My Time On deviantART

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​AOL Instant Messenger was the chatting application used by a lot of people around the early 2000’s, and one thing you could do was put an away message up, which was just text that explained that you weren’t at your computer. ​ I looked at one of my friend’s away messages one day and saw a link to a website where he had posted some of his art. ​ The site was deviantart.com, so I clicked it and went to his page. ​ I saw his art and a lot of other stuff there, and it was my introduction to online social media. ​ I might have had a myspace account at that point, but I never posted anything on it or even went there much. ​ But I was pretty big into photography, and an online art website seemed like something I could get into!

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​On October 1^st, 2003, at 8:58 PM, I joined deviantART. ​ A side note about the name: I always liked the original name and capitalization. ​ To deviate is to go against the typical or recognized way something is usually done, and art it capitalized because it’s an art site. ​ So I loved the capitalization, with it being slightly specialized and not typical. ​ And users of the site would abbreviate the name as dA, with a small d and big A. ​ Sometime in 2015 they decided to change the capitalization to DeviantArt, which was sad to me, since it was more inline with what was expected. ​ From here on out, I’ll use the original capitalization, mostly because it’s how I remember it (and no one likes change.) ​ There was a quote in the staff section of the site (more on my moderation later) that read “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. ​ ~Frank Zappa” and that quote is perfect for what that site meant to me at the time. ​ I loved it.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I had never engaged much online — I had mostly used the internet to read stuff and take in whatever was there. ​ But this was a place where I could upload my photos, comment on art, post journals, and even go to the forum page and see what people were posting there. ​ This was huge, to me. ​ So I made an account and I was over on electricjonny.deviantart.com. (I’m still there, too.)

