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lochrannn · 2 years

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Do you think that ao3 is the best platform for fanfiction writers or should there be some changes?

Hey OP, I’m gonna level with you, I was considering not answering this question at all because it feels a lot like I’m being dragged into disc horse that I have no real interest in participating in. But I’ll try and take this question at face value and in good faith and I’m genuinely sorry in advance if my tone drifts into the defensive.

My short answer is, hell yes!

For one, is there really any even comparable alternative? And secondly what changes should there even be made for authors specifically? I mean, I can store and sort my stories, people can indicate that they like them, write me comments. I can give information through tags that make them searchable for people looking for something like them. This is perfect! Would I love it if more people read my fics? Sure, but that’s not an Ao3 problem, that’s because I write for a small fandom ship in the absolute drought period between seasons. That’s on me. Ao3 is an archive, a library, it’s not their job to promote my stories. They make my stories just as accessible as other much worse and boring stories (in my personal, probably bad opinion) and they make my stories as accessible as much, MUCH better stories (in my personal, vey wise opinion). How people interact with the stories is entirely on fandom behaviour and how people find shit – whether through Ao3’s search functions or my own promotion on other platforms… tumblr for instance.

Now, I feel like, if this is about the Ao3 bad or Ao3 good conversation, the question should actually be, is it the best place for readers and should there be any changes made. And there I’d say, minor ones if any. This is always about the idea that Ao3 is somehow responsible for the content on their archive, and I wholeheartedly disagree. If they were a commercial operation (and please see this post about why they very much are not) I’d say they’d definitely be responsible for the content they make money off of, but they aren’t, so they’re not. Ao3 has an exceptional content filtering system, so though I’m sure there’s some heinous shit on there, because people are going to people, I’ve not actually come across anything, cause I can easily avoid it by not going looking for it. But what I find distasteful, the next person might find some artistic merit in or any kind of personal entertainment, and honestly, vice versa. And if a fic becomes big that’s usually because it gets attention elsewhere and then, I think, the discussion about it should happen on that platform, too (mind, I do believe people should feel free to go into the comments of a fic to tell the author off if they think they’ve done something really bad, while hopefully not being a total arsehole about it. But honestly, why bother engaging with something you find upsetting? Close that tab and use the tags to find the type of coffee shop AU that’s more to your taste). But I don’t believe that by content being available on Ao3, the people who run it endorse it or promote it. It’s just being stored there and it’s up to individual users how they want to interact with it.

And ultimately on what basis would anyone make a decision of what content is acceptable and what content isn’t? We’re all watching the internet being sanitised beyond recognition and functionality due to advertiser pressure and we’re rightfully appalled at nonsense like female presenting nipples. I’d much rather have a website where, if you are so inclined and go looking for it, you can find someone's FICTIONAL WRITING about incest and rape than the entire internet being rid of love and sex and queer stories and people boning aliens or sentient werewolves, and I just genuinely don’t see how we are ever going to get rid of one (though I’m not even sure we should) and hold on to the other. We can only ever learn to engage with this stuff responsibly and critically, or individually chose not to engage with it at all (which Ao3 makes very possible), but that’s not going to happen by simply making it all go away for everybody.

If there was one change I could suggest, it would simply be to make it easier to block authors whose stuff you just don’t want to see anymore (there is a script/site skin you can run, but you need to know it exists and it’s a tiny bit involved, you can find the info in this post. I've used it, it works). Like, if there’s an author who continuously tags stuff as your ship, for instance, and it’s just so they can brutally murder one of the love interests, then I think it’s understandable you don’t want to see them anymore (yes, this is why I went and found the script to block an author, and yes, I also understand how this is an incredibly minor complaint, compared to, say, legitimate complaints of perpetual racism in fic – and here I don’t mean discussions of racism or depictions of racism, cause that is my understanding for why the tag exists, so people can avoid that if they don’t want to read it, but rather conscious or unconscious racist attitudes within the writing).

So once more, wholeheartedly, thank fuck for Ao3 for protecting and storing transformative works and for not making it their job to be the arbiters of what is morally acceptable fiction. I hope that answers your question, OP.

#turns out i do have some feelings on this #but i don't have more than the ones i just expressed so i also have no interest in more of a discussion #i've seen all the arguments #this has been going on for years #i've come to my own conclusions

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bao3bei4 · 3 years

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kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right.

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one.

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked.

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did.

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction.

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere.

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015.

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found.

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you.

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom.

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people.

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right.

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age.

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible.

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses.

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad!

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare).

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever.

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about.

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story.

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.)

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf.

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes.

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god.

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair.

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah.

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010.

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it.

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu.

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video.

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories.

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably.

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious.

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to.

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended.

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see.

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down.

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not.

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place.

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine!

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them.

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.)

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad.

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again.

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies.

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

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robtblaze3288-blog · 5 years

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news-monda · 4 years

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jadelyn · 7 years

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Hi Jadelyn - I'm about a month and a half into an absolutely grueling job search. I've gotten a few interviews (which is progress for me), I know from a previous stint in an HR busy-work job that hiring takes time, and I feel like I've read every resume and cover letter advice post on the entire Internet, but it's really difficult not to feel discouraged. Any advice for keeping my chin up? What else could I be doing? (My field is communication/multimedia, if that makes a difference at all.)

