notes: previous antiweb rant (removed for incoherence)
🙡 part one: people keep ruining my birthday)
i hear you. i do. the solution to this is just being honest with what i can give people and acting normally. you think i haven't tried that? i've done that for two decades and mostly what it's gotten me is a kind of disconnected guerrilla cell network of people who would be gangstalking me were it not for the fact that to be "gang" stalking you normally have to like slash tolerate slash talk to each other. it has been, i do earnestly believe without reserve, the worst thing to ever happen to me. the only thing i hate more than being on the internet is not being on the internet, but the humane solution to that is something less "make your own website" and more "euthanasia". i've been workshopping this page for a month and a half trying to make it sound less bitter and odd and insane before remembering that the entire point is to prove that i am too bitter and too odd and too insane to be sharing a road website with other people. so!and i'm not kidding about the stalking thing. i've had people mail me things. i've had people try to contact my little sister and only found out because she was young enough that i was running her socials for her. i've had two seperate people put a blood curse on me, one of whom tried to get back in touch to buy an emergency commission off of me in a condescending act of magnanimous charity and then deleted their twitter (quote: for their own safety) when i posted gregor samsa girl not this in response to that. if i began counting the amount of people who i blocked for things they did that i thought were uncool and generally sucked to be around who then went on to change their name to my name it would just depress you before i ever got to the name-a-likes (not accurate but imagine something like natasha michelle, for example) or aesthetic clones that failed because they clearly didn't like the genre i design. i've not exaggerated in the past when i say that i think being white and tme has saved my life. during some of the worst years of my life (notably the ones i spent e-begging from a flat with a giant hole in the roof and no heating in winter) it has been hair-thin on if i was going to survive or not and i truly do believe that if even one or two more people had been just a little bit less willing to give me the benefit of the doubt i may not have made it. which obviously is the dream for the legion of komaeda kinnies (at least three seperate ones. btw.) like the girl reading this™ keeping tabs on me and doing shoddy witchcraft and setting up whisper networks that only last as long as their current circle does before they implode that too. but! it's still impressive to look at the shark as it swims by and realize that you're only not in its teeth right now because you look like one of the chippettes.
kind of heavy to drop in a segment about my birthday but whatever. an ongoing feature of this kind of dynamic i keep waking up midway through involves me trying to stream something i love for my birthday to all of my friends and people either picking a fight the morning of those plans or attending them just to pick fights with everyone else there. i've had people theatrically quit the same stream three times because they didn't like the main ship in a piece of media until i stopped begging them to come back, people try and devolve the whole thing into kinnie nonsense (derogatory), people refuse to join in with the kinnie nonsense (fun and playful) because nobody else came from their canon where [totally normal character] broke their legs six times a day, and the one time i gave up entirely and tried to make offline plans with my star someone i'd met online and tried to live with (until he quit his job and spent all of our communal funds on takeout just for him) had silently driven off with the car star let him borrow for work! every single other thing aside i want you to imagine trying and failing to have a pleasant birthday party without someone staging a public suicide attempt on the same day because it wasn't their birthday for ten straight years in a row. just for a second imagine it. that's one of my two seasonal internet events, and the other one is a late summer / mid autumn conversation with someone where i (tell them not to call my black friend a crazy scary potential danger to them bc they picked his boyfriends side in the breakup / ask them if they forgot to hit anon for this round of graphic rape threats / point out that you can't retroactively become a fictive of something you read this week after being front for six months / tell them that they're not allowed back into a server i run because their fiancee they bet all of their social credit with me on did the thing he did in the last two servers he got kicked from and had a racist kinnie meltdown at my indigenous mod / overstretched her play and revealed to everyone that she was on perfectly good terms with her rich daddy when we'd all been sending her our literal food money and letting her freeload off of her transfemme qp while calling her the f slur and sending her jewish boyfriend memes from a series she herself had called outright nazi propaganda / asked to stop taking advantage of me when i was severely dissociated to try and convince me i was a transgender man / mildly objected to constantly getting sent "i'd kill myself if i was as fat as you" comments regardless of their eating disorder / stop sending minors i'm mutuals with graphic sexual content / THESE ARE JUST THE ONES I REMEMBER OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD BTW) and the next month of my life becomes a cartoonish hellhole of them calling me every name under the sun until they find one that legitimately triggers me and then keep pinging on my viewcounters six times a day until they come back with one of the aforementioned remodel ripoffs or temporarily join hands with one of the other bitches from the list before remembering they also hated them for those behaviors and falling out again.
