I'll try to post through it a bit! I haven't spent a lot of time on social media this past year.

decided to add a lil process image, just cause!

I find it really hard to trust this new paradigm for its newness but mainly because I just spent most of a year under near constant duress and I am deathly afraid of losing this crumb of stability that tempts me "slow down, mourn, heal". This was always the hard part.

I think I still struggle with feeling like all of the rapid and painful change this past year isn't just temporary, like somebody is just gonna say "gotcha"! and it'll all be over. It doesn't feel real. And yet I did do that, I did go to the bar and get flogged by a crush. I learned his name even.

it really puts an extra sour twist on the already-rancid word "creator" imo. You're not a creator if you feed the algo, you're a cog in the machine, and yet you need to eat. It's a fucking job, and YouTube gets away with a lot of shit by pretending that isn't what it is.

I don't really have a point to bring this back to, I just think it's interesting just how extreme the algo forcing content into a certain type of box has become. You could argue the type of content that exists on YouTube is designed from the top-down, even.

and I think this dichotomy has existed since that switch and has only gotten more extreme over time. Vine appeared around the same time as the switchover, and that poured gas on that fire.

now we've ended up with this false dichotomy of extremely longform super indepth youtube content that's kind of dry in a bad way or just poorly structured and aimless (I am staring daggers at every game reviewer who needs to spend 5+ hours talking about a thing rn) and that sucks lol.

sometimes it is good for things to be short and command my attention masterfully rather than be long and making me dissociate instead. Sometimes it is good for things to be long and exhaustive and detailed. The point is that the algo rarely allows for styles to breathe.

before the shortform slop, we had reacters and commentary tubers and the 10 hours rain sounds occasionally interrupted by homer saying d'oh with reverb or w/e. This is also slop (debatable for commentary tubers but definitely some of them). It is the algo-optimized vapidity of its era.

why am I having this thought now? well because I was watching a pretty well-made and chill cooking short, which had a companion video. Okay, time to deslop! I say to myself, opening the video and not finishing it because it is not very well-made without snappy editing.

It isn't *my* game but I am trans and so is the mouse making it! It just got its steam page up. FFTactics inspired TRPG made by my friend who (and I asked her if I could share) designed large portions of my favorite level in all of Prey, the Arboretum. store.steampowered.com/app/4180060/...

which in and of itself, was an echo of edgy teens in the youtube atheism scene taking their trolling efforts too far several times and continuing to triple down on it

it makes claims of like "oh the journos all have this secret group where they all wanted to slander gamers at the same time!" false claim seem like such projection in retrospect, too, omfg

It's like, actually shocking the amount of coordinated organized tactical harassment even by today's standards