Social media sucks! We all know it!

And fandom culture. That sucks too.

When you devalue the worth of a human’s creations to how aesthetically attractive it is and how fast the next one will come out, it breaks down the soul of the art and the soul of the artist as well.

I’m thankful for how my obsession with Pokeau has kind of prevented the artistic burnout for me in a way, where much of what I create is done for the sole purpose of projecting my love and thoughts of it to the world – and to manifest a ‘physical’ representation of it.
But it hasn’t prevented the negative feelings associated.

Cliques are rampant, people get into fights constantly about things that don’t actually matter, and if you can’t game the system, you’re left in the dust. It sucks! And as someone who experiences rejection sensitive dysphoria, it got to the point where I’ve had to involuntarily leave altogether because it made me feel like my creations were worthless. While artistically I was doing fine and my passion was aflame, I felt like nobody cared and it didn’t matter.

It’s even more unfortunate how much socmed has monopolized things – I’m forced to stick around if I want to find artists to commission and work with.

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The ‘rebirth’ of the old web

This is something I’m particularly bitter about, if for no other reason than I feel old. Neocities is an amazing resource and tool for creating your own website – hell, it’s free and got 10 goddamn gigs of storage for that price! But I often feel some the the attitudes by the users leave more to be desired.

I do not hate Neocities – quite the opposite, actually. My issue arises with certain things that appear commonly among the community.

The biggest issue I have being of accessibility. I’ll admit that I am not perfect with accessibility either – but if I had to count the times I’ve browsed independent websites and had a migraine triggered or nearly something worse… it’s not fun. There’s a reason certain things died with the old web. I know certain things are all hip and trendy and ‘aesthetic’, but to pretend these things are better than the ‘modern web’s’ aesthetics when they are actively hostile to disabled people is frustrating!
Especially considering many of these people did not grow up with the ‘old web’, and are yearning for a sense of nostalgia they never experienced. Trust me! A lot of things are worse on the internet, but a lot of things are better too!

Despite what many claim, the attitudes present from social media do persist here as well.

The feeling of ‘superiority’ depending on how your site looks or how it’s formatted or how much javascript or whatever other framework it uses is something I’ve also encountered. Ultimately, it should not matter how you utilize human creativity. It’s human nature to sometimes be a dick about hobby-related stuff, because the ‘I’m better than these people’ mentality can certainly help boost an ego.

But no matter the outlet, as long as we’re not sucking up to the Big Man of social media, aren’t we in this together? No one way of expressing oneself is better than the other.

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In the end…

Do what you want always forever. It doesn’t matter how you express it or what you use, just don’t put others down for not doing things the way you want them to be done or create things that are harmful. Life’s too short, twitter sucks, and you have all the power in the world to create wonderful things in whatever vision you may have.

tldr