The sabriel master

Usually, people pretend they have no feelings; I pretend I have.

[olderthannetfic]

A New History of Fandom Purges

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed

1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites

1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere

1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites

1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites

2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites

2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again

2001 - Tripod Massacre

2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN

2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks

2002 - FFN bans porn

2002 - FFN bans RPF

2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes

2004 - FFN bans script format

2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic

2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded

2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again

2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes

2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal

2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids

2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it

2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites

2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted

2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted

2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly

2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity

2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic

2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN

2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence

2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org

2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn

2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic

2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content

2014 - Quizilla shuts down

2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors

2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids

2014 - Viddler deletes vids

2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

2016 - y!Gallery deleted

2016 - Elfwood goes offline

2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic

2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama

2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad

2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs

2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban

2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning

2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.

Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.

Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.

Fans grudge reported each other.

Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.

[totallysilvergirl]

So grateful for the historical memory and the long view on a phenomenon many of us have come to late, and/or take for granted.

And this is why AO3 generates twice its goal amount in just a few days: they are irreplaceable.

[yayroos]

For everyone’s information:

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.

[marsupials-of-mars]

PLEASE PARTICIPATE THIS NEEDS TO BE BIG SO WE NEED TO FOLLOW THROUGH!

[bastard-is-dead]

Doing this. Who else is in?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I’m in!

[badjokesbyjeff]

Doctor: Do you want the good news first, or the bad news?

Man: Good news first please, doc!

Doctor: We’re naming a disease after you

[everythingiswhatevernow]

Why is this funny

[armellin]

Hello!

Thank you for supporting my aunt’s glass lampwork. So many of you liked these galaxies and flowers :)

There are still some left on my Etsy shop!

Please, check them out, and reblog this post. These pendants could be a great Christmas present 💛

Prices vary from 10$ to 25$, shipping is 5$.

Thank you!

[armellin]

My aunt, btw her name is Olga :), she was so pleased with your reaction to galaxies she makes, she wanted to make more! Are you interested?

[octavibelle]

oh my god i just saw a post talking about jaegers and people piloting them and being drift compatible and i took an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize they were talking about Pacific Rim and not, in fact, someone pulling a fucking Ratatouille on Eren Jaeger and i just….

[truntechgodhead]

the porn filter only detects HUMAN skin tones you know what that means

[truntechgodhead]

homestuck is legal

[thiost]

trolls have grey skin

no nipples no problem!

they dont have human genitalia cant get banned for a tentacle

homestuck porn legal

[adiduck]

Our time has come, homestucks. Flood this hellsite with weirdass homestuck porn. Let it die as it lived: filled with horse dong and tentacles.

[shoresoftheshadowlands]

[somecunttookmyurl]

Tumblr is self-destructing and the entire conservative government just got found to be in contempt of parliament for the first time in HISTORY this is the greatest 24h of my life

[bubobubosibericus]

What did I miss?!

[somecunttookmyurl]

Oh man. This is absolutely golden. So first off. What’s contempt of parliament? In short, obstructing parliament from its duties. In the UK that extends to publication of reports and papers that would be necessary for parliament to, well, parliament. Normally this extends to an individual person being especially obstructive. Now. The Conservative government obtained legal advice for the Brexit shitshow. But they refused to publish it in full which means parliament (which includes, y’know, opposition parties and non-conservatives in general) can’t parliament. What reason could they possibly have to refuse to publish legal advice on something that effects the whole country? I wonder. Hmm. Thinking emoji. Anyway. Today the entire Conservative government have been found to be in contempt of Parliament. The entire government have been found to be obstructing the proper running of the country. We hold votes on that sort of thing, and the general consensus (18-vote majority) was “the Tories are obstructive little pigshits”

Also they have to publish that legal advice. In full. Tomorrow.

No word yet on whether the entire government is going to be sent to the Elizabeth Tower yet. We haven’t done that since the 1880s but I’m willing to bring it back.

[bubobubosibericus]

Glorious!

[strangehorse]

Readers from other countries: you have to understand that, so far, Brexit has been about three years of nothing happening and still somehow dominating the news cycle. A random MP from Croydon will say that they don’t think Theresa May is doing well and it’ll make headline news. Like, that’s not news, that’s rolling above a nat 1 on perception. The ‘nothing happens’ is occasionally broken by Something happening, except it’s always terrible. At this stage, people keep arguing about whether to accept a shitty deal or no deal, because nobody took Critical Thinking at AS Level and the concept of a false dilemma is somehow unthinkable to them. 

