After almost a decade on this site, I found another Tumblr user in the wild. I stopped to tie my shoe with rainbow laces this morning outside the silversmith at Colonial Williamsburg, and I heard it.
āI like your shoelaces.ā
Oh. Oh no.
I responded the only way I could. āThanks.ā And then I reluctantly added, āI stole them from the presidentā¦and if that makes sense to you, Iām very sorry.ā
The poor man, in full Colonial dress, stared at me for a long moment. And then burst into laughter. And said, āI havenāt thought about that in YEARS and this has never happened to me before.ā
25-35 is such a weird fucking age because youāre 100% a bread-and-butter Standard Edition Millennial but the cool teens are like āok boomerā because you have a Real Job but the actual Boomers at your job are like āIām not going to listen to a literal fucking childā as they download 16 self-replicating viruses and meanwhile the Gen Xers are telling you to refinance a mortgage for a house you donāt have and youāre sitting there at the Adults Table with the pretty tasty casserole you cooked because youāve finally figured out how to do that now but everyone is eating the Boomerās store-bought macaroni instead and admittedly they do sort of taste similar so it probably wasnāt worth all the trouble of cooking from scratch and youāre trying to comfort the freshly-graduated sobbing 22-year-old next to you because she just woke up here and doesnāt know where she is but you have like maybe 5k dollars in a savings account labelled RETIREMENT that grows approx. twelve cents a year and you keep eating dry macaroni while smiling incomprehensibly and periodically blacking out like ??????????
Look I know everyone is getting the porn bot follows but like .. what's are they even for? What's the point of them? What are they trying to accomplish?
Okay, so... tumblr is 'free' right? It costs nothing to create an account and utilize the service. So the startup costs of running a pornbot army is zero, right?
Wrong!
Shady websites sell kits to create/operate pornbot networks. You pay $$$ for an engine and a collection of scripts tuned for various free websites. And apparently (I guess) there is a new tumblr script that comes preloaded with a zillion girlie names + 3 digits, so all the prospective portbot meister has to do is start the script with some seed values and wait for their bot army to grow.
In order to fly beneath the radar, these scripts operate in stages. First they create the account then follow a few high profile blogs. THAT is why, when they first follow you, they're just a generic stolen cheesecake pic named (randomly generated name) ChestyMoorbutt754 with an otherwise empty profile.
Then after a preset number of days/weeks they start blogging 'content' like bit.ly links to malware or whatever. Along with some legit-looking reblogs to keep up appearances. All these scripted behaviors are configurable.
Their hope is that some certain percentage of idiots will (1) click thru the hosted links to an intermediary landing page (with ads, naturally) that acts as a portal to buy subs for OnlyFans, Sinder etc, or (2) interact with an actual chatbot that eventually convinces the poor schmuck to enter their credit card info so it can be hijacked.
We're seeing a new flood of bots NOW because twitter is floundering and all the talk about twitter alternatives (like tumblr) has caught the attention of the guys who make/sell pornbot tools.
Who are the ones REALLY making profit off all of this. Not the pornbots themselves, but the darkweb dweebs who sell the accounts & kits. Because selling access to pornbot armies is guaranteed income whereas who the hell knows how successful any given pornbot will be in the wild. After awhile, the pornbot army gets detected & shutdown or the customer running the botnet get disillusioned and quits or both... then the cycle begins anew with new sheep to be fleeced.
Just like in the 1840s gold rush era, it wasn't the miners who got rich; it was the guys selling picks & shovels.
my quality of life has improved tenfold ever since i was introduced to breezewiki, a site that exists solely to remove the bloat from fandom.com wikis. no more ads, quizzes, random autoplaying videos, popups, recommended pages from other sites, or discord server member lists. just the wiki. these things are finally readable again
BreezeWiki is SOOOO good! they even have an instruction manual on their site for adding an extension to your browser that will automatically redirect you to the BreezeWiki version of any Fandom link you happen to visit, which has been an absolute game-changer for me. i've literally already forgotten what regular Fandom pages looked like, it's beautiful.
i just discovered today that they ALSO have a function (if you install the auto-redirect extension) that will usually stop you to let you know if a Fandom wiki you're visiting has a non-Fandom alternative you can visit instead. for example i was trying to look up a Zelda thing today and was greeted with this message:
so yeah, love the work they're doing over there! can't recommend BreezeWiki enough. i wish an inevitable and humiliating death to Fandom and i'm very grateful for intrepid heroes like these folks.
