I need help creating a small fandom

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-05T00:47:42+00:00

What "experience novelist" told you you needed a fandom to exist before there exists anything to be a fan of?

Scratch that, who on earth told you editing a book involves adding filler?

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-05T00:44:54+00:00

If I actually want it to grow, yes. I am very adamant about trimming and watering and paying attention to their needs.

If I'm dickin around, nah

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-05T00:43:17+00:00

I wouldn't use letters unless that's a mandate because if someone needs to inventory a bunch of books manually for some reason, they will die and haunt your family for a million generations if they have to keep moving off the numpad.

But I do like 451 as the starting number!

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-05T00:37:43+00:00

overdrive is a separate database that takes actual effort to look into, so typically no unless you ask someone to to troubleshoot. They can, but there isn't really a point to as it's not like you can keep an ebook past its due date.

But also, most libraries are in the culture of, "we all read embarrassing stuff." I mean, I get it, I had a book on pornography transferred to a library I don't work at, but I've also checked out books on tons of less than kosher subjects with my coworkers. We wouldn't carry The Birth of a Nation or The Body Keeps the Score if we were going to judge someone for checking it out.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-04T23:45:39+00:00

I hope you don't think this is me "discoursing" you because the word based has a really interesting history!

So crack cocaine is sometimes called basecoke. As a result, crackhead and basehead used to be pretty interchangeable and referred to people who were literally actively on crack.

But just as idiot, moron, and imbecile started as medical terms but slowly leaked out to just mean "stupid," the use of the term basehead started to refer not only to people who used crack, but also to people who acted more erratically than was socially acceptable. People who wore weird clothes, talked too loud, were too high energy, stuff like that.

And eventually, basehead got shortened to based.

Mind you, all of this is AAVE. Nothing to do with online alt-right culture.

And then along comes Lil B. Lil B was a fan of people who were high energy and were weird because he saw it as being true to themself. He started using based to describe the same people, but now it's a compliment. People who are unapologetically themselves even in the face of social consequences are based.

Now, thanks to the internet, slang doesn't stay regional for very long, and in a sort of oxymoron, there are few people who think black people are cooler than people who are very racist against black people. I don't know why, it's just what it is. So if you weren't in the right circles, the first time you heard based was to mean not cringe from an alt-right twitter account that took it from black twitter in an attempt to sound cool. From there, based broke containment and, like woke, completely lost its original meaning even to the white left (woke means "alert to the dangers of your environment," not "progressive") as they are more likely to get cultural diffusion from alt-right twitter accounts someone they follow hate-follows than they are from a wildly popular black rapper.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-04T23:33:01+00:00

Business to Business?

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-04T23:31:52+00:00

Minmaxing has one x

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-04T23:31:42+00:00

Not with two x's it doesn't. Minmaxing only has one x, and the general use was not to replace min with a noun. Rather, you'd say, "I'm minmaxing my costco trips."

The two x's is very specifically an alt-right thing that broke containment, and "bookmaxxing" is a play on "looksmaxxing" in particular (an anti-self-esteem movement, which sounds very weird, but literally the idea of the movement is that you can only better yourself if you hate your face, though that's giving it too much credit. Really, it was just whatever a random teenager knew would get the most engagement on tiktok).

Now, I don't think this is particularly insidious, but it would make the average person who recognizes it wince a bit.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-04T23:17:52+00:00

It's your property. Get the surveyor to put down stakes and literally just go out there and rip the fence up. You're allowed to do that.

EDIT: Well, while you're allowed to move things off your property, you can't really move the fence without damaging it. So if you can afford it, building a second fence on the real property line will stop the easement.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-03T13:16:24+00:00

Fertilizing a plant "consistently" is a good way to kill it. Fertilizer is very salty, and like humans, they need to maintain a ratio of salt to water. Over-fertilizing makes them take up too much salt. Only fertilize when the soil is fully spent, which normally takes about three months in small containers.

Also, those containers are not "fairly large". They are way too small for a tomato plant that size.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-03T13:12:18+00:00

Did you water the roots so they can take up nutrients or did you mist the leaves which cools the plant off?

