Some folks have tapped me inquiring where to follow me once this hellsite completes its death dance. Some old posts of mine have been making the rounds again, it seems.
If you’re looking for the direct equivalent to when I was posting in a more carefree manner (2012-2016 eras), there isn’t. That couch was burned down in 2017. If you’re looking for the conversational, back and forth public banter that Tumblr built its fame and following with, when you find it, let me know. If you just wanna lurk in my public streams, my main blog remains at Three Different Ways [1] and my tarot shingle is hung at Noxporium [2].
I am available on Facebook [3], and do accept messaging requests, but that is a private sphere for me and I do not make public posts there.
Failing that, there is my email address should you want to have private conversations. It’s very difficult to figure out and has been known to stymie even the bots! keriannox. gmail. Such a puzzle! Such mystery.
I’ve been lurking these past months, just watching my dash become lighter and paler as people left in advance of the current harrowing or finally getting tired of this shit. There are posts I wish I had privately saved and people I wish I had reached out to while the door was still open. But time has a way of giving no fucks and here we are.
I miss y’all. I miss the silliness and the laughter. I miss the puns and the instruction. I miss not having to prove myself worthy of sympathy. I miss the rhyme battles and the religious fandoms that demonstrated how a faith is actually walked the fuck out instead of acted out.
I miss when it was okay to not know, okay to ask, okay to share in the confusion together, okay to have different perspectives about the elephant in the room.
I miss when shitposting was an art and not an act of violence.
I miss 2012 Tumblr.
I know things are not going to go back to that, even if the investors decide that it will be more profitable to make room for that environment again. That ship is in Mythic Time now and it’s not coming back here.
Doors are closing and windows of opportunity are being recognized only after they have been sealed shut. I’m facing the same level of isolation that I grew up in. (My first exposure to the Internet happened in my high school senior year. I’m Old™.)
I survived that. I’ll survive this too. If anyone wants to come along, let’s go.
[1] threedifferentways. katalytis. com
[2] noxporium. com
[3] m. me/ kerian. nox
Reblogging this because the esoteric, occult, and magic communities on Tumblr will be fatally affected by the purging of adult content on December 17, 2018. Even if Tumblr backtracks and relents, the damage is done.
Unfortunately I’m going to lose contact and/or lurking privileges with the vast majority of you. I’ve learned a lot from y’all. If y’all find a place that a mostly quiet lurker like myself would be welcome, please let me know. If you have a blog or other hub, let people know.
The internet started off as a web of nodes and links. Time to re-establish those links again.
I’m not deactivating my tumblogs, but I will not be posting here anymore. I actually expect my tumblogs to be auto-nuked on December 17. Some tarot cards show nudity and some esoteric images I’ve reblogged are explicit.
In light of the most recent developments (re: a wide and ineffective anti-nudity measure), we should take a moment to appreciate the unpaid work of one man, who worked hard and plugged many leaking holes to keep tumblr afloat against all odds.
I am, of course, talking about the XKit guy.
Thank you, XKit guy, for helping so many of us make sense of this Titanic of a website.
I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +6k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search.
Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog*
*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted. Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat.
I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing:
1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month) 2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog) 3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it) 4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not) 5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)
**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted.
So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes.
P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything.
this is actually really useful if you have an art blog full of years of work that you otherwise no longer have access to the original files. A lot of the art I have in the early days of my art blog are in that boat. I did this process JUST for that reason and I was pretty astonished at just how many pieces of media it backs up! (literally all of it) Drawings I didn’t even realize were sitting in my archive due to having been posted to text posts or undercuts, or untagged for years! It’s worth it if just for that, even if tumblr isn’t shutting down or deleting your blog.
Not to get controversial or anything but can we stop with making fun of women being abused by their husbands and playing it off as ‘straight culture’
I lost 10 followers for saying we shouldnt make fun of domestic abuse victims.
can we also please stop making fun of men being abused by their wives thanks
Good addition
Can we also stop acting that domestic abuse is just a “straight” thing?