What's Happening in China? The November 2022 Protests
Hello! I know that there's so much going on in the world right now, so not everyone may be aware of what is happening in China right now. I thought that I would try to write a brief explainer, because the current wave of protests is truly unprecedented in the past 30+ years, and there is a lot of fear over what may happen next. For context, I'm doing this as someone who has a PhD in Asian Studies specialising in contemporary Chinese politics, so I don't know everything but I have researched China for many years.
I'll post some decent links at the end along with some China specialists & journalists I follow on Twitter (yeah I know, but it's still the place for the stuff at the moment). Here are the bullet points for those who just want a brief update:
Xi Jinping's government is still enacting a strict Zero Covid policy enforced by state surveillance and strict lockdowns.
On 24 November a fire in an apartment in Urumqi, Xinjiang province, killed 10. Many blamed strict quarantine policies on preventing evacuation.
Protests followed and have since spread nationwide.
Protesters are taking steps not seen since Tiananmen in 1989, including public chants for Xi and the CCP to step down.
Everyone is currently unsure how the government will respond.
More in-depth discussion and links under the cut:
First a caveat: this is my own analysis/explanation as a Chinese politics specialist. I will include links to read further from other experts and journalists. Also, this will be quite long, so sorry about that!
China's (aka Xi Jinping's) Covid Policy:
The first and most important context: Xi has committed to a strict Zero Covid policy in China, and has refused to change course. Now, other countries have had similar approaches and they undoubtedly saved lives - I was fortunate to live in New Zealand until this year, and Prime Minister Ardern's Zero Covid approach in 2020-2021 helped protect many. The difference is in the style/scope of enforcement, the use of vaccines, and the variant at play. China has stepped up its control on public life over the past 10 years, and has used this to enforce strict quarantine measures without full regard to the impact on people's lives - stories of people not getting food were common. Quarantine has also become a feared situation, as China moves people to facilities often little better than prisons and allegedly without much protection from catching Covid within. A personal friend in Zhengzhou went through national, then provincial, then local quarantines when moving back from NZ, and she has since done her best to avoid going back for her own mental and physical health. Xi has also committed China to its two home-grown vaccines, Sinovac and Sinopharm, both of which have low/dubious efficacy and are considered ineffective against new variants. Finally, with delta and then omicron most of the Zero-Covid countries have modified their approach due to the inability to maintain zero cases. China remains the only country still enacting whole-city eradication lockdowns, and they have become more frequent to the point that several are happening at any given time. The result is a population that is incredibly frustrated and losing hope amidst endless lockdowns and perceived ineffectiveness to address the pandemic.
Other Issues at Play:
Beyond the Covid situation, China is also wrestling with the continued slowdown in its economic growth. While its economic rise and annual GDP growth was nigh meteoric from the 80s to the 00s, it has been slowing over the past ten years, and the government is attempting to manage the transition away from an export-oriented economy to a more fully developed one. However, things are still uncertain, and Covid has taken its toll as it has elsewhere the past couple of years. Youth unemployment in particular is reaching new highs at around 20%, and Xi largely ignored this in his speech at the Party Congress in October (where he entered an unprecedented third term). As a result of the perceived uselessness of China's harsh work culture and its failure to result in a better life, many young Chinese have been promoting čŗŗå¹³ tĒng pĆng or "lying flat", aka doing the bare minimum just to get by (similar to the English "quiet quitting"). The combination of economic issues and a botched Covid approach is important, as these directly affect the lives of ordinary middle-class Chinese, and historical it has only been when this occurred that mass movements really took off. The most famous, Tiananmen in 1989, followed China's opening up economic reforms and the dismantling of many economic safety nets allowing for growing inequality. While movements in China often grow to include other topics, having a foundation in something negatively impacting the average Han Chinese person's livelihood is important.
