I made a thing

HELP A NERDY CONTENT CREATOR OUT

Hi! Yes I’m aware that I have been consistently starting up then leaving this page which is also the only thing I’ve been consistent with :P

However, this post is rather important.

Jay, a content creator who talks comics and is better known as ThePandaRedd, his partner Scarlett, TheActorBat, and their friend were sideswiped last night on their way to Rose City Comic Con.

BEFORE PEOPLE START FREAKING OUT, EVERYONE IS OKAY. Jay has confirmed that on their TikTok.

But while Panda & Co. are fine, his car unfortunately is not. In fact, it’s actually likely the thing’s been totaled. He and Scarlett have set up a GoFundMe to help pay for all the mega fuckery that’s occurred in the past 24 hours. If you can, please donate. If you’re like me and Jay where money is fucking nonexistent because the government and capitalism as a whole is a bitch, even something as simple as a reblog or a posted link on your other socials would help. Anything y’all can do is greatly appreciated.

Donate if you can. Spread the word. Help a comic nerd out so they can go back to being, well, a nerd.

Stay safe, stay geeky, and C.A.F.E

I need to make something other than a meme

not only does content look different from photoshop to tumblr but it also looks different from desktop to mobile and also looks different on different monitors. bite maim kill stab!

the tension between making a set before the final episode of a thing drops and 95% of the fandom vanishes .5 seconds later and actually waiting for the final episode to drop because what if relevant content 🤡

Tales from the Content Corner #1

I've been wanting to do a series for awhile where I talk about what its like being a wanna be content creator, I've seen so many people talk about tips and tricks and what stuff to buy but the actual social and mental health aspect? No body talks about it.

So whilst I would love to do a youtube or tiktok series on it all, I physically can't without ruining MY mental health cause I am simply too busy. But you know what I can do? Blog on tumblr like its 2012! Will this do good? NO! Am I going to advertise this anywhere else? PROBERBLY NOT! But I'm gonna do it and those who do see it might find it helpful.

With the context outta the way, let's get into the meat and potatoes of this post and my current mental crisis;

Feeling inadequate in comparison to others around you!

It's inevitable that, in any environment really, you will at some point start comparing yourself to your peers. In content creation though, I think its even worse than normal. It's like seeing the popular girl at school and wishing you were them, but instead of just your year group of something its thousands of people around the world.

Content creators only exist so long as people watch them. So to keep being content creators, to keep doing what we love to do, people need to watch us. It can be hard to get pass those first few weeks, or even months, when you first start and have 0 viewers.

What might be worse, though, is when you gain a substantial following and viewer base only for it to... disappear. And this happens to everyone, big and small, all at different time of their content creator journey. You see OG creators, like captn sparkles or inthelittlewood, who got millions of views every video just a few years back only to now a days get 20k.

My point is; lapses in growth or drops in views can happen to everyone at anytime. When your small tho, those drops feel so much bigger. You work so hard to get to 10, 20, 30 max views per stream only for it to suddenly disappear. It really sucks, but you can always come back from it, it just takes a lot of effort. Sometimes, having already worked so hard and lost it already, it makes creators not want to try anymore.

Algorithms constantly change, as do our lives, and when your not big enough to do content creation full time it becomes harder and harder to gain back that scrap of popularity. Or maybe you have yet to even get a boost to your following, maybe your new and are struggling to keep going when nothing seems to be working. It really sucks.

What makes it harder, and is the whole point of this post, is seeing others who feel so close to your level advance beyond you. I wouldn't call it jealousy, I personally feel so proud and happy when my mutuals grow and gain awesome opportunities, but it can be hard to watch. It can be hard to see them succeed and yourself not, it makes you wonder what your doing wrong or if you were even doing anything right in the first place.

So, how do you get through that?

Best advice I've found; learn from those around you, do what you can to improve and keep doing what you love doing.

Let's break that down real quick, starting with learning from those around you. It can be really helpful to deeply examine what other creators are doing to grow and try to figure out how it can make you grow. Don't copy people, obviously, but seeing what formats or things are helping others can be really useful when trying to grow yourself!

Doing what you can to improve really depends on your situation, we don't all have the money for a new mic or the time to spend editing daily tiktoks, its about figuring out what is attainable for you at the moment and doing what you can with what you have. You can also try to examine your own content from the perspective of a viewer -- if you were a chatter watching your stream, would you enjoy it? -- or getting feedback from others.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, do what you love. If you love content creation, keep doing it! If it starts to drain you mentally, emotionally and even physically? It might be time to stop, or take a break. There's no shame in it, we all need breaks sometimes, and if you stop enjoying making content you don't have to do it anymore. So long as you enjoy what your doing that's all that really matters, even if it doesn't always seem that way.

