Tumblr Blackout

[kiraly]

It's a few hours early, but I went ahead and logged out of my Tumblr account until December 17th is over. I don't know how much good it'll do - I don't really know how widespread it'll be, or if the douchebags in charge of that site will pay it any mind. It seems like they're already set on their shitty nipple ban and their shitty algorithm to enforce it, so we'll see what happens.

Anyway, the plan is to hang out on here, twitter, and the Synchronised Screaming writers chat for the duration of the 17th. If nothing else, it'll be a good dry run for the worst-case scenario of "Tumblr goes away forever". I won't deny that I'm attached to that site in a way that probably borders on addiction; I'll definitely miss it if it goes away. But I'm hoping to be able to stay connected to the friends I've made there no matter what happens.

For something more cheerful - if you're reading this, maybe hit me up with random life questions or fandom questions or writing prompts? Or tell me a random fact about yourself that I don't know? I know I'm not connected to a lot of people on Dreamwidth, but it'd be cool to get to know the people I am connected to a bit better. :)

Comments

/floating in from Explore->Latest

[hebethen]

FWIW, it's been the 17th in UTC for a while now! I was actually wondering a bit about what time zone that protest was for, but as I haven't actively used Tumblr in a few years anyway it was a matter of curiosity for me rather than something I absolutely needed to know.

Did you know they even IP-banned the Wayback Machine people from trying to archive things before the 17th? It really makes me think "deliberately tanking their stock" is less of a conspiracy theory and more of a, well, plausible explanation.

Fandom questions.... are there any old webcomics (whether finished or just left hanging forever in that most Webcomic of tragic fates) which you wish had more of a fandom?

[metimauresse]

i've also logged out of tumblr, for all the good that'll do. but cheerful stuff! i'm currently eating christmas cookies baked by my mother, do you do much baking? & what're some winter traditions you have?

Re: /floating in from Explore->Latest

[kiraly]

Heh, yeah, most of the posts I saw about the protest were pretty ambiguous as far as official time goes. One of them looked like it was calling for people to start it at midnight EST, but my friends in Central European time were logging off at midnight their time so I don't know if there's any wrong or right way to do it.

That's super sketchy about the Wayback Machine, I hadn't heard that! All the more reason to do individual backups of stuff, I guess. :/ I'm glad I managed to archive the bits of fanfiction I had hanging around on there.

Oooh, what a good webcomic question! I'll be honest, I don't actually know how active the fandoms are for a lot of the ones I've followed over the years; I didn't really engage much with other fans until a few years ago. One that makes me sad though (and is relevant to the topic of archiving stuff!) is that the very active comment section for the webcomic Nimona mostly went away (to my knowledge) when the comic got published in physical form and most of it was taken offline. It was the first comment section I encountered that was actually a delight to read. People got very silly, I remember there being whole threads about various background characters that got named by fans and given personalities. I was never very active in commenting myself, but by the time it ended I was just as invested in the comments as the comic itself.

And I guess thinking back to other comics I read religiously back in the day, I would have given a lot to have other people to squee with about Dovecote Crest (a comic about historical re-enactors too stubborn to admit they loved each other) or Skin Deep (a comic about people who are secretly mythological creatures). I had very shippy feelings about some of the characters in those, haha! Dovecote Crest has been left hanging forever, sadly, though at least a few arcs of it were finished. Skin Deep is still ongoing though (and my OTP got together, hooray!)

[kiraly]

Oooh, Christmas cookies! That sounds amazing. :D

My mom is an amazing baker - at Christmas she really pulls out all the stops! Growing up, my parents ran a summer camp, which meant we lived on the grounds and had access to the huge camp kitchen. So every year some family friends would come over, and my mom and her friend would make a ton of cookies - peanut butter blossoms, gingerbread and sugar cookies. The kids (there were always at least four of us, sometimes more) would cut out cookies and then decorate them when they were baked. My friend and I would get all detailed with the decorating, taking forever to make these beautiful cookies. But then of course, by the end people would just have to slap icing on the remaining cookies so we'd get them done, haha! Mom also bakes this amazing Swedish rye bread called limpa, which she's sort of locally famous for. For a while, she'd take orders and spend a whole Saturday baking massive batches to give people at church.

On a less-fun note, I now have celiac disease so I have to eat a gluten-free diet, meaning no rye bread for me. But! My mom still makes sure to bake stuff I can eat, using gluten-free flour and keeping it away from all the normal flour. At Thanksgiving she'll do pumpkin pie without a crust (she makes amazing pie crust too) and since no one else wants to eat the crustless pie, I get the whole thing to myself. :)

Re: /floating in from Explore->Latest

[hebethen]

Aw, that's a shame about Nimona. I'd heard something vaguely to that effect, but didn't realize the implications about losing the community history :( Hopefully at least some of that was able to have been archived.

I looked up Skin Deep and apparently I know of this artist from... Rule 63 fanart of TF2 characters that I once geeked out over years ago?? Small world!

[moment of silence for Dovecote Crest]

[minutia_r]

Yeah, I'm doing it more out of solidarity with my friends and community than because I expect it to accomplish anything, because I don't.

Re: /floating in from Explore->Latest

[kiraly]

Yeah, it was a shame. I'll admit I haven't actually gone looking to see if someone archived it, knowing fandom I wouldn't be terribly surprised. (And I can understand the reasons for it being taken down - lots of traditional publishers don't seem to know what to do with webcomics, so it was probably a contractual thing. But still sad.)

Ha! Small world indeed. I follow the artist on Tumblr and I remember seeing lots of stuff about TF2 back in the day.

[kiraly]

Yeah, same. And hey, I figure it forces me to see how much I rely on Tumblr (turns out it is EXTREMELY BORING standing at the library desk when it's almost empty and I don't have the blue hellsite to scroll through). So I guess if it really does go away, I'm going to have to find other ways to use my time.

Re: /floating in from Explore->Latest

[hebethen]

Oh, man, that made me anxiety-check to see if Digger still had everything. Bless indie publishers, it does.

The "big five" really do seem draconian. You know they took down most of Ursula K. Le Guin's blog posts when her posthumous essay collection came out? Not just on her self-hosted blog, but lots if not all of her posts at the Book View Cafe group blog.

Re: /floating in from Explore->Latest

[kiraly]

Oh no, that's awful! I'm glad to see that a lot of smaller publishers are starting to get better about that (I think I've seen a couple of webcomics published in physical form by First Second that are still online, for instance). But yeah, the bigger traditional publishers seem to still be...very traditional about that kind of thing. Hopefully they'll start to come around - living in a world with the internet at our fingertips should mean we have more access to information, not less.

Also heck yes Digger! I should really go reread that one of these days. It's always strangely thrilling to me to see how Ursula Vernon's career has progressed - I followed her on deviantart way back in the day because she was drawing bizarre and interesting things, and now her books are on the shelf at my library. It's kind of magical!