in the end the problem is me. there were things that happened to me, literally a half decade of online "do x or i kill the hostage (me)" grooming right after all of my actual in-person microtortures on the same subject, but they're a part of me now and i'm the problem. i don't know how to make friends in a way where the person i'm trying to befriend believes on any level that i'm capable of being hurt. i struggle to understand how someone can have heard me out and understood every point i made and conceeded they were true and then lie about me anyway because they hate me. so much and for so long i have felt like a tiger in some frances hodgson burnett novel. like something that people wanted to pet and to tame and to ride and to brag about having under their thumb, but never something that they wanted to have deep conversations with or that they considered intelligent enough to be worth trying for it anyway. so often after i fall out with someone the whole house of cards comes falling down and they reveal that their next step is to put a metaphorical bullet between the eyes of the rabid animal charging their way. i got a dm this year from a teenager i have never met who had an unrelated fight with one of the people who named themselves after me, who knew my url from the multitude of screenshots of my social media accounts said mini-me spammed their friend server with, whose entire reason for reaching out was that they wanted the bitch mauled to death and had been led to believe that that was my only purpose in life. that's depressing! it's not even the first time someone has been like "hey you don't know me but i know someone from 4 years ago who hates you obsessively and i just wanted to know teehee if you wanted all of the gossip teehee about their private life so you can rip their throat out for me (person you would block on sight)" and with that in conjuction with how often i'm on the outs with those people to start with because i told them they were hurting me beyond what i could tank they went No I'm Not... well. it's not easy to get back onto the tiger's back and believe that this time people will see me as a human being capable of those feelings.
🙡 (part two: other animals can also hear your dog whistle and will respond by trying to bite your hand clean off)
another issue i have online is something that's 30% whore oracle powers (the trend where sex workers will point out something and get run off the internet for it and then six years later everyone else gets their shit together and is like wait actually that was an issue this entire time and now it's also hurting me really badly as it slips from "acceptable" women to do it to to just any woman any time. there are transfem and black versions of this too and i know the power stacks intersectionally but the one i get is the hookervision and it ruins my life because i hang out on kinnie tumblr) and 70% me just not letting shit go despite lacking the constitution to go down into the mines and piss away six hours of my life every day cleaning out my notifications. i like my six mutuals and i don't want to lose them because i'm compelled beyond reason to argue with idiots about obvious dog whistles. i burst blood vessels in my eye during the amber heard trial when the overwhelming internet opinion was that the double her age previously abusive alcoholic that beat her black and blue was the real victim because she hit him back. i don't have it in me to do it again about ariana grande starving herself to death or the five hundred tradwives (nara smith, ballerina farm) who want everything but the label and who keep getting pushed onto my feed by dogs who can't hear their own whistle blasting. you'd think it would be easier in creative spaces away from the vacuous celebritybrained masses or whatever but literally on the site i'm using now one of the first five "friends and family invites" slots on half of the webrings i was interested in joining is an out and out radfem. i found this in three minutes after trying to check that the women of the interwebzz gang included, you know, the demographic of women who build most of the fucking interwebzz? by the way. literally found that out in the time it takes to listen to a song. what am i meant to do there? run a dnfi in my website? block everyone in an unrelated ring in case they knew? not block everyone in an unrelated ring and find out that they knew? it's shit all the way down and i don't have the temperament to field even one person sealioning something everyone with eyes can see. i'll kill you. i'll fucking kill you.
