New Website, Final Post
Hello! I have a new personal website. Now that this final adjustment to my online presence is live, I will not ever sign into Tumblr again, but I promised to let ya'll know where I went, so here it is!
Tumblr Confession #1: Squigglydigg
I left Tumblr at the beginning of 2022. In truth, I withdrew my heart from it at the beginning of 2021. I left for many reasons, each one long enough to fill a blog post. This one is about Squigglydigg.
For many years I was a part of a really wonderful fan community that sprang up around a series of animated music videos. It was called Mystery Skulls Animated, to differentiate it from the band Mystery Skulls, whose music was used in the videos. Squiggly was an up and coming artist who rocketed in fan community status for her stellar fanart. She was lauded and loved and pedastaled for a long time. Our posts intersected from time to time--as they do on Tumblr--and we talked sometimes. Occasionally she would show up in my writing streams and gave me advice as I worked on the fanfiction saga Thicker Than Water Tales.
I don't remember exactly when she first got dragged. I know that it was done behind her back on Tumblr. She wasn't even tagged in the post. It was allowed to circulate for a long time before she saw it, so she got to see a list of people who "liked" the callout post, several of whom had seemed like her friends before.
Months (years?) passed, and she got called out again. And again. And each time I watched, bewildered, but silent. It didn't seem right, but I was afraid. Lines were being drawn and I didn't want to stand anywhere when the lines made no sense to me in the first place. I thought I knew what was right, but I didn't know how to say it. And I was afraid of the anger.
I kept silent.
Signing Out
I have written way too many drafts of this post in the past year. Some were angry, some were depressed. All were too long and preachy. In the end, they sounded divisive and incendiary. Nothing I wrote read back to me as helpful or healing or unifying. So, let’s keep this simple.
I don’t have a personal site to move to yet, but it’s time for me to leave Tumblr. For most of this year my posts have been queued and I logged out for weeks at a time. With no Facebook and minimal Tumblr in my life for a whole year, I stabilized way more than I thought I would, which is enough of a reason for me to log out for good. I will leave my blogs up here until such time as I have a place to port them, but I will not be posting any more, and I will not be here to answer asks or IMs. I have three in-progress fanfics right now, and the rest of each story will be posted to the fanfic specific sites mentioned at the bottom of the post.
I don’t anticipate joining another social media platform, and the websites that I’m a part of (see notes at the end) were chosen for their focuses, not for their interaction capabilities.
There’s been good times and bad on this site. I appreciate the communities I’ve been a part of. I appreciate the people I’ve spoken with. I appreciate the tool that this site was for me and the ways that blogging out my brain mess helped me sort it. But, like my meds so long ago, I kept using this tool long after it was no longer helping me, and long after it started doing me more harm than good.
Thank you for the experiences. Thank you for tagging along with me on part of this journey. I leave you with my favorite video that I found on this site, and I hope you have a nice day.
WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME
- Youtube (all commenting switched off): https://www.youtube.com/c/DustyRoseReads
- Ko-fi craft shop & tip jar: https://ko-fi.com/dustyrose
- Parents’ website (guest blogging): https://improbablepeople.org/blog/
- AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecallsmehischild/works
- Fanfiction.net: https://www.fanfiction.net/~hecallsmehischild
- Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/user/hecallsmehischild
Find me elsewhere in the future by searching Dusty Rose or Hecallsmehischild (on rare occasions as Hecallsmehisown when a character limit is imposed)
jadedaceofspades-deactivated202
Eggnog from 1895
I feel like I used to rush to Tumblr every single time to unload every single experience, internal or external, big or small. Now there is a new little whisper at the back of my mind that I've been attending to lately. It says, "Some things, just for myself." And I shut the laptop and walk away.
TITLE: HIT AND RUN
FANDOM: MYSTERY SKULLS ANIMATED
RATING: T
SYNOPSIS: Mystery Skulls Animated secret santa oneshot. It was supposed to be a calm, relaxing, fun game night. No ghosts, no cryptids, no hot leads. Just friendly competition and fresh pizza. But the pizza delivery person claims to have hit something weird on the way over, and it's impossible to say no to Vivi once she gets going.
Note: @msaholidayspirits 2021 Secret Santa gift for @titenoute! Featuring Titenoute's MSA OC Fiona! A fic of firsts: First time I've written an MSA fic with someone else's OC, first 3rd person non-specific POV I've tried in ages, and first time I've written solely pre-cave material. I had a couple mini-comics, sketches, and a profile to go off of for the OC Fiona. Fingers crossed that I landed somewhere close to an accurate portrayal and also that the literary police don't ram down my door. Pre-Cave gang gains a new friend, Merry Christmas! Cover photo by 5demayo at morguefile.
.......................................................................................................
(Mid-November) So, I've been on a major cooking kick lately...
- Steamed Pork Buns
- Hambagu
- Garlic mashed potatoes (old recipe tweaked over the years)
- Melon Bread
Went to visit my sister in Lancaster, PA and I got to feed a goat. They had a little quarter-for-feed machine nearby and the goat followed me every second after I squatted in front of that machine. It was especially eager for cracked corn. It was a bit magical to get to feed it (says the city slicker).
