the antidepressants kicked in

I go by 1247/J/SpectrumCore, I'm that weird guy who likes some obscure japanese gamedev's rpg maker games a very normal and healthy amount. Content might be nsfw

[001247]

Moved to @spectrum-core

as of writing this, this account will finally become inactive

i won’t delete it as originally planned because there are too many posts i feel are worth keeping, however this account is linked to way too many terrible experiences for me to feel comfortable using it, so see you on the other side if you feel like following my new acc

[agender-witchery]

On Project Moon

Hey, this is gonna be long, I'm putting most of it under the cut. This post is about the recent firing of VellMori from Project Moon, I know that it warrants some tags for triggers, but I have no idea what's commonly used, so if I miss something, please tell me.

Additionally, I have written this up in a way that if it escapes the target audience of Project Moon fans, it can still be understood, so with that in mind, there will be Library of Ruina spoilers.

The tl;dr for those who don't wanna read the full thing is that Project Moon was put in a very bad position with some violent extremists targeting them and that I'm not happy about any of what happened.

So, for those unaware, Project Moon has fired VellMori, the CG artist for Limbus Company. Now, a not inaccurate statement that can be made from this is "Project Moon fired a woman for being a feminist" but this is... somewhat reductive. Let's immediately get out of the way that VellMori did absolutely nothing wrong. Some people have said she is a TERF. I've seen no evidence of this. Some people have said she wished death on all men. I've seen no evidence of this.

What I HAVE seen is that VellMori thinks sexual abuse is bad. Now, why would this lead to a firing? The short answer is that a bunch of violent incels, one of which was literally dressed as a clown, came knocking at their office doors.

See, Limbus Company has a "beach" event coming up. In this event, we are getting a water themed outfit for two of the characters, one male and one female. For Sinclair, the guy, he has been given an EXTREMELY slutty mechanic's outfit. For Ishmael, the woman, she has been given a very skintight wet suit outfit. Now, I wanna take care to note that VellMori is the CG artist - she had no hand in these designs, a man made them. I would also like to mention that both outfit designs are amazing, and I will be including them at the end of this post for reference.

Now, upon revealing the wet suit design for Ishmael, a bunch of whiny incels on what is basically Korean 4chan got upset that Ishmael, instead of being in a bikini as is usual for gacha games, was wearing a wet suit. Nevermind that the designs in Limbus Company have always been conservative and that the Sinclair design is the most skin we've ever seen and it's just an open shirt. Again, the wet suit is still super revealing, it's skin tight and this is literally the first design of her that doesn't make her look flat chested. They're not rioting over the lack of sex appeal, they're specifically mad that it's not a bikini.

The incels come to the conclusion that the lack of any skin being shown on Ishmael's outfit is a result of evil feminism. No, I'm not exaggerating. They initially begin harassing the artist who is actually responsible for drawing the outfits, but upon learning that he is a man, set their sights on VellMori because she's a woman, and being an artist is good enough I guess. What they do from here is they start digging and digging and digging on VellMori's twitter, making use of archived pages because many of the "offensive" tweets had been deleted.

I'd like to take a moment to point out that VellMori never actually tweeted anything out here - it was all retweets from a 4-6 year old archive, and retweets that have been long deleted. These retweets contain such transgressive statements as "I'm sick of misogyny" and "If being against patriarchy makes me antisocial, then so be it" and just... mirroring back to men what those men were saying to women. Some people would like to have you think she was calling for death to all men. She wasn't. She ALSO retweeted all this stuff while she was a teenager and well before she worked for Project Moon.

Nonetheless, the incels had decided that feminism was the reason Ishmael had a wet suit and not a bikini and they had found a feminist working for Project Moon. It is at this point that we must take a brief detour and talk about Library of Ruina, Project Moon's previous game.

See, in Library of Ruina, one of the protagonists, Angela, has this whole arc about escaping her abuser and becoming a human. Yes, she is literally a robot, but Project Moon isn't exactly a stranger to symbolism in their stories and a feminist reading of Angela is ridiculously easy. The main antagonist in Library of Ruina is Argalia, the Blue Reverberation, and his crew is called the Reverberation Ensemble. Every member of the Reverberation Ensemble is a violent lunatic who each want to reinforce the status quo in their own unique shitty way. In addition to this, typically in order to reach the titular Library, you would need to be invited. The Reverb Ensemble are the "uninvited guests", the ones who managed to reach the Library and knock down the door without an invite.

