I’ve gotten messages telling me @buzzfeed featured my post on their snap today and my question is, once again, where’s my cut of the check going to whoever’s job it is to literally screenshot my content and repost it?
@buzzfeed why do you pay your employees to copy+paste my content? why not hire creative people instead? just wondering.
@buzzfeed either start paying me, or stop using my stuff thanks!
I genuinely do not care when people on reddit or facebook or somewhere else screenshot and repost my content, because they’re not getting paid either.
What bothers me is that @buzzfeed has paid employees who have at least ten times now reposted my content to earn their paychecks. Whereas I am blogging for free on a platform that offers virtually no opportunities for content creators to profit from the time we spend.
I clearly offer something Buzzfeed wants and values as marketable, but rather than reach out to me to discuss how I could be an asset to them, or to at least ask permission to repost my content for free, they just pay their employees to scour my blog and make money off of me without benefiting me in any way.
It’s bullshit, and I’m genuinely tired of it.
@buzzfeed stole one of my posts for a listicle and apparently it was so good they quoted it verbatim for the article header to get clicks. Never once heard from @buzzfeed about permission or compensation. I could really use that too because I’m disabled and struggling on govt aid. So @buzzfeed you paid someone to steal my content in order to earn ad revenue for your selves so how about giving a cut to the people actually creating the work?
What is it gonna take though? @buzzfeed getting sued by a creator? Getting sued by multiple creators? Constant DMCA takedowns? There is no way @buzzfeed can claim they aren’t successful enough to pay all of its contributors. The exposure argument doesn’t work when so much of the stolen content is poorly credited or not at all. Its pure theft and hoping to get away with it by either the creators never seeing it or hopefully the creators being jazzed that they showed up on buzzfeed.
Go on Twitter and tweet that they stole your work. Link to their page and to your original work. Tweet out that you’re looking for other writers and artists who have had their work stolen and posted by buzzfeed without compensation. Make sure that every single person who responds includes a link to their own work and a link to the buzzfeed page that uses their work. Make sure to @ buzzfeed in each and every tweet from every complainant. When you have a roll going, tweet that you’re looking to file a class-action suit against @buzzfeed. Tweet that you’re looking for a lawyer. You will get a response from buzzfeed. They will want to avoid even the preliminaries of a lawsuit, and will certainly want to avoid bad press.
hi friends, i deal with this on a regular basis too. despite my pleasing, bitching, endless demands, threats and appeals to their humanity, newspaper editors and journalists do not appear to give a single shit about journalistic integrity or paying people they steal content from. as a way to combat this i have been listing myself as a writer for those publications in my twitter bio and added them to my resume
whenever people get mad at me online for making a bad post i tell them to contact my “’employers” and complain until they remove my content. i highly suggest everyone else does this as well.
often i get people (or journalists) asking me if i work for those publications and if they’ll give me a foot in the door and i usually behave like a terrible lunatic so i poison the brand that stole from me. i also encourage you to do this.
e: also dont listen to the idiot above suggesting a class action lawsuit, they’re within their legal right to do so bc twitter allows them the right to use anything you post on there without your explicit permission. that’s what you sign up for when you sign up for an account on twitter. just bc its legally fine doesnt mean its not morally bankrupt
anyone on these interwebs wanna talk about……… clowns?
Hey d’you want to know why some clowns are scary?
i am definitely apprehensive but sure i would like to know
So I learned to be a clown briefly in grade 7. And here’s the thing, clowning is taking the worst aspects of yourself and amplifying them to the point of hilarity (It’s quite good for self-esteem, actually). But here’s the thing, some people try to make their clown a happy clown when they themselves aren’t a happy person, and that is, technically, lying. And our brains are REALLY REALLY GOOD at detecting lies, so warning bells go off. And therefore we get scared.
TL:DR, the only scary clowns are the ones who are lying.