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​This was before Facebook and most other online social networks, and it’s where I learned a lot about online communication. ​ It’s where I learned what an emoticon was. ​ It was a site that let me type the letters :‌) and have it turn into a small, smiling, yellow image, which is practically standard these days. ​ It had a lot of back-and-forth with people writing comments on artwork and other places. ​ It was my first glimpse into writing comments on a website and getting replies back on various things.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I posted some artwork and began to get comments on my art. ​ And of course, it felt great to see that happening. ​ It was amazing to me that my art could be uploaded to the internet and people from around the globe could see it and also add some comments to it. ​ My world suddenly opened up and that’s when I became an active member of the internet.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​deviantART is an art site, and what I mean by an art site, is basically anything creative. ​ Be it drawings, paintings, photography, digital art, fractal art, woodworking, sculptures, writing, poems, code, knitting — if you create something, then deviantART is a place to show it off to the world. ​ There is a catch, though: deviantART is a site meant for your own personal creations. ​ It is not a place to simply post things you’ve found on the internet. ​ It was not acceptable to find stuff and post it, even with credit given to wherever you found it. ​ It was meant as a place to showcase things you had made. ​ And I really took that concept to heart. ​ Often in life (and especially the art world) it’s rare to create something that isn’t influenced by other things. ​ We are all borrowing ideas or concepts and melding them into new things. ​ So a truly original idea isn’t really possible, but the idea behind deviantART is that it’s a place for creations to exist that have most of the final art origination from whoever is posting it there.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I loved that idea, mostly because it gave me a solid understanding that the things I saw on that site were born and created from the user that had their name next to the artwork. ​ It was simply art, made by that person, and uploaded to that site because they wanted to show it to other users. ​ The intention was “I made this, and now I want to show other people what I’ve done” rather than “I found something, and here it is” which — let’s be honest — requires a lot less creative and practical skill. ​ When I post things on the internet, it’s rarely things I’ve found. ​ The things I post are things I’ve created. ​ Be it writing, images, videos, or anything — what I post is from me, and I am posting it because I want to be as authentic to myself as possible. ​ If I do post things I’ve found other places, I try and make it very clear that “I found this and blablabla” or “I saw this and it means blablabla to me” and so on.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​Another idea that is still with me that was born out of being on deviantART was the idea that a comment means much more than a click of the mouse to indicate that you like it. ​ We are all familiar with Facebook and the “like” button there. ​ You see those “like” buttons plastered on just about everything and every site these days. ​ It’s even crept its way into our lexicon of communication. ​ We all know what liking something means, and we often attribute it to the fact that Facebook lets you show your appreciation by clicking on a “like” button.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​deviantART was founded back in 2001, before Facebook, and they had a very similar thing called a “favourite.” And yes, it was spelled in the European way because some of the developers were European. ​ But it was basically the same as a “like” button. ​ You could see artwork, and either add a comment, or you could “favourite” it. ​ It was known on the site as a “fav” and it was used in the same way as a “like” is on Facebook.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​It became very common for people to say “comments before fav’s” which meant that while a fav was nice, it was nothing compared to a written comment on the artwork. ​ deviantART was an art site, and we posted our artwork to show the world, but to also receive feedback on it and learn how we could do better. ​ So it was common for people to critique the art we saw and offer suggestions for how to improve things. ​ You can’t communicate that kind of information to people through a fav. ​ It needed to be a comment and be more specific. ​ We all liked that our artwork was favourited, but the real gold was when we would get comments on our artwork. ​ Comments were more important than a fav. ​ At least that was the case for me.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I loved that. ​ And it made sense to me. ​ I could understand that while it’s easy to click a button, it was a lot more work and time to add a comment. ​ And a comment let you describe things very precisely. ​ A “fav” tells me that a person likes something I made for some reason. ​ But getting a comment tells me that what I posted had an impact on that person, to the point where they wanted to write about what that impact was. ​ I am much more interested in knowing the impact I have on people than simply knowing that someone appreciated what I posted.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​And I try to carry that with me today. ​ I’m mostly on Facebook (that’s where most of my real-life friends are) and I often comment on the things they post about. ​ I’ll also “like” or react to their posts, but I prefer to write comments. ​ It takes longer and I can’t do it as often or as fast, but I feel that it means more to people than me clicking on a “like” button under their post.