Today's blog post might be a rather cold take, but I think it's important to write nonetheless. It's still more processing thoughts as I've gone through the large amount of feedback I've gotten towards fanfic.lol. I have to say, creating something that has gotten so much feedback has taught me so much. I'm extremely grateful and lucky for what I've been able to learn.

Have I gotten hostile, bad-faith arguments against the site, and by extension, me? Yes. But it really is a very small handful of people compared to the dozens who have been supporting me, with some people going out of their way to vocally defend the project and my intentions.

I've spent my existence on the Internet trying to build goodwill organically. I've tried to show, with my actions, that I do not care about currency of any kind—money, clout, power—I am deeply disinterested in all of this. My values outline what I do care about.

So, I guess when this core aspect of my identity is denied and invalidated, that's when I feel the most need to explain myself at length.

You see, one person in particular made a rather long post trying to paint the project and me in a bad light: they said I was an extremely junior dev (despite the many years I have in the field), that forking a GPL-licensed open-source project was scummy (?), that the project was completely out of scope for me, that I was only making fanfic.lol to try to selfishly sell things I've created, I could go on. I spent a lot of time trying to explain to this person how I am following best practices and that I've made many projects and websites over the years, but it became clear the only answer they think would be acceptable would be that I take the site down and let AO3 continue to reign as the sole fanfiction site (despite the fact several other AO3 forks also exist). Anytime I wrote a comment to correct the record, they would update their post cherry-picking the worst things I said instead of having an actual conversation with me.

And I think to myself, why did I dedicate so much time and effort trying to convince a single person that I have good intentions and that I'm competent? The answer was that they were an incredibly squeaky wheel.

The loudest people in the room are, more often than not, thought as being the most correct. At the very least, they're the ones listened to the most.

And these people are usually critical instead of positive. They are usually tearing things down while not creating anything themselves or at the very least pouring themselves into advocacy and uplifting. They are not dedicating their time and energy to creating a better commons for everyone, or they are only interested in their own vision of what's best.

And I think to myself, why do I not dedicate more time and effort to those who have been friendly and supportive? Why do I not write paragraphs upon paragraphs gushing about the things I love? (Okay, I actually did do this recently, that makes me feel a little better).

Most of the things I've created throughout my life have gotten small amounts of feedback, but that feedback has almost always been positive and intentional. And I need to remind myself that I should focus on this—because these are the exact kind of people who fly under the radar.

The brain you're using to read this sentence is not neutral and never has been. Negativity bias is one of the oldest things about us. The idea was first named formally by Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman in 2001. Negative events have been proven to carry five times the psychological weight of positive ones of equal size.

One cutting remark, one hostile post, one person who decides you are a fraud, it lands as a stone in still water, and the ripples go on and on. Meanwhile, the dozen people who quietly told you the work mattered, who sent the small emails, who simply showed up and used the thing you made? Those ripples are smaller, faster to fade, easier to forget.

Our ancestors who paid extra attention to the rustle in the grass, or the shift in the light, or the stranger's cold expression? They survived, of course. The ones who stayed soft and open to every positive stimulus, unbothered by threat, conversely did not pass on as many genes. The brain we inherited is a threat-detector first and a joy-register second. Your brain encodes the eyeroll and stores the criticism much better than any warm, good memory. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of you that is supposed to be rational and in charge, replays the embarrassing moments in the dark at three in the morning. It takes five deposits of warmth to balance a single moment of hostility.

Neuroimaging has found that brain activity spikes more intensely for negative stimuli than positive ones. Infants as young as six months show stronger responses to a frowning face than a smiling one. Our threat recognition runs deeper than any belief you hold about how you want to move through the world.

When I spent hours composing careful, measured replies to someone who had already decided I was lying—when I refreshed the page to see if they'd responded, if they'd understood, if something had shifted? That's how my neurology operates. The oldest instruction in our nervous system is there is a threat. address the threat. do not look away.

The problem is that instruction was written for a different world of predators and scarcity. In my world, the threat is never as dangerous as it feels. The critic will not kill me! They are a person with a keyboard and a certainty they didn't earn. And yet we hand them the microphone anyway. We give them the hours. We write the careful replies.

What we can do, and what the research in positive psychology consistently recommends, is to consciously retrain the lens. Gratitude practices. Proactive acts of attention.

Not toxic positivity, no. Not the performance of contentment, but the choice to use your will to notice what is good, to hold it a little longer than feels natural, to let it form a memory with the same durability as the bad ones. I am trying to do that now, here, in public, with you.

Well-reasoned, nuanced, kind people do not cause the same seismic waves that loud, polarizing people do. And they deeply matter. The quiet among us who are doing work and giving positive feedback and enjoying life do not get nearly the time and attention they deserve.

There is no reason for our cultural vocabulary to have "hater" be so commonplace when "lover" is so absent. Speak up about what you love more, reach out to those who are kind and give them the kind of dedicated attention and energy you give people who are critical and long-winded.

Fandom exists in the first place because of lovers. Because of people who deeply connect with cultural experiences and channel that connection into their own artistic work and community. That's why I am doing any of this in the first place.

When you pick up sand, the harder you squeeze and the harder you try to hold it, the less you'll have. When you cup your hand gently, the sand stays. I think that says a lot.

Send a positive message today to someone who probably would love to hear it.

When you love something, say so with the same energy you'd spend on outrage. More, even. Love is rarer on the Internet and it takes more courage, and it is doing more work in the world than any of us tend to notice.

The quiet wheel still needs the grease, it just asks quietly. And I think the lovers built everything worth keeping.

Be a lover. Out loud. Today.