hello. i wrote this huge thing and then wordpress ate it. i will have to come up with a cliffnotes version that sucks way more. sorry.

i would like to write more on comics. however, i also recognize that writing in my "essay voice" is, lets be real, pretentious. positing yourself as an authority on anything tends to draw a target on your back that invites strangers to start treating conversations with you like a yu-gi-oh! duel. additionally, i would be mortified to find out my navel gazing became someone's personal view without any reflection or thought.

on the other hand, it's getting really exhausting seeing the shit float to the top. as a lifelong hater, i feel that there is not enough "mean" (read: critical) criticism or discussion about web comics. there is an overwhelming desire to "not rock the boat" amongst artists and it feels like the over-saturated market that webtoons has cultivated has potential echoes of the degradation of the infamous moral and social clusterfuck that is the bloated and mirthless YA book industry.

anyway: i dont expect anyone to read these, but. you know. let's think deeper about many things...including comics. almost all of these are just adapted from tumblr. but at the end i will include responses to the comments i got on the last thing i wrote. :) thank you to everyone who took the time to comment!

 

i had the most unbelievably frustrating conversation the other day over the complete failure of modern criticism to recognize the most basic forms of misogyny, especially in mainstream media, and how the inability to recognize these things was leading to a dearth in entertainment for young women. we're lacking in entertainment that isn’t regressive or insulting to their capabilities. the attempt to rehabilitate “twilight”, a novel in which the protagonist (who i am told has no personality or interests [outside of getting attention from boys] in order for bella to act as a proxy for the reader) must choose between her family, her future, her dreams, her wants, and her desires or what her boyfriend wants, is an older example.

“lore olympus” has drifted significantly from its original central contrived plot revolving around persephone maintaining her virginity (?!) so she can keep her college scholarship, but the original concept appeared to offer the female readership a choice: either stay in school or become the 19 year old object of sexual obsession of a man nearly 3x your age (which is good) who will take care financial care of you. the protagonist is a waifish, weak, emotional, perpetual victim of the world around her who needs men to come rescue her from even the mildest of situations she finds herself in.

inexplicable cult classic “jupiter ascending” revolves entirely around who the protagonist should marry. she does absolutely nothing in the entire movie except get shuffled from set piece to set piece as she muses over  whether to marry the heterosexual buff dog man or the effeminate villain. tbh all of these properties are very similar to me in my head; they fail basic sniff tests but are gobbled up by masses who, i had thought, were more capable of discerning these concepts.

the inability to escape properties with these elements contributed significantly to my downward spiral as i became a teen/adult. there was a dawning horror that the number of avenues for success on my own were being deliberately made unavailable to me in order to keep an entire half of the population indebted to the other. i had realized that the expectation was not that i would get a job out of school, take care of myself, maybe meet someone along the way and maybe have a kid if it works out. i was supposed to get a degree, as a joke i guess or just to waste my time since i wasn’t REALLY supposed to get a REAL job, and then immediately i would be used as childcare/a live in maid because my interests were secondary to those of the man i was expected to marry (im also bi so that added another fun twist to it lol). my 20s and 30s were supposed to be used on children and taking care of my husband.

being confined to this future made it feel like i was trapped in a box that shrunk and shrunk and threatened to crush me under the pressure from all sides; i live in terror that i was fated to be something i couldn't even comprehend people thought was a normal, acceptable option.

pointing out the existence and proliferation of what, to me, are extremely basic concepts to reject as a feminist, causes people to launch into a type of defense that feels like it comes from another planet. accusations of puritanism, censorship, being the actual misogynist, etc. i dont know how to explain to people that pointing these things out, LIKE I AM DOING IN THIS POST LIKE THIS LEVEL OF DISCUSSION, is not a call for it to be banned or removed or changed or whatever. the purpose of bad art is to discuss it and learn from it. we’re supposed to dissect it and why it came into existence, not stomp out anything that isn’t flawlessly progressive.

if i didnt have anything to complain about i’d get bored lol. how is a critic supposed to criticize without criticism, you know.

look: the only arguments in favor of webtoons ive ever heard hinge greatly on the idea that the vastness of the audience on webtoons is crucial to one’s success in the “webcomic business” nowadays. people need money to live. to make money quickly in the entertainment business (and i would like to stress that this is the first time the artist makes a choice: when they decide to pursue art as a career. deciding to do this is not a choice that should be made lightly. additionally, i do not believe that people are being forced to turn to webcomics in order to make a living lol. can you even imagine), they turn toward the algorithmically curated and inflated numbers offered by webtoons.