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I just realized as I was writing this, but I often comment on things (on Facebook or in text messages, or in general conversation) and I’ll say what I like, and also what I don’t like or what could be improved. ​ I think that was born from my time on deviantART and developing a way of commenting that was sort of a complementary sandwich — start out with something nice, add some critiques about what could be improved, then finish off with something specific that stood out to me. ​ I’m always in the mindset that a person is posting something or telling me something and wants to hear my unedited opinion of what I think and how it can be improved. ​ Most of the time, though, people aren’t looking for that sort of feedback. ​ A lot of people aren’t showcasing something and having it be out there to be critiqued and judged and they aren’t looking for feedback. ​ I’m really going to have to work on that and remember that the world isn’t an art gallery or looking for opinions about how things could be better.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​A small, technical issue I had there, that really molded the way I am today, was their restrictions on your avatar. ​ We could upload a small image to represent us and it would show up next to our name. ​ It could be anything, really, but it had to be a small 50 by 50 pixel image, and it had to be 14 kilobytes or lower. ​ So the file size restriction were pretty limiting, especially if you wanted to upload an animated GIF image.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I can’t tell you how many hours I would spend designing and trying to shrink down my avatar in order to fit within those file requirements. ​ It was maddening, but it also taught me more of a general-life skill of working within the constraints of things outside of my control. ​ And I would work and work on my avatar, fine-tuning the number of colors and the number of animation frames in my avatar until it was just inside of the size limits. ​ And holy shit, when I finally got an image that I was happy with, and it was also within the size limitations, it was such a satisfying feeling.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​That site is also where I first learned about website coding. ​ This was in a time where the internet wasn’t as advanced as it is now, and a lot of the ease of formatting your text had to be done manually. ​ I didn’t find it hard to do, though, and I actually liked learning about it and doing it. ​ This wasn’t “highlight some text and push a button to make a word bold” or anything. ​ You had to type in certain HTML markup language — the same as you would if you were writing a webpage — and the site would know to make that word a certain style. ​ So if I wanted to write “The big bad bird shit on the _poor froggy” or something, I would have to write out “The <b>big</b> bad bird <i>shit</i> on the _poor froggy”. ​ I could understand that! ​ And it was my introduction into computer languages and how to do more on the internet than just view whatever was there — I started to understand what was behind the web pages and how those web pages were built. ​ That was right up my alley.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​From learning the special HTML markup language that you needed to type out to format your text a certain way, people were allowed to style their journals in a certain way that would help make them really stand out. ​ That was where I learned about Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, which is another set of code that tells the website how everything should look. ​ It was like a whole new world opened up for me, and I just loved it. ​ It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t for everyone, but for those who wanted to learn how to do it, it was just bliss. ​ And along with coding our own journals to display in a unique way that was designed by each user, we could also submit those custom journal designs to the website for other people to use that journal code and have their own journal styled in a special way, without having to know how to do it all manually by themselves. ​ It was very much a “I made this, and you can have it if you want, and even look inside to learn how I did what I did” which is precisely the way the internet was designed to operate.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​Along with learning HTML (which dictates what content was on a page) and CSS (how that content should look) I also got into JavaScript. ​ JavaScript (or js) is an actual coding language (as opposed to HTML and CSS, which is a lot simpler and doesn’t have quite the dynamic logical nature that js does) that lets a site do a lot more things than simply display text or images.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​Back then, the most popular browser — aside from Internet Explorer — was Firefox. ​ And Firefox was the first browser to introduce extensions that people could install and use. ​ There was one extension called Greasemonkey, and it was an extension that let you add in custom JavaScript to a website, and that code would let you do a lot of neat things. ​ You could go to a userscript website, browse through all of the custom userscripts that had been written by people, read about what it did, and if you wanted to, install it and see if it was useful to you. ​ And all of these scripts were open to people and allowed to be played with or changed and modified in order to suit the needs of each user. ​ Again, it was the original idea of the internet: have people come together, share ideas and knowledge, and share that knowledge with each other.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​And deviantART had a pretty strong group of coders who were very fond of writing scripts to change how the site worked. ​ My mindset when scripting is: “This could work better — lets see how to do that.” And most people who write user scripts are of that mindset. ​ I absolutely love that!

