you people are NOT reblogging this

If you’re transgender I want you to go out there and make the worst, shittiest, most twee or cringe or weird or kitsch or gross or all-around unappealing art you possibly can. The idea that all art, especially stuff made by oppressed minorities, has to be Serious and Cool or even GOOD is a prison. Art is first and foremost about self-expression, not being Cool or Good At Art. Make whatever you want. There's no rules and anyone telling you otherwise is a liar

EVERY TIME

Smell Headcannons is when all hopes of rescuing you are GONE

get off ai and join an rp server. you must

to everyone saying “oh i’m too scared of human contact/i can’t find anyone”

1. i promise, in an rp server, everyone is as much of an awkward nerd as you. you are not going to be crucified in the garden for being a bit shy

2. disboard is a great place to find to find rp servers, so is tumblr “look up *insert fandom* rp” and you’ll probably find one. if not, make one! i’m sure you have friends who want to join

the world is your oyster

i love seeing people in here advertise their own rp servers, and other people deciding to actually join some. go forth and roleplay my dear friends

when i say get off ai, i don’t mean “rp with humans but keep ai as a sidechick”, i mean get off ai. it’s an autocorrect powered by stolen writing, get your ass off

also i saw someone say we should be having kids only rp with c.ai because it’s “safer”. we are not letting kids have formative experiences with a fucking robot

slugs your limbus

Are you being fucking real with me right now? Are you pulling on my fucking dick? Are you seriously yanking it? Are you jorking it in the stripped club? My fucking peanits?

yall better be just as outraged about this as you were about notre dame

This is even WORSE.

To elaborate why this is worse: Art and religion are all well and good. But information can be critical. When libraries burn, information can be lost forever. Because we photograph art. We have blueprints of the Cathedral. The Notre Dame cathedral did not burn to the ground, only the wooden structures did. The entire library and everything within is gone here. Another reason this is worse? It was DELIBERATE. It was bombed. Accidents like Notre Dame happen all the time. But bombings don’t have to happen. So yeah, if you cared about Notre Dame, logically you should care about this too,

you're going about your normal day when, suddenly, surprise! you've been pokémon mystery dungeon'd!

unfortunately, due to budget cuts, the pokémon assigning quiz has been canceled. instead, you must spin THE WHEEL, assigning you a random, unevolved, non-legendary and non-mythical pokémon. you must now go on some sort of world-saving adventure as this pokémon. good luck!

tell me in the tags what you rolled, and how you feel about it - for bonus points, you can spin the wheel again for (or just take your pick of) a pokémon to be your partner.

bonus rules:

How birds act

Hey so commissions are open-

I got rlly sick over the weekend after covering a load of sick calls on my days off and woah look how the turns have tabled I just got my new place and I would really like some help covering the costs of my missing shifts and the costs for medicine and food

I extremely discounted my commissions this year and they might stay this price idk Please share this that would be much appreciated likes don't do anything here yo....

soundscape of young green martian playing with pvc pipes

i think everyone leaving "reblog dont (just) like" notices on their art needs to think about youtubers and their calls to action and how often it actually works, how often it only serves to irritate, and when exactly does it work and why that might be and what makes those calls different to all the other ones that just get ignored or frustrate people. because you are doing that, and you're doing it badly, and youre losing subscriber

youtuber who occasionally says things like "hey im particularly proud of this video so if you liked it id appreciate a like or if you have any thoughts feel free to share them in the comments id love to hear!" or comedy youtuber who figures out a new bit to integrate their call to action into so its different every time is way more likely to actually encourage me to interact than youtuber who says "like and subscribe" as an automatic sentence every single video, is how i feel anyway

or to be even more direct: of these examples which of them treats me as a person and seeks genuine human engagement and connection and which of these sees me as a number that could be going up

Where do I start with responding to this... let's begin with the uncharitable tag at the end I think.

You might not want to read a long response so here's the short version: this post is advice from one creator to another that what they are doing is not working, and I am trying to get people to think about why it isn't working and what they can do about it by presenting a way they can put themselves in their audience's shoes through the similar scenario of being the audience of a youtube video. I am not telling people to "bend over backwards in order to be nice to [their audience] to 'earn' their payment".

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The greater context of this post is this poll that I reblogged yesterday:

As you can see, ~74% of people will not be swayed to reblog a post that they weren't already going to reblog just because you told them to, no matter how polite and friendly you are about it.

And here's the thing, if you look in the notes of the post the comments/tags on it are all like this:

An absolute chorus of people saying "telling me to reblog your art makes me not even want to interact with it".

Thus clearly, it's not working. Setting aside the imperfect nature of tumblr stats, that's still a very significant amount of people who have voted on this poll and said they won't reblog a post if you tell them to.

So. I am not saying people need to "bend over backwards [...] in order to 'earn' their payment". I'm trying to explain why people are reacting like this—if you forget the humanity of the person on the other side of the screen and start treating them as a number that could be going up, you're going to alienate people and push them away—so that people can change their approach and actually get the result they want.

Or, in very simple terms: People don't like being told what to do. If you want someone to do something, you need to make them want to do it. Telling them to do it is not the way you do that.

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Also secondly this is getting way too long but it does need to be noted that there are several ways that likes contribute to getting posts seen, such as "based on your likes", recommended posts in general, and the "more posts like this" section that shows up in several different places on tumblr.

Thus, reblogs are in fact not the only way that posts get spread on tumblr nor are they the only contributor to the post ecosystem.

And indeed, if I take a look at the reblog graphs on my art, I might have a lot of reblogs on a post but they all terminate after that one reblog from me. Because most people on tumblr do not actually have followers, and thus reblogging posts is a way for them to interact with me and not a way for my posts to get more traction.

This is easy to forget if you've been on the site for a decade especially if you've been on the site for a decade making posts, especially posting art, but unless you have a highly specific themed blog, or you're a social butterfly, it's very common for people on here to just not have many followers at all.

Those 3 big clusters are all me, one is the original post, and the other two are self reblogs of it. There's a few short reblog chains that happened, but you can very clearly see that the vast majority of reblogs terminate the reblog chain there. Evidently, people are reblogging the post, but it's not spreading further because that's just not how it works.

Anyway whatever if you take away one thing from this post it should be this: if you want to encourage a particular behaviour in your audience, you need to think about what it's like to be your audience and then treat them how you want to be treated. Simple as that.

Now THIS is the Dragula babe content I WANT.

I’m crying this person is so hot