Oh, love. Job searching is The Literal Worst. I want to smack people who joke about being unemployed like "at least you've got lots of free time" bitch I have been there and I would've traded all that "free time" plus a couple firstborn children (I mean, not mine? But a couple of them anyway) just to be relieved of the stress and burden that is job searching. It's that bad.So first, I'm sure if you've been reading All The Things about job searching you've already hit upon Ask A Manager, but if not, for the love of god go read her blog. Go through the archive of cover letter and resume posts. Read the comments, too - that is literally the only site on the entire damn internet where I would actively advise this lol - often people will add bits of industry-specific advice that Alison wouldn't have known to give. Her cover letter examples are the single most helpful thing on that topic I've ever found.But that doesn't really address the hard part, that discouragement. Because job searching, at its heart, is a months-long experience of constant rejection before you finally get to a "yes". Of course that wears on you! Rejection fucking sucks, and it's so easy to start to take it personally after awhile. There's not much I can say in the face of that, but what I can give you, here it is:*you already said it yourself, hiring takes time. Keep reminding yourself of that. I actually just pulled up my work email on my phone to look at the weekly recruiting report that I emailed the team today, because it has a column for "days open" for each job. My longest-open positions have been open for 216, 183, and 166 days. The first and third are branch manager positions (that 216 day one is under an area manager who is my literal least favorite to work with because he always drags his fucking feet like this, I hate hiring for him), the 183-day one is for a part time teller. It's taken this manager OVER SIX MONTHS SO FAR to try to find a part time teller! When I talk about doubling your estimate of when they should get back to you, I am not kidding. I am perhaps even understating the case a bit. So at a month and a half in, the first jobs you applied to may just now be looking at resumes lol. It's so hard to do, but be patient. Keep reminding yourself that the time of hiring managers does not move like the time of us mortals in the real world. A mere day passes for the hiring manager, and years have flashed by for us here. *that being said, don't wait by the phone for anyone on the assumption that they just haven't seen your resume yet and as soon as they do they'll probably call you, either. The only way to stay sane in a long job search is to apply and move on. You're probably keeping some kind of record of where you applied and when (and if you're not, you should be), so when you put in an application somewhere, note it down on your record, then move on and pretend it never existed at all. Otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy staring at your phone and willing it to ring. Use hobbies to distract you. Go binge watch all of Leverage before Netflix takes it away (btw fuck you Netflix). Don't dwell on the jobs stuff! *and here's the biggest thing, and the hardest one to remember: it's not about being the best applicant period. It's about being the *best fit* for the specific job.The company is not asking "who's the best worker" or "who's the best person". They're asking "who is most likely to be successful in this role?" because a successful employee helps the company and is happier and more likely to stay long-term. I've stopped short of applying to jobs that I'm eminently qualified for and which pay more than my current job, because the job descriptions were heavy on administrative work and I'm actively trying to escape the administrative dungeon. Could I do them? Sure. Would I do them well? Fuck yeah I would. Would I be successful in the long run? No, because I'd be unhappy and resentful and still looking for more. So if I applied for an HR assistant job, and I go in there as a rock star HR assistant with 4 years of experience and a degree and a certification already under my belt, and another candidate came in who was perhaps less experienced or just not an overachiever, who was competent but maybe not particularly ambitious, the company would be better served by hiring that other person, not me. Because while I might've been a huge asset to the department in the short term and worked out more efficient processes and upgraded their tech because I'm a self-starter blah blah blah, in a year or two I'd be expecting promotions and/or looking at higher level positions elsewhere, and our hypothetical competent but not spectacular employee might not have revolutionized their workflows or been the point person for a whole new HRIS implementation, but they would be going merrily along being perfectly good at their job with no expectation of change. Which is better for the company than having to go through the hiring shit all over again when I find something better and take off. So on paper, I'd be the "better candidate", but the better hiring decision would be to not hire me. So when you get turned down for a job, remember that it's not a reflection on your quality as a candidate. It just means someone else was, not a better candidate or a better employee, but a better fit for that specific job at that specific company at that specific time. Which is a reframing I've found really helpful as armor against the tendency to take job rejections personally.(and under no circumstances, ever, is a job rejection, or for that matter a missed promotion, or getting laid off or fired, or literally anything to do with bad stuff happening to you at work, a reflection on your quality as a person. We're culturally really bad about over-identifying ourselves with our jobs and it's super unhealthy. Your value as a person has fuck all to do with your place in the capitalist engine. Fuck that noise.)

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askmicrowaveayem · 7 years

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MAYEM: The Crossing Pt. 8

[Previous]

[Archive] [Cast]

It was disconcerting to see Goop like that, but Kid knew he needed it, and just tried to help make his friend comfortable. Once Goop was asleep for sure, he pulled out the phone and put it on silent before texting Alphys.

‘Hey. We’re in the world for a little. Any news?’

A greeting came quickly after.

‘Hey!!! ^__^ How are things!? Good news here! No prototype but I think I might have an idea? :D’

‘Things are fine. Just stopping in to catch a nap for a few hours. What’s your idea? (This is Kid, by the way)’

The phone proceeded to explode with text messages, all a bit on the rambling side with plenty of emotes and exclamation points. They had mentioned using magic to feel instead, which was what she was going to try and had been studying a lot of magic books to get a grasp on it and might have figured out how to use magic as a conductor through something like a thermometer to give the illusion of feeling what the equipment was reading. It was still on paper and nothing was concrete, but it was something.

Kid bore the tide as best he could, trying to keep up and once or twice managing to send a text asking for clarification.

Mostly, though, he was relieved.

Alphy sounded really confident she could do something with this.

Only once the lengthy explanation was finished did she repeat her earlier question.

‘So how are things going?? Is he doing okay??’

It took Kid a long minute to realize he wasn’t reading about the new theory anymore.

‘Things are okay. Just wanted to rest up while the going was good in case we got stuck in a crazy world next (knowing our luck.) Goop is okay. Something spooked him in the last world so he’s just trying to rest up and hopefully he’ll be feeling better soon, but that’s the worst of it.’

‘Oh no! u_u Did he tell you what happened?’

‘No, he’s being private. We did talk a little bit though, and I think it helped some’

‘Ok! Well tell him I’m here if he ever wants to talk too, okay? n_n;;’

Kid grinned at the message.

‘Will do. You’re a great friend, Alphys :) ‘

‘(Did I do the face right?)’

‘Yes that’s a good start! ^_^ I’ll teach you more if you want sometime? Gaster didn’t seem to ever really want to learn them but I don’t think he really gets into the whole social texting thing. ^_^;;

How are you doing too anyway?’

‘Goop is bitter and stuck in his ways. Teach me faces so I can send them to him through morse code and watch him get frustrated.’

Alphys was very happy to have someone new to teach emoticons to. She ran through all of them she could think of, giving descriptions of what they meant for each one.

There were a lot.

She was happy to ramble on and on and on about them, even giving a few internet history lessons with a few on their origins.

Oh goodness.

Well… Gaster was happy that she was confident and excited about emoticons?

He made a mental note of a few that were interesting and finally sent off a text saying he should probably go, as he had to take a nap too, but it was good to talk with her and he was glad she was doing well.

Alphys gave him a long-winded goodbye and wished them both well.

Goop was still fast asleep even when the conversation had finished. He didn’t often get to relax in his own world and in a form he didn’t have to concentrate on keeping up. The emotions from the day had left him pretty rough around the edges too, which only made him more exhausted.

Kid didn’t wake him. He had a feeling that pitstops like these might be a good thing to make fairly regularly, at this rate, especially now that they were running into more and more upsetting, dangerous worlds, and… worlds like the last two, which weren’t so dangerous but…

Well. Anything that made Goop break down like that wasn’t exactly easy to deal with, all the same.

So Kid just sat beside him, waiting patiently for him to wake on his own.

All in all Goop would sleep for a good six hours, far more than he usually did. When he woke the puddle would twitch violently before swirling around, an opening peeking out to see where he was and what was going on around him.

Kid startled a little at the sudden, violent twitching, looking down at Goop. “You okay??”

The soul shifted to look at Kid. Despite his lack of any facial expression the void around him seemed tense somehow.

“Y̢eah.͠ ̶Į'm͠ ͠fi͠n̛e.̛” He said a little too quickly.

“That was very convincing,” Kid said, “What’s wrong?”

The tension melted a little more.

“... H̨a̸d͢ ́a̢ ̷dre͡am̡ ͏abo͢ut my c͡h͏il̢dhǫo̢d. ͡W͏o͢k̨e u͢p wi͞th͝ ev̶e͡ry҉t̨hi̛n͟g d̡a̵r͜k an͞d nǫt h͜a͟v͞i̴ng...͡” Goop trailed off, voice growing quiet. He didn’t finish the sentence, but it was clear where it was going.

Not having a body.

“G̨ot ̶s͡t͜a̢r͘tled ̛is ̢a̡lļ.̧”

Kid nodded, relaxing a little again as Goop became less tense.

“...ah. Yeah, that… that’d be a pretty startling difference.”

Goop was silent for a few moments.

