Tumblr’s TOS Changes, AO3, and You

OTW Legal talks about the new Tumblr Terms of Service and what they mean for fans (and AO3): https://goo.gl/EZWH62

Construction illegally started here last year without the proper paper work. And implied threats.

This wasn’t even eminent domain, because they never seized the land they just started showing up with it still privately owned.

So, I live nowhere near here, but if anyone wants to try to do something I felt I should spread the word.

This should be something supporters of private land ownership and enviornmentalists both agree on.

having to be “mature” at a young age sucks bc you aren’t really “mature-mature” you’re a child playing at a maturity bc you don’t have the foundation to be the bigger person when conflict arrives so what you do is ignore it bc ignoring a problem and being happy about a resolution look the same to your inexperienced eyes. Then you get adults praising you for a development above your peers but you aren’t really developing. You’re stagnant. Your peers will grow up and experience things and make mistakes and grow from them but you will keep yourself in this box, ignoring things ignoring ignoring ignoring until one day you have to face the fact… it wasn’t maturity you had. It was fear. And now you’re an adult too and you make all of your choices based on an emotional risk/costs analysis bc you don’t know any emotion other than fear & you have to start healing from your own childhood by making peace that you weren’t really a mature child. You were just a child who was given too much to carry & didn’t know how to say “no”.

Sex positivity

Casual reminder that sex positivity is the political position towards sex, which says that sex is not inherently more shameful, sinful or worse that other parts of life (and actually not better or exempt from political analysis either). As such, it has no relation to how easy sex is for you.

If you never have sex, or rarely have sex, or struggle to get undressed in front of someone, you haven’t failed at sex positivity. If you’re not comfortable in sex-focused spaces or just don’t enjoy them, you haven’t failed at sex positivity. Just like you are no less a feminist if you worry about how you look, and no less a queer activist if you are not ‘out’ everywhere, you are no less sex-positive if sex is a complicated thing in your life.

Your political position towards sex is seen in how you respond to attempts by respectability activists to de-sexualize LGBT identities, it is seen in whether you defend sex-focused queer spaces when their existence is threatened, it is seen in how you respond to sexual violence, it is seen in how you respond to people who pretend that there is no sexism, racism or rape in kinky spaces, it is seen in how you treat sex workers, it is seen in what you do to de-stigmatize STDs in your community.

Sex positivity is seen in a lot of your political actions but it can never be measured by how much you fuck or how public you are about it.

Canaries in the Coal Mine: If you cheered on censorship of weird art, you’re part of this problem

Unpopular fact that needs to be said now: if you ignored or worse cheered on the constant encroaching censorship of artists and didn’t speak up because it wasn’t the ‘right’ kind of art (your ~pure eroti ca~ art) that was under fire, you’re 100% part of the problem.

The weird ero artists, the hardcore ero artists, the distasteful ero artists, those gross artists have been your canary in the coal mine and y'all decided it was canary season and now… well we may all be in the grave YOU dug but guess what, you’re here too!

Maybe y'all will learn a lesson. Maybe y'all will stop flinging around false accusations for peak woke points and stop censoring art you find icky and artists that don’t peddle only the purest and unproblematicest of smut. Probably not. But a boy can dream can’t he?

The solution always is to speak out against censorship. “But I’m afraid to speak out–” The rest of us who put our necks out and got burned, how do you think we feel? But we speak out against censorship. We defend ‘icky’ art. Because we know the price otherwise.

And if you won’t listen to me because I’m just some queermo who makes weird comics, then maybe you’ll listen to a professional. 

 "[I]f you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.“ - Neil Gaiman, WHY DEFEND FREEDOM OF ICKY SPEECH?, Dec. 1, 2008

Dawn of the final day and all. Hope next site we all land on you pay attention to your canaries when we speak.

I figure that this will probably be a more controversial contention than some of my previous posts on this whole subject but like I actually think that there is something being lost even by just the deletion of the p*rnographic content of this website (and perhaps more importantly, the communities surrounding it).in terms of just a historical perspective.

P*rnography, which is seen as without any intellectual or artistic merit, is one of those things that is mass produced but v infrequently preserved at the time of its creation because it is seen as not worth studying or preserving, and in fact there is a tendency towards its destruction. But at the same time, there is a lot to be gained in understanding societies and their socio-cultural mores by looking at just that (along w other forms of “low culture”, i’m reminded of trash tabloid TV or cheap films on weird subjects or even just tabloids in general).

This is to a certain extent what is going to happen as more and more social interactions happen over the internet, or what is talked about sometimes as being a part of Digital Dark Age. These things have to be stored somewhere, on websites that might go down or in this case, they might be expunged from continuing websites. Unlike pulp novels or magazines, these sorts of things just disappear (w the potential exception be if they are saved on computers… that might themselves become unusable in the near future!)