i’ll start this off with my bone fides so i won't have to clarify any of this in follow up posts: i started workshopping my webcomic on tumblr in 2012 with doodles and by answering asks people would send me. i would also just post lore dumps for funsies. they are so barely related to the comic now, but they created interest and people asked me cool questions that made me think about the world i was creating. i started the comic in 2013.

i made enough money on patreon (as a very early adopter) to live in beaverton, oregon (with first 3, then 1 other roommate[s]) living the most spartan lifestyle a person could manage in order to avoid having to go back to my hometown. now i live in confusing moderate comfort in a house my bf and i bought in a burst of sheer market based luck right before everything exploded. we used all of my savings i earned working from age 15-30 as a down payment.

i still try to take care of myself entirely and contribute a proportional amt of my income to the bills. i use government aid and use(d) it get a lot of medical help that i would not have been able to afford otherwise. i sincerely enjoyed my poverty and i felt like i understood how to live under those parameters with ease and comfort. i was poor but i was free.

i do not like that i have to disclose this in order for people not to immediately dismiss me as coming from a place of monetary privilege. this shit is, or was, none of your business. im not interested being assigned a perception to my work and character that does not come from my words and deeds. i do not want “poverty artist” to be the signifier attached to me, forever, that people can scrutinize and obsess over whether or not i deserve the adjective i dislike.

but for things i do like: i like my audience very much, and i hope that they understand that they are under no obligation to care for me, keep me alive, finance me, etc. that is entirely my responsibility. but it is through their continued donations and support that i am able to draw my comic full time in a lifestyle i found comfortable, something that i sincerely imagined would not be possible while i was still working and in college. my audience of ~1.5k (i think, google analytics is kinda whack. lotta bots. this is with all that shit i could find filtered out) has been built up gradually over the past near decade and is comprised of funny, lighthearted freaks of nature who make me laugh very frequently. i just cant let them know that or they will become too powerful and use jokes to destroy me. i don't think i have a single bad thing to say about AGS readers. you guys are a hoot lol.

i do not have a discord dedicated to my work because i find the idea pretty unappealing and have had moderator experience in the past on other websites that i did not enjoy. i did not have comments on my comic until this year. previously the only way to contact me was via twitter, tumblr ask or email. i advertise my comic twice on update days, once in the morning and once at night, so i dont flood dashboards. i do not sign up for zines or jobs. i do not promote my work otherwise. well, there’s a link in my sa avatar, but let’s be real. no one’s clicking that.

WITH ALL THAT SAID:

i cannot empathize with the people who pursue the webtoons line of monetization and i find parts of (what must be) their reasoning morally abhorrent. i'm not even going to get into the predatory and laughable “pay per page” concept, an idea so blatantly evil that if it were pitched in any other medium it would get you laughed out of the room at best. i'm not going to talk about the ridiculous audacity of a comic host demanding you produce a minimum number of panels “per page” (im old lol bear with me) in order to be granted the golden laurels of “publication” (another choice the artist makes is the choice to pursue becoming a “webtoons original” as a financial goal. i think this is wildly unreasonable for every reason. but whatever. you might as well bet on winning the lottery). i'm going to talk about the bizarre, ubiquitous mentality present in webtoons artists that i cannot wrap my head around. what are people expecting when they sign up for a website that openly flaunts how disinterested it is in anything other wringing its user base financially dry?

if webtoons is not interested in anything other than financial gain and their purpose is to make more money every quarter at any cost, then why would that mentality not directly impact and poison the relationship between you and your audience, as well as your relationship with your art?

but lets put even THAT aside. god there’s so much i could hammer on. i will just focus on audience right now.

1. the quantity of an audience is not proportional to the quality of the audience. i dont think anyone is going to debate with me that the webtoons audience is good lol. this is because the webtoons userbase is comprised almost entirely of random teenagers and adults under 25. this age range is permitted to act like insane hooligans (to an extent) because that’s what the vast majority of us were like in some capacity or another at that age. i frequently hear complaints from creators about how their webtoons audience are frequently ungrateful, irrational, and impatient to them. this is the obvious outcome when two parties, especially parties that are doing business with each other, are shoved together due to algorithmic decisions and not by their own volition. both parties have been robbed of the opportunity of building up a relationship of trust and respect between the artist and the audience. however, building up this relationship takes time. and people want to be be making money as artists right now. presumably.

