So fun fact–I’ve gone into the calligraphy tag on tumblr, and plenty of times I’ll see people who post pieces that are, quite frankly, better than mine. And yet, they will often have a total of 0 notes. And it’s because they don’t understand that tumblr isn’t instagram. They have the edge with calligraphy, but I’m better at understanding how to operate tumblr–does it matter if theirs is better if no one sees it? So, I figured I’d outline some of the ways to run a successful calligraphy blog on tumblr!
Only the first 5 tags will show up in the tags. If you use serach, or go on mobile the first 25 will show up, so make sure to put the 5 most important tags first
Instagram is solely pictures and videos. Tumblr is Not. So while there is a calligraphy community, it isn’t the same as instagram. So definitely use “calligraphy” in the first tag, BUT if you use a quote from, let’s say a marvel movie, have the other 4 tags be marvel related.
Like don’t spam the tags by tagging things that don’t apply, but this is tumblr–there will be plenty of blogs who will then see calligraphy and lettering for the first time
(tbh less of an exposure to calligraphy means that their standards will also be lower on instagram. it’s easier to get a following while also then improving
something about tumblr that is completely different about instagram is that now these non lettering blogs will reblog your things, then exposing even more people to calligraphy who would never even follow that kind of blog
another point of tags with tumblr? use spaces. u s e. s p a c e s. Instagram you have to fit it within one hashtag. You do not have to do that with tumblr. When people search for things, they use spaces. If it doesn’t it won’t be found
and then the only people who will then see things are the ones who are also on instagram, which defeats the purpose of even using tumblr as another social media platform
so use spaces
something that I do is leave my askbox open to requests! at this point I get so many requests that I usually keep it closed BUT this is a pretty good way to accumulate and keep followers. People see that maybe you’ll make something for them, and they become ride or die since you made them something, and then are much more likely to reblog what you made, and tell their friends about it
this isn’t instagram, where all they can do is like it or comment. all of their followers will see it. tumblr is more interactive in a lot of ways than instagram–take advantage of it.
But, something that I do to accumulate commissions is to make rules about requests. I have word limits, won’t do full names or anything not safe for work, or color specific requests. If they want those things, then we can talk about commissions.
don’t let people pull you around–sometimes people can be demanding, but you are giving them things for free.
reblog other people’s calligraphy along with posting your own! if you really want to get their attention, put tags of commentary about what you think! it’s how you make friends on here and those are also the people who will then reblog your things! (plus it’ll make what you do more fun! success aND fun! always good!)
these are just a few tips and tricks for how to manage a great calligraphy blog, so go out and make calligraphy!
A reminder that it’s illegal in the USA to collect or sell the feathers of wild birds (and their eggs, bodies, and nests) even if you find them lying on the ground, unless you have a permit to do so. As in, actually illegal, not “outdated law everyone has forgotten about and is no longer enforced”. Eagle parts are extra illegal.
How about bones?? Not like bird specifically just animal bones in general. Also why is it illegal?? There so many birds ergo so many feathers no ones gonna miss em
The specifics depend on your state, the situation, and whether the species is a game animal, but usually, it’s illegal unless you are licensed (ex for educational purposes).
There really aren’t “so many birds”. The populations of many species are rapidly declining due to habitat loss and pollution. I’ve seen birds of prey autopsied and their insides are often coated in plastics. Pesticides and rodenticides wipe out truly horrifying numbers of larger birds – please only ever use mechanical traps for mice and rats, not poisons.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 was passed four years after the last passenger pigeon died. It discourages the personal and commercial collection of bird parts for very good reason.
Oh, Ship! Tag me in on this one, I’m ready!
So, the history of Wildlife law in the United States goes way back, actually, to the history of wildlife law in Great Britain.
See, in Ye Olden Days, the King was in charge of deciding who was and wasn’t legally allowed to hunt. This was a Big Deal, because many people needed to hunt to feed and clothe themselves and their families. If the King said “you can’t hunt anywhere near where you live because those are My Deer,” you were, well, fucked.
Eventually, this power of wildlife ownership was technically redelegated to parliment, but hunting often remained super inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy, privileged few.
So when people started coming here from there, it was a total free-for-all. You could hunt anywhere, anything! There were things to shoot in the US that had been extinct in the British aisles for centuries, even!
So not only were people hunting for food, clothing, to drive out unwanted animals (see: wolves), but also for the hell of it because they were allowed!
