Stickers, Mastadon, and Old Times

November 6, 2022

I think I wanna start a sticker shop. I think I wanna design, print, and cut my own stickers and sell them online--probably through Etsy to start.

This started with me thinking about my journaling habits. And wanting to have a real world space to bring all my journaling together into my sketchbook--since a quarter to half my journaling, depending, happens in my sketchbook, and the typed stuff, while nice, accessible even when I don't have my sketchbook...isn't usually stuff I revisit or even remember.

But if I'm gonna do that, that means I need to print them. If I need to print them, then I'm gonna need my own printer to make it cost-effective (and a thing I am actually likely to do, since large batches to a print shop are unlikely most of the time...though maybe a way to start with the sticker shop, so I only have one Big Apparatus Buy In to start). And If I'm Doing That, I want a scanner. And Also, I don't want to fuck around with inkjet printers, laser's the only way, And Also, I had that whim to Make Stuff, and Didn't I Want To Make Stickers...?

If you give a mouse a cookie, indeed.

Vinyl cutter?

So yeah. I finished putting together the blog section for SonicSpirit.net (haha, I so initially thought Dark Wind Studios...chaos, the old times...) last night, just need to plug it into the top bar across the site. It was a fairly extensive aggregation project, though there might be more posts to go scoop from elsewhere? I'll hafta look. But it can go public before I start in on the Deep Searching, can tweak as I go. Not totally sure about the opening page being a list of links, but also don't know a better way to put it together. I don't have the high level coding skills to build myself some sort of more current blog framework, or desire to install Wordpress...or even necessarily the ability to do so without wiping out everything, since apparently iPage still has my site as built on top of Weebly, even with no Weebly usage. Shit's weird, bro.

Then with the Musk-pocolips on Twitter, shit's just...looking dire. Like, Twitter's been getting more and more unworkable anyway, and I've been wanting to look or jump ship to alternatives anyway. Like, I've been actually using my Tumblr for the past couple months, and it's been a breath of fresh air. But the things that bother me about it--the fact that everything just gets mooshed together into one big pile, the threat of harassment, are still very present.

But I ran into a baby's first guide to Mastodon last night, and basically? It's kinda got a lot of the things I like about the old bulletin board system--in the form of various federated instances sharing a like-minded theme/interest/goal/reason to party together--like queer spaces, leftist spaces, kink spaces, etc. Like, it doesn't have the thread system or anything, so it's not like Ye Olden Days of topics and separate conversations in that topic one can partake in--it sounds like it's still more of the Firehose style of all social media...but in much more easily curated pools.

I know, I know, if I miss BB forums so much why not just join one. But no. I got a tab for Nonhuman National Park open right now that I still haven't gotten the courage up to look at at all. So much anxiety from past experiences, and I'm a different boy now, anyway. I'll get the courage up to face Nonhuman National Park. But Also, I want more than just one social outlet. And I guess I'm thinking Mastodon's structure might lead to me actually having some social interaction online, instead of fretfully lurking or posting and running.

Because I do have a pretty bad trauma response to the idea of interaction. Chaos, I hate DMs. DMs, PMs, none of them good. And like, some of that's always been there, "What do you have to say to me you can't say in front of all my friends, who might stop you." Chaos. Like even doing AIM chats with Pristine or any of the other unicorns from the Always Believe days were so stressful, and they were good. I enjoyed them. Then the StarSeeds, or whatever, who were all like, "Um, you guys are in a cult," and we're all, "Nooooo, we're totally not in a cult! Just cuz our leader is 15 years older than all of us and we have a lot of ways we can't interact because he'll get upset!" No, he was definitely a cult leader. Then fuckin' Michael who was supposedly talking to me to present the case against Emshir and just ended up trauma dumping on me about completely unrelated things. Oh, the tenth time you've told me about being a pallbearer for your grandpa. Fun.

YOU WERE, PURPORTEDLY, TRYING TO HELP A MINOR UNDERSTAND THEY WERE IN A HIGH-CONTROL SITUATION, HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY BE THIS BAD AT THAT!?

And he was the only one of them that found me, so...he just made their whole case look more foolish. We weren't in a cult. Everything was fine here, actually. But man, were Otherkin weird. Better stay sequestered away in our Valley with our Valient Fucking Leader. Chaos.

And that's how doing a bad job of talking to people how they're probably in a cult is worse than...I guess it's still not worse than not contacting us at all. For all that the group name I had was entirely unsearchable and brought up nothing helpful, knowing that there was a larger Otherkin community out there did help later when Emshir burnt the whole damn thing down.

That's another one to add to The List of things to blog about.

But it still made us turtle up, and even after Always Believe blew up three times while I was there, I still didn't join an outside Otherkin group until...kinda now. The now times.

Seeing posts about how unicorn Otherkin couldn't exist because we'd be blasted out of existence by the impurity of this world in general 'kin forums I tried to join and was ghosting didn't help.

Some people would stand up and rebuff it. Me, joining a new community, posting for the first time against an established community member who is apparently seen as authority enough to say such things...nope. Went into full on solitary unicorn mode and slipped away.

*snerk* You never know when we're watching...~

But yeah, it does seem that most unicorns I met (granted, most of those were kids in a high-control cult-like environment with me, and that's gonna shape this, too) are more likely to just ghost away and take a solitary path over fighting for a place in a seemingly hostile community. Best defense no be there, after all.

Like, we're still protectors and guardians. But we'll pick our battles. Protecting home, family, and heart is different than fighting for a space that doesn't want us--we're more likely to move on to find a space that is for us.

Problem is, that doesn't really exist, so now we have to fight to make our own.

I'm fully hedgehog and fully my unicorn self. I can pull on my hedgehog self to help fight. I have done, repeatedly. ^_^;; Being Fictionkin didn't make finding welcoming groups easier. Especially in 2009, where we were seemingly so reviled, as someone trying to come in and find new community.