In conclusion;

Learn from those around you, evaluate yourself and what you want to produce, prioritise your own health and remember feeling like this is incredibly normal, especially in the content creator space.

I'm not sure how often I'll be posting these, there are a lot of things I'd love to talk about to do with content creation and this has made me feel better about my own inadequacies, but we'll just have to see tehe.

i’ve started comparing a few of my gifs between gifv and mp4. i’ve mostly gone through the more basic sets so far but it looks like the conversion to mp4 also alters the colours??

GIF screenshot:

MP4 screenshot

it’s subtle but it looks like the mp4 version has a yellow tint now?? and it definitely makes gif way more blurry and you can clearly see the loss of detail in the mp4 version :/

It's the fact that I have to film tomorrow and yet I wanna stream why am I like this

You want to know why making content on my days off is so hard? Because my neighbors know I'm home and pick the worst time to bring me my mail that accidentally got delivered to them or check on me. Look old man, I had almost no clothes on, a glass plug in my ass, and was literally just grinding a stuffed dinosaur 2 seconds ago. I appreciate you greatly but I've got to go now 😅. I appreciate them, I really do but their timing is awful.

Me: wants to dress up cute and make content

Also me: doesn’t want to get out of the blanket nest

notes on the edit i stayed up all night making:

gif set that took thirty minutes:

me:

The life of a content creator

I like writing so much more than filming but so many platforms prioritise video so it performs so much better 😭

Looking nice and full today 😋

#oh mood#i would add than fandom moving so quickly ALSO means that the pressure to binge is STILL super strong (at least for me)#because when a show gains any traction in fandom you have a few days at most before every single major reveal/development/etc. in the show#is all over your dash or timeline#so it's just 🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪#hollywood bullshit

Your tags! Oh but so much, now you have to watch the film/series in a day and quickly make parallels or create the important scenes. Otherwise we will say that you have plagiarized someone who did it before. While you can't do anything about it. If you too, you had the idea and have a life.

It is truly so frustrating!! Fandom's ever shrinking attention span combined with the dearth of content that is IMMEDIATELY available in full HD has made it so much harder to stay sane as someone who likes making gifs. I got into gifmaking because there were things I wanted to see for characters I love that weren't getting made by other people. And, despite the extremely specific suffering that our current media/fandom landscape has created, I truly do enjoy giffing. Studying the things that my faves have appeared in on a frame-by-frame level has helped me notice new things about them and their projects, it's made the gaps between appearances (or since their final appearances) more bearable, and has served as an outlet for my own creativity. 

Yet, all that said, it is still frustrating and somewhat demoralizing to know that while gif making hasn’t really gotten any easier or faster, the amount of fandom engagement you’re likely to get has drastically decreased, especially on anything made outside the increasingly small Peak Engagement Window™. (Which, for whatever small number of non-gifmakers might actually be reading this, can be as small as a few hours and is rarely longer than 48 hours).

I don’t want my gifmaking to turn into an endless quest for notes, so I try to ignore this and just make things when I make them. But, at the same time, it is a super weird feeling to know that, due to occasionally having an offline life not always compatible with concentrating my Photoshop based OMG NEW STUFF behaviors into a very small, almost always middle of the night, window of time, the external rewards of anything I make is going to be dramatically lessened.

Further, and I think more importantly, not every gifset idea comes to you on the first viewing. Sometimes there are things that I only notice while rewatching (and not always on the second rewatch) or months or even years later when some new piece of the story is revealed and helps me recontextualize parts of what I’ve already seen. I love it when a rewatch unlocks a new way to present or explore the movies and characters I love; I love giffing parallels I just noticed on rewatch #2143279 of the Captain America Cinematic Universe or finally figuring out how to execute an idea that has been rotting on my gif ideas doc for ages. And, while I know that Tumblr’s userbase has shrunk over time and that MCU fandom in particular is not what it was in 2019, it is still deeply frustrating and annoying to know that, unless deemed Funny™ or possibly involving some level of brand new just dropped 3 minutes ago content, even the best received “Older” Material gif set has a much lower ceiling than it once did. (And, in my opinion, a ceiling that has sunk must faster than the size of this site’s userbase or any particular fandom).

So, yeah, giffing great, but giffing on 2023 tumblr also an exercise in frustration and pressure to make Bad Decisions regarding your own sleep schedule ¯\_(ツ)_/¯!!

People who don’t understand how archival standards work shut up about AO3 forever challenge.

“All fanworks and fannish works by authors who want to be on the archive and whose work does not break US law” is a set of standards. They may not match your standards for your fanfic archive, but yes— your archival standards can, in fact, be “all of it” if you have money for the server costs. Also most archives dealing with oral histories and texts have rules for creators to remove their work from the archive. None of these complaints make AO3 not an archive.

I’m so tired of people pretending they understand how archival (or any!) collection development works.