stamps
this page is going to be a collection of deviantart "stamps". deviantart was, for better or worse, a very formative part of art improvement and content creation for many people, and holds a nostalgic place in many hearts. that being said, it was a fucking shithole of unmoderated hatespeech and minors talking to creepy adults, so rather than romanticize it, i'm just going to show you a bunch of stamps with varying levels of irony, congruence with my current or past views (some are individually relevant, some are more just so ubiqitous to the culture at the time i'd be remiss not to include them - the fandom war stamps, my God!) and age... the older the better.
each stamp here has a je ne sais quoi that maybe you'll understand if you were cultured enough to be commenting on sonic the hedgehog recolors in 2009. it was a time and a place where people would look at a 95x50 pixel stamp, go, "yeah, i'll go ahead and either agree or disagree/identify or not identify with that" and if it's a green light, broadcast it to his 34 watchers. you'd find a guy whose account is 90% graphite drawings of anime girls holding swords, then you scroll down to his stamps, and see he's got these stamps next to each other: 
. and so, you're thinking to yourself: well, i can see the individual accounts of those who made these stamps. i can see the that this user agreed with all of these, or uses these to define himself in one way or another, probably out of context from each other. but maybe this person has just shown the viewer something incredibly powerful and unique: that they very well may be the only person currently on Earth who is an outspoken classical liberal israeli nationalist straight friendship enthusiast feet-sniffing autochorissexual rarisponge shipper. unless, of course, you stumble across someone with the same arrangement of stamps - oh, look, you found another user like them! they're destined to be best friends.... wait oh shit...one of them has a million Original Character x Sonic stamps, and one of them has a million stamps AGAINST the very same concept. rats! i guess it's not meant to be.
these days, people whittle down their weird, complex, often times completely conflicting views into acronyms that fit in a twitter bio. am i saying the stamp approach is better? is the deviantart-borne Eclectic Stampism a more authentic form of communicating and developing your moral compass or personal aesthetic predilections?
no. not at all. all of this sucks, and are arguably a weird type of commodity fetishism. or some hyperreality shit; i don't know, i don't want to start having to get into some discussion that means i have to MLA cite Baudrillard this Neocities page. i bet you just want to get to the stamp collection, too. point is, neither of these methods of beaming your beliefs to strangers on the internet hold all that much material value when it comes to things like community organization or, you know, making a difference and standing up for what you believe in. but, i'll tell you what. you can learn a lot about someone by looking at their stamp collection, even if you aren't sure if they mean the stamps in the same way the creator of each stamp meant it. it's maximalist, it's interesting. it's a product of its time.
in the spirit of that, i truly believe having a "digital stamp collection" remains a hilarious way to signal your interests and virtues. it can't be taken too seriously, or else one finds oneself devolving into carrd.co culture territory. the fact of the matter is, it makes you seem like a 13 year old from a bygone era or a maladjusted adult who draws inuyasha erotica. or, maybe, it will be be the next new in-vogue way to harken back to "old internet" even though, for many of us, this was a very recent phenomenon, and to some, still ongoing. in any case, dA stamps are always straddling the line of sincerity and embracing the digital medium for what it is. and for that, it has its own inherent attributes and values that go beyond simple identification or practical use... wait... perhaps the REAL "deviantart fetish community" were stamps, if we are using "fetish" in the anthropological sense.
...or maybe i'm full of shit and trying to justify collecting obnoxious pixels in 2022 as erudite.
unless i'm mistaken, these are all created to be used freely across the internet, if you need something taken down, contact me, i'm happy to oblige!
use these wherever i don't really remember why or what i made them for. don't credit or link back just use it :)