“S̴o̧ h͢o͏w̶ ̷lon͜g͜ w͟as̴ ̵I ͢a̶sl̛ee͞p?̕”

“..about six hours,” Kid said, glancing around the room a moment before answering. “You were really tired.”

He made a whistling noise despite having no lips. Or mouth. “W̶ow.͞ S̀w̸a͟p ̵ti͠m͜e ͠I gu̢es͠ş?̸”

The void started to build up around his soul, arms bracing against the ground as a torso and head started to form.

Kid understood making his own voice, but he was kinda curious about that whistle.

“Sure. I won’t need too long. You feeling okay?”

“I think so.” Goop said, slowly standing before adding the details of his face and suit. “I’m going to work on something that grampster wanted if that’s alright while you’re sleeping.”

Kid nodded, and since he knew Goop was going to be working on something that would be able to distract him, he said, “Okay. And I contacted Alphys. She’s still confident her idea will work but there’s nothing for us to look at right now unless you want to read the details. And she says if you ever want to talk, she’ll be there if you’re having a rough day.”

He blinked and looked down at Kid. “Oh. Alright.” Goop managed a bit of a smile, “Did you tell her thanks for me?”

“I told her you would probably greately appreciate it,” Kid said, relaxing a bit and managing a smile back. He handed the phone over. “If you want to look.”

The conversation had been about Goop, so he had a right to know.

He took the phone. “Okay. Thanks.”

Kid nodded. “...Good luck with the favor.”

He curled up in the newly vacant spot.

Goop nodded and headed over to start working, grabbing one of the receivers to pull it apart and do what the old Gaster wanted in the time they had while Kid slept.

Kid didn’t sleep for very long. He’d had a lot of time to rest at the last world they were in, emotional distress aside.

He slept for about two hours, woke quietly, and slunk over to Goop’s work station without disturbing him.

Sometime during those two hours Goop had shed some of his void, setting it aside while he sat on the stool by his workbench, hunched over the communicator still modifying it. He didn’t quite look like Voidkid though, his skull a little more his own shape and his body less trying to simulate clothing and acting more as just a black placeholder to what would have been a bipedal form.

He looked more like a child version of himself than the little shattered clump of souls and didn’t seem to notice Kid wake up and walk over.

It was strange and a little uncomfortable to look at Goop and see a child, especially a familiar child, and… Kid decided the best course of action was probably to just not say anything or comment.

He found a place to sit down and let Goop get to a stopping place in his own time.

Goop would continue to work for a few moments before he turned to glance back at where Kid had been sleeping only to find that he was sat elsewhere.

He tried to hide his embarrassment and pulled the rest of his void back, quickly forming his regular body again but not doing so too quickly so as to not look as embarrassed as he felt.

Kid looked up as the void shifted around. “You don’t have to hurry,” he said.

“It’s fine.” Goop said, finishing up what he was doing before shoving the modified communicator into his chest.

“You sleep okay?”

Kid nodded, giving Goop a smile. “And you?”

“I guess.” Goop said with a lopsided smile and shrug.

He still felt a little embarrassed for being caught testing out being a kid.

“Is there anything we needed before heading off again?”

Kid didn’t mention it, and hoped that might soothe some of Goop’s nerves.

“Nothing but letting your kids know you’re alright if you haven’t already. We’re still fully stocked up, otherwise.”

“Ah, right.” Goop said, rummaging around for his phone before quickly texting back and forth a few times. He glanced over at Kid.

“You talk to yours?”

He shook his head and reached out for the unmodified scanner.

Goop handed it over.

For a little while, they both hunched over their respective devices, tapping away to their kids and getting caught up on distant news in their family’s lives.

Maybe they were just trying to delay from the nerves of going to the next world, though..

Goop caught up with both of his kids before telling them goodbye and putting the phone away for another time. Then he waited until Kid did the same.

Kid held onto the scanner, finished his own conversation, and looked up at Goop slowly.

“...so. Think our luck will hold..?”

...could they call the last two worlds lucky? He wanted to. They hadn’t been the sort of nightmare worlds that he remembered from before.

“It won’t now that you’ve said something.” Goop said flatly, even though he was joking. “Remember what happened after we got those bracelets?”

“Ugh,” Kid said, rubbing his eyes. “...let’s pretend I said nothing, then.”

He wanted to forget that argument, and that double-world, and that fear of Chara killing Goop’s children never existed.

He took a deep breath and tried to still himself, but just the thought of what lay ahead was enough to put him on edge.

Goop inhaled deeply and gave him a firm pat on the shoulder before stepping into the machine. “Just gonna make a pitstop to hand this off and then off to the next.”

Kid nodded, “It’s finished, then?”

He followed Goop inside and found his spot.

“Yeah, wasn’t too hard to put together.” Goop shrugged, closing the door behind him before setting course for the world they had just left and jumping to it.

Kid just nodded. “I’m sure he’ll be glad.”

It was early, early morning when they arrived, before even Papyrus was awake. The house lights were dark.

Goop didn’t want to wake them.

He… didn’t actually want to talk much either.

He stood outside the back door and pulled out his notebook, scribbling down a note about how it worked and he hoped it was what the Gaster wanted. Then he teleported inside to set it on the kitchen table.

No one noticed. No one stirred. The house remained sound asleep, and Kid waited in the machine for his friend, fidgeting nervously.

Goop teleported back a moment later and closed the door to the machine. He offered Kid the best smile he could muster.

“We’ll be alright.”

Always the optimist, despite how nervous he was too.

He punched in the coordinates to the next world.

Kid nodded and braced himself for the jump.

They landed with a thud of dirt.

There was an explosion of sound outside as soon as they emerged in the other world.

Howling.

Fuck.

Goop looked at Kid with a wide eye before heading for the door, hand hovering on the handle.

He flung it open, ready for a fight.

Dogs.

They’d been caught off guard and were bounding away from the machine in a rush, fleeing--fleeing towards what looked like the horizon of Hotland.

Deep pits of magma dotted the dark landscape, and a skeleton-shaped body lay, trampled in the dust, coughing and wheezing.

He was alive.

Against what was probably his better judgement Goop rushed forward to the skeleton. “Hey! You alright?”

Kid followed him a step or two behind, head up and eyes wide, scanning the horizon for more attackers.

The skeleton groaned, looking a little battered but able to sit up on his own, despite the dusty pawprints on his clothes and face.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine…”

He froze very suddenly after speaking and turned to look up at Goop with wide, shocked eyes.

“...what the fuck.”

Goop blinked, then looked around nervously and retracted his hand.

“... Uhhh….”

The skeleton snatched the hand, feeling over it, and then felt all the rest of the way up Goop’s arm until he reached the face. And then he felt over Goop’s face, like he wasn’t sure it was real under his hands.

“UH,” Kid agreed.

Goop rippled and quickly yanked his arm away, almost pooling into a puddle before reforming behind Kid and shuddering.

“What the hell, man!?”

Kid spread his arms out protectively in front of Goop, scowling at the stranger despite his usual instincts.

“Sorry!!” The skeleton said, standing on two legs now and not appearing hurt, holding his hands up. As he looked them over, it was clear his shock had changed. Now he just looked ecstatic. “I mean, no, it’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you! I got ahead of myself, I’m sorry. I’m from another world, too!!”