I guess maybe this is because p*rnography is just an academic interest of mine, but I think Tumblr’s model already had a way of creating structural gaps (in the form of blog deletion), but there really is something that could the the site of study that could just disappear soon! Like, that’s not to say that these things are like good or not skeezy or systemically in a weird way wrt ethics (and I think there are limitations to this sort of logic) but they are socially relevant in some way, and I think there’s something being lost in the record by getting rid of all of it. Just because it has v little “social utility” doesn’t mean that there isn’t at least some historical interest, I guess, esp. when the libidinal imaginary features so prominently in many different political spheres and conversations.

“tall/small couples are problematic because there’s a power imbalance” is NOT one of the cold takes i expected to see at the end of 2018, and YET,

*breaking up with my s.o.* it’s not you, it’s just you’re 6'4" and tumblr told me that means our relationship is unhealthy,

This is apparently the discourse in question?

oh. my. god.

this just in: short people can’t date

#actully on second thought im glad this hellsite is dying #pull the plug tumblr#do it #put us all out of our misery #set us free

fucking cosigned

“Any relationship with a short person is problematic because of a power imbalance”

I guess I’d better tell my girlfriend she’s Problematic for loving me

Also oh my god

Reading the above post made me Genuinely Envy The Dead

Because they never had to live to read how Steven Universe ships are “Problematic” because Something Something Bullshit or that short people shouldn’t date the tall because That’s Abuse Apparently

Welp. Okay then. It's actually worse than I thought.

Use your white privilege

TUMBLR NOW BLOCKING THE WAYBACK MACHINE

I just… I don’t know how to respond to this with anything other than an infuriated fucking howl, honestly? I’ve checked this and @essayofthoughts has checked this and there’s confirmation that Tumblr is actively banning archival efforts so it looks like this is not a bug.

If you were planning on archiving anything from this website, you’re too late. It is all going to fucking burn. Not only is Tumblr committed to destroying the platform, they are committed to absolutely fucking anyone who is trying to conserve any part of it.

Fuck you @staff. Fuck you.

Quizilla 2.0

Oh god, please don’t remind me of Quizilla. I’m both incredibly grateful and SAD that I’ve access to my stories posted there.

Oh GOD. quizilla was the first platform I wrote fanfics on. Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

these comments prompted me to do some reading on Quizilla and the story really is similar: years of neglect and mismanagement followed by an abrupt announcement of closure. this of course is a story close to my heart, since it’s the exact thing that happened with the Wizards of the Coast official forums, which were broken beyond useability, limped along for a few years, and were finally shut down with just enough head time for me and a few other people to manually go through the 7-8 years worth of threads in the Storyline and Art forums and save every god damn one of them to the Wayback Machine.

of course, Tumblr has made such efforts impossible, and it’s not clear to me that Quizilla works would even have functioned in wayback.

someone on twitter commented to me that we might lose the vast majority of Homestuck meta if Tumblr finally goes down without being mass-archivable. I’m genuinely not sure how we’d ever even know the extent of our loss here, not just for Homestuck but for other fandoms around various webcomics and anime and so on, particularly obscure shit that doesn’t have a large enough fanbase to sustain archival practices.

apparently Quizilla enabled the creation of uniquely formatted and interactive fanfiction. Tumblr enabled uniquely formatted ask blog fiction, and more fragmentary, nonlinear, downright fucking modernist fanfiction structures.

the loss of such sites is not just the loss of texts but of entire genres and media formats. gone without a trace, gone without most people even realizing that something was ever there at all.

This is one of the things that bums me too because there’s genuinely no other way of crossposting the kind of fannish works Tumblr made possible on other websites, even if you have a similar format to tumblr

I’ve been trying to figure out how to crosspost my Potter fic blog to ao3, but I can’t even figure out how to start because while every piece on that blog builds on a single shared alternate universe and all feed into the main narrative backbone story that built Chaos Is A Butterfly, they’re also a) standalone pieces and b) do not exist in any particular chronological fashion

In fact with Tumblr, I could use the formatting to tell a non-chronological story and shape how people read a character and emotionally engaged with them through that in a way that I don’t think can even be replicated on ao3. Neither can I replicate the sense of the blog existing in itself in a contained but sprawling alternate universe where the reader is led wandering through it, rather than following a linear narrative through it.

@themonsterblogofmonsters posts fic everyday, but if you visit the front end of the blog, it’s an entire encyclopedia and “reference book” in and of itself. You can’t get that functionality on ao3 and you can’t get it on pillowfort. Short of designing a website from scratch, I don’t think it’s actually possible to achieve.

And these are just two instances! I’m struggling with how to archive meta or collaboratively created fic or headcanon - how do I file it, where do I file it, how do I attribute the different people who contributed. What do I do when I’ve made a meta that builds on someone whose blog is gone?