For a while though, hunting was still very much an “I need to eat” business. Can’t fault ‘em for eating, ya know?
But once Europeans became really established here, with cities and leisure time and fashion, things got way out of hand.
There were pretty much No laws dictating how many animals a person could take, or when and from where they could take them.
What’s more is, suddenly, it wasn’t just for food, it was for MASS PRODUCTION! You know what women REALLY wanted? Hats With Feathers. Lots Of Feathers.
People were already killing Many Birds, but not Enough. “We need to kill WAY MORE BIRDS and FASTER,” they said. So they made These Big Guns.
They were made for mounting on boats, and who gave a damn about ammo? ANYTHING that could presumably maim a duck was a go. They loaded them with pieces of tin, metal, shards of broken glass, ya know. The usual.
Then, at night, during Mating season, they’d go out onto the water, shine a light so that all the ducks raised their heads to investigate, fire the gun, and instantly decapitate hundreds of ducks a shot. It was wild.
So this was happening
And the REASON this was happening was there was a demand for these ducks, feathers, mainly. Meat second.
The demand is what’s imperative here. It didn’t matter if you had the means to kill 100 or 1000 birds in a night. If you shot ‘em, someone would pay for ‘em.
You can see where this started going wrong, however. Eventually, there were like, uh, no birds left to shoot.
So now everyone’s starting to say, “well, what the hell…it seems that shooting All Of The Birds At Once has somehow wiped them out. Maybe we should do something about this.”
NOW, that was NOT a popular move. People were really loving the whole “I can kill anything any time I want” thing going on. They argued that limiting their take would violate their rights and freedoms (never mind the hypocrisy of claiming any rights to the wildlife of this land that had been taken from the indigenous peoples they’d killed and driven out).
But responsible hunters knew that wildlife and hunting laws were imperative to the continued existence of wildlife.
This wasn’t a new concept, mind you. Responsible Wildlife laws are even in the damn Old Testament:
“If you come across a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young.” Deuteronomy 22:6
Makes sense, right? Eat the eggs but make sure the mother remains to lay more.
And more than a century before, John Quincey Adams is quoted in reference to the issue:
“I went with my gun down upon the marshes, but had no sport. Game laws are said to be directly opposed to the liberties of the subject; I am well persuaded that they may be carried to far, and that they really are in most parts of Europe. But it is equally certain that where there are none, there is never any game; so that the difference between the country where laws of this kind exist and …where they are unknown must be that in the former very few individuals will enjoy the privilege of hunting and eating venison, and in the latter this privilege will be enjoyed by nobody.”
ANYWAY. Point was, people were realizing that if things didn’t change fast, there’d be nothing left to hunt, to eat, or to use for Fancy Hats.
So we got the Lacey Act of 1900, the first federal wildlife law.
“I have always been a lover of birds, and I always been a hunter as well, for today there is no friend that the birds have like a sportsman-the man who enjoys legitimate sport. He protects them out of season; he kills them with moderation in season.” John Lacey.
It limited market-hunting and commercial wildlife trafficking. People with Super Duck Guns were especially unhappy about this. However, if ducks understood federal laws, they would’ve been thrilled.
The problem was, there was still a HUGE demand for feathers, for meat, and absurdly, for specimen for people’s private collections. “I don’t CARE if that’s the last known living Auk. I want it.”
So they had it.
What we needed to do was to destroy the demand for bird products. And to destroy the demand, we had to stop products from being made. If no one is walking down the street wearing a Fancy Bird Hat, no one else is going to say “oh! I want one too,” and no one is going to pay a Fancy Hat Maker to pay a Big Duck Gun owner to shoot 1,000 birds.
So we got the Migratory Bird Treat of 1918, which made it almost totally across the board illegal to own Any bird parts (excluding legal game birds, but laws about when and how many you could hunt were forming to protect them).
There is a misnomer that taking something off the legal market will increase demand because people love what they can’t have. That’s proven untrue in this case. Very few people are actually willing to break Actual Federal Law in order to own a hat they can’t wear in public. The issue was larger society and for the most part law-abiding citizens who wore this stuff while it was legal but moved on once it wasn’t.
The reason it still exists is to keep the demand for bird parts non-existent, and it’s WHY you can’t legally collect feathers even when they fall off a bird naturally.
Because hey, YOU may live in an area with a healthy golden eagle population. Or a Blue Jay population. Or Red headed woodpeckers. YOU find their feathers all the time! They just fall off, no harm done.
