i've been thinking about different kinds of literacy.

financial, technology literacy mostly.

this all got started because i'm signing a lot of legal papers lately - and without getting into it there was one that had a slight bit of text missing on one that  drastically changed the amount of rights i had and i very thankfully caught it on a reread and was obnoxious about getting it fixed despite comments of 'no they should be the same.... oh shit. they're not'. i do truly think it was accidental, but recently playing through the whole pelleas-accidentally-signed-the-blood-contract side plot in radiant dawn only a few weeks later sure had a new flavor there lol.

and....  god the freedom that tech literacy alone can give you is insane.  it's allowed me to live in multiple worlds of a kind for decades in peace in ways i don't think anyone else fully understands - to seamlessly slip between those despite being housebound. to have total intellectual independence in evesdropping politely in different circles, to wander around and learn and sympathize with a far wider slice of humanity than otherwise. all because "i'm good with technology", on a pretty average-to-me level; it's not like i'm a sysadmin. additionally - despite the recent NSFW/kink art crackdowns, i've been able to operate mostly unaffected from an infrastructure level because i've already anticipated and built it smartly like my site (complete with rss blog and the like), giving me the runway to continue to build and draw at my own pace.

contrast this with a certian flavor of social media personas where it's very clear they don't have the willpower or desire to even learn how to do that; and how then, they're effectively stuck to the arbitrary rules of whatever platform they're on.

many, many types of coercion exists and will always exist, but having just a basic level of that literacy protects you from so much of it.

really funny i use the few social media i do these days exactly how i treated various functions of deviantart

dA inbox: discord & email, check every few days

dA gallery: bsky with all notifications turned off except for replies + only-photos/artwork/media-seen (and comment on a handful of those), tumblr.

dA portfolio: fancy purdy kradeelav.com stuff ~

dA journal: this, once in a blue moon. :D 

dA really was the proto-social media in so, so many ways.