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​So I would see various scripts posted to deviantART, and I would install them into Greasemonkey, and have various things on the website change and work better for me. ​ And quite often, I would want to change the script in order to have the script — that was already changing the site — be changed even more, to suit exactly how I wanted the script to work, and in turn, how I was able to use the website. ​ It basically came down to control: I loved being able to control exactly how a website worked for me.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​There were scripts published that would add in buttons into comment boxes that would add in the bold or italic or other various formatting options that a lot of us are used to. ​ It was a quicker method to automatically insert the right HTML formatting options around certain words we wanted to have custom formatting for. ​ Another script that was absolutely adored, was called SuperdAmn. ​ The deviantART website had a page you could chat with other people on (I’ll write about that soon) and it was known as the deviantART Messaging Network, or dAmn for short. ​ So SuperdAmn was a super version of dAmn, which basically added shortcuts into the chat page to quickly do things that would otherwise take a lot more work and time.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​Script writers would put in their own work and time in order to add features to a site they felt were missing. ​ And quite often, the deviantART site developers would see these scripts and add in those features — officially — and have all users of the site able to use those features, without having to do the technical work of installing extensions and scripts. ​ It was honestly an amazing thing to see and be a part of.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I would eventually start learning JavaScript and modify scripts from other people, and then I would write scripts of my own that would do various things, for deviantART, and then for various other sites. ​ For example, I wrote a script for Facebook that simply adds in a blank text box that is fixed to the bottom left corner of the page. ​ I did that in order to take links or pages I see there that have a lot of tracking information within the link and modify them. ​ I can drag the link into that text box, remove the parts of the link I don’t need (removing tracking information) and then drag that edited link into a new tab. ​ Another script I wrote is for YouTube. ​ It adds a bar under each video I play with the remaining time listed. ​ It’s a reverse progress bar telling me how much time is left on each video, basically. ​ I know I could simply hover over the video to see the time left, but this puts it under the video and is always visible, which saves me just a few milliseconds of work and time, and it adds up after a while. ​ It also saves me from saying, in my head, “Fuck me, how much time is left on this video? ​ I wish I had a countdown timer so I could time this right and fit this into the rest of my day.” Again, it lets me control the website in a very specific way to suit my desires for how the YouTube page works. ​ I view scripting as a way to do a significant bit of work once, that saves me fractions of seconds, over and over again, for the future.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I just counted, and at the last time I was using Firefox, I had a total of 219 different scripts for various sites. ​ I currently use a different browser and have a different extension that works in a very similar way to Greasemonkey. ​ I love the ability for a user of the internet to take control of a lot of what gets seen and how things can work, and have the tools and control to fine-tune things to work how they want. ​ So in short, it’s a control thing, with me. ​ We all love control, and I managed to find a way to very accurately control just about anything a website would let me control. ​ These days with phones, it’s getting harder and harder to find that control. ​ It’s been hard to be at peace with a lot of that. ​ But I’ve been taking things slowly and I still use my old-fashioned desktop computer as the primary way I do anything on the internet, mostly because of the control it lets me have.

