So I have a quick favor to ask.
I’m trying to get the readership of this blog up to the level it was when I took my hiatus, and then some, but it’s been tough so far. A lot of people who used to read the blog don’t know I’m back and posting, and of course a lot of people don’t know about the blog at all. And so my posts aren’t getting the traction that I know they could.
And, to be frank, unless I’m able to get readership up to the level it was at before, I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep the blog going long term. I’m going to give it some time, of course, but at some point I’ll have to decide whether or not the blog is going to remain viable for me.
So I’m wondering: if you get something out of my work on this blog, could you spread the word about it?
If you know someone who used to read the blog, let them know I’m back. If you know people who don’t know about the blog but who might like it, let them know it exists. If you’re active on social media, share some of my posts from the blog, either by using the helpful buttons at the bottom of each post or by sharing my social media postings about them. (Unfortunately, Elon’s enshittification of what was Twitter has limited my ability to publicize the blog on social media; I’m still building up an audience on Bluesky and Mastodon.)
I really think that there’s a much wider audience out there that would enjoy (if that’s the word for it) recent posts like MAGA is having a racist meltdown over a statue of an overweight black woman in Times Square, The “woke left” made right-wingers hate black people and embrace Harvey Weinstein, the Free Press declares, and Why men get furious at women who say they prefer the “dad bod.”
And if you want to help in a more direct way, and can afford it, please donate here with a credit card or PayPal account, or on Venmo, whether it’s a few bucks or something more. I truly appreciate every donation!
I rely on donations in part so I can keep this blog ad free–which liberates you all from the annoyance that is advertising and gives me the opportunity to cover topics that advertisers don’t like. Also that means I don’t have to chase traffic for traffic’s sake or seek out “hate clicks.” I can concentrate on doing posts that matter to readers who appreciate the blog. I just know that there are more people out there who would appreciate it.
If you’re tight on money or not on social media, I have a few other suggestions on ways to support the blog here, if you’re interested. Commenting on my posts is always good! Not only do I learn a lot from your comments but it also helps foster a sense of community around the blog.
I’m thankful for any help you can give me! Ultimately, you folks are the people who make this blog possible, and I’m grateful to have you as readers and supporters.
You can always reach me directly at dfutrelle at gmail.com if you have thoughts about this or anything else, or if you have a good tip for a post.
Thanks!
David
PS: If you’re a writer feeling stuck, or if you need writing advice or brainstorming help, it turns out I’m a writing coach as well as a writer. For more details, see here. A half-hour phone or Zoom consultation is free!
Just thought I’d plug that too.
eh, I’m a bit of a lurker anywhere I go tbh but posted three links fwiw! Thank you for making whtm what it is 🙂
TikTok might be a good bet. Political commentary cam get a lot of traction (especially of its funny!) And it’s basically the only social media platform without a aggressively unfriendly algorithm in terms of reaching people organically.
Give it time. Bytedance are just waiting for enough users to be locked in by network externalities, then you can bet they’ll jump on the enshittification bandwagon.
As for the OP, interesting timing: I namedropped WHTM on a trans discord yesterday.
As far as reclaiming older site participants are concerned, I did mention Crip Dyke and Yutolia back when the long hiatus ended (but before you went on another, much shorter hiatus). Crip Dyke is now back, obviously (not my doing, unless someone else messaged her based on my mentions). Yutolia I’ve seen on Fundies Say The Darndest Things, but as an occasional lurker I don’t have an account and don’t post there, and it felt wrong to create one just to DM someone. I have no clue where anyone else is.
Pharyngula of Freethought Blogs recently gave this site a signal boost, though it doesn’t seem to have done much, at least in terms of active posters. No idea about lurkers, obviously. I don’t have a platform of my own to spread the word, but if I did, I would be hesitant to do so due to my internet safety paranoia (I prefer to remain as anonymous as possible and would rather that my various online identities were extremely difficult to link to each other).
This might be off-topic but Trump is now taking in “Afrikaner refugees” from South Africa who do not require refugee status, they are either just economic migrants who are falsely claiming refugee status or they are white nationalists who long for the apartheid days. Either way, most white South Africans are not interested in Trump’s “offer” and he’s doing while at the same time also denying entry of people who really do require refugee status, like people from Sudan.
First, congrats on the reopening. I have been lurking off and on, didn’t feel like interacting or that I had anything relevant to say.
Would like to recommend this site to people, but off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone who would actually contribute. In the past people have always gone “Oh, that sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out” in the polite tone that says “Yeah, no, not gonna bother”.
