#metablogging

yes you are a respected professional in your chosen field. extremely competent and intelligent. giving off general vibes of adult normalcy

If you dont remember;ı was the guy who called congratulated on making the "one of the lamest self inserts in SCP wiki." And then you blocked me. And then a fan art was made based on that comment of mine, which really flattered me. But know that ı still am very **fucking pissed** off over that. Like, dude, people probably called you something worse than that, but the thing that ticked you off was being called lame ? Grow a back bone, cause your ego might crush the lower part of your body.

I will block anyone for any reason (including being mildly annoying in my notes) and never apologize for anything.

But hey, listen, this happened months ago, and if you remembered and made this alt account to send this ask, I think you might actually be upset and not purely trolling. So let me try to respond from the heart and give you some advice:

I think you have a way of looking at social media that is going to cause harm to you over time. I'm a very small-scale internet celebrity, which is awesome, and it is objectively and genuinely cool that you have opinions about something I made! And it's cool that you got fanart! But I'm also just a person out here using the internet for fun. There might be more nuance here if we were friends or neighbors, or if I were in some kind of position of significant power over you, but in reality, as a person I once saw leave an annoying comment on my tumblr post, I don't know you and I have no responsibility to interact with you.

There are a lot of people on the internet who are beacons of hate. I spent a lot of time on 4chan as a teenager, I would know. And the internet of my teenage years was actually better equipped to deal with this - we had a word for that, "trolling", and we had a protocol in place: "don't feed the trolls."

And on one hand, this leads to value judgments - a lot of people who you might snap-judge as a troll aren't doing this just to get a rise out of you, they might actually be in a really bad place or have a legitimate complaint or have a different cultural background or communication style. Maybe you're one of these. But "don't feed the trolls" is still a good heuristic to follow:

A) a lot of trolls will also pretend to be legitimately suffering or just bad at communicating, and will use this to further exploit your goodwill

B) If everyone knows you don't feed people who look like they're trolling, everyone gets pushed towards being polite. It's obvious if you understand decision theory.

These days, it seems like people feel a lot less agency over the internet - and some of this is valid, social media is vastly more engaging in sort of a predatory way than the forums of my youth, algorithmic feeds are widespread, etc. But the truth is every time you log onto the internet, you have a choice about what to look at. You can quit using some app. You can close the tab. You can look at something else, or unfriend that person, or report that scam.

Blocking is, for me and many many others, a tool for that. I like some things about tumblr, but I take active steps to just see things I want to see, because it's my life and I use this website for fun. And that includes blocking trolls or people who are indistinguishable from trolls.

You might take this as permission to do the same - you don't have to talk to annoying strangers for fun!

Think about it this way: what do you want out of tumblr? If that includes being part of a community, then how do you make an internet community that's good, when different people want different things?

And it can feel bad to realize you've annoyed someone else or they don't want you in there space or they've blocked you - like, 100%, I feel a biting shame over stuff like that. But I don't endorse that shame. Other people are out there growing their own gardens and you gotta roll with it. Maybe you made a bad impression, or maybe they're odious and unpleasant and petty - or maybe some kind of relationship there was never going to work out and they just realized it first. Who knows. You each have to curate your garden in your own way or else you're going to drown in the weeds.

So I logged into an older account I have, then clicked the drafts folder. I found a draft of an email from 2017.

In 6+ weeks I've made very little progress on coding and software troubleshooting. At first I thought it was burnout, depression, or a mood that would pass. Then I got distracted by non-software activities. Then I thought tackling some simple coding tasks would build momentum. Then I imagined I'd return to my software projects as soon as I got bored enough.

Now I'm terribly bored, and code still isn't happening. I do routine maintenance to update project dependencies, and I did file one issue and a 3-line PR to address it. But when I tell myself it's time to do something creative or substantive (like write a new app or add a feature to a library) I hesitate and nothing happens.

It's difficult to explain my lack of productivity because it seems ... irrational.

This being a devblog, I gloss over large portions of my life. I don't write about weather, food, identity, aging, money, family, sexuality, or politics here. Nor do I discuss my friends, conflicts, illnesses, or personal history, except as they relate to computers. Perhaps I give the impression I'm Mr. Spock from Star Trek, a guy with no relationships, no emotions, and no interests other than math and computers.

But I'm human, of course, and when a human's needs go unmet, they tend to act out in ways that seem outwardly ... irrational.

My current dilemma reminds me of an earlier era, when my main ambition was to write fiction, and I experienced the horrors of "writer's block." I had no editor, no boss, no customer breathing down my neck, so whenever my urge to write evaporated, I was left staring at blank page, criticizing myself and feeling useless.

My theory about writer's block is it's caused by having thoughts or feelings you need to express, but don't. This could be because they don't fit with your current project or because you're afraid to commit them to writing (where someone might see) or because you're denying them or completely unaware of them.

this is why you can’t ever win against one. trolls do not actually care about the topics they debate or the misinformation they spread or the arguments they have. to them, the whole thing is just a joke. you’re not going to change their minds or make them feel bad about what they’ve done. you’re certainly never going to get one to apologize. you cannot win against a troll — negative attention is their whole objective, because it makes their trolling even funnier

I'm Light AKA Sophia Light.

Here are some things I've made:

I Once Saw The Face Of God, art + poem

BE NOT AFRAID, this eldritch angel emoji (using an unfortunately now-defunct emoji mashup tool)

This angel mask!

Various SCPs and SCP stories. Here's my author page on the SCP wiki. Some of my favorites are:

Dr. Light (My girl! I made her!)

SCP-778, Paradise Falls

SCP-3091, Temporal Funnel Trap

The Flytrap

My contributions to the Resurrection Canon

It Would Make Sense If That Were True, But Actually It Doesn't Make Sense At All, So Good Luck (originally posted on my tumblr)

7 Things that New Level 3 Researchers Should Know (crossposted to tumblr)

How to tell if you live in a simulation, a creepypasta tutorial on the simulation hypothesis and being a large language model. Written for Gearsday 2024, posted on the wiki too.

Does anyone remember this website?, a little zine.

I've been into ARGs lately. Here are some things I've written on other people's ARGs.

I have at least one ARG of my own. I'm not telling you what it is.