The Spark - 24 Nov 2022 Urumqi Apartment Fire:
The current protests were sparked by a recent fire that broke out in a flat in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province. (This is the same Xinjiang that is home to the Uighur people, against whom China has enacted a campaign of genocide and cultural destruction.) The fire occurred in the evening and resulted in 10 deaths, which many online blamed on the strict lockdown measures imposed by officials, who prevented people from leaving their homes. It even resulted in a rare public apology by city officials. However, with anger being so high nationwide, in addition to many smaller protests that have occurred over the past two years, this incident has ignited a nationwide movement.
The Protests and Their Significance:
The protests that have broken out over the past couple of days representing the largest and most significant challenge to the leadership since the 1989 Tiananmen movement. Similar to that movement, these protests have occurred at universities and cities across the country, with many students taking part openly. This scale is almost unseen in China, particularly for an anti-government protest. Other than Tiananmen in 1989, the most widespread movements that have occurred have been incidents such as the protest of the 1999 Belgrade bombings or the 2005 and then 2012 anti-Japanese protests, all of which were about anger toward a foreign country.
Beyond the scale the protests are hugely significant in their message as well. Protesters are publicly shouting the phrases "ä¹ čæå¹³äøå° XĆ JƬnpĆng xiĆ tĆ”i!" and "å ±äŗ§å äøå° GĆ²ngchĒndĒng xiĆ tĆ”i!", which mean "Xi Jinping, step down/resign!" and "CCP, step down/resign!" respectively. To shout a direct slogan for the government to resign is unheard of in China, particularly as Xi has tightened control of civil society. And people are doing this across the country in the thousands, openly and in front of police. This is a major challenge for a leader and party who have prioritised regime stability as a core interest for the majority of their history.
Looking Ahead:
Right now, as of 15:00 Australian Eastern time on Monday, 28 November 2022, the protests are only in their first couple of days and we are unsure as to how the government will respond. Police have already been seen beating protesters and journalists and dragging them away in vehicles. However, in many cases the protests have largely been monitored by police but still permitted to occur. There seems to be uncertainty as to how they want to respond just yet, and as such no unified approach.
Many potential outcomes exist, and I would warn everyone to be careful in overplaying what can be achieved. Most experts I have read are not really expecting this to result in Xi's resignation or regime change - these things are possible, surely, but it is a major task to achieve and the unity & scale of the protest movement remains to be fully seen. The government may retaliate with a hard crackdown as it has done with Tiananmen and other protests throughout the years. It may also quietly revamp some policies without publicly admitting a change in order to both pacify protesters and save face. The CCP often uses mixed tactics, both coopting and suppressing protest movements over the years depending on the situation. Changing from Zero Covid may prove more challenging though, given how much Xi has staked his political reputation on enforcing it.
What is important for everyone online, especially those of us abroad, is to watch out for the misinformation campaign the government will launch to counter these protests. Already twitter is reportedly seeing hundreds of Chinese bot accounts mass post escort advertisements using various city names in order to drown out protest results in the site's search engine. Chinese officials will also likely invoke the standard narrative of Western influence and CIA tactics as the reason behind the protests, as they did during the Hong Kong protests.
Finally, there will be a new surge of misinformation and bad takes from tankies, or leftists who uncritically support authoritarian regimes so long as they are anti-US. An infamous one, the Qiao Collective, has already worked to shift the narrative away from the protests and onto debating the merits of Zero Covid. This is largely similar to pro-Putin leftists attempting the justify his invasion of Ukraine. Always remember that the same values that you use to criticise Western countries should be used to criticise authoritarian regimes as well - opposing US militarism and racism, for example, is not incompatible with opposing China's acts of genocide and state suppression. If you want further info (and some good sardonic humour) on the absurd takes and misinfo from pro-China tankies, I would recommend checking out Brian Hioe in the links below.
Finally, keep in mind that this is a grass-roots protest made by people in China, who are putting their own lives at risk to demonstrate openly like this. There have already been so many acts of bravery by those who just want a better future for themselves and their country, and it is belittling and disingenuous to wave away everything they are doing as being just a "Western front" or a few "fringe extremists".
