peoples' tumblr exceptionalism is becoming increasingly hard to tolerate at all. i experience this with discord too, and it's tiresome in the same way the far-larger-than-i-would-like amount of Apple fanatics are tiresome.
stop having pet companies. stop excusing the shit things they do, stop praising them for things that aren't even true about them, stop treating companies like they are your friends. they aren't. they don't care about you. individual people in a company can be caring and good, but that isn't the same as the company as a whole being good.
i'm not asking people to be suspicious and disdainful like i am of these companies but i do expect a minimum level of both self-awareness and critical thinking, which seem to be largely lacking. sigh.
especially ...ironic...? is ironic the right word? that since i deleted my tumblr account i only kept track of a few peoples' tumblrs who refuse to leave, and had to cut that number down even more once twitter's demise began and people i thought were sensible and compassionate became sneering dickweeds about the whole thing. and even now i consider cutting that number down again, and another of the very few people i keep track of had to set their blog to login-only because the harassment they experienced was bleeding into people making them fear for their irl safety. which if i stop keeping track of the other blog will leave me with. one.
well, shot out to Ren Basel for having the only tumblr still worth reading that i can also view without an account at the shithole website (and isn't run by one of my friends.)
that said, i am glad to see people either moving off social media to make personal websites again, or make them alongside their social media. it's probably not a very big movement as it is, but i'm glad to see it all the same. especially seeing people on neocities or off places like wordpress and blogger, which i do feel personal web journals away from social media are better for avoiding some of the particularly bad behavior social media seems to encourage, you're still chained to a corporation and its interests. you don't own your account or website unless you can download all the files easily and just as easily move and upload them somewhere else.
both those things are important, too. even places that allow you to download your data like twitter and tumblr... where would you put it? where can you upload it all again easily? and the answer is: you can't. there isn't anything. i'm sure that's enough for some people and that's fair all the same, but i'm not always sure if people realize what that truly means. that once you're left with downloading your account data being the only option, it's effectivelly offline data now. the only way to re-upload it somewhere else would be as bits and pieces of what it once was.
sigh. i didn't even want this entry to be about this, but i guess it's just what's annoying me right now and all my greater troubles are things i don't really want to detail publicly online. the world does feel so heavy though, and people are far too often so treacherous and cruel.
in better news i achieved something i've wanted to do for over ten years in WoW: i beat the Celestial Tournament! it was quite easy with the excellent guide on wow-petguides.com (provided in case anyone else wanted or needed it,) the real tedious part was just leveling up all the pets used to beat it. i'll still have to level up some more for the rotating set of trainers in the coming weeks but. it's hard not to feel silly for realizing powerleveling pets once you have certain pets to 25 was so easy. i didn't realize a decoy-blocked hit still counts for experience gain eligibility, i didn't realize you could use decoy to just swap in a fragile level 1 pet and have it take a decoy-blocked hit, then swap in a max level pet again to finish the fight. it all feels so obvious now.
admittedly i'm still just not really into pet battling as a thing on its own, but i do appreciate the feeling of my favorite pets being max level and boosted to highest quality, and also like pvp i may not really enjoy it on its own but there's just too many rewards i really want locked behind it so i have to do it.
if anything, i'm just thankful WoW's side content (and content in general) is vastly less boring and frustrating than all the horseshit FF14 has going on. don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of things that irritate and frustrate me about WoW as well, but playing FF14 for a while made me really realize how much better and less fucking horrendous the systems for things are in WoW, especially in the current expansion. i've also just. never had an entire expansion make my depression worse the way Endwalker did. gods. at least g'raha was there to make the whole thing actually bearable.
i stopped playing that around 6.1 though, after being throughly uninterested with both the direction the main story was going (again) and how dull the content was, i really have no intention of ever going back. FF14's real (and only) strength lies in its great characters, and i don't have to play the game anymore to carry them with me in my mind. i'm honestly and genuinely a lot happier playing WoW regularly again instead.