Hiiiii!!! I'm kinda new to tumblr, and I just read your beginners guide. I sort of got the jist of what tumblr is like, but do you have any tips for me to become more familiarized with it??? Like do you discourage me from doing anything or recommend me to do something???
Hi! Iβm glad the Beginners Guide is still helping people. Honestly, it covers most things.
When it comes to thing you should avoid;
1. If you hate something popular or fandom related DONβT tag that thing while complaining about it. If you do, all the people who like it and follow that tag will see your post.
To give you an example: If you like Gravity Falls but hate Fiddlestan, you can make a post saying that you dislike the ship. However, if you tag that post #Fiddlestan #Fiddleford McGucket/Stanly Pines people who love that ship will be the main ones who see it.
You wouldnβt like it if someone came up to you and started telling you how much they hate something you like so donβt do it to other people.
2. This one is an old internet rule in general but donβt feed the trolls.
Some people are just jerks and get off on being annoying. Do not engage. Do not keep arguing with them. Walk away and get on with your day. If need be, block them.
3. You donβt need to reblog things that make you miserable.
Feel free to ignore any posts with reblogs that say stuff like βif you see this and donβt reblog it, I donβt trust you and you should feel bad.β I mean β if itβs a post about something you care about β you absolutely can reblog it but reblog a version without the bullshit, shaming, nonsense addition.
If the next big world event has just happened, you can post about it all you want but donβt make yourself miserable doing so.
Tumblr is supposed to be fun. If you feel like youβll cry, have a panic attack or just make yourself unnecessarily sad by constantly talking about/rebloging posts about βTopic Xβ, you are doing it wrong.
If you find yourself doing this, stop. Either reblog something else or go offline for a bit. You donβt owe anyone an explanation and you arenβt helping anyone by damaging your own mental health.
When it comes to things you should do;
My best piece of advice is to join small fandoms. If you love a show/movie/book/band and no one has posted about it yet, donβt be scared to make the first post.
Iβm not saying you shouldnβt join big fandoms too but small fandoms are great.
Big fandoms are fun (if you avoid the drama) because you will get lots of content. Small fandoms are fun because you will get engagement from a few people again and again.
You are much more likely to make friends in a small fandom and you might get to watch them grow into something bigger.
Small fandoms are also mostly or completely drama free. About 3% of any fandom is toxic. If you are in a fandom with 10 people, then the chances are that none of those fans are toxic. If one of them is, you can just block them.
If you are in a big fandom with ten thousand fans, suddenly that 3% is 300 people. They are still a minority but they can be a very loud minority which is much harder to ignore and can give the fandom as a whole a bad name.
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Since apparently there are a fair few people whose introduction to Steampunk was Cloudward, Ho!
Let's start with the basics: Cloho is technically not steampunk. It's Gaslamp Fantasy (the non-scifi twin to Steampunk). The line between the two is very blurry.
With the understanding that these are very basic, beginner-friendly definitions:
Steampunk imagines an alternate history in which the second industrial revolution (yes, there were two: the first industrial revolution was in the 18th century/1700s, the second - the one most people think of when they say industrial revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. Again, there is some line blurring) advanced technology significantly farther than in reality, with a focus on retrofuturism (which is "a movement in the creative arts emphasizing and harking back to depictions of the future as produced in earlier eras" - i.e. Steampunk is the time between the Second Industrial Revolution and now as the people living through the Second Industrial Revolution might have imagined it).
But the setting is, of course, only half of it. While Steampunk's surge in popularity about ten years ago (urgh) made it very popular to just use the asthetic, the Punk in Steampunk is just as important as the Steam. Punk is an ideological movement, not just a suffix or fashion trend. Generally speaking, punks are politically on the left, being against all forms of bigotry, against animal cruelty, and against the hyper-corporate mainstream culture, while being heavily inclined to mutual aid.(Although, of course, it has been co-opted numerous times by groups that are the opposite of everything it stands for.)
So. Cloho gets this more right than many other Steampunk works, because it is explicitely anti-capitalism, anti-classism, and anti-consumerism.
As for the Steam. I can't believe I need to say this but apparently I do. Steam-powered technology is powered by Coal. Steampunk is always a balance between the Steam "What if the coal based industrial revolution advanced technology further" and the Punk "fucking up the environment with coal is bad, actually". But if you have a Steampunk setting, there will be coal in use to power your cool machines or you have a lot of explaining to do in universe.
Cloho ...has problems with this. We do get mentions of lots of inventions steaming and the Zephyr being coal-powered. But most thinigs seem to just steam randomly with no coal input. Now, this bit is significantly more flexible, so it's not an issue - especially since the biggest offender is Van's prothesis which is actively holding back something magic and putting water under a lot of pressure (thus could make steam without coal). But it is noteable.