Goop was still rippling and uneasy, for once not being ashamed of hiding behind Kid. He didn’t like being touched like that, especially not by a Gaster he didn’t even know.

“Y- wait what?” He asked, hunched down to peer over Kid’s shoulder even though he was taller.

Kid figured it was better to let Goop do the talking right now.

He was fairly lost.

The skeleton in front of them still looked ecstatic, though.

A little off-balance, but ecstatic.

“Yes! You are too, right? I haven’t met another monster like us in so long, you can’t even--achoo!--it’s been so, so weird and lonely, and I only really understand Gaster, and he never takes anything seriously, so I’m just! Here? But now there’s other people!!”

Goop glanced at Kid again before finally standing his full height.

“... Okay I’m really lost right now and this is usually the other way around.”

The skeleton deflated a little, looking a bit desperate, but didn’t know what to say either, shrugging helplessly at Goop.

“I’m not from here, I--” he sneezed again, “--ugh. ...I’m from another world and y...ou know what, fuck it, let’s just go to the lab.”

He turned promptly and started trotting towards the faint outline of the lab in the distance, right where it always was, clearly expecting Goop and Kid to follow.

Goop eyed Kid before leaning into the machine and pulling out the chip, then quickly starting the scanner before following.

Kid shugged helplessly, shaking his head, but followed a moment later.

The lab didn’t have a door out front like it usually would.

It had a small, arch-like entryway that Gaster had to duck down to enter through. Kid had to do much the same.

The inside of the lab smelled like dog.

There were chew toys, bones, and ripped stuffed animals everywhere, and Gaster was talking rapidly with a good sized, long-haired black dog with dark gums and a tightly curled tail.

The dog looked at them, panting excitedly.

“This is Gaster,” Gaster said.

The dog yipped. Gaster ‘ughed’ and wiped his nasal cavity again.

Goop stared at everything in the lab.

Stared at Gaster.

Then at Gaster…?

“... What.”

It wasn’t even a question.

“I told you,” Gaster said, gaze flat an unamused. “I’m not from this world! This is Gaster! Somehow??”

The… Gaster-dog yipped happily and rolled over.

Gaster sighed and rubbed his belly. “Yes you’re a good boy. Such a good boy. Oh my goodness.”

The back leg was going.

Kid stared.

Goop thrust his hands out towards Dogster. “What.”

He thrust his hands out towards the bones and toys. “What.”

He thrust his hands out towards the arch-shaped door. “WHAT.”

“Yes. They are dogs. Yes. I know. It’s adorable.”

As Dogster enjoyed his belly rub, a few more dogs poked their heads out of nowhere and trotted in through the doors, happily shoving up against Gaster in jealousy.

Gaster wordlessly started to scratch as many heads as he possibly could with only two hands.

“Please help me. I’m the only thing with hands in a world filled with dogs.”

“Okay, okay, hold on.” Goop covered his face and took a breath before gesturing down to Gaster.

“In this world everyone is… a dog…?”

“Everyone,” Gaster said, eyes wide and a little fuzzy around the edges. “It is the best and worst thing I’ve ever experienced.”

He promptly started violently sneezing, but kept diligently petting the small hoard of dogs around him.

“... You’re allergic? Are you kidding me?” Goop gestured outwardly.

“I’m allergic,” he confirmed, nodding, sneezing again and scratching a dog’s ears. “I ran out of medicine the first week. I’m--chsodasldfjkg--kind of used to it by now, I guess?”

Kid just stared at him.

...then, he got down and started petting the dogs, too.

Goop still didn’t join in. He had never had pets before. Well, chickens, but still.

“Okay, how did you get here?” He asked.

Kid hadn’t had pets before either, but…

Well… they just looked so happy when they got their ears scratched?? How could he say ‘no’ when Gaster only had two hands and there were so many waiting? So even if it was a little weird when he ended up petting Dogster, he dealt with it.

“Well, I opened a door in my lab one day,” Gaster said.

“... And when you stepped through you ended up here?” Goop finished, expression falling slightly.

Gaster nodded, being licked in the face by a curly-haired sandy dog.

“Yes! And I haven’t been able to find a way back at all! Gaster’s been helping me, but it’s a little out of his expertise.

Dogster lifted a paw and put it on Kid’s shoulder.

“Oh my god he has little white toes on the underside,” Kid whispered.

Goop looked at the crowd of dogs, still way too many to be pet by only four hands, and sighed.

“One second.”

He turned and teleported back to the ship, coming back a moment later with his extra void and sat down, using the tendrils to pet the dogs.

“Is your world not that bad then? You wanna get back?”

“Hm?” the other said, not appearing at all bothered by the extra void tendrils. “Well, I-I’d like more scintillating conversation back, yes.”

“What’s your world like?” Goop asked, hoping to maybe narrow it down to a quadrant at the very least.

“U-um, well, there’s normal monsters around. W-we only really have one or so dogs like this, I think? I’ve only ever seen one little white one, other than the canine units. And the, uh, the places are all the same, but we have actual names for them instead of scent markers; Hotland, Snowdin, Waterfall--um…”

He seemed a little at a loss, only knowing his world was quite different and not fully sure what the other was looking for.

“Above ground? Below ground? After or before the war? During the war? How many humans have fallen down? Do you have kids?” Goop asked.

“Below Mt. Ebott, and, er, yes, the war with humans is long over, really dreadful thing that was; I haven’t heard of any fallen humans? And no, of course not, I was far too busy for that sort of thing.”

“How long have you been trapped underground? Were you born before or after monsters were sealed?”

“Um, I think we’re going on about a thousand years now?” Gaster said, tapping his jaw, not minding he’d just scratched a dog with it and he was allergic. There was no escape at this point. He’d long accepted he would be sneezing forever unless he could leave. “And I was born a bit before. Don’t remember much. Mostly just grumpy back then.”

One of the dogs wiggled onto his lap, tongue lolling out happily.

Gaster nodded and pulled out his notebook, flipping to a few pages and then to a clean page and writing something down, trying to narrow down the coordinates a little, although it was still like throwing a needle into a haystack and hoping to find it later.

“How far have you gotten to getting back home?”

“Not far,” Gaster said, scratching a dog’s neck. “I don’t really have any idea where to start.”

Goop glanced at Kid, “... Well. You’ve got us for three days and I can build a time machine, so… maybe the quickest way would be to figure out your soul frequency and give you the blueprints?”

Kid nodded, shrugging.

It seemed like a sound plan to him.

“What good would a time machine do, though?” Gaster asked, confused. “I-I mean, thank you for your help, but--”

“Oh, uh, it’s a bad time machine,” Kid said. “But it goes through dimensions very well!”

“‘Time machine’ sounds better than ‘interdimensional traveling ship’.” Goop said, flipping through to a few new pages so he could start writing the blueprints to his machine for the other Gaster.

“That doesn’t say anything about how reassuring it is, that says something about your naming abilities.”

All the same, he stayed beside the other Gaster, helping him pet dogs and ignoring the incessant sneezing. “How long have you been here?”

“Uhhhh a couple months at least,” Gaster said, rubbing his nasal cavity again.

Goop looked up at Kid and narrowed his eye. “Shhhh.”

“Look, I’m just saying. You and Asgore share at least one thing in common, and it’s probably your naming abilities.”