Why am I talking about this? Well, the incels decided to start calling themselves the Reverb Ensemble, and referring to each other using names of the Reverb Ensemble members such as Pluto, Elena, and Oswald. Having taken on the moniker of the uninvited guests, they then showed up to Project Moon's office to protest. Over the lack of a bikini. Now, remember how I mentioned someone was dressed up as a clown? One of the Reverb Ensemble members, Oswald, is a clown with an extremely tenuous grip on reality. So much so, that his ideal world is one in which there is no meaning whatsoever. That is the character they chose to dress up as. This is either a case of extreme self awareness or extreme self unawareness.

Eventually, the incels were let into the office possibly as a form of damage mitigation to prevent the crowd of protestors from getting any bigger. This was a questionable decision, but they had a group of violent incels at their doorstep either way, and I don't exactly have full details on this. Regardless, Project Moon had on their hands a group of violent protesting incels, who they felt compelled to let into the building, and who had demands including the firing of their feminist employee.

So while "Project Moon fired a woman for being a feminist" isn't inaccurate it also isn't the full picture. More appropriately, it'd be "Project Moon fired a woman because a group of violent incels who weren't satisfied with a form fitting wet suit instead of a bikini showed up to their office demanding that an artist who did not make the wet suit design be fired because she retweeted some feminist stuff 5 years ago while she was a teenager".

I'm not happy with this. None of this is good. People are allowed to be feminists, and Project Moon stories have always presented progressive ideas to anyone with half a brain to do some basic literary analysis. I can understand why they would cave to the demands of people who were threatening them and showed up to their actual place of work, but at the same time, that's someone's livelihood gone and proof that in the future, the same sorts of people can use the same sorts of tactics to bully Project Moon into doing whatever they want. All of this sucks.

For those who would like to see the retweets in question alongside translations: https://twitter.com/danghwangs/status/1683884236888223744

And for people who would like reference as to what the artworks these incels were up in arms about, Ishmael in the wet suit and Sinclair in the mechanic's outfit.

[stalkiwi]

Very interesting post about the situation, I still would like to add some things about it:

The first is that VellMori did seem to have interacted with some Tweets by the past and not that long ago, with some being questionables, by using her second account, which is private.

(I don't really know how to translate exactly, but basically those are feminists posts promoting the men abusive behavior and saying that raising a boy is raising a sexual predator, from what I understood with Google Translate... A more accurate translation is very welcome!)

Now, I'm not saying that she is being wrong. Is it good, is it bad? Seeing how most Korean men have acted, can we really blame women for acting like this toward them? Is it something of the norm in Korean feminism? Maybe it was a huge important movement that most women followed without really thinking about it? Did VellMori changed her opinion?

I'm obviously not Korean, nor a professional in sociology, I can't reply to any of those questions. I however did saw on Twitter that VellMori draws male characters, have male characters herself, liked posts and art from male, gay and trans artists, so saying that she hates men/wants them dead because she interacted with RadFem posts, and that she is a TERF, seems quite untrue.

The second is that the gender war in Korea is awful, from what we've seen. But who's wrong, who's right, is another whole story. Men are being awful to women, women are being awful to men as a reaction, so men are even more awful... In the end, if you're a man, you're seen as a pig, if you're a woman and support women's rights, you're seen as trying to make men evil. There's no winning side, that's unfortunately how it is.

Now, I just want to ask something really important to all people who are mad at Project Moon for firing VellMori:

What would you have done if you were in their shoes?

As a reminder, you're a small company, in a country with norms and cultures that are very different and a very bad gender war going on, people apparently know where your office is located, your game, that you created to raise your funds, is being threatened of being deleted...

Can you really say you would have made a better choice?

I'm not saying it's the right choice. But in a situation as such, it might have been the best, for the company, for the artist, for the game.

I'm still not taking sides here, I just share information and want you all to think about it twice. I'm also upset to know that VellMori got fired (I really love her art!), but also, I hope she can find a job somewhere else, she did mentioned on Twitter wanting to join Sony studios, hope she can!