It’s literally teaching our baby gays that any same sex relationship their going into is safe and they don’t need to be worried about being abused and controlled.
i know ive talked about this before but we literally have no reason not to bring the original gay flag made in the 70s by gilbert baker back to regular use!
the pink originally symbolized sex and the turquoise was for magic/art and it would just be really cool if we could bring both the stripes back into regular use again since there wasn’t any significance behind the removal of the stripes and we’re perfectly capable of mass producing flags with all the stripes again!
if anyone is interested, in 2017, shortly before he died, gilbert baker added a 9th stripe in lavender to represent diversity, partly in response to trump’s election. while i dont expect it to gain any kind of widespread usage, it is an interesting fact!
2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) – deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
Dec 17, 2018 – Tumblr officially bans all “adult content” in visual media (videos, gifs, photos, and illustrations), defined as depictions of real-life nudity or any depictions of sex acts.
“Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.”
So like, the way this is worded it seems like it’s okay if illustrations have exposed breasts as long as it’s not in a sex act? It seems like the ban on nipples is photo only? This is really damn confusing for artists but, in general I can still be here since I don’t post a lot of nsfw related things. I am terribly unhappy that female nudity is being policed like this and hope that things like this and this and this are still allowed.
It’s really unfortunate that artists are being roped into the same troublemaking category as the spam accounts. It sucks that they’re using the tagline “a more positive tumblr” when adult content is not negative in nature. I posted earlier this year about wanting to be more confident about expressing sexuality through drawing and it sucks that it’s treated like this.
A reminder I suppose for anyone leaving tumblr that my twitter and instagram are both under the name juanjoltaire as well.
Edit:
“Written content such as erotica, nudity related to political or
newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art, such as sculptures and
illustrations, are also stuff that can be freely posted on Tumblr.”
So at least artistic nudity is okay but this still is terrible.
I run a completely SFW blog, but I want to take a moment to talk about how this is utterly messed up.
Tumblr has basically allowed Apple to determine corporate policy for them to the severe detriment of several users across the board. Apple removed the app, and now this is how Tumblr responds? Apple is just using their corporate power to be the morality police for everyone else now, and it’s fucked.
I don’t think it’s even that tbh. Apple’s complaint seemed to be centred around an endemic spam-bot problem, and a serious child porn issue; neither of which was tumblr doing absolutely anything about.
Tumblr has thrown the baby out with the bath water here, all because of problems and illegal material they let fester, and refused to lift a finger over for years.
we’ve literally been complaining about pornbots for the last five years or so with no real efforts made to solve the problem, until now. It’s absolutely the fault of tumblr’s staff being incredibly incompetent.
Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.
Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).
Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.
So what is changing?
Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.
Why are we doing this?
It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.
Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.
So what’s next?
Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.
Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.
Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.
Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.
Jeff D’Onofrio CEO
Translation: we’re punishing our entire user base to avoid admitting that our cut-rate devs cannot distinguish between bots and human beings.
So far, I’ve seen victims of smear campaigns get deleted (and later often restored), and seen no evidence that anything is safer for anyone. And we’ve been through this a few times, and we know that it’s not going to make us safer, it’s going to make us more endangered, because it’s going to be another tool that spite-reporters can use to get people they disliked banned.
This isn’t going to produce diversity or foster diversity. It’s going to result in the diversity leaving, and I honestly don’t believe for a minute that isn’t the intent.
yeep, it’s definitely time to at least set ourselves up with solid migration plans.
I’m crossing my fingers that tumb doesn’t actually die, but… I’m not holding my breath, and I’m actively sorting out other options. Pillowfort’s having issues apparently but hopefully they’ll be back up and we can keep long-form blogging instead of just reverting to twitter… meantime I’m at least contactable there with the same username.
House Of Crows 