“the only scary clowns are the ones who are lying” is a mood and im not sure how but it really really is
please tell me the wildest shit that happened in homestuck’s fanbase, its like listening to old tales that can’t be true but are.
Well there was the girl who nearly killed herself by soaking in a bathtub full of vodka and grey sharpies to try and dye her skin for her troll cosplay. And the fact that a bunch of fans sent the creator a MASSIVE horse dildo that later ended up in the comic. And the two people who spent $10,000 dollars a piece to have their OC’s appear for one frame and be immediately killed. And the one time a homestuck flash update ended up DDoSing newgrounds by accident. And the totally irregular update schedule made it so there was an application developed to tell you when the comic updated. The culture around homestuck is really surreal to look back on just for the sheer volume of alternate universes and fans works and in jokes and subcultures that developed within one fandom. It really makes me wonder if anyone will be able to capture that level of obsessive enthusiasm again. Like people joke about Steven universe being the new homestuck and I can see some parallels but that fandom still seems way smaller and way less messed up than homestuck at it’s peak.
It wasn’t just internet concentrated either, it pretty much set up a lot of standards and practices for conventions today. In-characters panels were no where near as popular until Homestuck popularized them and now there’s ones for every fandom out there, versus only a scattered few (mostly Hetalia) before Homestuck had 5 going at any given con. The concept of a “draw party” was also a Homestuck invention, I believe, draw parties being midnight meetups at dead parts of the con center where people sat around, trading art cards and generally hanging out but with the common theme of them all being Homestuck fans. “Gotta go fast” and “first” took on whole new levels because as soon as a new design were released the first person to put together a cosplay for it got an intense amount of notoriety, mainly because it was generally just a few hours after the design appeared. Hell, I was once at a con where Homestuck updated on Friday and the next morning someone had made the cosplay in their hotel room and wore it to the con.
Sadly there were also downsides which is where the crazy stories come from. Homestuck was something absolutely new because it was a perfect storm of being huge, having almost all characters you could cosplay require body paint, and having a really disproportionate amount of fans being very young and inexperienced at how conventions worked.
Many conventions put limits on body-paint after Homestuck got popular because of young, inexperienced cosplayers not sealing their makeup and tarnishing convention centers. Going to a small con that forbids body paint? Homestuck is why. Homestuck became feared at a lot of cons because a non-consensual hug from anyone at a con is awkward and shitty, but if it was from a Homestuck fan you ran the risk of having grey stains all over your costume, and I had seen it happen to people on multiple occasions. Homestuck was also the first fandom to finally force conventions start making rules and limitations on fan-run photoshoot gatherings, which they had previously just ignored or discouraged all together. Homestuck shoots were so big conventions had to start working with them. The Saturday photoshoot at Otakon that Alex and I ran at Homestuck’s peak had an estimated over 700 attendees, and the next year was the year Ota started regulating their photoshoots through official channels.
Speaking of that photoshoot and crazy stories, Michael Guy Bowman and Tavia Morra, two of the most prominent members of Homestuck’s music team at the time, literally showed up on a whim with a guitar and asked Alex and I if they could perform a three-song set in the middle of the shoot, then came back for the next day’s shoot in their Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido costumes and did it again.
Don’t even get Alex started on how she ran in-real-life Promstuck events in Manhattan for years with official venues, decorations and literal tickets.
Being in Homestuck for the time I was there was an incredibly surreal experience, because having been going to conventions for years before Homestuck, and having been somewhat in the center of these events (Homestuck was the only fandom where I was considered a “BNF”), I can still see the way Homestuck has changed aspects of fandom events at cons. I was in one of the first in-character Homestuck panels back in the summer of 20fucking11 and ended up being in some incredibly popular ones in 2012-13 that still get hits on YouTube today. Alex and I’s model for photoshoots are still being used by friends and people who we don’t even know who run other fandom’s events. Some cons I had reached out to so I could get official approval to run photoshoots of hundreds of people are still using my model and system to regulate shoots at their events years later. Hell, by the time I was hitting my peak along with Homestuck I was going to 10 conventions a year and running an average of 3 photoshoots per con, not to mention an average of 2 in-character panels per weekend that I was either in or running. At some of the cons I attended staff knew me so well because I had to secure the shoot details in advance and had so many panels under my name they had my number listed under “in case of Homestuck issue call her” because Homestuck was a category of attendee cons literally had to separate from other attendees and learn to anticipate ahead of time. I will emphasize, I was never on staff, they just knew me as the liaison for the massive hoard of grey 13 year olds that scared the shit out of them.