“I don’t even name anything though. That isn’t even a name. It’s just what it does.” Goop argued.

“But it’s not a time machine?” Kid said, rolling his eyes. “It’s a dimensional transport.”

“Yeah but I didn’t know I would be going to different dimensions when I first started calling it that. I thought I would just be jumping around in time.”

“But that’s not calling it what it is.”

Goop threw his pen at him. “Shut the fuck up I’m trying to write.”

Kid grinned and caught the pen, throwing it back.

“Yeah, yeah.”

The pen stuck into his shoulder, pulling inside before reappearing in his hand. He rolled his eyes at Kid and started to write again.

Kid sat with Gaster, talking with him some and trying to give him some of the conversation he’d… mentioned being denied.

It helped pass the time while Goop wrote.

It would take a long time for Goop to write the blueprints for the machine, turning from page to page and scribbling away, ripping a few off and flipping them back and forth.

He wouldn’t finish until that night.

Gaster didn’t seem to mind, having long lost any sense of time outside of the times the dogs tended to do things.

They brought out food later into the night, tails-wagging and looking very cheerful. Kid didn’t ask where the food came from, but Gaster ate it quite happily. Dogster fell asleep with his head on his bipedal double’s lap a while later.

When the blueprints were finished he stacked them together neatly and handed them over to the other Gaster. “Okay, there’s the blueprints for the-” He paused and looked Kid dead in the eyes. “-dimensional transport.”

Kidster gave a quiet applause.

“Shithead.” Goop said, but was smiling all the same.

“I am showing you my earnest support,” Kidster said.

“Thanks dear.”

“Anything to boost your ego, darling.”

After a moment Goop sighed and rubbed his face before standing. “Alright. I’m heading back to the machine to get his soul frequency. I’ll be right back.”

He turned and was gone, tendrils and all.

#mayem #the crossing #goop #kid #undertale #RP log #alphys #dogster

23 notes · View notes

samuelfields · 4 years

Text

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide

I initially “cut the cord” to save myself money.

At the time, it did save me a lot. I traded in a $70/month cable subscription for a $10 Netflix subscription.

Then all the other streaming services came out. HBO Now, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Showtime, and all the rest. When I add them all up, I get right back to $70/month.

Are there options to watch TV for free and still save money?

You do have options to watch TV for free. We looked into it and put together a complete guide on how to do it.

The True Cost of Watching TV Online

Watching TV online through a pay streaming service subscription is a popular choice for people after they cut the cord.

Streaming services deliver what’s almost an à la carte way of watching television. You can select a service that has the channels you want, eliminating channels you never watch (and their costs).

However, there are some significant expenses with streaming services. They’re not quite as costly as cable or satellite TV, but they’re closer than the marketers want you to believe.

Internet service: When you stream, you will need to pay a monthly charge for a high speed Internet connection. (Perhaps you already do this.) Depending on where you live and the speed you want, this can cost $40 to $100 per month. You’ll want a minimum speed of 5 Mbps for streaming HD quality video. And if you are streaming to more than one TV at a time, they each need 5 Mbps access. So for two simultaneous streams, your total Internet speed would need to be a minimum of 10 Mbps. For 4K quality video, you need a minimum of 25 Mbps. Higher Internet speeds cost more per month.

Streaming subscriptions: Streaming subscriptions vary in price. They can be as low as $5/month. For streaming services with popular cable channels that offer live programming like ESPN, Sling, Hulu Live, and AT&T TV Now, you’ll pay $25 to $100 per month.

Even if you only get two subscriptions, you’ll end up paying about $25/month plus your internet bill. On average, you’re looking at $100/month for a decent internet connection and two subscriptions. If you want 3-4 subscriptions, expect to pay $150/month all-in.

Is it Really Possible to Watch TV For Free?

For those who want to watch TV online for free, many options exist. Mind you, not all of them are legal, especially the peer-to-peer sites. If you watch copyrighted material illegally on a website, you could be subject to receiving a copyright infringement letter from your ISP.

Fortunately, multiple free TV options exist that are legal. Keep in mind that they don’t give you the same level of service of a pay TV subscription.

Here are some of the drawbacks of going with free online TV versus a pay TV subscription.

Commercials: Many free TV sites force you watch commercials, and you cannot skip them like you can with a DVR. At best, you can mute until it’s over.

Quality: Finding HD video quality on a free online TV streaming service is hit and miss. Finding 4K quality video is rare. And if your Internet signal is not consistent, you’ll have constant pauses and skips in your shows or a drop in video quality, which is frustrating. If you must have high quality video with your TV shows, free online TV may not be for you.

Newer shows: Free services don’t typically have the latest episodes of shows like you’ll find with pay streaming services and cable or satellite TV subscriptions.

Time spent searching: Finding a specific show can be a bit of a challenge with free TV online services. You may end up using several different services to find all of the shows you want.

Sports: Sports fans will not be happy with legal free online TV options. They have almost no live sports events.

Those who don’t mind putting in a bit of work to find the shows they want will be better candidates for free online TV. If you like your TV watching options well-structured and set up for ease of use, a cable or streaming subscription is worth the expense.

7 Options for Watching TV Online for Free

1. Borrow Someone Else’s Account

If you have a family member or friend who’s willing to let you have the account information for their Netflix, Hulu Live, or streaming service account, you can watch TV online for free. Most of these services allow two or three people to access the same account at one time.

2. Use a Free Streaming Service

Streaming services that are free for users typically are ad-supported, so you’ll have to watch quite a few commercials. These services are available through a smart TV app or a website. They don’t have very many newer shows, like paid streaming services do. But there are some shows on these services that you will not find elsewhere.

Crackle: The Crackle web site offers access to several dozen TV shows and hundreds of movies. You do have to create an account but it’s a free process. It has very popular older shows like The Facts of Life or Roseanne. It even has some original programming.

Internet Archive: With Internet Archive’s free TV section, you can choose to watch some old TV shows, along with classic commercials. There are replays of some live news shows for important events, such as 9/11. It definitely has things you won’t see anywhere else.

Pluto: Pluto TV is about the closest thing to live TV that you’ll find for free. It offers free on demand and live shows, and you’ll select them through a series of “networks” on Pluto’s channel guide. All you’ll be missing is the remote in your hand to scroll through channels.

Popcornflix: With Popcornflix, you can see quite a few 1990s children’s shows, which is fun for those seeking some nostalgia. It also has many different TV shows and movies across other genres, including some foreign films and documentaries.

Retrovision: If you really like old television shows and movies, Retrovision is made for you. You’ll find quite a few shows and movies from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s here, as well as a few newer ones.

Snagfilms: The site’s name may not be all that great, but Snagfilms gives you thousands of movies and older TV shows. Its claim to fame, though, is a large number of documentaries.

Tubi: Tubi offers mainly movies for free, along with some TV shows, in an ad-supported format. With a free account, you can create a list of your favorite shows and movies, or you can resume a movie you stopped watching earlier.

3. Visit a Network Website

The major broadcast networks (FOX, ABC, et cetera) and some cable networks allow you to stream the latest versions of current shows for a week or so after the show originally airs. You also will find episode recaps and special clips about the shows at the network web site.

You will have to watch commercials, but this is a great way to stay up to date on current shows, all for free.

