The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.
Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.
Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.
Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.
Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.
good luck with your plan to sell ads targeting a user base that doesn’t exist any more, @staff.
Then they’re def gonna let Tumblr die on the vine when it doesn’t pan out. It’ll take a few years but mark my words, this is going to work out about as well as when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and everybody left. Also, fuck Verizon forever.
Plz lemme know if you reblog this and it disappears. I have Suspicions.
I mean, there are already mutuals of mine reporting that they can’t see this post, only a “post was deleted"notice on my blog, and I’m the OP.
So, whatever your suspicions are, I suppose mark them as confirmed.
I worked very hard for 10 years to build an audience here on Tumblr. It’s weird watching it crumble before my eyes. I’m not really sure how to process this. I no longer have the energy to build somewhere else. So I am kinda stuck on this sinking ship.
I understand why people are compelled to leave. But it is all still depressing.
I just wish Tumblr cared enough about its user base to come up with a different solution.
They basically said, “Be gone, pervs!” and that’s not cool.
Enjoying adult content does not necessarily make someone a pervert. It just makes someone a human being. There is art and beauty in so many of the things being flagged. And apparently dinosaurs and legs and dogs are being flagged too.
They told us they were only coming for our nipples.
They lied.
Perhaps Tumblr should change its motto.
Nipple Free™ since December 2018.
I do hope some of you will stick around with me. I still have things to share here. And I will continue to write essays and post way too many corgis over @sirfrogsworth
I’m sorry Tumblr no longer cares about you.
But… I do.
Thank you all for changing my life and giving me a purpose. You are the best.
...not just dead, but stinkin’ up the basement. PHEWW-WY!
Personally, I’m not sure who runs Tumblr anymore; is it Yahoo or Apple? And I’m not that thrilled about the loss of all the porn blogs. They’ll just become someone else’s problem.
Frankly I’m not that fussed; my tumblr isn’t NSFW, and if absreruns goes down I won’t be shedding tears. It was an impulse project that’s worn itself out, and there’s always subgenius.com for the Art Mines of alt.binaries.slack.
I have been considering restarting a personal website for a couple of months now, but never managed to figure it out. What theme? (Not exactly the design, I’m talking overall.) If I make it into just the official Cranky Rabbit website, then any other pursuits will get skewed into Shit Cranky Does. And that’s a website design that I consider important if I’m to get a music/production career off the ground.
At the moment I’m pondering what CMS to use in the back end, and whether or not to retire the old domain. I don’t really need it and it’s too callow. It might be better to let it lapse and get a new one. Something I can use as a generic top level domain; *.[something professional sounding].nz.
I have a Phaser install on my localhost, and a test game with a crude “Desperate Fun Productions” splash screen (it’s from “Lowlands” by the Tall Dwarfs.) My zines are mostly issued under the Desperate Fun Productions name. So at the moment desperatefun[productions].[co].nz is the front-runner. If I can think of something else a bit more optimistic and a bit more timeless that’d be good.
(Something that lends itself to an easier to draw logo would be nice too.)
People criticized The Matrix for its “humans are batteries” concept (I sure rolled my eyes), but it works great in this context as literal metaphor for capitalism turning us into zoned-out resources for non-human (corporate) entities to efficiently drain our life energy for their profit:
I always thought it would work better in that regard (read: this is what I wanted), if Morpheus rather than Neo ended up being “The One”™. Because then it’s not just the realization that you’ve been living the lie, they all had that and Neo is a good way to show it, but also I think a deeper meaning to specialness and not being plugged in. That the real power isn’t in kung-fu and accepting your specialness individually, but in the idea of unplugging others, that the power is in the attempt to create a society that is antithetical to being a battery. Neo kinda converts to that but it is Morpheus that champions it. So… I just thought the metaphor would work better. Or something…
A Christmas Carol is so wild to me because it takes not one, not two, but like four fucking ghosts to convince this dude not to be the biggest douche in the universe. Like, four fucking ghosts came back from the dead, rose from the Goddamn grave to be like, “I came back from the dead because you need to quit your shit.” Fuck. How big of an asshole do you have to be to have four fucking ghosts tell you to stop?