When people who have been in the fandom five years like me try to emphasize how big Homestuck was we’re not just talking haha it was huge, Homestuck fundamentally changed the landscape of conventions for years and a lot of those changes stayed.
OHH MAN PROMSTUCK, the final event clocked nearly 500 attendees and cost roughly $12,000 when the whole thing was wrapped. That’s barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this sort of discussion though.
Homestuck was a phenomenon because with frequent updates and no defined update schedule, the hype train never stopped. Frequently fandoms will go through phases of an explosion of content and then a resting period, which can easily be tracked by when new content appears. With things like TV shows, video games, or even most webcomics, having a schedule means you could tell when everyone was going to be freaking out, and the subsequent planning around that meant the hype train could be quantified. The problem with Homestuck was those curves couldn’t be tracked, especially because there was NEVER any warning what KIND of content we were getting. One day could be an update dropped at 5 AM EST that was two kids pelting each other with fruit. 4 hours later we could get a flash that killed 17 people. Then it could be THREE DAYS before another update where haha it was retconned that was a dream none of those people are dead. It was fucking anarchy. Sure there was a WAY to define the plot but knowing what was going on or what was coming at any given moment was fucking impossible, and the break between these updates is what spawned “update culture”.
The thing with update culture is that most content creators are aware of, and plan content updates around, the idea of what the fans will be feeling and thinking once that content is done being distributed. For TV shows, episodes are released with beginnings, middles, and ends- a narrative arc that allows people to start thinking about media the way the creator wants them to, leading them along with little trails of plot and puzzles to solve. But Homestuck’s updates weren’t planned like that, because they came in chunks of whenever it was done, a carry-over from the original Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format. Because of this, people were theorizing about thing that’d be fixed in the literal next page, but because we didn’t have that information, the weirdest shit started being produced. It also didn’t help that Homestuck has some fucking weird shit happen in it! And sometimes fan theories wouldn’t resurface until literal YEARS down the line (Tricksters, anyone??) and people would be screaming and throwing themselves on the floor. There was no predictability, and therefore ANYTHING WAS VALID. And it created an incredibly interesting, though HORRIBLY chaotic space, that by god, was so much fun. Homestuck was a large-scale production media produced like a fanfiction author and because of the size of the audience lead to PANDEMONIUM on a scale that can’t be easily replicated.
Like it’s not really appropriate to say “oh x is the new Homestuck” because the very nature of Homestuck’s creation and population ensures there will never BE another phenom like it. The landscape of fandom, due to Homestuck, has changed, because update culture can’t exist without the perfect storm of described attributes that this comic had- that now no one else can replicate because Homestuck caused people to move away from that style of storytelling BECAUSE of the hectic fandom! It all feeds into itself. (Sort of like the story of this comic, honestly.) The Homestuck fandom experience will likely never happen again because of the way Homestuck shaped the fan scene. And that’s cool to know about!
