Slower, longer writings and explorations of whump, hurt/comfort, and the fanspaces that surround them.
Completely unrelated to whump, I've been thinking a lot lately about how our attention is commodified on the internet, how "samey" and de-personalized our spaces on the web are, how filled with landmines of attention grabbers, cookie notifications, tracking pixels, and bot-generated content.
I love the community that has sprung up around whump on Tumblr. I also crave quieter digital spaces for long-form work, and personal archives. The feeling of permanence that comes with a web page instead of an ephemeral blog post. I love stable links and systems that encourage thoughtfulness and moving slowly in our online lives.
To be clear, I'm not the only person thinking about this (see articles like this one, search engines like Marginalia, or Jenny Odell's 'How To Do Nothing'.) And these are very much personal opinions - ways I've been trying to bring my digital life in line with my values. As the saying goes, if you like your Tumblr, you can keep your Tumblr.
If you'd like to join me, though, I do think there's one strong argument for moving at least some of your personal content to smaller platforms or even independent servers: Tumblr is ephemeral. I learned this the hard way when they unceremoniously deleted all of my blogs in June of 2021. While they were reinstated, many others have lost years worth of content this way. We all know how terrible Tumblr's search functions are. And from an archival perspective, the volatile nature of Tumblr's content police makes me incredibly nervous. (If you write NSFW content, you'd better be especially cautious.) Archive of Our Own is an incredible resource,especially as it provides legal protection against litigious mega-corporations, but original whump content floats at the margins of its intended purposes. If you choose to, say, monetize your original whump content, you'll have to do it outside of Ao3 anyway, as that violates their terms of service.
All of that is to say, I'm not leaving Tumblr or Ao3 and I'm not asking you to, either. But if you'd like to join me in a quieter, more permanent side-bubble of our whump community, you're welcome. If you'd like to add a link to your own off-Tumblr "slow whump" site, please do contact me via Tumblr or, if that's not possible, contact using the Wince Mag email ( available at the Wince Mag website: https://wincemag.wordpress.com/ ). Feel free to book-mark this website - I plan on adding a lot more links and content, and I'll try to note what's new as I do so.
Happy reading, happy writing, happy whumping,
~Ari
they/she
https://withalittlebitofwhump.tumblr.com
Personal collection of fiction (fanfic and original) and non-fiction (not yet complete).