#beebzblog — Public Fediverse posts

There's something that just kinda clicked to me just now about the nature of art. Whether we admit to it or not, art is an act of expressing yourself. It can be as detailed as a painting or as simple as a one word poem. As soulful as a eulogy or as casual as an insult. We can define our own meaning to what art is at any moment, but this is the way I see it. And as someone who has been repeatedly told and oftentimes shown that my voice, my feelings, my comfort doesnt matter, is it any wonder why I feel this lack of meaning with my art?

Should it be any mystery how I took the connection being discarded by the one person I trusted the most in this whole world in an instant and came up with the idea that I no longer had value. 15 Years with someone you met just on the brink of puberty, who had saved your life in more ways than one. We were almost at a point where our friendship was hitting the halfway point of my entire life. Her loss leading directly into being homeless in 2024, one the streets in the middle of January, well I wont belabour the point. The way I was treated changed me as a person and a system. It's like I died and finally getting housing that Summer after months of torment was simply reanimating my corpse.

I often feel a lot of shame that that happened to me. I had considered my first homelessness to be a "noble sacrifice". It was a voluntary choice I made when I was 19 so I could gain independence from my severly abusive mother. But not only was I protected by getting into the emergency shelter immediately and being a youth, this time I had no way of making money and was fighting for disability, and my partner at the time knew that. So then came all the shame and gravity that came with being on the street and treated literally less than human. I still kept drawing, and I still do it, but have often lately felt a struggle to connect with it, unless it was vent art, which I was always reluctant to do because not marinating in the feelings felt a lot more appealing.

And then it hit me. I continue to feel the shame and dehumanization lessons I had to suffer, not only throughtout my whole life anyway, but the added intensity that being street homeless gave. If nobody gave a crap about what I had to say when my life was on the line, why on earth would they care about anything else from me. And this is not to discount my friends and community who have loved and kept me afloat. But the conflicting messages of only getting positive feedback through the computer and being completely disregarded in person, I often feel like believing my friends is only deluding myself. This is often the first sign of me going into a depression induced psychosis episode.

It's no wonder I seek so desperately for validation and approval online, because when every other avenue demeans you into nothing, you either latch onto what keeps you going or succumb to despair. It's hard to have hope because I keep getting all the wrong lessons because of whats going on in the world that keeps directly keeping me down. and then I go through all this to see all the most violent fighting going on about the stupidest bullshit, i.e. puritanical censorship of fiction. Why does being allowed to express myself mean so much to me? It's literally whats keeping me alive. The promise and hope of being able to make more art. The longing for me to pursue the projects I spent my life over. To take everything that helped me escape the brutal reality, and maybe help someone else escape theirs too.

this message was brought to you by medical marijuana and playing YunYun! Rhythmn Psychosis. Rim de Lacent!

P.S. "Escaping reality is a crutch" not only is an ableist statement, but it's an easy thing to say when your reality isn't a bullet hell and your hitbox is half the screen.

What keeps me alive should keep me alive. I'm not hurting anyone and I put warnings on things, nobody is walking into something they dont want to see if I can help it. But thats beside the point. The seemingly simple things that I hold close to my heart because they help me find value in myself. Any I need to cling to everything I can to keep going. Even if sometimes its because making my friends happy make me happy. And that should be okay too. When my own identity has been demeaned so much that I dont even know what I want from myself, I need to allow myself grace and let myself take little steps.

So much of my thinking gets blocked by all these arbitrary rules my mother placed on me. In fact, a lot of the self soothing techniques I would do would just be bowled over by her and essentially brainwashing me out of healthy coping mechanisms. Like bruh. But yeah, my reality blows, and its hard to keep going, but I need to start questioning my self meanness a lot more. It's hard when its so thickly reinforced but augh. I just hate having to argue with headmates over it </3

#BeebzBlog #BeebzArt #traumarecovery #cptsd #transweedDotEmoji #abuseSurvivor #homelessness #artBlock #depression

You have to give in to the fact you already know people are laughing at you

Creating becomes hard when it couples with panic attacks

#BeebzBlog #BeebzArt #ArtBlock #ComicEssay #traumarecovery #poetry

My disabled friend, Staff Lead of Aethy @tox, is at risk of Homelessness because of abusive roommates and is in critical need of your help. Gofundme

2 Years ago today I was in his same situation, and ended up on the streets with my cat in the dead of Winter. That experience still haunts me greatly, my heart pounds just recalling all I went through. Tox doesnt deserve this. If you were there for me in 2024 and know the horrors I experienced, please help and keep Tox from that fate.