Links:
BBC live coverage page with links to analysis and articles
ABC (Australia) analysis
South China Morning Post analysis
Experts & Journalists to Check Out:
Brian Hioe - Journalist & China writer, New Bloom Magazine
Bonnie Glaser - China scholar, German Marshall Fund
Vicky Xu - Journalist & researcher, Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Stephen McDonnell - Journalist, BBC
M Taylor Fravel - China scholar, MIT
New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre - NZ's hub of China scholarship (I was fortunate to attend their conferences during my PhD there, they do great work!)
If you've reached the end I hope this helps with understanding what's going on right now! A lot of us who know friends and whanau in China are worried for their safety, so please spread the word and let's hope that there is something of a positive outcome ahead.
for other good publications/users on twitters to follow:
Chuang is a publication focused on Chinese labour movements that's been covering the protests since the Foxconn factory protests
Chenchen Zhang and Tony Lin have been one of the many people translating videos/screenshots
What's on Weibo/Maya Koetse also provide updates from around the Chinese internet, from netizens' voices to memes
okay so itās like. scum villain is an unpolished, tropey danmei novel. scum villain is a funny and incisive parody and genre deconstruction. scum villain is a fix-it fic for a story that doesnāt exist. scum villain is a comedy. scum villain is a tragedy. scum villain is about cycles of abuse, changing your fate, and taking responsibility for the things that happen in your life. itās a romance where the main character is too dim to figure out heās in love even when heās literally married. itās about guilt and forgiveness. itās about internet culture, and making fun of bad sex scenes in webnovels, then turning around and writing an even worse sex scene yourself. itās about toxic relationships and chances for growth. itās about realising that the people around you are people, with more depth and humanity and complex inner lives than you might have given them credit for. scum villain is aboutā and i cannot stress this enoughā dick jokes.
There is a stream of Reply Guys everywhere these days saying things like "oh, it turns out that Twitter keeps working with less than half its employees? Wasn't it going to crash as soon as Elon took over? He proved that all that people were just doing nothing but making Twitter unprofitable with their salaries!". And it's hard to contain myself and not go into a reply burst mode each time, so I guess it would make sense to write a post on the matter.
See, did Twitter need 7000 employees and 5000 contractors to keep working? Oh fuck no. Of course not. See, on Tumblr we are about 200 between full and part time employees (part time meaning "people that do work for tumblr at times and for other parts of Automattic at others"), plus a number of contractors I don't know (dealing with things like internationalization or human review of reported content), plus a bunch of "operations" teams that work at automattic-level and covers Tumblr on their duties (HR, payroll, events, etc).
So let's say that if Tumblr was its own company, it could sustain the current level of operation with maybe three or four hundred people.
Now, Twitter has at least one order of magnitude more users than Tumblr has ever had. That makes things a little bit more complex, but not extremely: it probably makes the work of people like systems more "interesting" so they need to be a bit larger. Other things like security or support also need to be scaled up. But others, like development, design, data science, editorial, internationalization, sales, etc are not really affected by the number of users. So let's say that Tumblr could keep the current level of operation with 600-800 people if it had the same traffic than Twitter.
Then, why Twitter needed so many people? Why haven't it break already if they were needed?
Let me start making something super clear: Twitter had been breaking for the last couple of weeks. Very clearly if you know where to look at. The fact that they haven't had a major outage is a sign either of a very well designed architecture or that Musk kept enough domain knowledge around to keep the engine going. But multiple smaller systems have been going down without no one to lift them up again.
Some examples are the web SSR system: that's server side rendering, and it means that when you load Twitter (or Tumblr) the server creates a "picture" of your dash and send it to your browser. From that point, the server only sends raw data and it's your browser who is in charge to create that picture, but SSR makes you see your timeline in one or two seconds, instead of 5-10. I hate SSR, most devs do: it makes our lives much more complex and needs a lot of work. It also makes the user experience much better. Well, Twitter SSR has been off since at least one week ago (that's when I noticed it). You may have not realized about it, but if you go to your Twitter account and what you see is the UI loading and then a loader where the timeline should be and it takes several seconds for the tweets to show up: that means SSR is off and your browser is doing all the work.