2. the primary purpose of an audience is not to obtain money from them. at least, dear god, i really hope this is not the idea driving people’s desire to do webcomics as a career. the creators entering the field with this mindset are DOA, straight up. even if you were capable of hiding your odious motivations, whose money are you willing to pursue? would you change your comic if it meant making more money from the audience? do the highest bidders influence the artistic choices being made? is that the relationship you want with your audience? in that case, why not just take furry porn commissions, a field which makes fucking stacks upon stacks of cash? why bother with webcomics and all this extra work?

3. why would an audience of teens and young adults have money to spare? lol for real tho. teens dont often have unfettered access to cash. college age adults are famously deeply in debt to the nightmare state we live in. to jump into this audience with your hands held open is going to result in disappointment when they’ve already prioritized giving what little they have to artists they already know. i dont know what people are expecting with this one. it’s like panning for gold in a swimming pool.

this doesnt even touch on the uglier stuff. but the choice to go all in with webtoon is foolish, selfish, motivated by greed and childish false promises of fame. i do not have any respect for the artists that line up in the hopes that they can simply “jump the line” and skip one of the most, if not the single most, important aspects of a career in art. artists cannot treat their audience as though they're a tutorial mission the artist is simply too advanced and skilled to sit through. i am not going to feel bad for or comfort the people who saw a company strangling and smothering everything it touches, a company that is subjecting its customers into increasingly more incremental means of payment, a company that has objectively unreasonable demands for the art they host compared to what they pay out, AND WILLINGLY SIGNED ON TO SECURE THEIR OWN BAG.

so that they didnt have to build an audience! the fuck!

my assessment is that to use but mostly to defend webtoons is to have a vast amount of disrespect for your audience.

a fair question was asked: “what about the hypothetical webtoons user who purely uses the site as a platform? they have no ambitions to make their comic a career and do not seek financial or emotional reward. how do they play into this?”. its a good question, because clearly not everyone on webtoons has to have gone in with stars in their eyes and dreams of making it big (ha ha! suckers! we got another one boys!). but this question is easily answered by this simple fact: only recently did webtoons introduce a feature that slices up your enormous strips into 800x1280px chunks to meet webtoon’s deranged “suggested” upload criteria (i presume the algorithm prioritizes longer comics because thats what webtoons values, as well as factoring other data like favorites, pages views, etc). before that, you had to do it yourself. they would demand panel minimums. and then tell you to chop all those panels up. into smaller panels.

presumably, the point of this is that it makes it harder for people to pirate (but mostly it makes it hard to uh….share, to be honest. it makes it an unpleasant experience to show people something you like. wtf am i expected to do when i want to show someone one funny part? webtoons wants the clicks, so they do for real want you to link the page and be like “now scroll down 6000 panels until you see the funny"). but here’s a secret: there’s a thing called “automatic scrolling capture” that works like a charm. i use to to post comics to sa or so my friends can read parts that make me laugh. so. fuck your anti-piracy, you big loser lol. (i have strong positive feelings toward piracy but thats a whole other 20000000 words)

i understand the purpose, the utility, the appeal and have a deep love of the vertical strip; people who can’t read will inexplicably will accuse me of hating the format when i complain about the arbitrary restrictions or assume i don’t understand that “its better for phones” (a dubious claim, given you have to scroll 800 miles of white space in-between each panel as a cheap means of extending the user retention time in the analytics). somehow, the fact that there is no room for variety or that webtoons has determined the infinite canvas (one of the features that is exclusively unique to the web as a medium!) doesn’t produce enough capital to be worth exploring does not bother people.

now, look. i DO read a few comics that are hosted on webtoon and literally only one is served well by the format. it’s because it does not try to hit panel minimums or use the vertical strip format at all. it’s posted like a regular, paneled comic page. the other has suffered horrifically when it strains against the restrictions. the apparent solution for spreads is to lay the panel on its side. on a phone you can just turn your screen. on a desktop it looks like hot dog shit.