@Jono Yeah, It’s just a publicity stunt, and best of all, the same people who who whine we don’t vet the usual immigrants enough are endorsing these people who got rammed through in literal weeks. (The brown ones usually spend a year and a half to two years fighting the red tape and proving themselves to get in)
I’ll recommend the site to people I think might be interested. I know people here have already mentioned TikTok. I remember when We Hunted the Mammoth had a YouTube channel. Maybe try making some new material for that?
Thanks, everyone, for the support, even if you can’t necessarily reach a bunch of people who might be interested in the blog. Every bit helps!
I will definitely be making more YouTube videos at some point, though they take a long time to make, a lot longer than I thought they would. And I’ll try to figure out how to use bits of them for TikTok videos, or even try making some from scratch.
Was always a silent lurker too, but so happy to see you’re back!
Will spread the word!
OMG, I found you!! How? Husbeast was telling me about some cephalopod related news and it made me think of Pharyngula, so I came over to see if PZ had said anything about it. Looking at the blog list, what do I see? WHTM!
Hi, David! Hi everyone!
What happened to the Youtube channel?
I think it proved to be far too much work compared to writing text articles. :3
Welcome back!
Hey Hambeast. Great to see you again.
But you can’t come with half a tale. What’s going on in octopus world!
@Hambeast;
Good to see an old familiar name back! And I’d like to know the cephalopod news as well.
@Alan Robertshaw:
You might be amused by this creative legal use of vampire constraints:
http://web.archive.org/web/20250816210900if_
Source: https://www.tumblr.com/cheacegirl/791944820791918592/i-made-a-bad-comic-and-now-you-have-to-look-at-it
@ FMO
Heh. I should do a vid on vampire law. My American lawyer friends are tying themselves in knots over whether a vampire cop can enter with a warrant.
@Alan Robertshaw: Really depends on whether supernatural laws can be contingent on mortal laws, or whether they exist entirely separately.
If a being needs permission from the owner or “legitimate resident” of a property to enter, then there might be an objective supernatural definition of what that means, so a vampire cop couldn’t enter even with a warrant. Though if someone’s home, the warrant would probably be a pretty convincing means of obtaining permission.
On the other hand, vampires can freely enter any place which is open to the public. (Though presumably only during business hours.) If supernatural law allows such a being to be in any place which they are allowed to be by default rather than merely “open to the public” and that definition is influenced by local mortal laws, then a vampire cop could *probably* enter with a warrant, provided that it’s legitimate.
(Which brings up another question: What if a vampire tried to stay in a store past closing hours? Would they be forced to leave, or does it only apply to entering? Also, what would happen if you picked up a vampire and tried to carry or throw them into a place they can’t enter?)
There’s a third approach, which is rarely used (that I’ve seen): “what the being truly believes”. They know, somehow, what exactly supernatural laws they’re supposed to follow. And they can’t loophole themselves out of not following them (at least on purpose) or just decide what they believe to be true. But they can get bound by the laws in situations where they don’t objectively apply or break them by accident if their knowledge or perspective of the situation is faulty.
For example, a vampire could be invited in by a burglar who pretended to be a resident of the house. Or they could be unable to enter a public place because they mistakenly believe it’s not “public enough”. Or they may or may not be able to enter a place which is open to the public but is currently being used for a private event, depending on their perspective. A vampire cop who is genuinely acting as a cop in the moment might be able to enter with a warrant they believe is legitimate… or they might not, again depending one whether they believe their police duties give them an inherent right to enter regardless of anything else.
(Which also brings up the question, if it’s partly belief-based, what if a supernatural being is very stupid or very drunk or has a rather bizarre and dysfunctional mindset for their kind.)
@ snowberry
I like your analyses. Seems to me one test here could be ‘could the vampire be arrested for S.4 POA86’, which can only be committed in a ‘public place’.
This also reminds me of the Doctor Who debate we’ve been having for decades. Are the ‘Laws of Time’ actual physical laws innate to the universe, or just rules imposed by the Time Lords.
@Full Metal Ox, Alan Robertshaw, Snowberry:
Heh. Some of that was abused in one novel I read… there’s an author by the name of Nick Pollotta who wrote humorous fantasy among other things (he’d collaborated with Phil Foglio a couple of times) and one of the series he did was called Bureau 13, which was basically a silly version of a government agency tasked with investigating supernatural menaces. (It actually pre-dates The X-Files by a couple of years, and to my understanding was loosely based on a campaign run using a tabletop RPG from the 1980s called Stalking the Night Fantastic, which was later re-named around the time the novels were released.)