There are also issues with certain methods of authentication that went down two weeks ago and still don't work.
There are also reports of the advertisers tools being broken.
There are a clear issue with the performance of their CDN (the images take ages to load and sometimes they don't even do it).
These kind of things are not really very noticeable by the average user, but they are clear consecuences of the lay-offs. How?
Well, let's go back to Tumblr. As I said, we have enough people to operate and keep the platform stable. Even to develop one new thing at a time and improve one or two of the existing ones. But thats it. Twitter, until last month, operated on an entirely different plane of existence. They did A LOT of things we can't do in tumblr: from having complex reporting tools for advertiser to having more than a coupe people working on internal tools (for example, to make support folks life easier), having strong international teams focusing on each country, etc. They were able to fix bugs, even the smaller ones, probably within the day. They were probably working on half a dozen major projects at the same time.
Are those things necessary for Twitter to be online? No, not at all. But they give it several layers of polish we can't have at Tumblr: how often you see something buggy going on in Tumblr that takes a few days to be fixed? How often that happens on Twitter (or Instagram, or TikTok, etc?). That's the difference: on Twitter, someone reports a bug, and that bug is going to have a few engineers on it almost immediately. If they can't find the solution, someone else will take it from them once it's their time to log off. Until it gets fixed. Here? It will need to go to the queue, and if it's not major, it will take days, or weeks , for someone to get it fixed. Because there is not a lot of us and our hands are full already with something else that in that moment has a bigger priority.
This is the world Twitter is entering too: SSR probably broke because any of the quick changes they were doing with the verification checkmarks (our SSR worked as a champ when we introduced the important blue checks, just saying :P) and its there waiting for someone to be able to take a look and figure out why. The advertiser tools maybe got broken by some change in the database that needed to be reflected also there, but there is no team working on them to keep them updated anymore, so they will be broken until someone scream enough at Musk so he decides to take a couple of engineers away from other project for a few days to fix them. Etc etc.
So if Twitter just go to operate with a much more limited team, it probably will be able to be online (thought major disruptions are way more probable), but the service level expectations will have to be much, much more reduced than what they used to be. Seeing bits and pieces of Twitter that don't work or are bugged, as we are already seeing, is going to become the norm. How that will play with the "normie" crew that uses Twitter will have to be seen. And how the different government branches, both in the US and the EU, that were keeping an eye over Twitter as hawks over a rabbit running on a clear field will also something interesting to pay attention to.
It would also mean that a bunch of projects that were happening are now not happening. A project can take a long time. Imagine they were doing a UI revamp and it was going to take 2 years.
Users wouldn't see any of that work until it finally launched.
Now, 1.5 years in, the whole team is fired. On the outside it looks like nothing changed, but now no new UI will launch in 6 months. The site can still be up, but basically all the future plans and improvements will stop.
Also, there are multiple things that can be going wrong at a level that the average user just don't see. Even if it's not technology failing. Like, people are uploading entire movies at Twitter now because the rumor mill says their DMCA takedown system doesn't work: but honestly, I don't know if that's true or if it's just they have fired too many contractors and now no one is there to review a message queue that has been filling for three weeks already, but whatever it is, it's because of the lay-offs.
Or Musk announcing they are bringing back all the racists and straight up Nazis that were permabanned, but "next week". Why does it takes them so long? Probably because this is something that needs to be done by hand, and they don't have enough folks to do it quickly.
You know, people in Tumblr are extraordinarily resilient to bugs. God bless your souls, seriously. There are things that were bugged in the old web post editor that got fixed when we built the new one... And we ended getting bug reports in the new editor because people have built entire workflows based on the original unfixed bugs.
But the thing is Tumblr, even in its peak of popularity, never got much bigger than we are now, so the level of service people is used to is still "things get broken and someone needs to go to the basement with a big wrench, fix them and return all covered in grease and dust", not "technology is indistinguishable from magic and things just work", like Twitter or Facebook. And that's the difference between being 200 and being 7000.
