the great migration and things that got thrown off the wagon along the trail

 

On Friday night, I made the Great Migration from LJ to Dreamwitdth. Previously, I had had a Dreamwidth Account during the era of the anon-wank meme, SadFrenchPeople. When I had reported the group to the admins, especially since the anon posters were saying really disgusting and straight up defamatory statements, DreamWidth's response was to just ~le shrug~ and tell me not to look at it. I immediately deleted my account.

It took a LOT from me to make a new account with DW. I hope to be back on LiveJournal someday, it's just not okay for me to be on there right now, either everything that is going on.

I painstakingly went through and downloaded each and every LJ icon. Only 6 made the Great Migration, because I am not going to pay DW for an account when I am already paying for LJ. At least I have everything preserved there for the time being.

You know that old adage that you're not supposed to talk about the internet off of the internet, let alone ON the internet? Unfortunately for the folks that ran SadFrenchPeople, I did talk about this on and offline. When I had mentioned it on my now-deleted Tumblr that this group Was a Thing, people flooded my inbox begging me to delete my posts, and then made comments about how I would "never make it" as a musician. Or something like that. 

Listen, when I dislike someone, I pretend that they don't exist and merely go about the rest of my existence.

And, unfortunately for the folks of SadFrenchPeople, I will never stop talking about this.

I deleted my Tumblr, all 3 blogs on the same account, a matter of weeks ago. Maybe it was a full month ago. I hadn't been on there in years. Every once in a while I would check and reblog something, or post something. My posts never got any traction, despite how many tags they had.  I know it's not about views, but if you are trying to make art your career, views and likes and shares are, unfortunately, things that keep that career alive. I deleted my Tumblr(s) because I didn't want to be reminded of how much bullying I had suffered on that platform. The DMs from people telling me unalive myself because I dared question another user, with a much bigger following than I had, why they had copied all of my character designs. 

I remember being so upset about this at the time, and I had every right to be. I lost friendships over this. This wasn't just about some stupid fanart, this was about MY art, my money. In the years in between, I had sort of second-guessed myself, gaslit myself as to thinking, "oh, this wasn't as bad as I remembered." Upon looking at the images of the stolen art again, yes, it WAS that bad.

This person took my designs they stole and put them in their portfolio, and got an internship working at [a very high profile animation company].

It's this weird thing that keeps happening to me--no one buys my art or music, but people steal it and rip it off. 

I will miss LJ a whole lot until we meet again.

I won't miss Tumblr.

Even though I had been bullied so bad with my first LiveJournal account that the site had to CLOSE DOWN MY ACCOUNT and gift me a new one because they felt so bad for me. I lost 3 seminal years of my life that I had cataloged on that original account. I am sure that it's better left lost to the ages, but it would be interesting to see what those years were like.

During my late childhood and into my late teens, I was on the bumper crop hit parade of incompatible psych meds. I started the original LJ in 2003(?) to sort of catalog my symptoms because I wasn't getting the kind of help that I needed or wanted. My memories of that era are spotty--not because of the distance of time, but because of the psych meds. One of the ones they had me on, Serzone, was so controversial, it was taken off of the market in the contemporary timespan (2004) of this horrifying era. I think it's now illegal (?) to give Abilify to minors. There were just so many of them and they literally made me both OUT OF CONTROL (to the point where I almost died) and they robbed me of huge chunks of time from that era.

At least I had 19 year old me, 2006-era LJ preserved. There are so many things from that era I don't want to remember. Heck, there are so many things from so much as last week I don't want to remember. I know there are a great deal many more things in this world that are happening right now that maybe need more attention than an online blog I still, for all intents and purposes, still have access to for the time being.  It doesn't make it any less sad. More than one thing can be sad at a time.