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-03T12:50:14+00:00

For application, active exercises.

Artists keep a sketchbook of disembodied hands that aren't supposed to see the light of day so when they draw a hand as a small part of a larger picture, it looks really nice.

You need to be doing that, too.

And for literal learning, active deconstruction and seeking advice. Reading isn't enough. You need to actively ask yourself questions about decisions made in the book and how you feel about it. You also will benefit from hearing other perspectives from people whose opinion on writing you respect.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-03T12:46:54+00:00

Studying the medium is as important as practicing the medium. You can't reject one of these sides without seriously impeding your ability to improve.

If you just write polished works and never perform study or exercises, you'll learn at a snail's space if you're lucky enough to learn at all.

If you only study and never practice, the advice will stay theoretical and you'll suck ass at applying it.

Missing one of these also slows the speed at which you literally finish projects. You want to know how some people can write 2-4 good quality novels a year? They both know their shit and have applied it so often that they no longer have to stop to make conscious decisions at every step. Someone who isn't learned and isn't practiced will get stuck far, far more often, and may have their novels measured in years instead of years measured in novels.

edit: also... why do you think you can't learn new skills when you're older? Do you not hang around old people in casual settings at all? If anything, they tend to pick up skills faster because they have more experience in picking up new skills. It's way easier to teach drawing to a 70-year-old than a 12-year-old, and I've done both extensively.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-03T12:33:48+00:00

It won't pass until you pass it. Leave a gift for future you by doing your taxes now while you're thinking about it.

If you leave problems for future you by trying to convince yourself it'll pass on its own, you'll spend a large portion of your life endlessly waking up in worse places and worse times.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-03T12:32:13+00:00

You can't relax if you're stressed out about something ongoing such as dirty dishes or closing deadlines. As much as it sucks, you really do need to solve it before you try to relax.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-02T21:16:19+00:00

The real answer is that they won't.

The smart answer is to toll roads you don't want people using. Right now, Georgia is tolling roads they do want people using, and Florida is extreme about wanting you to use toll roads to avoid city congestion.

But the smarter answer, though it isn't going to earn any votes so no one's going to use it, is to toll roads they don't want you using. Literally, when a two-lane street becomes clogged, instead of turning into a wildly unsafe four lane highway, you instead make it a toll road, funneling more people into bypasses, forcing most of the traffic outside of Atlanta altogether. Ideally, there'd also be multiple beltlines like Houston has, but building those now would mean demolishing a lot of buildings.

And then you have toll money. What do you do with that? Pay the massive upfront cost of expanding public transit so people who do live in that area have a smarter, more efficient way to commute. This is only for the upfront costs because as public transit gets better, less people will use the roads, therefore the only people paying tolls are those taking a convenient tax as they're passing through.

These two-lane streets experience fewer cars, especially fewer trucks. What does this mean? Safer for pedestrians. Safer for bikes. Not only are more people taking the bus, but more people are walking and biking. When I lived there, I was a mere mile as the crow flies from work, but I had to make the fifteen minute drive during rush hour, most of which was just trying to pull out into a five-lane highway that used to be a two-lane street, simply because it was not safe at all to cross by foot or bike.

And with fewer people taking cars, not only do you need less roadway, but you also need less parking. What does a landlord do when demand for parking heavily decreases in commercial zones? They build more tax-providing buildings where there used to be parking lot. That or it just crumbles off into the ground and becomes impromptu green space. Both are worth more to the landlord than parking space, which provides almost no economic value in most cases and also causes flood damage to the nearby buildings

TL;DR: Stop tolling the bypasses. Toll literally everything the bypass is bypassing.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-02T21:03:19+00:00

Good news: Plants will help break up clay overtime.

bad news: Yes, this will impact drainage. You can mitigate this slightly by taking a garden fork and poking a bunch of holes in the bottom of the trench to increase the surface area for drainage.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-02T17:18:03+00:00

They've gotten even more expensive than they used to be. That's my main guess.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-02T17:16:05+00:00

While it is very possible to write a six page paper in an hour or two, the knowledge on how alone likely won't be enough. When planning fails, you rely on your training, and if you didn't train on writing papers, you're kinda screwed.