So you pick them up, make them into cool jewelry and art, and post them on your etsy and pinterest.
They’re super popular! People love them!
Now I want in on that business!
But there aren’t many golden eagles, blue jays, or woodpeckers around me, so I don’t find their feathers often. But you know what’s way easier than looking for one, fallen feather? Shooting a bird and getting a lot at once.
And thus an innocent market has once again created an unsustainable demand that will threaten bird populations.
And that’s why it’s just flat out against Federal US law to own, collect, or sell almost any wild bird parts!
And MAKE NO MISTAKE! This law is Very Enforced. Wildlife officers Do pay attention to people talking about collected bird parts, and they Will throw the book at you. The fines are wild. Don’t risk it.
THANKS FOR READING THIS LONG-ASS EXPLANATION!
This is a beautiful history of why wildlife protection laws matter. This is why I’m so stringent about people adhering to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
being forced to be constantly accessible damages your boundaries and ability to make boundaries. I don’t care what anyone says about “it’s 2017 and you should be able to text back unless you’re in the hospital or the movies”. no one is entitled to anyone 24/7. it’s fucking unhealthy at best and manipulative and abusive at worst to expect this of someone.
give people their space. make sure your people give you your space.
Hi, I have crippling anxiety, and I assume when people don’t text me back that they actually hate me.
So yeah, quick responses are nice. Especially if it’s a friend who I KNOW is attached to their phone at the hip.
Hi, I’m sorry to hear this, but this still doesn’t make you entitled to anybody’s time!
While quick responses are nice, they should never be expected! Because even people who have their phones at their hips all the time have other things to do!
@theoriginalmajestic hey, pal, as someone who is in successful recovery from “crippling anxiety” might I suggest that instead of expecting your friends to cater to your every need and exist purely to provide stimulation and constant reassurance to you, that you instead focus your efforts on healing from anxiety yourself so that you can resort to self-soothing techniques and crisis management strategies when anxious instead of flipping your fucking shit because your friend took a nap and isn’t here to validate your (by definition) inherently irrational behaviors and (unconsciously, I’m sure) manipulative tendencies? Cool, thanks, good luck buddy, I’m rooting for you.
you’re gonna have to be more specific than that mate
Certainly!
Considering no one can truly be available 24/7, if you rely on your friends’ responses to manage your feelings of anxiety, you are both validating and perpetuating your irrational thoughts (“if my friends didn’t hate me, they’d respond immediately”) and also setting yourself up for inevitable failure and future emotional crisis (because eventually there will be a time they do not respond immediately). This also doesn’t help you grow and progress to a healthier place along the path to recovery, because at best you’re just maintaining the status quo by temporarily relieving symptoms, not learning or practicing techniques to handle those symptoms before they take over your entire mood.
There are of course several more productive ways to deal with anxiety instead of expecting your friends to constantly prove they don’t hate you. I’d always recommend a good therapist as the best idea (and have written at length before about how to find a great one) but barring that option, anxiety is a disorder particularly well-suited to self management.
Most major chain bookstores have a psychology section; I’d think books on cognitive behavioral therapy/CBT would be a great place to start, because CBT is all about identifying the negative thoughts in your mind (“if my friends don’t respond immediately they hate me”) and replacing them with more accurate, healthier statements (“just because my friends have their own lives, it doesn’t mean I’m not important to them”). Alternatively, everyone here probably knows I’m a huge fan of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy/DBT. It was created for (and by!) Borderline people, but seeing as how it’s essentially an upgraded form of CBT plus some other bells and whistles (self-management of suicidal thoughts, that sort of thing) it should work well too. And I know Barnes & Nobles stocks CBT and DBT workbooks specifically modified to be used by people with Anxiety.
Visiting the bookstore is also a good time to pick up some books about Anxiety Disorder. Obviously you know you have it, but understanding what sets it off, what it looks like, and how it works will be really useful for the next bit, and if nothing else is VERY important for any sort of self-advocacy on your own behalf toward doctors, teachers, employers, or parents.
But my FAVORITE trick? My go to technique I always seem to resort to in the moment to handle symptoms of any of my disorders but especially my anxiety? I psychoanalyze myself out of them.