why bother with a site with such draconian and stupid restrictions borne from a pure profit motive? why bother with a site with a notoriously annoying userbase? a site that is so aggressively hostile to its talent? i suspect its because alternatives aren’t known to them, so i highly encourage everyone pursuing webcomics as a hobby to look into self-hosting. [everyone groans at my shit]

it’s much, much cheaper than you would expect. (all of mine+google drive space for backups would probably cost like 120 bucks a year? maybe a lil more. not much.) it will teach u….skills. i was going to say more but i sound like a 60 year old man rambling aimlessly with what he thinks are nuggets of wisdom. you dont need me to sit here and give you a lecture on the benefits of DIY and how it builds character or whatever. but its a good skill to have. is all i'm saying. its worth the effort.

plus, its relatively easy to set up something basic with neocities and rarebit. just copypasting code.

anyway. augggh ouuurrg. webtoon. [stomps around like godzilla] smash and crush and bite

you probably already read this one

i watched that newest video by that guy super eye patch wolf about the blatant scam business that is selling courses on “how to succeed on youtube” and i have some serious problems with the framing of nearly everything and the lengths it goes to portray people infested with the embarrassing illness of being obsessed with metrics and numbers as pure victims of youtube’s apparent mind control abilities. in order to believe this, you would have to accept that people who go through great lengths to willingly engage with a career that they chose for themselves and maintain unilateral control over are completely helpless. i copy pasted most of this from a forum post right after i watched it lol but ill edit it into a more coherent and cohesive set of thoughts.

1. first of all, the people buying these youtube courses are suckers with money to (apparently) burn falling for a very blatant “get rich quick” scheme with the belief that they can teleport straight into fame and fortune with little effort on their part. these motives should be mocked, mercilessly, without restraint or pity. there is quite literally no other reason to invest in something so blatantly and obviously designed to siphon money from your wallet unless you are both stupid and desperate for attention.

either way, if you spend money you dont have on this crap it’s on you lol. its like claiming you got taken advantage of by the guy who sold you the brooklyn bridge. no shit, idiot.

it was suggested that the people buying these programs are “victims of capitalism” and i am confident that this does not excuses their behavior. we all are! the vast majority of us recognize that paying people so you can skip to the good parts of working in entertainment is pathetic, at best. pathological at worst.

additionally, i should add for context that i am a native from nevada, the state in the union with state-wide legalized gambling. one thing you will notice about nevada is, despite being named the #1 state of gambling addicts by the most whack study i have ever seen in my life (it rates states by “casino friendliness”. that’s literally the point of nevada?! anyway), i think you would be very hard pressed to find a local who gambles because that’s for the stupid tourists to blow money on to support us. i do not have a lot of sympathy for the people who throw money away on something that famously “always wins”.

 2. the youtube creators whining about how hard it is to look at analytics pages and how bad it makes them feel should be embarrassed of themselves. if looking at the data legitimately upsets you and has a death grip on your life (like the guy who said his wife hated how much he checked it and it was causing problems) then there are extensions and tools to block pages or sections of pages in order to prevent yourself from staring into the abyss. simply do literally anything to better your life!

every artist who was on deviantart has already had this obsession with numbers long knocked out of them and the remaining stragglers who still cling to metrics and likes as proof of their worthiness are viewed as fucked up fame-obsessed weirdos. as they should be. i cannot think of a single other artistic pursuit that has people talk so openly about how data poisoned they are and have it treated like its a perfectly acceptable or legitimate means of measurement.

3. everyone gets less return on projects they worked hardest on. everyone enjoys the lowest-brow entertainment over effort and education. this is not a problem that is unique to youtube creators. visual artists have been bitching about this since time immemorial. it is a frequent, tacky talking point to complain about how your doodles get more likes than the work you labor over. there have been at least 10000000 posts about this subject. the solution is so simply get the hell over it lol wtf. the rest of us manage to cope so come learn from the best of the best.

everyone is going to become irrelevant. this is the reality of the entertainment business. framing it as a fail state rather than an inevitability would eliminate a lot of anxiety about having to be perfect and constantly keep to a schedule and maybe, just maybe, discourage people from attempting to make this dumb shit their fucking job. making your money via ad revenue and sponsorships should be considered a deeply immoral way to make money in the first place but: thats a whole other can of worms.