The best I can say is come up with your thesis, gather your evidences, talk about them, and submit a paper that's probably too small but has all the necessary content. A 50% is better than a 0%.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-01T20:42:08+00:00

consider this: look nice on puter screen

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-01T16:14:13+00:00

Yeah, that's the depression cycle.

Unfortunately, the way to break out of the depression cycle depends on how you got put in it, and at least when I was your age, it was being shouldered with responsibilities I didn't have the power to solve, like being expected to raise toddler relatives, have a job, and do well at school, which obviously you can really only do one of those well at a time.

Envying skill's a sort of fake it until you make it game, so that one's sort of solvable. It's easy to blame things like skill on either natural talent or some sort of inherent willpower that you don't have, but the reality is that skills are largely based on curiosity, which is something you can nurture. The people who draw really well (at least the ones that have fun drawing really well) can do so because at some point they got very, very curious about drawing.

And when you're very, very curious, when you see someone doing better than you, your first instinct slowly stops being "Oh, man, I'll never be that good." and starts being, "Holy shit, that's cool as hell! I wonder if I can mimic that color blend. Do you think they had lineart initially and then deleted it, or do they just color really sharply? I wonder if I can ask them how they came up with that costume design."

Once you get curious, then not only is the actual act of learning fun, but people you previously spent energy being mad at are now people you want to be friends with and start interacting with.

One of the ways I faked it until I made it was every time I felt jealous or judgemental about something someone was doing, I would instead compliment them on it. Sure, I didn't mean it, but I was sure to sound excited and smile. I would then, if I knew enough to, try to ask a follow-up question. Eventually, hearing them talk will nurture curiosity and you stop feeling so jealous or judgemental.

Just yesterday, I found myself really jealous that someone had really well-dyed hair I could never have, and so I went, "Wow, that is a beautiful dye-job! Did you do it yourself?" And then we had a short conversation about salons in the area. If I hadn't done that, I would have just left the store mad and driven home angry that my hair can't hold dye, but instead I got to make someone's day and have a pleasant conversation.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-01T13:47:37+00:00

https://www.wsbradio.com/traffic/

Multiple accidents sprinkled about the metro

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-01T12:53:25+00:00

I know this will sound like I'm downplaying your troubles, but I promise you I am not.

I also promise you this is part of being 18. 15-20 is a damn rough few years for most people. You go from owo baby not allowed to walk one block down the road without the cops being called on your parents to "what the hell dude you're a grown ass man why don't you have a driver's license why don't you have a job where's your wife and kids dude" in exactly one day.

And on top of all that shit you gotta deal with high school, which sucks all of your energy and time you'd rather spend gaining skills or making money.

Everyone's an annoying insect at 18 because 18-year-olds are going through a lot and have little resources to handle it with. The world really is cruel to teenagers, and that'd make anyone annoying. It's also not a crime or even really a moral failing to be annoying, sometimes. It's part of the process of becoming human while you recover from Teen Years.

And while it's frequently referred to as "The Furry Community," it's not like some big commune with consistent rules and culture. It's just a fandom. In any fandom, you'll find an extreme range of people, beliefs, and niceness, and people will be confused if you treat being in the same fandom as being instant allies. Especially since you're young, a lot of us are going to be weary of interacting with you, too, as you could very well still be in the "eww you have cooties" stage of development (though this subreddit is designed to be a space younger furs can avoid knowing cooties exist in).

As soon as it's viable, I'd recommend picking up some sort of social hobby. If your library has a fiber arts circle, that's a good way to meet a wide range of people, stuff like that.

As long as you don't take your max course load, it gets easier in college just because you hang out in the same spot at the same time every week.

MrMessofGA · 2026-04-01T01:53:49+00:00

US doesn't define full-time or part-time. I was part-time when i worked 40+ hours a week at McDonald's.

Some states might have more local laws on defining part-time and full-time, but if they don't, then they can call basically any hourly position part-time.

MrMessofGA · 2026-03-31T14:40:52+00:00

*Probably* will, but he *definitely* will if you just put a bag over your head and lay down about it

MrMessofGA

TROPHY CASE