rewards of anything I make is going to be dramatically lessened.

Further, and I think more importantly, not every gifset idea comes to you on the first viewing. Sometimes there are things that I only notice while rewatching (and not always on the second rewatch) or months or even years later when some new piece of the story is revealed and helps me recontextualize parts of what I’ve already seen. I love it when a rewatch unlocks a new way to present or explore the movies and characters I love; I love giffing parallels I just noticed on rewatch #2143279 of the Captain America Cinematic Universe or finally figuring out how to execute an idea that has been rotting on my gif ideas doc for ages. And, while I know that Tumblr’s userbase has shrunk over time and that MCU fandom in particular is not what it was in 2019, it is still deeply frustrating and annoying to know that, unless deemed Funny™ or possibly involving some level of brand new just dropped 3 minutes ago content, even the best received “Older” Material gif set has a much lower ceiling than it once did. (And, in my opinion, a ceiling that has sunk must faster than the size of this site’s userbase or any particular fandom).