But other than that, remember that nobody is truly innocent, that nobody is truly evil, we make mistakes, we learn, we can regret it, we can not always make the best choices, sacrifices have to be made in the end, that's how it is. If you choose to not support Project Moon anymore, it's fine, but don't spread hate or misinformation please. And in any case you should not feel ashamed to love their games!

In my case, I will continue to follow both Project Moon and VellMori (as well as Na_gai, the artist behind the Identities art), and create content for the universe and fanarts, because I still love this game, this universe, and these artworks, from a purely artistic point of view.

[staff]

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[despazito]

[unionizedcrabbucket]

if you make the dash non chronological im goign to stop using this site.

[lullnyx]

TAG YOU ARE UNLUCKY

[great-tweets]

omggggg

[bisaster-energy]

that kitty really went

[yharnambimbo]

[sixpenceee]

Time lapse of 2 Queen Of The Night (Epiphyllum oxypetalum) blooms

[flora-file]

If only you could post the scent…

[byjove]

Every time someone says “Babies don’t belong on flights.” parents get soooo angry. The bottom line is DO NOT PARTAKE IN AIR TRAVEL WITH YOUR INFANT UNLESS YOU QUITE LITERALLY HAVE NO CHOICE, your newborn will not enjoy Disneyland, pediatricians quite literally advise you to not plan a long distance vacation in your child’s first 6 months of life. The airport and air travel in general is unhealthy and stressful for babies. STOP BRINGING YOUR FUCKING BABY ON THE PLANE UNLESS IT IS A LIFE OR DEATH SITUATION. It is not selfish kid-hating behavior to say “Don’t travel with your kid until they’re older and vaccinated and don’t travel with your kid if you know it’s going to be a negative experience for them.” The screaming is a secondary problem to the fact you’re lugging your fresh out of the womb tot through a bacterial and viral breeding ground to be trapped in an overstimulating metal capsule in the sky for hours.

[001247]

For various reasons regarding my mental health I’m deleting this account eventually (hopefully soon but also summer heat has me feeling like a pile of sludge so i may Not Do Shit for a while idk)

Will make another account beforehand and notify friends about it/sollow accounts i care about before nuking this one so, just so you know i guess

[spectrum-core]

it me :)

[001247]

i’m this guy

[001247]

For various reasons regarding my mental health I’m deleting this account eventually (hopefully soon but also summer heat has me feeling like a pile of sludge so i may Not Do Shit for a while idk)

Will make another account beforehand and notify friends about it/sollow accounts i care about before nuking this one so, just so you know i guess

[parkchanwoohoo]

MSG is to white women what fentanyl is to cops

[ynsryr]

had to sit down and have a long think about why white woman hate metal gear solid

[papasmoke]

been so unplugged from everything I totally missed that we shot the balloon down with a fighter jet, fucking bloons tower defense country, aren't there satellites that can discern the faces on a deck of cards from orbit now? what's the argument here other than that it's chinese? are we pretending it's the civil war and they're using them for reconnaissance before a cavalry charge?

[papasmoke]

A lot of the time some of your strongest monkey turrets in bloons tower defense don't get used until they bring out the really big balloons with the hardened coating in the late game

[sexhaver]

[loxare]

Tumblr telling me I can give gifts to blogs I love as if I'm not right in the middle of reporting and blocking their bot ass like ajshatfav

[loxare]

Hey how's it feel being hilarious

[centrally-unplanned]

Adding “Tiktok Mary Poppins cosplayer respond to allegations that he was wearing a Third Reich medal in his latest fit by coming out as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler complete with past life memories before his entire social media prescence was nuked with the sole exception of their egg-laying kink spotify playlists” to the internet sentences treasure vault. Amid all the societal decay we still got it boys.

[ketyoulater]

let's see what kind of soil we get

sand

silt

clay

Voting ended onFeb 8, 2023

[processes]

fantastic use of polling… i am so proud of us

[titkoks]

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Congratulations! That's the worst anyone has ever done it!

[dayrlbiggins]

you gotta be as gay as possible on the computer otherwise alan turing died for nothing

[thoodleoo]

middle schoolers will literally say anything to each other. i had my 6th graders working on a translation and one of them told his classmate "look it up, dictionary boy" when he wanted to know what a word meant as if that wasn't the funniest thing you could possibly say in that situation