Also I feel I should clarify on some of the above points. To begin, they’re all fucking true. – The sharpie dyeing story is unfortunately real. It’s original source is 4chan, the OP posted it on their personal tumblr blog (which for some reason still routes to my page if you google it). It can be found here. – The horse dildo was also real. It was sent as a joke because of a series of horse dick jokes mentioned in the comic; for those not in the know about Homestuck, there’s a character who talks a lot about horses and their rippling muscles. Hussie included it as a find-able item in a later walk-around minigame flash. – Two people did in fact donate $10,000 to the Homestuck kickstarter to have their fantrolls be canon and then murdered. While I don’t personally know the story of the female fantroll, the one in the top hat (Nektan Whelan) was actually made by an American Army veteran who read Homestuck while deployed in Iraq. He credited it was part of what helped him stay positive during active deployment. I can’t find the link to this conversation because it was on formspring like 4 years ago but if anyone has the link, let me know, I’d be curious to have it archived. – The Homestuck flash in question that killed Newgrounds was Cascade. Hussie recorded that at that time he received over 1.2 million unique pageviews trying to access it at once, world-wide. It also crashed the main Homestuck site and forums, then megaupload, and (for a VERY short time), Twitter and Livestream, because people started streaming it and tweeting the links. Someone made a comic about how that experience felt and as someone who was there screaming at Newgrounds to let me in, I can promise it’s accurate. – The update notifier was a godsend, and people would design specific macros, sounds, and images for their notifiers. It became a mini-culture in itself how you heard about the update. For a long time, I used to make tumblr posts about it. Update culture, and how fast you got to the update, was so real.
Anyway, hi, I’ve been in the Homestuck fandom for more than 5 years now, talk to me about it. It’s been a hell of a ride.
Even if you’re not into Homestuck the fandoms cultural significance is fascinating
Honestly get vaginas and ovaries out of feminist art, like??? Not everybody is a cis girl, tiffany the terf, go back 2 making wooden vaginas on etsy
Okay honestly OP of this post is young enough to be forgiven a little ignorance, but the fact that I’m seeing this reblogged by people who I know should know better is making my eye twitch.
Vaginas are a heavily stigmatised body part in and of themselves. The fact that vaginas have historically been believed to belong exclusively to women is obviously the driving force behind the stigma, but that stigma has well and truly gotten strong enough to detach itself from gender – people who would swear they love and respect women as people still find vaginas viscerally icky.
This is a problem. It is a problem that kids in school are being given woefully incomplete, inadequate, unsafe sex ed because no one in the education system wants to mention the V-word. It is a problem that the field of gynaecology still lags so far behind other medical professions. It is a problem that sexually active adults around the world would rather risk ovarian cancer than face the humiliation of exposing their genitals to a doctor. It is a feminist problem, a major player in the ‘women’s bodies are gross and dirty and inadequate’ field, although clearly cis women and trans men and trans women and nonbinary AFAB folks are all impacted differently by it.
There is absolutely, 100% a problem in the world at large, and in the feminist movement specifically, with people eliding genitals with gender identity. There is absolutely a shitty TERFy push to lock trans women out of our communities and that’s something we should all as feminists be on guard against. But the solution to the problem is not ‘stop drawing icky vaginas’, like fuck, what is this, the monthly shareholder meeting of Conservatives ‘R Us?
For as long as vaginas are held to be an inherently shocking and gross and taboo feature of human anatomy, representing them in art will be a valuable feminist act. It’s not about who does or doesn’t have a vagina – it’s about the fact that those of us who do have vaginas are suffering for it and would like that to stop.
Fucking Christ, feminists, keep drawing vaginas. Draw vaginas until your wrists ache. Draw vaginas until we have obliterated the last person in the world who thinks that vaginas are dirty and shameful and should be kept private. Print out this post and draw a vagina on it and send it back to me, I don’t give a fuck. Just keep drawing vaginas, because apparently the world still finds them so disgusting that credible self-identified progressives are now joining the fight to keep them under lock and key.
if cisgender vaginas bother you so much, go draw some trans vaginas! men can be feminist AND have feminist vaginas. problem solved.
I love kids they’re all like.. “when i grow up i’m gonna be an astronaut and a chef and a doctor and an olympic swimmer” like that self confidence! That drive! That optimism! Where does it go
It gets destroyed by adults not believing in you and telling you to pick a realistic career. And by society creating all these obstacles to the point that you’re too tired to try.