the k-pop guy who said he would cry if he couldnt do youtube for a living needs to hang it up right this second bc that’s such a fucked up way to waste your life lol. 8 years of doing shit he hates just to see the number go up in the miserable hope that maybe, some day, this activity that he despises doing will be slightly lucrative. just...keep it as a hobby wtf. what could he possibly be getting out of this? like, what is his end goal? after he makes youtube, which he hates doing, his full time job….then what?

i dont get it. i dont understand coddling these poorly thought out impulses like they’re natural or that youtube is a real or viable career for anyone. i think no one should be talking about entertainment as a career, right now at this moment, with any kind of certainty for what the future might hold. [scary voice] the truth is that it could and likely will come all falling down at any moment. and its possible that there is literally nothing you can do about it.

4. its luck. the secret ingredient to success is luck. you can alter your chances (specifically by being rich and/or attractive). you can do everything you’re supposed to do when it comes to self-promotion, editing, presentation, and information. but in the end its still almost entirely based on luck. he does say this but i was in the middle of my post when he said it lol

this doesn’t mean that no one but the most shining stars become household names. it means that you should not treat a video sharing site as anything more than a way to share information or entertainment with people and expect very little. you’ll either be pleasantly surprised or youll explode and die. who knows.

5. him attributing jake paul's behavior and that insane lady who made her kid cry for a youtube thumbnail to a desire for higher views was insane lol. they’re sociopaths dude. come on. they are not motivated purely by wanting to see a number go up, the level of deluded self-interest that one needs festering in their body to abuse their child for money or take financial advantage of a stranger’s suicide is extraordinarily abnormal human behavior and does not even remotely compare to people who have just caught the madness after clicking on the analytics page. you have to be able to differentiate between a person who is pathologically ruthless to the point of being dangerous and your garden variety losers.

the last section where he tries to impart to you what its like to blow up is so unrelatable lol. and not just bc im ms sour grapes and im just jealous, which is usually the go-to defense people whip out when you try to criticize the way people interact with their fame, but rather the expectation that other people, strangers would celebrate your financial success is weird. you know, there are two old maxims that come to mind when it comes to attracting a group of hatewatchers:

if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

and

if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen!!!! computer send post thank you

i'll be honest, bc its not cute when people pretend like its not the case, but this is primarily a chance for me to rip into one dipshit in particular who needs help getting down off their cross. but i would also like to thank and respond to the longer messages i got.

thank you very much! i'm surprised that people bother to read my ravings at all. when i write i feel like farnsworth in the angry dome.

i think its really strange that the common societal expectation of artists working a day job and selling art on the side completely dissipated from public consciousness. obviously the desired outcome is that an artist can live off their work alone, but we live in a world where the obvious much more likely outcome is some degree of failure. what kind of person dives in to art as a career expecting to be met with nothing but unbridled financial success? completely disconnected from our unfortunate reality.

i think there's a romanticization of the artists life that comes from the little peeks some artists offer their audience. the highly edited and curated photos and videos featuring people's pristine work areas make it seem like a comfortable living is easily possible with a little thrifting. sometimes you can look at a work area and be like "damn this person knows where to shop for the good stuff!" or "this is the most carefully designed ecosystem i have ever seen and must have been collected over decades".

sometimes you see a work area and can immediately clock that the artist's life is being funded entirely by their family.

from john kensmark:

well said. good post about money's continuous role as evil in the world and how it is now being used to snuff out creative ventures outside of those owned by an IP.

all of this (about how making money with art is hard) would be less awful to hear if every single job in the world weren't mini stanford prison experiments. but. we don't seem to be swimming in options that won't get you banned from all major airlines.

alright dipshit, since you made an effort spilling your dunning-kruger all over my website, i think some of the insulting and crybaby shit you typed warrants a response in the hopes that we can still smack you back into reality.

the idea that someone would turn to art for money in desperate times is laughable if you think about this concept for literally a single second. citing poor mental health as a reason neurodivergent people would theoretically choose a career in art over any other job in the entire world is absolutely downright hysterical. this is the ego destruction career where people famously explode and flame out so hard they become internet urban legends. a career built on criticism and interpersonal relationships with other artists. it's clear you put no thought into this at all, because this sincerely pathetic attempt to invoke ableism as a counter argument reads as a cynical and insincere move made because you got your feelings hurt.