I have researched anxiety as a disorder very thoroughly. I’m fortunate enough to have access to a good therapist (which, I won’t deny, helps a lot) with whom I’ve discussed what anxiety looks like. I’ve put a lot of work into identifying what MY anxiety looks like (for instance, I tend to worst-case-scenario and it sounds like you do too: “I don’t want to call my boss, what if there’s an issue I don’t know about, and by calling him I remind him, and he fires me, and I lose all my money and wind up homeless, and–”) and just as importantly, what the WARNING SIGNS of my anxiety looks like. Through experience and hard work I know exactly when I’m starting to pull my thoughts from the anxiety part of my brain, not the part that lives in the real world.
And I take a step back, and I go somewhere private, and I talk through the false logic to point out the flaw. Often, in front of the bathroom mirror; looking myself in the eye seems to distract me out of obsessive hysteria.
For example (note again, UNDERSTANDING ANXIETY DISORDER HELPS HERE):
“I texted Janet that I was upset, and she didn’t text me back, and it’s been like an hour, and I know she was using the phone earlier, she must be ignoring me!”
“Ok, so what specifically am I feeling right now, and why?” (I always start with this)
“Well, I’m upset! I thought we were friends and friends are supposed to care! So, I guess I’m mad at Janet too! But like, idk at the same time I’m mad at myself for being like this! No wonder she hates me!”
“Okay so I’m in a rough place and I reached out and she didn’t answer right away, and I’m feeling rejected, and I’m also frustrated with myself because I’m feeling hurt over it. Has Janet TOLD me she hates me?”
“Well, no, but maybe she doesn’t care enough, or she thinks I’m needy!”
“That doesn’t make sense, I know Janet well, we had a great time yesterday, and she’s a nice person. She’d tell me if I was doing something that annoyed her. Could there be other reasons she didn’t respond?”
“I mean…I guess…her phone could have died…or she forgot to unmute it….or maybe she was driving, or she saw it and meant to respond and got distracted….”
“Okay, so which is more likely: that my friend of 5 years secretly hates me and has been hiding it all this time even though that would be a really mean thing to do and she’s not mean? Or literally any one of those things, say, her battery died because she uses her phone so much?”
“I guess…the battery thing…”
“So it’s way more likely than not that she DOESN’T hate me. Now, I know a few facts. I know I have anxiety. I know that anxiety’s symptoms include going into panic mode over minor setbacks, and also having trouble understanding social relationships and feeling insecure in them. And I know when *I* get anxious I start secondguessing all my friendships and getting really selfcritical and thinking nobody likes me. Doesn’t that sound a lot like this? So really, if you think about it, thinking their friends hate them is exactly the sort of textbook symptom you’d expect to see in someone who has an anxiety disorder, right? And the whole thing about anxiety is it’s my brain misinterpreting things and jumping to irrational conclusions because anxiety likes to think everything is a catastrophe. So if this is almost definitely my brain being anxious, then it’s not based on my actual real relationship, and Janet doesn’t really hate me.”
Usually by then I’ve either A, convinced myself what I’m freaking out about is irrational, or B, so thoroughly distracted myself by my self-dialogue that the overemotional moment has passed and I can think more clearly. And at this point, it’s become so habitual and easy to recognize my anxiety through practice that it usually winds up being “ooh, Janet didn’t respond, she must hate–shut the fuck up anxiety no one likes you.”
What I find really helps wrap it up is by thinking of one productive step I can take to deal with the situation. Sometimes that’s making an immediate plan, like “I’m going to wash my face, pour an iced tea, and go watch that show I wanted to see.” Sometimes that’s “ok so tomorrow when I see Janet I’ll just tell her that I tend to really secondguess myself sometimes, and if I ever do something to genuinely piss her off, could she make sure to tell me? That way if I get like this in the future I can trust that Janet isn’t mad at me, because if she was, she’d have said so.”
I’ve been doing this for years and my anxiety, while still present, isn’t medicated and hasn’t severely fucked me up in ages, because I understand what it looks like and I make a conscious effort to strip it of its power over me. I promise you, that’s a way more productive use of time and emotion, and you’ll get way more benefit out of it than you’ll get out of checking your phone 18 times an hour in panic because nobody’s answered you yet. And as a bonus, it’s not forcing your friends to play caregiver to your negative symptoms, which is unfair to them.
Specific enough, mate?
As a psychologist, this last post makes me choke up with joy. Yes. CBT. It works. It’s so rare that I get to see someone successfully utilizing it – because once they do they leave me. *tears up*
@thursday-next-thursday I was pulling from my experience with DBT, actually, but of course one derives from the other!
I encourage anyone with anxiety to also read through the entirety of this post. 💙