But they’re not really unrealistic, SOMEBODY is going to be an olympic swimmer and it might as well be you.
Actually I want to talk about this a little more than I did, because olympic swimming is incredible and works perfectly to talk about attaining goals.
I used to be a varsity swimmer, and I was damn good, but I was forced into it by my parents and completely lost my love for it and therein my drive. But in high school I was swimming against such talented swimmers like Olympic Swimmer Missy Franklin. I’ve met her, and the main difference between her and me was that I was strong but had no passion, but she was strong BECAUSE she had passion.
And I could have been good, really good, maybe even Olympic good. I even have the predisposition for it, been swimming since I was 2 years old, have a mom who was almost an olympic swimmer. Missy didn’t have either of those things, she just wanted it, loved it, had been doing it for a long time, and decided she was going to kick ass at it.
Right, that’s great and all, but I completely missed my opportunity to be an olympic swimmer, yeah? and can never achieve those dreams I had as a kid? No, not even though. There was this whole thought that female athletes peak when they’re 17 years old and lose their skills quickly after that, and male athletes peak around 19. But then Olympic Swimmer Dara Torres shows up. She was an olympic swimmer when she was 17, 21 and 25. Pretty normal age for retirement. She had a few kids. She kicked butt at being a mom.
And then at 33 years old she decides she’s bored or something gets back in shape and kicks so much ass at the trials that she lands herself on the Olympic Team ONCE AGAIN. And then 8 years later, she decides, heck I’m 41 now, no one has ever made the olympic swim team as old as I am, I want to get in shape yet again and teach these children how sports work.
And she still has the record for oldest US Olympic Swimmer, not even any men have beat out that record.
So basically what I’m saying is you could be an olympic swimmer, you really could be. And there are obviously a lot of things stopping you and trying to get in your way: your brain, society, too much chocolate cake for example. But if you really dedicate yourself to it and love it with all of your heart you could, you really could.
And lets say olympic swimming isn’t your jam? That’s cool too. There isn’t a single skill in this world that you can’t learn if you absolutely love it and want to. Any skill you want is going to take time. There are countless famous people who started learning a skill after 20, 30, 40, or even 50. Not a single person has even been president under age 35 (most likely because you’re not allowed to be, but there’s a reason for that). Whatever you want to do you’re probably going to be bad at first, and I’m talking really shitty.
Van Gogh got started in his 20′s and was thought to have no artistic talent at first and was forced to sit in the back of classrooms where the worst artists in the class sat. So yeah you’ll probably be bad, like really bad and everyone including you will think you’re bad. If you stick with it though, if you’re willing to work for years and years, if you keep loving it after all the pain it’s given you,
then you might just paint Starry Night.
#looks like there’s still time for me to learn how to draw
… YES. As someone who started drawing at 35 and who always was like: ‘eh, I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life, but I would love to be able to’ this is near and dear to my heart. If you want to draw, start drawing. Keep drawing. Be shit at drawing at first. Keep it up, doodle things on scraps but also draw stuff you don’t think you can draw. Challenge yourself, you will be surprised what you can do. It will be frustrating at times, but it will also be awesome. It is SO much a matter of practice and dedication, not talent.
This applies for writing, too.
Don’t ever think for a second that it doesn’t! Want to start writing? Then write! You will get better the more you write, the more often, and you will improve, all of the time, as long as you dedicate yourself.
And don’t forget music.
My dad is in his late 50′s, decided he wanted to learn guitar, and is going for it. He’s learning finger picking style. He sounds good, even though he has no natural musical talent and no training. (He says he doesn’t sound good, but we’re working on that little self-esteem issue.)
Meanwhile, me? I have a lifetime of musical training, excellent ear, and I’m just learning basic chords on guitar. Been self-teaching longer than he has, and technically speaking dad’s waaaay better.
