Going out of Business

 Hello All,

As the banner reads, I will be decommissioning this blog at the end of 2024. I had a lot of fun writing for it back when it was active, but the more I have thought about it as I have gotten older the more uncomfortable I have become with it existing. 

I wrote all of these stories when I was a teenager, and when viewed through that lens, they're fine, if badly written. A lot of the characters are that age, because I was that age, and a lot of the images chosen for the captions reflect that as well. That's all fine if they're written by a teenager and read by teenagers, and they were fine then because I mainly wrote them for myself. 

I've also in the past few years faced a bit of a personal reckoning with TG captions and how I feel about them. Nearing the end of my tenure on this blog, when Google started to be more serious about marking content as explicit, I wondered if what I made was explicit or not. I was never interested in full nude or pornographic captions, but there was certainly an element of eroticism to what I was writing and the line seemed a bit blurry. At the time, I didn't give it a ton of thought, because I was a dumb teenager. 

But the more I think about it, the harder it gets to enjoy certain captions, including and especially ones I wrote. I have become significantly more conscious of image sourcing, and pay much more attention to image context than I did in the past, which was zero. Was this a consciously taken picture? Did the woman consent to be photographed in this way? How old is she? How would she feel if she knew her image was used for these stories? I know none of this really matters once something is on the internet, but personally, I don't feel comfortable creating or consuming something now without asking myself these questions and getting answers I'm comfortable with.

I am now most definitely not a teenager, and rereading a lot of these makes me uncomfortable. A lot of the characters are around the age I was back then, and reading those stories and seeing the girls associated with them makes it hard for me to enjoy them the way I did when I was that age. 

And that's fine, that's a normal thing that happens. Tastes should naturally change over time, and honestly I'd be more concerned if I was able to enjoy the same things teenage me did. This blog just happens to be a time capsule of a what a teenage me was interested in, and adult me doesn't like it. I think that happens to everyone, or at least it should.

I still write stories from time to time, with much more consciously sourced images, over on opentgc.com under @ashertg. I usually source from TheChive, under the assumption that their image vetting is at least somewhat acceptable, or from professional shows and movies and what not where I know more information about the subjects. I can't speak for everything on opentgc, but at least what I've contributed I can stand and be comfortable with.

I'm leaving this up until the 1st to give anyone still around time to read this explanation. I've already removed some of the posts I was most uncomfortable with, but I'll let the rest have one last month in the sun.

Thanks for being a fan of what I wrote so long ago, I hope you have a great rest of your year.

Asher