4. Watch Digital Media Through Your Library

If you still have a library card, don’t throw it away. You may be able to use it with hoopla, which is a digital media service. Public libraries allow you to use hoopla to borrow digital media for a limited amount of time.

You can watch TV shows and movies online for free this way, all by checking them out using your local library card. Items like audiobooks are also available.

5. Sign Up for Free Trials

Most pay subscription streaming services give you a free trial period between 7 and 30 days where you can try the entire service for free. You may have to provide a credit card number to sign up for the free trial, and you have to remember to cancel the service before the trial expires or the service will charge your card.

You can only use this free trial trick once per email address. It is extra work, especially for short trials. But it is an option.

6. Check With Your Cellular Carrier

Sometimes, a cellular carrier will give its customers access to digital media, including some TV shows and movies. For example, Verizon is currently giving its customers free access to the Disney+ streaming service for up to a year.

7. Visit the Websites for Your Local Broadcasters

Your local broadcast channel websites won’t show movies and TV shows. However, you can access local news stories, weather broadcasts, and sports highlights through these websites. You also sometimes can stream the local newscast each night.

Budget TV Online – Cheap But Not Free

Say you don’t mind spending a little money for TV, as long as you receive a better quality than the free TV options. You have some choices here too.

On demand shows: Services like Netflix and Amazon Prime do not have popular cable channels like AMC or ESPN for live TV. However, they have thousands of on demand titles, as well as some original programming. They cost $8 to $15 per month.

Focused streaming services: Services like Disney+ and CBS All Access give you the ability to watch shows from a particular provider for a low price per month of around $5 to $12. Of course, these costs add up quickly if you have more than one service.

Over-the-air networks: You probably have several channels available to you through an over-the-air broadcast signal. These local networks broadcast major network programming, as well as local news programs. Purchase an easy-to-set-up HD antenna for $25 to $75, and you can pull in these signals for free, including some sports.

Digital rentals: Through services like VUDU the Google Play Store, you can rent movies and TV shows digitally for a reasonable price.

Cutting the Cord Successfully

When you want to watch TV online for free, you have quite a few options. Best of all, quite a few of them are legal.

You may need to be fairly creative to figure out just how to watch the shows you want. And you may need to use more than one free TV service. But when you remember you’re paying $0 for your TV bill, you won’t mind doing a little bit of extra work.

For those who truly love their TV and love saving money, watching TV online for free is tough to beat.

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Finance https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/watch-tv-online-free/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

0 notes

paulckrueger · 4 years

Text

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide

I initially “cut the cord” to save myself money.

At the time, it did save me a lot. I traded in a $70/month cable subscription for a $10 Netflix subscription.

Then all the other streaming services came out. HBO Now, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Showtime, and all the rest. When I add them all up, I get right back to $70/month.

Are there options to watch TV for free and still save money?

You do have options to watch TV for free. We looked into it and put together a complete guide on how to do it.

The True Cost of Watching TV Online

Watching TV online through a pay streaming service subscription is a popular choice for people after they cut the cord.

Streaming services deliver what’s almost an à la carte way of watching television. You can select a service that has the channels you want, eliminating channels you never watch (and their costs).

However, there are some significant expenses with streaming services. They’re not quite as costly as cable or satellite TV, but they’re closer than the marketers want you to believe.

Is it Really Possible to Watch TV For Free?

Fortunately, multiple free TV options exist that are legal. Keep in mind that they don’t give you the same level of service of a pay TV subscription.

Here are some of the drawbacks of going with free online TV versus a pay TV subscription.

Commercials: Many free TV sites force you watch commercials, and you cannot skip them like you can with a DVR. At best, you can mute until it’s over.

Newer shows: Free services don’t typically have the latest episodes of shows like you’ll find with pay streaming services and cable or satellite TV subscriptions.

Time spent searching: Finding a specific show can be a bit of a challenge with free TV online services. You may end up using several different services to find all of the shows you want.

Sports: Sports fans will not be happy with legal free online TV options. They have almost no live sports events.

7 Options for Watching TV Online for Free

1. Borrow Someone Else’s Account

2. Use a Free Streaming Service

Snagfilms: The site’s name may not be all that great, but Snagfilms gives you thousands of movies and older TV shows. Its claim to fame, though, is a large number of documentaries.

3. Visit a Network Website

You will have to watch commercials, but this is a great way to stay up to date on current shows, all for free.

4. Watch Digital Media Through Your Library

You can watch TV shows and movies online for free this way, all by checking them out using your local library card. Items like audiobooks are also available.

5. Sign Up for Free Trials

You can only use this free trial trick once per email address. It is extra work, especially for short trials. But it is an option.

6. Check With Your Cellular Carrier

7. Visit the Websites for Your Local Broadcasters

Budget TV Online – Cheap But Not Free

Say you don’t mind spending a little money for TV, as long as you receive a better quality than the free TV options. You have some choices here too.

Digital rentals: Through services like VUDU the Google Play Store, you can rent movies and TV shows digitally for a reasonable price.

Cutting the Cord Successfully

When you want to watch TV online for free, you have quite a few options. Best of all, quite a few of them are legal.

For those who truly love their TV and love saving money, watching TV online for free is tough to beat.

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Surety Bond Brokers? Business https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/watch-tv-online-free/

0 notes

kennethherrerablog · 4 years

Text

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide

I initially “cut the cord” to save myself money.

At the time, it did save me a lot. I traded in a $70/month cable subscription for a $10 Netflix subscription.

Then all the other streaming services came out. HBO Now, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Showtime, and all the rest. When I add them all up, I get right back to $70/month.

Are there options to watch TV for free and still save money?

You do have options to watch TV for free. We looked into it and put together a complete guide on how to do it.

The True Cost of Watching TV Online

Watching TV online through a pay streaming service subscription is a popular choice for people after they cut the cord.

Streaming services deliver what’s almost an à la carte way of watching television. You can select a service that has the channels you want, eliminating channels you never watch (and their costs).

However, there are some significant expenses with streaming services. They’re not quite as costly as cable or satellite TV, but they’re closer than the marketers want you to believe.

Is it Really Possible to Watch TV For Free?

Fortunately, multiple free TV options exist that are legal. Keep in mind that they don’t give you the same level of service of a pay TV subscription.

Here are some of the drawbacks of going with free online TV versus a pay TV subscription.

Commercials: Many free TV sites force you watch commercials, and you cannot skip them like you can with a DVR. At best, you can mute until it’s over.

Newer shows: Free services don’t typically have the latest episodes of shows like you’ll find with pay streaming services and cable or satellite TV subscriptions.

Time spent searching: Finding a specific show can be a bit of a challenge with free TV online services. You may end up using several different services to find all of the shows you want.

Sports: Sports fans will not be happy with legal free online TV options. They have almost no live sports events.

7 Options for Watching TV Online for Free

1. Borrow Someone Else’s Account

2. Use a Free Streaming Service

Snagfilms: The site’s name may not be all that great, but Snagfilms gives you thousands of movies and older TV shows. Its claim to fame, though, is a large number of documentaries.

3. Visit a Network Website

You will have to watch commercials, but this is a great way to stay up to date on current shows, all for free.