In any case, the leader of the group was the classic ‘lateral thinker’… he didn’t have magic or amazing sword skills, he was a good commander (in the sense of ‘knows how to do something by knowing who can do it’) and good at puzzles. One of the novels involved a plot where somebody was doing a summoning ritual in his garage, and apparently one of the requirements of the ritual was that it had to be performed in a location owned by the person performing it. So the leader looks at the massive magical ritual and various protective spells that are preventing them from entering, and yells to the person inside, “You are under arrest!” And as his co-workers are looking at him like he’s insane, he continues, “By the authority invested in me I hereby declare this location a closed crime scene, off-limits to all but authorized personnel!”
And the ritual shuts down.
In a completely separate thought, on the ‘do they have to believe it’… there’s a webcomic called El Goonish Shive where that’s actually part of the world background. The Immortals (basically faeries but they don’t like to call themselves that anymore) have laws amongst themselves. But because none of them would ever agree to laws that they could be tricked into breaking, the only way to actually break those laws is willingly: they have to actually believe that they’re breaking them. Which means anybody who can figure out loopholes or ways to convince themselves that they aren’t really breaking the law can do things you might not expect, but they actually have to honestly believe it. They cannot lie to themselves.
@ jenora
Reminds me of “Love at First Bite”
@Alan Robertshaw:
*laughs* I mean, there have been jokes before about what counts as a holy symbol… like having a yuppie couple using their platinum credit cards as holy symbols, after crosses had failed. It was holy to them, and that’s what counted.
@ jenora
I like the idea that vampires can’t see their reflections because mirrors used to be silver backed, and it’s actually the silver that rejects the image. So they could use cheap* modern mirrors to shave. Similarly they won’t show up on photos because the film utilises silver nitrate, but presumably they do show up on digital?
(* mirrors used to be so valuable a C17th countess traded a wheat farm for one.)
That now makes me think there ought to be some vampire stories where the most important skill for their assistants is barbering, so as to avoid the vampire hunters frequenting barber shops.
“Hah. I am a Count, not some run of the mill street blood sucker to be caught so easily at a barber shop“
@Alan Robertshaw:
I wrote a story years ago where I went a different direction… I’d actually been starting with a kitsune which always shows its true form in reflections, and I decided the way this worked in the context of the story that the kitsune didn’t actually shapechange, they just used a psychic illusion so anybody looking at them saw what the kitsune wanted them to see. Mirrors showed the true shape because the person not looking directly at the kitsune wasn’t being effected; also some people were just immune to the illusions, which was how ‘true sight’ worked. It also meant that cameras (analog and digital) would always capture the true form, which was why such beings had mostly retreated from everyday life, because cameras are everywhere now.
I would later extend the same concepts to vampires in a sequel to the story… vampires used the same sort of psychic illusion to appear human. Vampires weren’t actually invisible in mirrors… they showed up just fine if you understood what to look for. A vampire in my story was basically a hive mind controlling a swarm of mosquitoes, essentially immortal unless you could kill every member of the swarm, including any eggs. The vampire didn’t keep around a coffin of dirt from home for sleeping in: he kept around a coffin full of rotting material for insect breeding grounds.
(A number of my readers considered that idea frankly more horrifying than the traditional version of a vampire.)
One of the fun parts of world-building is the way the ‘but how would that affect this‘ aspect can generate more story ideas.
Silver is supposedly good against supernatural evil in general. There’s probably a lot of silver-related lore which didn’t carry on to the present day. Most people only know about silver harming werewolves (and sometimes wraiths), and I’m about 99% sure that the vampire/mirror thing is about silver. Also holy relics/symbols are often made of the metal, which might originally have been at least as important as the faith thing.
Though, can vampires appear in photographs? Digital photos, most likely, but film photos use silver halide. Is that enough to “block” the image, or would it require pure silver? Would the other chemicals still work, resulting in a miscolored transparent image? Or could silver halide actually be *more* potent, given that it’s a kind of salt and salt is also effective against supernatural evil?
Does the fact that all but the lowest-power telescopes have reflector mirrors mean there could be space vampires we can’t even see?
Side note: Probably most people know this, but in case anyone doesn’t: Turning into a bat isn’t part of any European vampire lore (though the Moroi can fly and are sometimes depicted as having bat wings). Dracula could do it, not because he’s a vampire, but because he’s also a wizard. But there’s at least one vampire-like being which can turn into a bat that I know of, the Azeman from Central America. Though that being is almost as much of a were-bat as it is a vampire.
I like the vampire lore in Let The Right One In, and the idea that vampires can ‘think’ things like wings and claws and it somehow works out for them.
And the film version was amazingly subtle in how it illustrated that.
…I just re-read and realized I forgot that @Alan Robertshaw already covered the photo thing, oops. And apparently different types of camera film use/used different forms of silver, so both “silver nitrate” and “silver halide” are valid answers, as are “silver bromide”, “silver choloride”, and “silver iodide”.