It’s just…this entire fandom nucleus that shaped how we did fiction and meta (writing attached to gifsets, meta attached to gifsets, tag meta) that is basically impossible to preserve on other sites.

Policy on Explicit Artwork & Underage Characters

This post is to clarify Pillowfort’s position on sexually explicit visual art, particularly art containing minors. We apologize for not clarifying our position on this earlier; we have been working on revising the ToS to address these issues, but an incident arose today that necessitated us taking action on this matter, so it seems necessary to put things in plain terms now.

As of this statement, Pillowfort will not allow explicit visual art of characters that appear to be underage. Now, due to the inherently subjective nature of trying to determine the age of a fictional character in a stylized medium, the “gray area” cases will be up to the discretion of the moderator reviewing the content. Broadly, if your characters are close to 18 and could plausibly or arguably be of age based on appearance, that will be allowed. We are not going to comb through the wiki of a particular fandom to try and find the canonical age of a fictional character and then try to figure out if the character in the art piece is supposed to be represented at their canonical age or not. Similarly, many works of art contain sexual activity as a theme of adolescence and coming-of-age– I’m sure you yourself can think of many movies, shows, etc. you’ve seen that featured underage characters in a sexual relationship, some even explicitly– and even if you wanted to argue that art that explored adolescent sexuality was fine and it’s ‘just pornography’ that should be censured, we aren’t going to be the arbiters of what is art vs. ‘merely’ pornography. Therefore, sexual depictions of characters in later stages of adolescence may broadly be considered ‘safe.’

However, any explicit or sexual art of a character that appears to be physically pre-pubescent or barely pubescent (i.e. not plausibly or arguably of age, or even close to it) will be prohibited. We realize this decision may anger some people, but we have devoted a considerable amount of thought to this decision and we feel this is the best approach for our community.

Importantly, we don’t want people to worry that this heralds a broader ban on ‘problematic’ content. When it comes to fictional depictions or descriptions of divisive subjects such as incest, rape, abuse, etc., we do not intend to restrict that content, for largely the same reasons as discussed above with regards to ‘gray-area’ underage content. We understand these subjects can be distressing for many, and we do request that people posting content that is potentially upsetting tag such posts with the relevant terms so that it can be avoided by those who don’t wish to view such content. The only situation we foresee penalizing the posting of this content would be a case already covered in our ToS, where a bad-faith user appears to be intentionally spamming completely unrelated tags or communities with violent or sexual content with the intent or result of disrupting the usual functioning of that tag or community.

We will update the ToS to reflect these new guidelines soon. As always, if these new guidelines are unsatisfactory to you and you want a refund for your PayPal payment to us, you can email us at [email protected] and we will process your refund as soon as we can.

View this post on Pillowfort

Okay, so I was supporting PF as an alternative to tumblr. No more. Here are my problems with this, in no particular order:

-They banned a user and deleted their blog for this before actually updating their TOS. And they didn’t inform the user or flag the post or anything. Just, boom, gone, no communication or reason given, again, for something that wasn’t even in the TOS at the time it was posted. That’s some shitty and shady moderating.

-This cannot be enforced. Between art styles (everyone knows that anime with the 30 year old woman who looks 10, or the 12 year old boy who looks 20), natural human diversity (height, medical condition, bust size- remember that time Australia banned adult women with A-cups from appearing in porn?), a policy that boils down to what a mod ‘thinks’ a picture looks like is basically just giving every mod a ‘hot or not’ button and basing the banning on that.

-Also, we’re talking about fiction. And fandom, which is fiction’s weird-niche central. How do you make a call on a piece of art depicting a child in an adult’s body (body-swapping, shape-shifting) or the reverse (such as an immortal child who is mentally an adult)? What about inhuman characters? And how are you going to rule on non-classically-sexual, non-nude fetish art?

-On a demographic note, this will be slanted against queer, survivor, and disabled artists. Since it’s down to mod preference and bias, preference and bias will come into play. Women are drawn ‘younger’ looking than men in a more normalized way (Disney’s Rapunzel and her mother, who is presumably twice her age, are basically twins), so art with a het ship and similar mlm art where one partner is femme/uke-like are likely going to be treated differently. Disabled, intersex, trans and non-binary individuals sometimes have different or minimized secondary sexual characteristics, so it’ll target them too. Survivors who express or process what happened to them in art will be banned.

-This makes no sense. Gore, torture, rape between adults, etc are still allowed, so this won’t make the site safe for work. And all of those things are clearly objectionable in real life, so this isn’t about only allowing obviously healthy/consensual porn. It’s just a random line drawn in the sand, and that means there are no guarantees that more random lines won’t follow.

-The vagueness leaves this open for abuse. If fictional depictions can be banned, then people can easily mass report ships or art they don’t like. And every mod trying to figure out if Prince of Tennis (a series where young teen characters are drawn more like adults) porn is ban-worthy or not is one less mod focusing on real CP that victimizes real children.