Befera

just gonna casually ramble idk. gonna talk about rp and what i think i am wanting out of the experience as an adult...

alright so back in the day rp was painfully easy to get into. make free forum, make basic concept, advertise, people join, people create characters, people post and it's no big deal. half the time there's no art in the posts, there is a pure fun about the play-by-post format, yadda yadda.

a shift happened at one point where rp sites became about the aesthetic and user interface. i love that stuff too but it took away the love of writing for me. i know this is not the case for everyone but for me it made me question why i was putting so much more time and effort into making something look good and it stopped being fun. at one point i think i decided it was too much work and i stopped trying to impress everyone else on the forum with character art or fancy code. i think i had kind of a deep insecurity that i was not as good as other people and that drove me away as well.

i started only feeling comfortable on sites where i was admin and could control every aspect of the game. sounds absolutely cringe but it's the truth. there were a lot of things about modern animal role play especially in the equine sphere that bothered me. horses wearing clothes, using magic, going to bars/brothels, this sort of high fantasy stuff is not my scene. for some people it's exciting and interesting and i respect that but i have always had an aversion to role playing humans because a big part of the pull of forum rp for me was to get away from human life and play out the life of a more primal being.

so from time to time i get the urge to rp again. primarily horses. i have rped wolves and dogs in the past but it's not the same feeling as with horses for me, possibly because i started with horses. so when i get this urge to rp i do a few things. first, i go around and see what sites are active. i start on one site that i think is still around, just type in the url, then i scroll down to the affiliates and click around and check the advertising boards and see what's going on around the community. in the past few years i have found maybe 3 equine sites that are active, the majority of them not on forum hosts that i really like. i am a proboards person because that's what i started on and i know proboards code really well as far as modifying the layout of the site and doing stuff in posts (though doing stuff in posts and on profiles is really limited in pb, so i will sometimes opt for mybb if i am joining someone else's site).

and then what happens is i look around and i mostly just see communities that i don't know how to fit into. even ones that seem to check all the boxes for what i would want to be involved in, i talk myself out of participating. either i don't like the way it looks, i don't like the way the lore is, it's too high fantasy, it's too complicated, etc. then i get the idea: i know, i'll just make my own site.

when i want to make my own sites a few things go through my mind. firstly, what i do not want, and then i make a note to absolutely not allow it. then i think "well this is limiting the game because people who have characters especially with expensive art that have aspects that are not allowed in my game are not going to be able to participate as easily" and eventually that realization kind of makes me just not want to make the site because i don't want to be that guy that says "this is a realistic site except you can have a couple of unrealistic things but just the kinds of unrealistic things that appeal to my personal style interests and nothing weird that my personal characters would look at in a thread and think is weird" — so needless to say it's an incredibly selfish endeavor for me to create my own site with so many restrictions just on what people's characters can look like.

therefore i end up completely talking myself out of the entire thing because i realize i am being selfish and it's inevitably going to suck the fun out of the game. so what is the solution? sometimes i think it'd be nice to just create a free for all game where there are limited restrictions and just let people do whatever, but this thought comes from a place of laziness. something that inspired me deeply when i first started role playing was the actual plot of the sites i joined. even if the plot was simple, the plot acting as a writing prompt was very intriguing to me. i want to get back to the "old" feeling of rp where it was simple but inspiring. i am not sure if that's possible now.

i am a person who does not have a whole ton of hobbies that i keep up with. i am chronically mentally ill and always lacking energy unless i am forced to do something i don't want to do. i remember being in high school and even in college and having so much energy to do these great things in the horse rp world like making a new skin every month, coming up with contests and games and fun stuff for members to do on sites that i was staff on, etc., but i don't know what to do now. i want to rp and have a good time but i don't want the extra workload. so then i go back to thinking... why don't i just join someone else's site?

and the cycle continues. i find 3 active sites and they don't interest me. they're too high fantasy, they're too complicated, they're too xyz abc 123... so i give up.

not sure if anyone else has experienced this but it's where i'm at with it all. i also am so averse to even having online friendships anymore with anyone. i don't even want to be bothered to talk to anyone. people reach out to me and i feel an aversion. i think that might be because i had a really good online friend once who was kind of a mean person and very controlling/domineering about what they wanted. even so, i felt a very motivating sense of "we're the best, let's get this done" with that friend and we used to make a lot of cool stuff together. i'm not sure if that has anything to do with it but i do feel like when i ended that friendship that i lost my partner in crime so to speak. there was a sense of "we're the dynamic duo that makes the best horse rp sites out there" when idk if that was really the case. half the time we were just trying to revive the memory of "old" horse rp which was toxic in its own right.