4. Watch Digital Media Through Your Library

You can watch TV shows and movies online for free this way, all by checking them out using your local library card. Items like audiobooks are also available.

5. Sign Up for Free Trials

You can only use this free trial trick once per email address. It is extra work, especially for short trials. But it is an option.

6. Check With Your Cellular Carrier

7. Visit the Websites for Your Local Broadcasters

Budget TV Online – Cheap But Not Free

Say you don’t mind spending a little money for TV, as long as you receive a better quality than the free TV options. You have some choices here too.

Digital rentals: Through services like VUDU the Google Play Store, you can rent movies and TV shows digitally for a reasonable price.

Cutting the Cord Successfully

When you want to watch TV online for free, you have quite a few options. Best of all, quite a few of them are legal.

For those who truly love their TV and love saving money, watching TV online for free is tough to beat.

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/

0 notes

mcjoelcain · 4 years

Text

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide

I initially “cut the cord” to save myself money.

At the time, it did save me a lot. I traded in a $70/month cable subscription for a $10 Netflix subscription.

Then all the other streaming services came out. HBO Now, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Showtime, and all the rest. When I add them all up, I get right back to $70/month.

Are there options to watch TV for free and still save money?

You do have options to watch TV for free. We looked into it and put together a complete guide on how to do it.

The True Cost of Watching TV Online

Watching TV online through a pay streaming service subscription is a popular choice for people after they cut the cord.

Streaming services deliver what’s almost an à la carte way of watching television. You can select a service that has the channels you want, eliminating channels you never watch (and their costs).

However, there are some significant expenses with streaming services. They’re not quite as costly as cable or satellite TV, but they’re closer than the marketers want you to believe.

Is it Really Possible to Watch TV For Free?

Fortunately, multiple free TV options exist that are legal. Keep in mind that they don’t give you the same level of service of a pay TV subscription.

Here are some of the drawbacks of going with free online TV versus a pay TV subscription.

Commercials: Many free TV sites force you watch commercials, and you cannot skip them like you can with a DVR. At best, you can mute until it’s over.

Newer shows: Free services don’t typically have the latest episodes of shows like you’ll find with pay streaming services and cable or satellite TV subscriptions.

Time spent searching: Finding a specific show can be a bit of a challenge with free TV online services. You may end up using several different services to find all of the shows you want.

Sports: Sports fans will not be happy with legal free online TV options. They have almost no live sports events.

7 Options for Watching TV Online for Free

1. Borrow Someone Else’s Account

2. Use a Free Streaming Service

Snagfilms: The site’s name may not be all that great, but Snagfilms gives you thousands of movies and older TV shows. Its claim to fame, though, is a large number of documentaries.

3. Visit a Network Website

You will have to watch commercials, but this is a great way to stay up to date on current shows, all for free.

4. Watch Digital Media Through Your Library

You can watch TV shows and movies online for free this way, all by checking them out using your local library card. Items like audiobooks are also available.

5. Sign Up for Free Trials

You can only use this free trial trick once per email address. It is extra work, especially for short trials. But it is an option.

6. Check With Your Cellular Carrier

7. Visit the Websites for Your Local Broadcasters

Budget TV Online – Cheap But Not Free

Say you don’t mind spending a little money for TV, as long as you receive a better quality than the free TV options. You have some choices here too.

Digital rentals: Through services like VUDU the Google Play Store, you can rent movies and TV shows digitally for a reasonable price.

Cutting the Cord Successfully

When you want to watch TV online for free, you have quite a few options. Best of all, quite a few of them are legal.

For those who truly love their TV and love saving money, watching TV online for free is tough to beat.

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Money https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/watch-tv-online-free/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

0 notes

andrewdburton · 4 years

Text

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide

I initially “cut the cord” to save myself money.

At the time, it did save me a lot. I traded in a $70/month cable subscription for a $10 Netflix subscription.

Then all the other streaming services came out. HBO Now, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Showtime, and all the rest. When I add them all up, I get right back to $70/month.

Are there options to watch TV for free and still save money?

You do have options to watch TV for free. We looked into it and put together a complete guide on how to do it.

The True Cost of Watching TV Online

Watching TV online through a pay streaming service subscription is a popular choice for people after they cut the cord.

Streaming services deliver what’s almost an à la carte way of watching television. You can select a service that has the channels you want, eliminating channels you never watch (and their costs).

However, there are some significant expenses with streaming services. They’re not quite as costly as cable or satellite TV, but they’re closer than the marketers want you to believe.

Is it Really Possible to Watch TV For Free?

Fortunately, multiple free TV options exist that are legal. Keep in mind that they don’t give you the same level of service of a pay TV subscription.

Here are some of the drawbacks of going with free online TV versus a pay TV subscription.

Commercials: Many free TV sites force you watch commercials, and you cannot skip them like you can with a DVR. At best, you can mute until it’s over.

Newer shows: Free services don’t typically have the latest episodes of shows like you’ll find with pay streaming services and cable or satellite TV subscriptions.

Time spent searching: Finding a specific show can be a bit of a challenge with free TV online services. You may end up using several different services to find all of the shows you want.

Sports: Sports fans will not be happy with legal free online TV options. They have almost no live sports events.

7 Options for Watching TV Online for Free

1. Borrow Someone Else’s Account

2. Use a Free Streaming Service

Snagfilms: The site’s name may not be all that great, but Snagfilms gives you thousands of movies and older TV shows. Its claim to fame, though, is a large number of documentaries.

3. Visit a Network Website

You will have to watch commercials, but this is a great way to stay up to date on current shows, all for free.

4. Watch Digital Media Through Your Library

You can watch TV shows and movies online for free this way, all by checking them out using your local library card. Items like audiobooks are also available.

5. Sign Up for Free Trials

You can only use this free trial trick once per email address. It is extra work, especially for short trials. But it is an option.

6. Check With Your Cellular Carrier

7. Visit the Websites for Your Local Broadcasters

Budget TV Online – Cheap But Not Free

Say you don’t mind spending a little money for TV, as long as you receive a better quality than the free TV options. You have some choices here too.

Digital rentals: Through services like VUDU the Google Play Store, you can rent movies and TV shows digitally for a reasonable price.

Cutting the Cord Successfully

When you want to watch TV online for free, you have quite a few options. Best of all, quite a few of them are legal.

For those who truly love their TV and love saving money, watching TV online for free is tough to beat.

Watch TV Online For Free: The Complete Guide is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Finance https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/watch-tv-online-free/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

0 notes

news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years

Text

How the worst parts of the internet helped shape me as a kid

This post is part of Mashable's You're Old Week. Break through the haze of nostalgia with us and see what holds up, what disappoints, and what got better with time.

a/s/l?

If you know what those three letters stand for, there's a good chance you grew up on the internet like myself. An internet filled with opportunities to steal your innocence.

There was something special about the internet of the late '90s and early 2000s that can never, ever be replicated. It was mysterious, misunderstood, and truly a free place of exploration. More importantly, it was mostly anonymous, or at least it appeared that way.

SEE ALSO: How creepy YouTube channels trick kids into watching violent videos

As parents currently grapple with how their children interact with the internet at such a young age, it's important to take a step back and look at how we got here. Let's relive some of the horrors I witnessed growing up on the internet and consider what lessons their lingering effects hold for this generation.