Have you ever met a rich capitalist
Also, one of those ghosts was a rich capitalist douche. He needed to reform Scrooge to work off his own sentence, didn’t he?
Marley’s ghost basically told Scrooge that if he kept being a greedy douchebag he would go to hell and Scrooge still needed convincing and that honestly is 100% believable to me
That an old rich white guy being told “Your going to hell unless you help the poor” would respond by going “I still kind of want to NOT help the poor tho?”
Charlie Dickens knew what was up.
Dickens had to work in a factory hos entire childhood. His father was thrown in a debtor’s prison. Thats why all his stories are about rich fucks getting owned.
The thing I love about A Christmas Carol is that
at the time he wrote it, Christmas, as a holiday, was on par with our Arbor Day. And Scrooge held the Majority Opinion.
Dickens originally set out to write a Very Serious Pamphlet About the Plight of the Poor in Modern Times, with numbers, and statistics, and gruesome details about the state of debtors prisons. And he realized that it would probably not change a single thing, in the end.
So he changed it to fiction, and made it emotional, and focused on the lives in one specific family. And he also self-published it, because he realized that a for-profit publishing house wouldn’t want to touch it. And gave it to friends.
Not only did it help change people’s attitudes toward charity organizations and help reform labor laws, it also (pretty much) revived the whole custom of celebrating Christmas at all.
That, my friends, is the power of a well written ghost story.
I just looked up this to see if this was true and it is!
The pamphlet was going to be called ‘An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’
He decided to write the story because he realised that soap-boxing factory workers and their employers on the importance of educational reform wasn’t going to work on a society-wide scale.
A Christmas Carol is literally a leftist/socialist story about not being a dickwad to your employees because they’re human too, your ‘fellow man’
Fortunately, modern media have nerfed the social commentary side of things. After all, that was way back then, but this is the modern day! We’re so much more enlightened now.
“You can’t see your work properly until it’s some distance in front of you. […] You won’t see what works and what doesn’t until it’s out in front of you. And your mistakes are more valuable than your successes. I guarantee you that you’ll never see all the things you need to fix until you’ve got a foot or two between you and it.”—@warrenellis, Warren Ellis discussing the comics form (Wired)
Unbiased journalism is not pretending both sides are equally valid. Unbiased journalism is reporting the facts even if those facts include that one side is irredeemably awful. False neutrality is propaganda.
Repeated for emphasis: False neutrality is propaganda.
if 99 experts say one thing, and 1 expert says another, presenting both sides as equal is misinformation
You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression.
We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Todaywe take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report.
The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment.
Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now.
If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu.
We wouldn’t, in my ignorant opinion, be having this threat looming over us if corporations hadn’t been designed with just the one directive in mind: to generate profit for the shareholders regardless of any damage caused.
For some reason I’m trying to think of Asimov laws for corporations.
We need them.
The current corporation is, in my opinion, not only similar to a 1950s B-movie monster, but obsolete.
If Cryogenics Were All Free, Then You Could Live Like Walt Disney
& Live For All Eternity, Inside A Block Of Ice
But Instead Your Time Is Set; This Is The Only Life You Get & Though It Hasn’t Ended Yet, you’re getting pretty old
Happy Birthday!! Another year is through. Happy Birthday!! And another decade, too. Happy Birthday!! We’ll sing it loud and shrill ‘Cause now that you have reached the top from here it’s all downhill
Now we gather round to cheer that you’re not in the ground and here we let out a bright and joyful sound because we’re glad you’re here
Today you’ve reached a milestone with forty years on this old home And so I’ve called you on the phone to depress you with this news
Happy Birthday!! Yes, I’m afraid it’s yours Happy Birthday!! I’m sorry there’s no cure Happy Birthday!! Well the truth is you could always say There’ll be another 40 anyway so let’s just lie and say you’re young.
I sang it in my head to the tune of The Arrogant Worms’ “Happy Happy Birthday Song”.
