Anyway the last point I have to make here is that even if tumblr breaks under the algorithm (almost certain if they don’t back out of using it) and/or everybody leaves… I don’t have anywhere else to go or post things
people like to joke about it being bad, but I legitimately really like Tumblr. it actually feels like a blogging platform in a world where facebook and twitter are active political weapons that manipulate us elections. i don’t feel like i’m baring myself to content i don’t want to see here, or having to engage with a popularity-focused culture. the content isn’t sorted to influence you or trick you. it’s a bunch of people being themselves on their own terms. it’s oldnet.
yes, i do use other websites, but i’m not interested in posting personal things to any of them. this was a place i had control over and i’ll stay with it until i can’t. and when that happens there’ll be nothing left.
⭡ This.
I mean, I’m not joking when I talk about how awful it is – hell, I left for several months – but I have nothing to replace it with, and that’s what brought me back.
deleted a bunch of chronic pain and chronic illness posts from blogs they’ve left (like mine)
This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects.
The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.
ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers.
Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)
This is a fucking problem, let’s not blow it off.
I know some people are too young (or simply weren’t involved in fandom back then) to remember what went down with livejournal and a couple of other sites “back in the day”, but it all started out as “it’s okay, we’re just removing the nasty porn”, and then “okay well, just make sure you put your porn behind a cut, no, wait jk you need to host it externally, a link is fine, maybe” and pretty much devolved swiftly into “actually sweety, LGBT content is inherently NSFW by default because it might make the kiddies gay if we expose them to it, so y’all need to leave now byyyeeee”.
Like…that happened. And it took nearly a decade for the fandom spaces to recover and stabilize and to get to the point where LGBT content creators could host their content without being told “you’re not welcome here” and I’m just sitting here, watching as youtube demonetizes LGBT content creators, and Facebook flags up LGBT ads as “inappropriate” and now tumblr is going through the queer and gay tags and just mass blanketing it as inappropriate, while actual pornbots and nazis wind up in my recommended feed.
Like I am uncomfortable y’all. I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like “the olden days” where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone.
And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.
So yea, the sky is not falling, but the ice under our feet sure is making worrying sounds.
Here you go. I had to take the actual hyper link out cause tumblr wasn’t letting me reblog it otherwise, and I’m not about to reblog the actual main thing on to my dash. Not again.
Here’s an interesting bit of California Disneyland Mansion lore. Around the summer of 1974, someone with a firearm within the park fired off multiple rounds. Two confirmed gunshots struck both the ballroom wall in the Haunted Mansion, and a snowflake on Adventure Thru Inner Space. A third hole was found in the Primeval World diorama on the train. Later investigation by Anaheim Police determined the holes to be .22 caliber with bullet fragments matching between the holes.
This left Disney with a problem. The panes of glass at the Ballroom scene are so large, the roof of the building would have had to be removed (i.e. destroyed) to replace them. Disney’s solution was to cover up the hole in the glass by disguising it as a spider web and place a fake spider right over the hole. So next time you ride the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, when you leave the ballroom scene just before entering Madame Leota’s room, look for a spider and web on the last pane of glass in front of you.