punkymaysnark

Yesterday, I attended a campus panel called "Lessons Learned". 

Six women who have all been successful in the creative industry, one the founder of the organizations. They didn't have much time, so they talked about their experiences in the industry, and then took student and audience questions.

I piped up with my questions about if any of the women had to deal with a string of failures, relating it back to my own string of failures in creating characters and generally having my concepts seen by an audience.

They took turns picking at the question, but their ultimate answer was that I needed to "redefine success". I have to rethink what success looks like to me. Set a realistic smart goal. Determine who I want my audience to be. If people are enjoying what I do, then that's at least a little success.

Changed my perspective on things, that panel did.

RpNation never welcomed me back, but that's okay. In retrospect, I was a huge see-you-next-Tuesday to the staff, and I'm not owed being unbanned, even if I've matured. (Plus, however much the asshole I was back then, I'm still not happy about they're apparently okay with users stabbing each other in the back the way [REDACTED] did to me...) Still have the Iwaku, though, which I also want to use again.

I revived my Plurk before I made my grand return to Dreamwidth. I think having to pay ten bucks to change your username is kind of ridiculous, but Plurk is so small that I probably just paid for more bandwidth for a week. Unfortunately, I saw the news on Plurk about LiveJournal, and it looks like mine was already deleted before I had the chance to back up anything. Also, I was off Plurk for so long, my feed is just me, myself, and I. It can't even suggest followers to me because of how little I've interacted with it. So there's a fun problem to solve. 

The fandom wiki for The Chronology Series is still up. So are the remains of the related servers. With all this time passed, I don't remember a whole lot of what happened in that drama. Thatguyinthestore is basically gone now, according to him disappearing from the blocklist on both my old Discord accounts. His Tumblr is gone, his Twitter is gone, and his last Reddit post was seven months ago. I still think about him sometimes. Wonder what he did with his life after effectively getting banned off the forum roleplay world. ('Cause Iwaku banned him, too) He did make a a huge hitpiece against me on r/BadRPerStories, which I didn't read all the way through because I knew it was gonna get me pissed and hurt. Like any abusive ass, he pretty much exonerated himself and made it seem like his only mistake was ever inviting me to the group. Psh. Never mind that I tried to leave the group repeatedly, his right-hand man even agreed that I shouldn't be around anymore because I was causing drama, and he dragged me back in every time. Unsurprisingly, he got a silver Reddit award from his fellow pricks, and all I get for my perspective is negative downvotes and being told I should just leave roleplay altogether. Sigh. I like he name he made up for me, though. "Poppy The Psycho". It's not good to use the word "psycho" these days, but you must admit, it is catchy. I might steal it and use it sometime.

After the fallout of that group, I sought others. They...all had similar implosions. Something about multifandom Discord roleplay just always causes it to go up in flames. I miss my Stranded Squad a lot, but...yeah, you guessed it. You know the kicker? I think I saw that they did a reunion tour on RpNation that I couldn't join because, y'know, banned. I joined a Total Drama-based Discord group that I left in a huff because they were making it pretty clear that I was the least liked member. I felt bad and tried to connect with them again in November...left on read. Geez, at least tell me "no", don't be like the pet store that waited six months to tell me the position I applied for was already full. Luckily, I found another Total Drama-lite group that's been much more stable. We even rebranded recently.

I tried three times to get a Tumblr following. Pinkglittermilkshake fucked with the wrong conservative account and got dogpiled. PopcornPie made a very bad-taste vent post regarding her jealousy towards Vivziepop and got dogpiled again. PunkyMaySnark, in an absolute twist of bullshit, thought it was based when the late Pope Francis called out JD Vance on being an awful human being, which obviously means she agrees with everything that Pope Francis ever said, including the transphobic stuff, even though she time and time again argues against actual transphobia. Frankly, Pitbolshevik, you can go fuck yourself.

I've had similar problems with getting a Reddit following. Reddit, for some reason, brings out the absolute worst in people, including myself. Because of that, their automated moderator system does not like me. Been permabanned twice after some arguments I had with other jerks. I shouldn't keep trying, but after getting the "unwelcome" from Tumblr, I might as well try everything. Besides, having a community for all your little niche interests is nice, as long as you stay out of where the jerks are.

Privated and deactivated my Twitter, for obvious reasons. Oh, I'm sorry, "Eeeeeeeeeccckks". I've lost faith that Twitter will ever be restored to its former glory. Elon will probably shut it down before he sells it to anyone else.

The good news is my Bluesky is going well. It was going really well for the first few months, then I got buried by the algorithm and don't get a lot of interactions. That's fine, I'm kinda used to the algorithm working against me at this point. Seems that no matter how many artists I follow, my For You is filled with politics. Makes one turn a little negative.

When I returned to TroubleCube, I was shocked to find that no murdergames had been posted to since '23. What happened there? I stopped using TroubleCube because it was clear that I was no good at doing murder games. I still freshly remember being so bad at being a murderer that I literally caused the fucking game to end weeks ahead of schedule. Like, I failed so hard it directly led the other characters to find the other Blackeneds among them. Better believe I had that character of mine permanently killed off...Anyway, what exactly happened to the others? Did the multifandom roleplay curse strike them, too?

I have a SpaceHey, but thanks to Kathy Hocul and her "SAFE Act" or whatever it's called, Spacehey can no longer offer its services to New York state. I can still use it, I just have to use Opera VPN to bypass the gate. Meanwhile, Roblox is still readily accessible in New York even though the CEO is not at all sorry about the pedophile ring that's infested its servers. Sure, that's fair.

I think I heard DeviantArt is closing down and, frankly, good riddance. it was hard enough to build my following there, then Wix drained the soul out of that site with a bendy straw. If you didn't already have 100k watchers when Wix dropped their stupid Eclipse update, tough shit, might as well deactivate now. I've entered other art sites instead: Cara, Pillowfort, Inkblot, FurAffinity, Sheezy, Toyhouse, Unva le, and, naturally, Newgrounds. The Newgrounds is actually coming along, actually. After joining the outright disastrous Chicken Little Rehatched collab, I was invited to join Bee Movie Repollinated. I want to do a good job for the latter because my contribution to the former was junk.

Overall, I'm in a better place now than I was in '22. Found my new groups, made some new friends, got some new interests. And maybe it's here that I'll be able to comfortably post about my pet project.