Meanwhile a good portion of the Labour party really do not want Brexit to happen, except the leader (Jeremy Corbyn, and I would require a whole other post to talk about him) who is like ‘Brexit is okay but ONLY if we do it.’ 

Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats are like ‘we’ll cancel Brexit! And we’ll legalise weed!’, but nobody’s forgiven them for double-crossing us on tuition fees and they keep accidentally electing bigots, so the twelve voters who support them can’t really do all that much.

The Green party do technically exist, and that’s all I can really say on them.

UKIP, the nationalist bastards who got us into this mess in the first place, haemorrhaged membership back to the Tories in the most recent election (shocking. i know). General cretin Nigel Farage quit as party leader when Brexit got voted for, claiming he’d done his job, and recently he just left the party altogether because he doesn’t like where it’s going. something something moral backbone of a chocolate eclair something

Also the Leave campaign were found to have lied, accepted dodgy donations and pulled some VERY shifty things, meaning that a lot of people who voted for Brexit now feel they made a mistake.

So the people have been trying to demand a second vote on Brexit, or to at least have some say on the conditions of the leave agreement (did I mention everything we’ve done so far is fully reversible?), but TMay just keeps repeating things like ‘will of the people’ and ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and then going home to relax by killing a few disabled people after dinner. You know how it is.

But then the actual Brexit agreement is released and ministers start dropping like flies. The guy who wrote it quits IMMEDIATELY after it’s published because he Doesn’t Like It. Cue the tiniest violin in the world. People are squabbling over the right way to do Brexit and keep mentioning just leaving without a deal, which is like quitting your cushy job by taking a shit on the counter and just hoping things will work out for you.

So, essentially, I’ve given up hope on this not becoming a complete clusterfuck. It already is a clusterfuck. My only hope is that it will be an entertaining one, as it’s been so astonishingly dull, and this has very much met my hopes. They fucked up so badly that the whole government is on the naughty step. The fucktangular omnishambles continue, and I for one say throw them all in the tower, vote them out of government one-by-one like Big Brother, and televise it to make money for the BBC.

[anoras]

“tumblr is catholic now” tumblr became protestant don’t play

[maelwife]

[atamajakki]

if tumblr was catholic you could pay for nsfw rights

a pussy indulgence, if you will

[retrogamingblog]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[ain-t-bovvered]

[irish-luthor]

tumblr nsfw ban is gonna bring back cubism

[hearticho]

#can’t flag the nipple if u can’t figure out where it is (via @irish-luthor)

[truntechgodhead]

the porn filter only detects HUMAN skin tones you know what that means

[truntechgodhead]

homestuck is legal

[carry-on-gayward-son]

Words cannot express….

[dankmemeuniversity]

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

There were two professors like this in my department and I was one of like 20 people who was taught by both of them so there was a very small gang of us who knew that Professor Brick Wall and Professor Overshare were married with two kids.

[toboldlywrite]

Just in case this needs to be said:

It’s the first draft. Use the word “suddenly.” Put as many dialogue tags and adverbs as you want. Say “he saw” “she remembered” “she felt” “they wondered” as many times as you need to. Put the em dash there, put in too many commas, use semi-colons with reckless abandon. Type in [whatever] instead of thinking up a title for something. Just write it. If you worry too much about the particulars, about all the advice posts you’ve seen saying whatever you’re doing is wrong or not good enough, you won’t get anything done. It will slow you down as you go back and try to reword what you just wrote to make it better, proper. The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done. And when you get to the end, you’ll find that all those “mistakes” are just clues for your future self to put together to make it all better.

Putting in adverbs and certain dialogue tags are a note for you as to who is saying something and how they’re saying it. When you’re editing, you can make sure it shows through the story instead. The word “suddenly” is a reminder to make things more abrupt. The first draft is just you mapping out where you want to go and how you want to get there. Don’t waste time trying to get it 100% right now, because then it will never get done. Don’t think too much– just write. Save the thinking for editing later.

[closet-keys]

The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done

[kanjabeto-deactivated20180421]

Tom Holland on the set of Captain America: Civil War

[eric-coldfire]

Young spider shows off to momma spider who can’t be bothered.

[seriousfic]

“Mom, are you watching? Mom! Mom! You’re not watching!”