deviantART Chat

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​But anyway, I want to keep writing about the chat network on deviantART, known as dAmn. ​ It came into existence in 2004, if I’m remembering right. ​ And around 2006 I was becoming a regular member there. ​ This was a web page you would load, and you were able to join a room, and you were among various other deviantART members who were also logged into that room, and you could chat with them, in real time, and it was sort of a new concept for me. ​ I had used AIM and chatted with a few of my friends, but this was a group chat, with people from around the globe.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I loved chatting on that chat page. ​ It was another glimpse into the fact that not everyone thinks the way I do. ​ There were other mindsets and perspectives people had. ​ And being a live chat, there was a lot of communication that could go on. ​ I loved that I could almost have a regular conversation with people. ​ I often struggle to talk to people in real life, but I was much more comfortable with online chatting. ​ It gave me the ability to write what I would have normally said to someone, but let me do a quick re-read of what I was going to send and correct any errors I might have made. ​ It was like regular talking, but with the added bonus of a final check to ensure that what I was saying was indeed what I intended to communicate.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​It was also a glimpse into the personalities of problem users. ​ Internet trolls. ​ People who desired attention, and got that attention by causing other users harm & hurt. ​ A live chat page was a prime place for trolls to come to and cause problems. ​ I would see general trolls who would repeatedly post huge blocks of text over and over that would fill the entire screen and prevent other people who were chatting from seeing the other conversations. ​ I would see users that would pick on other people or make fun of something about them and just generally be an abusive troll. ​ I would see people trying to post links to some scam site in the hopes that people would go there and fall victim to whatever the site did. ​ I would see users who would make racist or sexual comments to other users or users that would try and get into sexual role plays (which was strictly against the rules) and other such nonsense. ​ As with a lot of life, there are good things and bad things about the internet. ​ The chat page on deviantART makes it all available, and at a very fast and easy pace to get into.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​After a while, chatting there pretty regularly, I was asked if I wanted to volunteer as an administrator. ​ I was shocked, to be honest. ​ It was strictly a volunteer position, and there was no expected job responsibilities and of course no pay, but for me, it was recognition of the time and work and familiarity that I had put into the site.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​So in 2007 I became a volunteer administrator of deviantART. ​ Specifically, an administrator of the chat and forum network. ​ A deviantART “Messaging Network administrator”, or “MN@”, as it was known. ​ I was in email contact with the staff member who managed that group of volunteers (her name was Fiona and lived in Scotland) and was walked through the various administrative tools and areas of the site I would have access to in order to help run things.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​My responsibilities were the forum page and chat page. ​ Which meant, I would spend time in the forums and chat and mostly keep an eye out for trolls, spam, or other issues that needed to be dealt with, or brought to the paid staff’s attention in order for more drastic measures to be taken.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​deviantART had (and still does, I believe) a somewhat unique policy of never deleting or removing things — be it comments or forum threads or chat content (obviously) — and what I would do (in the forums) is pay attention to threads that were posted in the wrong section or that simply contained spam or threads that weren’t appropriate for the forums, and I would comment on the thread informing the original poster of why that thread was being locked, and then I would lock it so no one else could post there. ​ After some time, that thread would fall off the page of threads there and just disappear. ​ It wasn’t gone, though, just not easily visible unless you had the right page URL.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​Just for shits & giggles I’ll include a rather snarky lock message I made when a user posted in the wrong forum. ​ It was a forum that had a title that was not clear unless you were already familiar with the site, and this forum would get a lot of posts that didn’t belong. ​ I was also drinking pretty heavily, and I think at various points in my volunteer position, I just got fed up and decided to handle things my own snarky-ass way, which wasn’t exactly appropriate.