If you can't donate, boosting and telling your friends can help get eyes to other people. If you're able, offer commissions in exchange for Gofundme contributions. Contact your friends who know housing laws, have experienced similar situations or have connections with organizations or programs that could help him. Please, knowledge is just as valuable.

You may not know my friend Tox, but if you know me, if you remember what I went through. Please help him for my sake. For the sake of all the good he's done not only for #aethy, but #CreativeClash and #fandom at large

RE: https://aethy.com/@tox/115856101831150522

#BeebzBlog #mutualaid #disabledmutualaid #gofundme #homeless #evictionrisk #housingaid #signalboost #legalaid #charityart #fundraiser

I originally wrote all this in a series of sporadic discord messages to a friend who was concerned about whether to hashtag his art in the first place. I used to do a lot of independent sleuthing and research on my own for years trying to figure out the best ways to build my audience. Judging by how sometimes people get amazed at how many other people I know, maybe there is some weight to my words? Heh, but humblebrag aside I am extroverted to begin with.

Don't sweat it everyone. Theres always luck involved too. Dont delete your stuff. Repost if you wanna. who cares! In my personal opinion, microblogging social media platforms were meant to be snapshots of the present and are hard to keep "clean" while still cultivating an engaged audience unless you're already established. But at the end of the day, I'm still just some guy and you canb take or leave whatever I say with no issue. Go for what makes things click for you and dont be afraid to experiment. Ciao.

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #Aethytips #Artsupport #postingtips

Even with all this in mind, it's easy to feel as though hashtagging is still overwhelming because of everything you have to look up. However, if you consistently draw or post things with overlapping themes, the process for tagging new posts can become easier as you get a more assembly line approach to it. When I tag my art posts, my thought process is tagging for my Constants,. basic Variants, and Key, Traits.

Constants would be what is always consistent for my character I'm posting for and my organization. #BeebzArt #TristeMiedo #catboy #OC.

Variants are what I use for what I think would be the most commonly searched objective truth about the drawing #furry #fursona #anthro #kemono.

Traits are pretty much anything else that I think would be the appealing thing someone would look for that would be appreciated in my work for one reason or another. It's also to help peoples filters who dont want to see these traits properly hide the posts so I dont make anyones day worse, heh.#femboy #nudity #ass *#chubby

Image attached for a practical example of how i did this :3

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia #fediadvice #filters #cw #contentwarning #blacklists #alt4me

In my opinion, its good practice to evaluate your posts and define the objective aspects of it. As an Example this could be Gender, Species, Kink, Theme, but those categories can be whatever you want. (It is at least good to CW and/or hashtag kinks or themes people may like to avoid, because even though your post would be filtered, not only does it not get you flack from someone who didn't wanna see it, you intrigue people who ARE interested to have a look)

If you had fanart from a show with 2 characters in a ship you like, the objective truths about the art you can tag for would be Name of the show, character names, ship name, or even what AU the picture is! Its your blog you can use hashtags to find your posts again too!

For organization sake I try to put the categories of my hashtag all together in order so I'd have something like Numbers, Alphabet, Double Digits It'd be like #1 #2 #3 #a #b #c #10 #25 #42 This is completely optional and order does not matter for visibility, its just something i like to do to keep organized

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #fandom #fandommeta #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia #fediadvice #filters #cw #contentwarning #blacklists

To figure out which tags you want to use, it can be a combination of trying to puzzle out the correct format of the tag or using other people's posts to hop between the relevant ones. For example, if you are tagging fanart for a show with spaces in it, what is more often used? Would it be #The_Show or #TheShow? Same goes for characters. Is it #Character_Name , #CharacterName or #TheShowCharacterName

What I usually do is check my first instincts of a tag and evaluate the frequency of them so I can make my own judgements of which I'd like to use for my own blog archives and visibility. From there, I'll see if the posts in that tag have adjacent posts, as other people often will do what we said in the last post. Use different hashtags for the same concept. Especially in cases of fandom work, this is an easy way to gather intel on what the community is using the most.