Chat rooms

For those utterly lost, a/s/l stands for age, sex, and location, and was commonly used in chat rooms during the golden era of the internet — 1995 to 2005-ish. Thanks to Facebook and the rise of social media, much of what we now do on the internet is tied to our real names. But back in the day, we hid behind usernames and screennames, and we changed them often.

I don't exactly remember any vivid conversations I had on the internet with strangers, but I do recall frequenting Yahoo Chat rooms when I couldn't find any of my friends to chat with on AIM. Remembering that today, I'm kinda horrified.

While those chat rooms around the internet had plenty of normal people just looking for conversations, they were also riddled with who the fuck knows trying to get off or take advantage of a young kid. There was even a dedicated section just for teens. Even worse, you could chat with people based on a specific location.

A screenshot of Yahoo chat from the year 2000.

Image: yahoo.com via waybackmachine

Yahoo Chat rooms were rife with catfishing long before the internet term was ever coined. You could be whoever you wanted to be when someone asked you a/s/l? And people were pretty upfront about seeking kids to chat with. While, thankfully, there were no To Catch a Predator scenarios for me in the days of the early internet, it's highly likely I interacted with plenty of scummy people looking to take advantage of kids during that time.

Back in 2005, Yahoo finally shut down user-created chat rooms in an agreement with law enforcement. "Yahoo removed or barred the posting of 70,000 rooms whose names suggested illegal conduct, including the promotion of sex between adults and children," CNET reported at the time.

Yahoo permanently shuttered its public chatroom feature in 2012.

Somehow, I made it out unscathed, and was smart enough to know better, but the chat rooms of the early internet were truly a terrifying place.

Rotten.com and gore galore

Just last year, the internet lost one of its earliest and most disturbing websites, rotten.com. For now, at least.

"The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience," a welcome message reads on an archived version of the website from 1999.

A screenshot of Rotten.com from the year 1999.

Image: rotten.com via waybackmachine

Simply put, rotten was a compilation of the worst images the internet could find. From pictures of dead celebrities to photos of brutal crime scenes, car crashes, and botched surgeries, the shock site was capable of disturbing just about anyone who made their way to it.

Rotten.com was introduced to me by an old boyfriend of my sister's when I was probably 11 or 12. I recall seeing a photo of a man involved in a motorcycle accident, his head splattered across a highway, and another picture of a guy sucking his own dick. The picture of the accident still fucks me up; the photo of the guy giving himself a blowjob is still impressive.

While I (thankfully) never became a frequent visitor of rotten.com, the disturbing images I saw on the site desensitized and prepared me for the awful internet of today. As I grew up with the internet by my side, I can recall seeing countless beheadings. I watched the entire video of Saddam Hussein being executed in 2006, an unnecessary amount of shootings, car accidents, and just about everything else that would make a normal person vomit.

Seeing those pictures and videos at a young age absolutely helped me cope with some of the things I see on the internet today. Would I be better off not seeing them? Maybe.

Porn, porn, and more porn

I was about 11 or 12 when I was sitting at my computer, probably playing 3D Pinball when I overheard my dad and his friend talking in the kitchen, just down the hall.

"You can just type lingerie into the search and you wouldn't believe what comes up," he told my father, revealing that there was actually porn on the computer in the living room, which he literally never touched at that point.

"No wonder he spends so much time on that thing," my dad joked, clearly referring to me. Jokes on you, Dad, because I had no idea of the obscenities that were available just a few clicks away.

A screenshot of sex.com from the year 2000.

Image: sex.com via waybackmachine

Of course, the first moment I was left alone after hearing there was porn on the internet, I typed something like "boobs" into AskJeeves or Yahoo search. I surfed my way to a crude porn site as fast as my 56k modem could bring me, only to be greeted with an age disclaimer asking me if I was 18 years of age or older.

After thinking it over for a few seconds, I decided to risk it and click "yes." Despite thinking the FBI was going to raid my house for this very serious offense, this began my exploration into sex. I never got "the talk" from my parents. It didn't matter — I had the internet.

It's worth noting here that the internet moved at a grueling pace back in the late '90s when 56k was still king. So navigating a web page with photos, like porn, took a very long time. Given this fact, and that at the time my computer was shared with my family, I decided to do what any preteen would do with a color printer.

That's right, I printed out porn. My mom found it in my sock drawer, and still occasionally makes fun of me for it.

While there are more than a few think pieces on how learning about sex through internet porn is terrible for a young boy's mind, and will turn them into sexist monsters with unrealistic expectations, I'm thankful for the unfiltered internet as a useful resource in my horny pubescent youth.

Talking about sex with anyone — even friends — can be humiliating at that age, and at the time sex education provided to me in school was laughably bad, sometimes even frowned upon. That said, there are definitely more appropriate ways to learn about sex, and as a society, we have much to improve upon.

Weed, drugs, and an online education

When I was 14 years old, I smoked weed for the first time.

This wasn't some spontaneous decision made in a dimly-lit room forced by peer pressure. I wanted to try marijuana, I sought it out, and I learned everything that I need to know about smoking weed through the internet.

Weeks before lighting up, the topic came up among a few of my good friends at the time, and we decided we were going to do it. I won't lie, I was pretty terrified of what would happen, so I did my best to sift through the bullshit pushed upon us by D.A.R.E., and find out the truth about marijuana. I found Erowid.

While there were plenty of websites dedicated to cannabis in 2001 and 2002, Erowid was, and remains, one of the best sources for information on drugs. The thing that makes Erowid so great is that it provides real information from real people about their experiences with various drugs, including dosages, effects, and experiences.

A screenshot of Erowid.org in the year 2001.

Image: erowid.org via waybackmachine.

I'll be the first to admit that I adopted cannabis use way too young, and I'm sure that it affected my school performance and my brain development. But teens and young adults aren't going to stop experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and at least the internet informed me of the real dangers in a way that wasn't preachy.

Would I have tried cannabis without the internet? Definitely, but using the web to learn about drugs was an invaluable resource that was not available elsewhere. I consider myself lucky for landing on Erowid, and not a forum with irresponsible users suggesting people us harder drugs.

Are the kids gonna be alright?

I've been thinking a lot recently about how the internet has shaped me as a person, and how it's affecting the youth today. Before muttering their first words, kids have probably already watched a YouTube video. They have Instagram accounts before they're able to read, and hashtags dedicated to their entire lives.

But for me, the internet was a choice. I sought it out, and all of its opportunities to corrupt my youth. For kids today, it's become nearly impossible to disconnect.

And again, when I discovered corners of the internet I shouldn't have ventured to as a kid, it moved at a snail's pace. Today's web is fast, pictures load in the blink of an eye, and HD streaming video is basically expected, thanks to YouTube.

It feels like the internet is at a breaking point, and we as a society are finally questioning the experiment. It's incredibly important for us to ask ourselves how the internet has altered our lives, and not just the convenience factor with 2-day free shipping, but really, how has the internet changed who we are? It certainly changed me growing up.

I do still value the internet as an important growing up tool, which helped me learn about life, both the good parts and bad. But in the back of my mind I'll always wonder what would have happened to me if I never logged on.

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#_uuid:cdef7de6-6b47-3f67-adef-4c1cecbc5715 #_author:Brian Koerber #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

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