@electricjonny – Aug 2, 2007

Ok now, lets take a minute and look at the title of this forum. dAmn. That’s kind of vague, that would make one want to learn more about the forum and what it’s for. If you take a look at the description of the forum, you would see that it says: deviantART Messaging Networking issues and general discussion.

Now, from that we can see that this forum is for message networking issues or something like that.

I have no clue what that is, do you? Lets see if we can find out shall we? For most websites, if you look at the bottom of the page, you will see a help link. And what do you know, there’s a help link at the bottom of this page. You can get to it by clicking here. In that help link you will find the FAQ, lets see if it can help us. Let’s type in dAmn and see what happens. We get a big heading of: dAmn

▶ What is dAmn? [a link to a page describing dAmn]

Now it’s pretty obvious that we should click that link to find out what this dAmn thing is all about.

Clicking that link, it says:

dAmn stands for deviantART Messaging Network – a set of technologies to enable realtime messaging for deviantART.

Now from there, it’s kinda obvious that real time messaging is a chat service that deviantART has, and the dAmn forum is only for this real time chat service discussion.

You can get to the chat part of this site by clicking the Chat link at the top of the page, or by clicking here.

Therefore, this post is in the wrong forum.

[I closed with an image of a giant lock icon]

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​The chat side of it all was a lot different in a lot of ways. ​ Us MN@ really had to be familiar with the technical side of how the chat commands worked, and then also be familiar with the fast-paced nature of a chat room with upwards of 100 people talking at the same time. ​ The hardest part, I think, was to deescalate situations before they got out of hand. ​ That took a certain skill and a certain patience and also a certain knowledge of the general behavior of people. ​ Sometimes there were clear-cut “no-no’s” that would come up, like sexualized chatting or spamming or malicious links, and then other times there were people on that edge of “too far”, and you would have to keep an eye on them and get a feel for how they were affecting the room.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​One thing I learned from doing that, and is still something I very much practice today, is how I respond to the general trouble-maker trolls. ​ The people who would come in and not directly break any rules, but I knew that they were there with the intent to ruffle some feathers. ​ They were doing it for attention, and negative attention is still attention, and that’s just how some people are on the internet. ​ It got to the point where I would simply not respond to those people or even talk about them with other members in the room. ​ I would watch them like a hawk in case they crossed that line, but I wouldn’t let them know that they were having an impact on me. ​ And often that would work — they would eventually get tired and just leave the room. ​ Often I would have to explicitly explain the rules to a person, or kick them out of the room, or ban a person, but for the general running of the room, it was mostly just a lot of patient watching of what was going on and trying to keep things civil.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​And I do that these days on the internet. ​ As we all know, the internet is full of a lot of stuff. ​ Some stuff we love, some stuff we hate, other things enrage us, and some things are fun to get into and start to raise a ruckus. ​ But more often than not, I ask myself: “Is what I want to say about this being asked for? ​ Is my response going to make this situation any better?” and very often, the answer is no. ​ I sort of view the internet as though I’m walking into a restaurant with thousands of different tables and conversations and people talking about just about everything, and for me to add my internet comment on something is very much like me going up to some table at a restaurant and randomly engaging with the people there.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​In a lot of ways, that random and open engagement opportunity is just how the internet is, but I always try to start out with the idea that “I should be kind, I should describe how the situation is for me, explain my views and how I feel about whatever it is, and if I feel it would be appropriate to do so.” A lot of stuff on the internet doesn’t have to involve me, lol.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​But anyway, my early days of chatting on deviantART and using the forums played a pretty big role in how I portray myself on the internet today. ​ I was a deviantART volunteer for the forums and chat pages for a year and a half, and I’ve been a member of that site for 18 years or so. ​ That site was a site I absolutely loved (and still is, to some degree,) and I spent quite a few hours there each day. ​ It inspired me to keep shooting photographs, it let me upload my art there, it started my learning of JavaScript and CSS and various other geeky things, it let me practice my online communication skills, and then of course, it let me see a lot of amazing artwork from people.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​The volunteering I did was also great, and great in a pretty different way. ​ It was really eye-opening to learn more about how the site worked from a staff perspective, and then it was also really interesting to see more of the behind-the-scenes tools and abilities that staff members and volunteers had. ​ To put it simply: it really opened me up to a bigger world than I thought was out there.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​It also let me have a chance to become pretty close friends with a number of people — both regular members of the site, and then also other volunteers and staff members. ​ There’s been two deviantART members (and MN@ volunteers) that I’ve met in real life. ​ I met one who lived just a few hours from me, and we met up and had some food at a roadside diner. ​ It was nice to talk to and see the human behind the username. ​ I met another user (and volunteer) just a couple of years ago while she was in the area doing some research in Ann Arbor. ​ Again, it was really nice to see a face behind the username and chatting we had done for so long on deviantART.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I remember I had a pretty good friend who I knew on the chat page there. ​ He went by the username “DarkestVirtue”. ​ He was similar to me in that he was comfortable and even liked and preferred to talk to people through chat. ​ He had a sort of “I’m just me, and I’m here to describe what it means to me and how I see it all” mindset. ​ He was a kind of cool and collected guy. ​ He didn’t stand out in the crowd of chatters, but he did stand out, simply for his honesty and humble personality. ​ He wasn’t talking to be heard; he was talking to encourage the conversation to keep going.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​He had some health problems, and he died a while back. ​ It was a sad time for me, not to mention the rest of the chat members. ​ There was something that left with him when he died, and I don’t even know how to describe it. ​ It was sort of a semblance of peace and tranquility. ​ I still miss chatting with him.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I meant to be writing about my volunteer time on the site. ​ I guess memories can drift around when you dive back into them. ​ Anyway, I would spend quite a lot of time on the site and specifically the chat and forum page. ​ It was just fun to be there, and I also wanted to help weed out the problems that would come up, from users causing problems to more innocent problems with people simply posting in the wrong forum section.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I was also part of the help chat room on deviantART. ​ It was a room where anyone could join and get help about various parts of the site. ​ Think of the now-common live text help you see on various sites, but this was all done by a real human user, and while it wasn’t perfect, we did indeed end up helping out a lot of people, and in a much quicker way than if they had gone through the official “contact the help desk” way of getting help. ​ What I liked was that I was able to offer help to other people, and being a volunteer was recognition and of the fact that I was able to and also liked helping people out. ​ I liked that quite a bit, and being able to feel that in other areas of life has been somewhat hard to do.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​My volunteering ended sometime in 2009 (still not sure of the dates), after a few mistakes I had made. ​ In short, I didn’t understand the gravity of certain things, and also didn’t understand or listen to things that were part of being a volunteer on that site.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​It was also at a time where I was drinking pretty much daily, and while I don’t specifically remember any problems due to my drinking there in the chat rooms, I’m sure I wasn’t the best volunteer for basically the last year I was a volunteer. ​ Without getting into details, I had spread some information someone said to me to another staff member, and that was not alright. ​ It was something told to me with the understanding that it was specifically between the two of us, and I had copied and pasted parts of that conversation to another staff member, in the hopes that they would see things the way that I did. ​ I guess I was more caught up with the end-goal I had of being right, and completely glossed over the more fundamental and deeper issue of how to keep things said to be between me and the other person private. ​ I broke some trust that we had, and there’s not really a “my bad, I’m sorry” that can repair something like that.

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​I sort of went on and on about deviantART. ​ There was a lot to go over, and in a lot of ways, it’s shaped the way I am today. ​ I will be forever grateful for the people I’ve gotten to know on that site —‌ from staff members to users to other volunteers. ​ There was a solid and lasting relationship that was born from that site. ​ The site also encouraged my love of photography and improved it quite a bit, then brought to life my interest in coding and a better understanding of how websites work. ​ My work in the help chat room and then being a part of the volunteer team to help keep the site running well was also a good thing for me. ​ I learned quite a bit, was able to develop a good mindset for online communication, and it opened me up to things I would never have had before. ​ A lot of it was hard and painful to go through, but as these things usually are with that, I can look back and very deeply appreciate having had the experiences I had.