Hot take but we should really be holding games publishers more accountable for things like “deliberately misrepresenting and misselling the product and its collectors edition goodies or completely failing to inform buyers of changes in scope and production”, and “causing a child gambling epidemic in the UK by putting gambling mechanics, that would feel out of place even in a free to play game, in $60 licensed titles”
They just posted this an hour ago, 12.03.18. just in case anybody is interested.
With the new update to Tumblr’s community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we’d like to take a moment to reassure all y’all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it’s legal under US law, it’s okay to post here. We’re 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we’re here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways.
Tumblr’s definition of “adult content” seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It’s definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr’s, I won’t lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it’ll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that’s small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.
Holy shit!
Wow, that’s some great service right there! Why the fuck did no one go there to begin with in the first place?
I’m thinking the limited pic sharing space and the more closed atmosphere of it. Personally, I prefer the format way more than that on Tumblr. I never really liked how this site was set up after being an LJ user. I prefer the journal based way of sharing but I know a lot of people would miss reblogging abilities.
Pillowfort has that…like, you get the journal but you can reblog from.main into other comms…or make a post to go into that comm only that’s off main. I got used to the reblogs here. I dunno that I can go back to copypasta x-posting 😂
Believe me, we tried to make fetch happen. We really did. But by the time DW was up and running and pretty good as a site, LJ fandom was splintering. Everyone said “wait and see” for long enough that the drive to make DW active just wasn’t there.
Many people desperately clung to LJ. They felt attacked by all of the attempts to make them go to DW or the other options. They felt abandoned by the people who jumped ship before they really had to. They wanted to stick it out and either try to deal with the new policies or make petitions and see if they could get LJ back on track.
Other people favored a different journal clone. Greatest Journal and Insane Journal were both popular with groups of fans at various times. The set of people who wanted to leave LJ but specifically wanted a LJ-like experience was divided, making each of these other hubs less active. Some people had already tried to leave LJ before the mass migrations, but they ended up in empty communities while the real action was still, for a while, back on LJ.
By the end of LJ, it had some features that weren’t available at the clones. Many people also had lifetime accounts they’d paid a bunch of money for. It wasn’t just the money either: having an account type that’s only rarely for sale marks someone as a long-time user. That social cachet goes away if you switch sites. The new sites didn’t have the entrenched communities or homey feel of LJ for people who’d been comfortable there for a decade.
By the time we all finished milling around, yelling at each other for picking the wrong journal-ish option, Tumblr had developed big fandom communities. New fandoms were active here, so here we came. Some people who like text and don’t like too many images staid behind. When I went and looked at my old DW, there they were, still posting regularly. Some people left fandom entirely. Some people went elsewhere and are now invisible to me.
Fans will use any site, no matter how shitty and lacking in features, if that’s where the rest of the fandom is hanging out.
I still belong to a couple of active yahoo groups.
But the biggest factor is that, back then, DW had no track record. We didn’t know that GJ would be gone or IJ inactive or that DW would still be living up to its promises a decade later. It sounded good but was unproven, just like Pillowfort now. LJ was hard to leave, just like Tumblr is now.
The sites themselves are different, but the social and emotional forces at work were exactly like what’s happening on Tumblr now:
“Well, I haven’t been deleted and my friends are here, so I’m staying.”
“That other site is weird and has weird features!”
“Let’s start a petition! They’ll have to listen if we get enough people!”
The iconic McElroy Double “Unless.” I can hear them perfectly.
I noticed a couple people in the tags saying the Double Unless is a Hamilton reference, which means there are people out there who don’t realize that Hamilton was actually referencing the McElroys, not the other way around. Lin said so himself.
So anyway, I just wanted to share the good, good news.
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.
Verizon delete challenge
I really tried to read this article but they mentioned “female-presenting nipple” in the first paragraph and I started cracking up again
Title: The Radical Copyeditor’s Style Guide for Writing About Transgender People: 2.8-2.11: Avoiding Invalidating Language Traps
Speech bubbles contrast the following phrases under the headings “Invalidating language” versus “Validating language”: “Women and trans women” versus “Cis and trans women”; “Students who consider themselves ‘non-binary’” versus “Non-binary students”; “Zed, who identifies as agender” versus “Zed is agender”; “her secret was exposed” versus “her history was publicized”; “closeted,” “stealth,” and “passes” versus “private” and “nondisclosure”; and “an out trans man” versus “openly trans” and “public.”
Plot Designing 