🙡 (part three: i thought you drowning was just a bit you did while we played mermaids, sorry)
admittedly, a lot of these issues are my fault. there's a certain demographic of person who does... okay, not well, but very successfully in online spaces so long as they never have to one-on-one maintain a connection or follow through with action on any of the fun pretense they believe everyone is engaging in. i've spent a very long time sat right at the intersection of "didn't know you were allowed to say no (because i wasn't)" and "loudly and egotistically assured that they're an outgoing genius and everything they do is all according to keikaku" which as you can imagine is a nightmare in a bottle for someone who believed the second and wants an honest answer as to why i've been offline whenever we had plans because i was uncontrollably throwing up again at the thought of them earnestly hitting on me. i'm also, hilariously, one of the abuser% of people online who has an avoidant attachment style rather than an anxious one. (admittedly as far as i'm concerned saying this is as scientifically / medically / psychologically valuable as sharing my meyers-briggs or aura colour. which is to say: not at all) and the way that this manifests has rather traditionally taken the form of me attempting to kill whoever talks to me in rabid animal self-defense. i'm not blameless in any part of this dynamic and do in fact wish i could figure out how to have meaningful human connections without the bit where i lovebomb them (under the impression that it's a normal catchup between me and someone i'm just super vibing with this week) and they get oddly possessive of me while also feeling a consistently rising contempt that comes to a head when i bluntly tell them that i disliked a behavior of theirs and they feel that i'm wasting all of their goodwill in forgiving me for going missing / saying i was going to bed but then hanging out with someone else / twitter matchies they weren't included in / twitter matchies they WERE included in but i got the "good" one (nevermind that if our pfps were reversed we'd have the same fight because it was never about the character and always about how i talked about my The Character) / etc. where was i?i wrote notes for this but they're obviously incoherent. the next bit just says YOU CAN VERBALLY NEGOTIATE SOMEONE OUT OF SAYING THEY'RE MAD AT YOU BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE THE FEELING GO AWAY and i don't really know how to extrapolate on that. often the things people have been mad at me about have not been annoying behaviors or wild inconsistencies or feeling devalued but instead have been the bit where i threw up uncontrollably or being on the verge of homelessness or having black mold poisoning on either two separate occasions or one really long one depending on who you ask. or whatever the fuck my mum was on when i learned that kind of servile appeasement that nobody likes or wants, i guess. anyway the point is more often than not what happens is someone is like "i feel like you don't care about me in xyz specific way" and they're literally right and my response is "i know, it's just that i got six hours sleep this week and the roof is leaking and my heat went out and i had to drop out of school because they hired my rapist brother to serve the only food on the free lunch plan that's my single meal a day right now bc my mother thinks i'm getting too fat at home and i have bronchitis so bad my phlegm is black and my husband quit his job again midway through my visa application that hinged on him being able to provide for us so i'm now functionally undocumented on a foreign continent with no money and my homophobic neighbour who tried to kick the door in keeps taping her nudes to the window and blocking the fire escape and playing bible sermons about hell through the window so i've kind of been dealing with that and haven't had time to check in on our standing plan to rabb.it anime" and they've felt (i assume!) guilty and bad which wasn't my intent so much as Getting Them To Stop was and making them feel guilty about the whole thing was the quickest route after telling people beforehand and then being normal. i'm working on it! all of that to say is that when someone is already mad at you for being a flake they don't get less mad when you talk to them like they're the bad person for expecting you to crawl out of that-which-looks-like-the-grave and chill with them. they just lose their only avenue to tell you about that until the next time you piss them off until your current eight year misfortune spiral doesn't make them feel bad for you so much as it makes them hope the next one takes you out for good. that's my attempt at being fair about the whole thing, anyway. if you ask me without my therapy hat on i'll say that people who want a good morning text every morning are emotional vampires who won't let you sleep at night if they're still up and who probably want to put a camera in your home & that it's normal to want a few days to yourself every week to stop existing & that antidepressants don't work for me but i don't think that's related to the topic at hand thanks.