I'm grateful for roads. For the roads that crisscross the country. For the private and public services that repair and replace them. For the ability to get in a car and travel, near or far. I am grateful for cars and the network of roads we've inherited.
I am grateful for cooking gadgets that make cooking cost me less energy.
I am grateful for easy, instant, free/cheap access to a wide range of knowledge.
There's an older guy who my husband and I have over for dinner a lot. He's brilliant. Like truly brilliant. And, like us, he's odd, so we don't have to be awkward about social interactions because we're all odd. He'll come fix a couple small things at our house, and we'll either go out to eat or make something here. We'll talk everything from politics to physics to invention ideas and whether or not I should take up sewing. He loaned me a sewing machine to see if I would like to work with it. Recently we went to a high school football game and he narrated over it every step of the way until my husband and I mostly understood how the game works, and that was a first! I'm grateful we have this friend in our lives.
I am grateful that this year felt like it moved, like there was an actual flow of time, unlike last year.
I am grateful for very silly hats, and all the people who make them.
I am grateful for poke places that offer delicious options for people who hate raw fish.
I'm grateful for dumb memes that get stuck in my head and make me laugh.
I am grateful for the child-like joy of stickers. Large ones. Small ones. Shiny, glimmering, colorful ones. Stars, flowers, butterflies, and unicorn stickers. Stickers.
yes please. this would be a great day for this to come true
When I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine how ‘May you live in interesting times’ could be a curse. But now I would so love to not have a year’s worth of news happen every week. PLEASE.
likes to charge, reblog to cast
Genuinely, though? We can take steps toward this.
The more I read and learn and talk to people, the more I think times were never boring. I think that's a misconception on our part, partly (I think) because we've come into larger awareness of the "interesting times" and believe it is a new phenomenon. We've been through capital letter Wars, Depressions, and Pandemics before, it just feels different because it's happening NOW instead of being dead in print on the page. There has always been a crisis where we were on the edge, there has always been the sense of "This is it, we're really going to capsize this time." But we haven't yet. We've always pulled back from the edge. It's just we're hyper-aware of it now on a scale much larger than "my family" or "my community" and that's crushing.
If you can't take a concrete action (NOT just "awareness") that fixes things at the national and global level (and few can), then I'd encourage stepping away from those discussions and focusing on more localized areas of your life that you can take action in.
Think about the last sentence of the tweet: You haven't watched the news in seven years. That's something you can actually accomplish. There are things you can actively do to move toward this kind of peace. And maybe, moving away from Total Global Awareness will give you the internal space to do something concrete in your local community.
Things I've done to move toward OP's peace:
- Tanked my Facebook. Plan to tank the rest of my social media (Tumblr, IG) when I get a personal website to port my blogs to. Until then, I restrict my interaction with those platforms (load my queue, sign out for weeks, etc). Anything I plan to keep (YouTube), I massively restrict my ability to read or receive comments.
- Get updates about news/politics/the upsetting things with people I trust who really seem to have a handle on analyzing multiple sources of information. Get those updates on as infrequent a basis as I can handle. It's okay to outsource truth-sorting and analysis to people who are better at it, and it's okay to pace consumption of information that negatively impacts your functioning.
- Reject both wings of the popular media, read widely from books and independent journalists on multiple sides of root issues (working on the balance part of that).
- Moved away a couple degrees from "dense city" to "city outskirts". Am willing to start over again and move even further away from cities in the future.
Waiting for peace to come to the world around you before you achieve this dream is a fantasy. It won't happen. Ask yourself what it would take for you to have the kind of peace you need, and then form up a long term plan how you can MAKE that peace around yourself. Impact things in your immediate vicinity.
If this is an important dream for you, work for this dream and make the sacrifices that you have to in order to have what you need. Spend the necessary time to make this a viable future. Don't wait for life to happen to you.
May I never allow myself to feel pressured into NOT reading or watching something or someone. May I never dismiss a voice before I've first heard what they have to say from their own lips or pen.
I don’t know if you've ever been told this, but it is okay to have a small, exclusive wedding. This is not a diatribe against large weddings, but I think it needs to be said that small weddings are okay, and in some cases should be fought for.
For months after mine, I would tell my “small wedding” story to new friends I was making and there would be audible sighs and wistful expressions of, “I’m so jealous,” and “I wish we’d done that.” It startled me how many people had never even considered that they were allowed to have a smaller wedding, or felt they were obligated to shape their most special day differently for the sake of other people. It alarmed me how many of my new friends had felt stressed and coerced into inviting everyone they knew, impressing them, and paying out of pocket for the privilege of shouldering that stress.
I get it. I grew up thinking it was the norm that everyone and their third cousin twice removed got invited to a wedding. That the stress of managing all that was just part of the territory. That The Big Day had to be THAT level of perfect, to pull everything off without setting anything on fire. As I started to realize the sort of price tag that The Big Day had in dollars and stress, the less sense it made to me.
So, in the lead-up to our own wedding, my husband and I talked a lot about the sort of wedding we wanted and things we really didn’t want.