so i don't really know what to think or how to think or if i can ever truly get back into rp again the way i used to. i have one character who is very dear to me and the rest barely have personalties. the one character i care about is not the kind of character that is gonna be cool with sliding into any old site and being a herd member. she is ambitious, ruthless even, and wants to be on top of the heap no matter what. she will step into any universe and find her way to the top where she can change the paradigm to her liking. this does not fly on most sites. i've tried joining sites and coming up with ideas for how she can be an interesting evil character leading a group of ruffians but people do not go for it. this character gives me the most creative juice if you will and it's hard for me to try to branch out to any other type of character because i just do not like threads where it's all boring small talk.

i don't know what is even fun about character 1 seeing character 2 at the watering hole and they say hello and 3 posts later the thread is dead. what do people rp about on horse sites anymore anyway? maybe i should go read through the active sites and see what people are writing. i think that may open my eyes to what exactly is going on and how it's playing out and why.

so i think that's my rant LOL. i'm just trying to figure out WHY i want to rp anymore because it seems like i always find every reason under the sun to NOT participate or have friends online or do anything creative in this community. i haven't even posted any art on this account in a long time but i used to love doing commissions and all kinds of manips. idk, it's rough out here for a bef.

HEY what's up so here's a small update on Bef's world.

I got a full time job a few weeks ago and it is going amazingly so far. I love it.

Bad news is that almost all of my paycheck I just got is going to go toward car repairs, and I can't continue doing my cat sitting job on the side if I don't have a vehicle so it's been rough this week not having it, because I was doing my full 8 hour day and then doing a couple of cat sits right after work every day and also doing 6-8 cat sits each day on weekends too.

Basically I've been working a ton and haven't had time for much else... but now without the car things have slowed down.

I also have been having some dental pain so I went to get that looked at and it turns out I need a root canal. Not a surprise. Bad news is that it's gonna cost like almost an entire month of income for me to get it done with the prices I was given. I have my dad asking someone he knows about that I guess but idk what else to do other than just have it done.

It was really scary to have my teeth and gums poked at and it hurt and still feels weird afterward. I haven't had a dentist do anything to my teeth since probably 2009 when I got my veneers put in... which is a bit insane. The dentist told me that my teeth look great for not having them seen by a professional in 12 years so that was cool, but I do have one tooth that is gonna need a root canal which is terrifying. I spent most of the dentist visit crying if we're being real.

So I have a great new job but I have to drop a ton of money now on car repairs and dental work which is pretty stressful and frustrating. If I get stranded at home without a car this weekend you bet I am gonna be doing whatever I can to make money via the internet. My ex who I live with is cat sitting for his parents this weekend too so I will have the apartment to myself.

I am considering making some adoptables on some free templates and maybe selling them for $10 a piece if that interests you guys. I am also thinking about taking some pixel icon commissions or YHH for pixel art. I would bust out my old laptop for this that does not have the retina display since pixel art looks INFINITELY better on that computer.

I know I've been out of the art game for a little bit but after the full year of 2020 sitting around doing nothing I feel really anxious and freaked out if I'm not actively working on a project. I find myself getting antsy at my job when I've completed all my tasks and I have nothing to do lol.

So that's what's going on right now, just trying to stay alive over here. Hoping I'll still have enough money for rent at the end of the month. I got my tax refund and still had enough for rent in the bank saved up before that so I will probably be okay but you never really know with this stuff. I'm about to drop over a grand on my car so it's pretty sad.

Anyway that's my life update. Thanks for reading.

~ Bef

Hi everyone!

If you're interested in my poetry, I would love for you to check out my poetry book which I just published through The Book Patch. You can find it here!

~ Bef

Howdy equiBRILLIANCE members, contributors, and everyone else who likes to submit art here! Thanks for scrolling down about 37 miles just to read this text! Eclipse sure is amazing with its extremely useful cover images for journals! Truly a gift to us all.

Sarcasm aside, as you know, Eclipse is officially rolled out, and I personally have no idea how group deviations are accepted at this time. If anyone can help me understand how this works that would be great because I don't want to miss submissions from anyone!

Thanks for continuing to submit your work to this group. The amount of activity here over the years has been amazing to see and I really appreciate all of you who add your work here!

Love,

Bef