...That said. Dear fanfic authors of AO3, for the love of whatever deity you believe in: CLOCKWORK IS A DIFFERENT AND OLDER TECHNOLOGY THAN STEAM POWER. WIND-UP BEINGS LIKE TORSE SHOULD NOT BE VENTING STEAM, BECAUSE THEY ARE CLOCKWORK, NOT STEAM-POWERED. (To be fair, the D20 crew also don't seem to understand that clockwork is powered by kinetic energy manually inserted by winding up when they talk about clockwork automatons, but still.)
Ahem. Pardon. Moving swiftly on.
But I started this with "Cloho is not technically Steampunk" so you're probably wondering: What the Fuck is Gaslamp Fantasy?
Great question!
Gaslamp Fantasy is a term coined by the creators of the webcomic Girl Genius to describe their too-fantasy-to-be-sci-fi work (Kaja Foglio has also said "we have no punk, just the steam"). Girl Genius won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story three times in a row before the Foglios (the creators) refused to be up for nomination again to prove the category was viably winnable. Yes, it's that good. You can start reading it here if the tagline "Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!" and the premise of "a world where Mad Scientists rule the world ...badly" sound fun to you.
Now, Steampunk and Gaslamp tend to lean towards Victorian England (with the Wild West - which existed at the same time - as a close second) for setting, because Victoria's Britain was where the Second Industrial Revolution kicked off, but that is by no means a requirement (the protagonist of Girl Genius - Agatha - for instance, is from alternate history Eastern Europe).
But as a result British and especially English stuff gets mixed in very easily. BTW. "Wet" as British slang means inept or ineffectual or - to use other slang - a bit of a pussy. It also has some political connotations as Thatcher's supporters called their opposition "wets" to the point that the opposition started calling them "dries". It does not mean that someone is actually wet as in covered in water. Yes, I get how Van having the Vanticle could make that confusing.
Naming in Cloho clearly follows - at least in the Confederated Imperial Republic - a very English style. How can I tell? Because the official spelling of one of the main villain's names is Mordecestershire. Not Murdershire. Mordecestershire. A name which makes USAers weep in confusion and every British person on the planet go "yeah that makes sense, that's not unusual, obviously it would be spelled that way". Why is it spelled that way? For the same reason "Wustersure sauce" is actually Worcestershire Sauce. A shire - usually ending up pronounced sure or sheer - is a a traditional term for an administrative division of land in Great Britain. Basically the same as a county. So a Worcestershire is the shire (county) of the City of Worcester. "Cester", meanwhile, means a place was built on the ruins of a Roman (or, in Cloho, Tressian) military settlement or town. This has the same etymological root as the word Castle. The Wor- and Mor- are thus the remnants of the Old English town names. Wor-cester-shire: the county of the original place name built on a Roman ruin.
If you want more advice on British (English!) name spellings vs pronunciations I cannot recommend enough this Steampunk song: Shibboleth. Because, oh yeah, Steampunk is also a musical genre.
Reginald Pikedevant also has a great song about why just putting gears on something does not make it steampunk, and a festive one for those still in the holiday mood.
Other musicians I would recommend include Professor Elemental/Rapscallion and Chums (very silly, very hopeful, and very British - he has a song about tea. just tea), Abney Park (may I recommend Airship Pirates?), The Cog Is Dead (here's a song about factory labour conditions, although the messaging is somewhat ...mixed).
Now. This has gotten a bit long. So I'm going to leave it open to other steampunk fans to leave their own recs in the reblogs.
The weather is warming, the sun is returning (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, at least), and if you can believe it, it's Bandcamp Friday once again β the perfect time to get yourself a spooky soundtrack or three, or indeed an album of jazzy hip-hop songs from an audio drama ghost story musical if you're feeling frisky..!
Find the Earworm soundtrack and the SatD music albums here, and if you like the songs and want to check out Earworm in its entirety, that can be found here whenever you want to get it.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
β Live Streamingβ Interactive Chatβ Private Showsβ HD Qualityβ Free Actions
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
Help the Shadows at the Door team make a horror musical, starring some of the top talent in the audio drama sphere!
You all know how much I love Mark Nixon and the Shadows at the Door team's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I never stop blathering about how much I love it. Watching Mark grow as a showrunner over the course of our acquaintance has been incredible and at the time Dorian Gray came out it represented an incredible undertaking and I was so, SO proud of him (and the rest of the team). And now Mark has set his sights on branching and developing his skills even more by developing a horror musical.
Tumblr.
Tumblr.
You love independent audio drama.
You love horror of the subtle pleasing terrors type.
You love musicals.
(I personally find them weird, but take that to mean this is a rare endorsement)
You like art made by, for, and about LGBTQ+ folks
π Let's make Mark's newest dream, Earworm, come true π