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #fandom #fandommeta #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia

The effectiveness of Hashtags can usually be broken down into how often people post to them. High frequency tags will have more posts with less time in between the dates of the posts while lower frequency tags will typically have less posts with more time between each post. Middle frequency obviously are somewhere in-between, sometimes fluctuating even.

There's a tradeoff when it comes to posting with a high or low frequency hashtag. If you post with a high one, you'll have a larger audience to see your work, but a potential downside is if it is really active it could be bumped down quickly. If you post to a low used tag, you'll remain in the forefront for longer, but not as many people may use the tag when they search. In my opinion, the best way to split the difference is use the tags you personally like for the same thing, but of various frequencies. E.g. #Water #Agua #H2O

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #TaggingHelp #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #SEO #socialmedia

There's a lot of things to consider when it comes to putting hashtags on your art, but it can often be overwhelming. Sometimes people might feel discouraged from using them because of bigger social medias purposefully placing posts with hashtags lower in the ever mysterious algorithm despite these sites having created the use cases of it in the first place.

Luckily, on the fediverse (or at least mastodon in my experience) there is no almighty algo to punch your posts dead in the water because you dared to try to become seen. So the first advice I have at all is, if you want a higher chance of getting more followers, engagement and even potential clients, is use hashtags! Try to ease yourself out of the hesitation and utilize these tools for the purposes they were meant for in the first place.

#BeebzBlog #ArtAdvice #ArtPsychology #Blog #Aethytips #Feditips #hashtag #taggingishard #socialmedia

How to Archive Your Text Posts on Aethy

Setup

1. On firefox, download this extensionhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-pagination-webext-fork/
2. (Optional) download the hide images extension to make the following steps easier and faster to load https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-hide
3. Change your preferences (The gears to the left of your icon) and in the"Posts" tab, uncheck collapsed posts and set Content Visibility to visible (you can change it back after the archiving)

Loading

1. Navigate to your hide boosts page https://aethy.com/@YOURNAME/hide_boosts4a. (Optional) Turn on The Hide Images extension on this page to make the future loading faster (The images will still be downloaded)
2. Right click on the "Hide Boosts" tab and go to the re-pagination menu item, and click "Load All"
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page or press the "End" key to activate the infinite scroll feature. (If you see a purple loading bar in the top left repeatedly filling, you've done it right)
4. Get a snack, walk away, wait for it to do its thing (You're allowed to switch tabs and it will load in the background) Sometimes you may have to press the end key again for it to continue loading, but just keep an eye out for your first post or oldest post you want to save

Saving

1. Once you've reached the beginning of your blog, right click somewhere on the page and select "Save Page As" and look for a place to save it onto your computer
2. Once it has downloaded, open the htm file in firefox. 9a. It's gonna look janky as hell right now, especially if you've had emojis in your username, it'll be between every post. To get rid of the excess images if you'd like, enter the files folder of the htm page (it will be in the same location as where you saved the htm file, just have all the media in its own folder with the same name)9b. You can safely delete all sfg files, duplicates or any other superfluous content you already have from the basic archive
3. Turn on "Reader View" either by clicking the icon in the url bar or pressing F9
4. CTRL + A and Ctrl + V (Select All and Paste) into a text editor of your choice (Drive, Obsidian, Notepad)

Voila, you have just archived all your text posts.

Additional Notes

• Why do this when you have the inhouse mastodon archive? If you take a look at the archive, they are json files and they fucking SUCK to try to navigate to look at all your posts in an easy format. And in the situation of bookmarks, they straight up only link to the posts, what good is that?
• This process will include Followers Only and Unlisted Posts but not replies from what I can tell. However, you can do this on anybody's page you have access to, on aethy or off.
• This guide is also meant to be performed from the aethy site itself. You should also be able to do this on pages via cubhub.social for any other page it federates with, once aethy is gone
• For reference of time this takes, I had 12,000 posts and used the hide images addon before starting the process. In the time it took to go to the bathroom and come back it had finished. All images were still downloaded into the files folder.

Final Thoughts

Fandom history is so important. With the state of crushing culture pushing us to further and darker corners away from each other, lost media is a heart breaking side effect of fractured communities. If you love someones posts, save them! You never know if one day it'll simply be gone. If you like looking back at your old time capsules, backup your activities! By keeping the memories of our resistance alive, we can keep going on.

#BeebzBlog #aethy #aethyrefugee #aethyexodus #strikethrough #fandom #fandomhistory #archivingguide #datahoarder