i'm not sure if "i cannot differentiate between art and porn" would be the defense i would go with in this situation. is this an attempt to appear more open-minded lol? i have no idea why someone would offhand mention their ideology regarding pornography and art other than to remind everyone how progressive you are. it just makes you look like you jack off to kid's cartoons.

dog, i know art is full of self-absorbed losers who are good for nothing. as one myself, you don't have to tell me this. lol wtf.

you either did not read the entire post or deliberately read it wrong so you could be more mad but i specifically mention furry porn commissions as a significantly more financially viable means to make a living than comics. your hypothetical artist, the one with glass bones and paper skin who is cursed with the most delicate emotional constitution and no means to develop marketable skills for some reason, could do furry porn commissions.

i dont know why you would assume this post is about those situations unless you wanted it to be so you made it about them.

genuine question: were you high when you wrote this? this is incomprehensible, and what little you can make out is just a middle schooler's concept of how "high" (fine) art operates.

i don't think i'm going to trust the social expertise of someone who did not have the good sense to put this shit where people can read it; i know what greedy losers look like. there is no one size fits all and no single behavior profile unique to them. a tumblr career scammer is vastly different from the character you created but both are "financially driven" (sorry, this sentence requires you to use your imagination and common sense. ask a friend to help you).

i think having this kind of intellectually revealing opinion about non-representational art (and that is what you actually meant right? you meant art that doesn't look like a recognizable object, place, or person? because otherwise i think you are going to have some trouble arguing against the influence of the works in the louvre) automatically disqualifies you from any further serious discussion until you both bother to learn the appropriate terminology and demonstrate a willingness to expose yourself to new art. to cut yourself off from an entire branch of the art world in a self-defeating move aimed at keeping up appearances (in the same brain-dead pseudo-socialist circles whose intellectual prowess is repeating a tumblr post they saw once about how "catcher in the rye" is a book for incels) sucks.

jesus fucking christ. lmfao.

what's actually incredible about all this is that you're not the first person to attempt to present this comparison as a gotcha with so much confidence and excitement. that's sad, man. it's sad that this is the lynch pin of your outrage.

i regret to inform you that the role a wal-mart employee plays is plainly, obviously completely different to the role of an artist working for a major comics corporation. a comics employee is the sole creator of the legacy of the parent company. without the specific skills of the hired artist, the company cannot create its product. and the product itself is the basis for the reputation and legacy of what is literally just an umbrella for multiple IPs. you can't just run into the street and grab someone and expect them to take the place of the artist you just fired. being an artist is skilled labor.

a walmart employee does not involve skilled labor that solely determines the reputation and wealth of the parent company. i hope this difference helps you in the future.

i like the part where you act like having moral standards is too much to ask and try to frame it like its unreasonable.

;:|

as easy as it would be for you to be able to dismiss me outright as a hypocrite, i have a pretty big section in the essay that you, ostensibly, read detailing how i've been able to live as an artist on 12k a year. to be making literally any amount of money as an artist is an incredible privilege but it's also the result of 7 years of hard work, hard living, and hard knocks.

the implication that i am secretly wealthy based on you not liking me is literally some of the most small-dicked behavior i have ever seen in my entire life. and i love that you inexplicably chose to lean into it. you had to have known how this reads...right?

imagine being the kind of person who, when confronted with the mere concept of adapting a more moral point of view, attempts to to shame someone who criticizes comic companies as a hypocrite for...having a home loan. i don't even tell people to buy a home. why did you decide that i did?

how did you come to be like this, op? this post, not even aimed at you specifically, burned your ass so bad you decided my tax bracket for me. you have 0 insight into the inner, or even external, lives of people who aren't you or exactly like you. i am confident making this claim because you are not only shockingly ignorant but proud of it. that you are totally incapable of conceptualizing the uncomplicated concept that someone can be poor and also own a home (and here's a hint, you big stupid bitch, homes cost a lot of money and have impacted my standard of living. this is normal) is revealing. you are dumb. you don't know it. it's sad.

op i need you to sincerely reflect on whatever it was you were trying to do here. not out of condescending moral concern in the hopes that this embarrassment will make you a better person. i want you to think about this bc i want you to report back on why you did this. and why you went with these arguments. i long to understand the people who do this shit to themselves.

jealousy's a disease bitch! get well soon!