Some of y’all following me were literally born in the 2000s (and no this is not going to be one of those awful 90s kids are better rants) but I know from personal experience that as teenagers, you don’t really understand exactly how young you are. Like I literally babysat kids your age. And I want to remind y’all that I am an adult. And there are lots of adults on this website. And if any adult, even an 18 year old, comes on to you or makes you feel uncomfortable in any way, you are 100% within your rights to report it, and please please please don’t let yourself fall for their lines of “oh you’re very mature for your age” or some shit because I promise you that no matter what, to someone my age, you are a CHILD, and they’re preying on you. Your safety is important, so please exercise caution in all your online interactions
alright i always feel Some Kinda Way whenever i see this post:
im not articulate enough to put all the right words to my feelings, but basically this post’s popularity is concerning because it makes light of the issues that arise from widespread age discrepancies between users in frequent and close communication with one another, and implies that those discrepancies are insignificant and can be overlooked.
tumblr users, especially adult users, absolutely need to be aware of their own age in relation to the age of those in their online social circle. if you’re 27 and would be uncomfortable discussing a particular topic with a 14 year old in person, you shouldn’t be doing it online. don’t send suggestive messages to minors, don’t RP sexual situations with minors, and if an underage person is the one instigating, it is your responsibility as the adult in this situation to stay uninvolved.
when you’re 15, that’s as old as you’ve ever been, so you don’t have the perspective to realize how vastly different high schoolers and 20/30-somethings are, but believe me if a 25 year old on here gets real friendly with you in a way that doesn’t obviously fall into a mentor/older sibling category, it’s a red flag.
aside from excusing shady and possibly predatory behavior, community wide disregard for user-user age differences subjects minors to inappropriately harsh treatment by significantly older users. ive seen well-meaning 14 and 15 year olds get publicly called out, dragged, and humiliated by grown ass adults who deemed a post of theirs problematic in some way. adults should not have the same expectations of children as they do of their actual peers, and children shouldn’t be encouraged by posts like these to see adults as their peers. yes, even when you’re just screaming about cartoons.
Question @people who were already actively reading fic back in the 90′s early 2000′s etc.:
Since I have a preference for older fandoms I keep ending up on older fic archives too, but I’m personally really more of an AO3-generation type person since I literally only started reading fic back in 2013 and ao3 is where I read my first stories..
SO on ao3 fic length/’size’ gets measured in WORDCOUNT (which.. makes sense to me and is something I can sort of work with to make an approximation of how long something is gonna take me to read etc.)
BUT on older fic archives I tend to see things get measured by.. idek what exactly? but? you end up with fic sizes like “55K” or.. “200K” and.. to me ‘K’ means thousand? but they most definitely do not mean 200 thousand WORDS, so..
is it FILESIZE?? like.. 200 KB if you save it as a textfile??? or?? what.. just.. W H A T ?
I’m pretty sure it’s file size because that mattered with dial-up. I think 4K roughly corresponds to 1000 words.
I’ve never felt… so old…. in my life
wait till the children find out we had to split up our “long” stories into parts because the way you got fanfic was through a mailing list and was rude to send a whole long story in one email. (and by “long” I mean like 20,000 words. that would be split up into five or six parts.)
because… what if you sent someone a long story and their email inbox got COMPLETELY FULL. then they’d miss other important emails. that was a thing that could happen. TRUE FANDOM HISTORY FACTS
*xxx * means bold! _xxx_ means italic! //xxx// means thoughts or song lyrics!
True, all of the above is true! The first fanfic I ever wrote was split into four emails and sent out to an email list. In fact, for a few years I composed fanfic *in my email at work* because I had no computer at home and no better place on my work computer to store it.
And eventually, you got good at gauging the length of the stories by the K size too. Like, this story’s only 5, 10K, okay, that’s a fast read, I can get through that in my internet time before school in the morning. But if it was a story that was something along the lines of 5 separate parts/files, and each file was listed as 90K? Save that one for the weekend…or copy/paste it to another file to read offline so you don’t end up spending hours on dial-up and then getting yelled at by your parents when the next phone bill comes in. That or just print out the story, stick it in a binder, so when you’re reading it in class it actually looks like you’re working…
This was more common with the fic archives of the time as compared to the e-mail lists. And, at least with the specific archive I’m thinking of, all of those stories had to be uploaded and posted as a text file, which was hell on the formatting too, iirc.
My sister’s 28 now – she still lives here. My 22 year old brother and I (19 and a half) live here, too. You’re never too old, don’t worry. ❤
33yo here checking in, got a brother 3 years my junior and we’re both living with the parents. The four of us are currently looking for a nice 3 bedroom house to move into when Mom retires in a few years. Every person is different, and every family unit is different. Find what works and don’t bother listening to people who don’t know your situation, basically.
37 year old checking in here. My parents and my uncle have properties that share a fence. (My Uncle’s house is one of the two houses my mother grew up in.) I lived on my own from the time I was 27 until I was 32 and an injury (and consequent loss of income) forced me to move back home. I still live with my Uncle, with my parents across the backyard, and all four of us eat dinner together whenever we can. And, don’t get me wrong, I loved having my own place, but you know what? What I have now is kind of amazing, too, especially because my Uncle isn’t young and he’d otherwise be living alone. But because he has lived alone a decent portion of his life, he respects my privacy and I respect his, but neither of us is alone unless we want to be, and that’s pretty great. ^_^ Also, my former neighbor is about 30 years older than I am and moved back in with her parents when she was in her late 40s, early 50s, and lived with them until they both passed away. You’re never too old to live with your family, whether they be your spouse/children, your parents, extended family, or found family. You’re doing just fine. ^_^
eirenical17 