Tiny butch fight lesbian, small and ready to brawl, powerful, hits things in the name of Bahamut, extremely soft around her wife
Elegant magical femme lesbian, well-spoken and a skilled diplomat, specialises in protective magical shields and scrying, will kill for her wife at the drop of a hat
They met when they were in an adventuring party together in their younger days and now they’re an established power couple who each hold individual powerful positions across two continents
They’re basically what’s holding half of Exandria together, let’s face it
Sometimes still go out on missions and kick asses alongside the younger generation. Show Vox Machina how it’s DONE
I’ll get to Tumblr and Facebook but first just lemme take a second to tell you these laws don’t do what they’re designed to do. They don’t stop trafficking, they actually make it harder to find victims. Turns out the easiest way to find victims is online.
These laws were passed in April and we saw a lot of sites disappear overnight. So why are Tumblr and Facebook acting now?
They come into force next month. Next month any website with a US prescence can be sued if it allows, even unknowingly, sexual solicitation.
To my mind, Tumblr saw Apple removing the Tumblr app from their store and went “eh, we needed to ban porn anyway, we’ll just act early.”
Their algorithm sucks because training an algorithm to spot lewd content is incredibly difficult.
Facebook yesterday announced its policy on sexual solicitation. Which is ludicrously overzealous, bans the discussion of anything related to sex, including incredibly vague language like “I’m looking for a good time tonight.”
The reason they’re so overzealous isn’t because they’re screaming “Somebody think of the children!”
It’s because if they miss *one* ad, they can be sued. They know algorithms for this suck, so they’ve decided to overcompensate for that and effectively ban talking about sex.
These laws come into force next month. At that time I expect Twitter to also crack down on sex work. I don’t expect we’ll be warned, Twitter will just remove accounts overnight.
“Why don’t you just start your own website, you aren’t US based, just do that.”
There are a myriad of reasons I can’t do that,
1. Age verification laws are going to happen soon here and I can’t afford to pay for that software.
2. The UK gov is considering our own SESTA/FOSTA laws.
Go to PornHub!
Mate I’ve made my opinion on that hellsite very clear. I don’t need another store front. I need a place to communicate with queer communities and advertise. PornHub fucking sucks.
SESTA/FOSTA is an attempt to limit not only sex work, but queer expression online. Queer relationships are seen as inherently sexual to some. We need to be fighting this, because it’s not just a stick to hit sex workers with.
To my mind these laws were always about stopping consensual sex work, whilist also punching at queer people, and sexual expression. This is a censorship bill.
Yell at your elected representatives, America. Make them realize what this is, because it was sold on stopping sex trafficking. The options on it were so good that all the democrats voted for it too. Liberals are just as much at fault here.
I know there is a lot happening, and it’s hard to keep up with it all, but this is important. SESTA/FOSTA needs to be repealed.
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa?
Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now?
On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…
And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.
We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.
As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.
I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.
… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.
Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.
This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.
No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.
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.
so on 4chan the word “wapanese” was used to refer to dumb anime nerds. white boy wannabe japanese. makes sense.
A mod got pissed at it being used so much and said that the next person to use it would get banned, so the boards decided to use a silly nonsense word to replace it.
by complete general consensus, the boards picked the word “weeaboo” from a perry bible comic.
henceforth, “weeaboo” was used in replacement of “wapanese”.
the end.
I have learned so much
this should be taught in history class
An object lesson in how attempting to censor words always fails.
Consulting Witch 