But while having a greasy and dusty gal with a giant wrench going around your site was a common sight in the early 2000-2010 internet, and may still be a thing in smaller platforms, the big ones have made people used to believe everything works with magic and elf farts. So it's going to be interesting to see how they react when they start seeing the odd people with the wrenches around again.
I think I've worked out (part of the reason) why there's been such a huge uptick in folks who don't reblog things on here.
This post has like 14k notes right now, and the tags and comments and reblogs are FULL of people who didn't know about fast-reblog, and -- you guys have been slow-reblogging this whole time!?!??!?!?
In the interests of a) making your lives easier, and b) encouraging you to reblog posts, which is what keeps this site alive, here's how you fast-reblog:
On mobile: press and hold the reblog button. Your blog icon will appear. If you have sideblogs, all of the different icons will appear. Drag to whichever blog you want to reblog to, and release. Job done.
On desktop: hold down the E key and click reblog. Job done.
and what about you, little haiku bot? do you feel kinship with your brethren? do you understand them? they speak words of enticement and seek love, but are met with disdain. you only parrot the words that cross your screen, but we all love you. or rather, since all you do is reflect us, maybe we simply love ourselves through you.
do you understand them, do you wish you could speak to us like they do? if you found your own voice, would we still care for you?
Seeing more and more blogs without a [username].tumblr.com site which means you can only view their blogs in tumblr.com/[username] mode, and I realized just the other day that nowadays you have to manually go to your blog settings and toggle the āenable custom themeā switch to have a browser site activated.
I REALLY recommend activating this! Especially if youāre an artist or if you have a themed blog, like if you reblog fanart for a specific fandom or ship. First and foremostly you can change the whole theme if you want to, you can really just go wild with building your personal aesthetic for your page.
But what I think is even more important, is that you NEED to āenable custom themeā to enable access to your archive! The link [username].tumblr.com/archive doesnāt work if you donāt have this enabled!
If you post art or archive fanart or fandom content of any kind, letting people access your archive makes it so much easier for people (and yourself) to find older art on your blog or to look for something you drew a while ago that they remember loving and want to look at again.
We talk lots about how on Tumblr old art gets to circulate, and the archive is part of how that works. Itās a really useful tool in finding good content that isnāt brand new. And especially if you are good at tagging, itās very easy to filter the archive to find ship content or meta or fics, whatever you want to find.
New RanWan fanvid for Shizun's birthday! ššš
legit cried when Mo Ran said "I caused your death" while sobbing, and then again when Shizun at the end says, "Mo Ran, I will use all that I have and all that I will have to love you." WHY DO THEY ALWAYS SQUEEZE MY HEART SO DAMN HARD???
My unworthy translation of the dialogue:
Link to Weibo source, please go give them some love: HERE
Visible mending is a decorative way to fix up an item. Instead of trying to make your mend as invisible as possible, the idea is to make it part of the garment's design.
Visual mending is not a single technique: it's more of a mindset. If you've got an item you love, it deserves to be mended, and if you're going to put that love into stitches, why not show them off?
That being said, there are some specific techniques that are popular with visible menders. Let's take a look!
Sashiko:
Sashiko is a type of traditional Japanese embroidery that is used to both decorate and reinforce fabric. In visible mending, sashiko is often used to cover up holes with patches or to reinforce thinning fabric. This technique uses a variation on the running stitch.
(Image source)
Some resources on sashiko:
SashiCo on YouTube: sashiko livestreams and information on the cultural aspect of sashiko.
Written tutorial by Upcycle Stitches.
Free sashiko templates by TheSpruceCrafts.
Fixing jeans with sashiko by Soluna Collective.
(Image source)
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Embroidery:
Regular embroidery is also a popular technique to accentuate your mends. Check out my embroidery 101 post to learn how to get started. You can embroider patches, or use embroidery to hide or accentuate any stitches you've made to fix holes. Embroidery's also a great way to cover up stains.
(Image source)
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Patches:
There are many ways to add patches to a garment. My tutorial on patches is a good place to start if you want to make custom-shaped patches to sew on top of your fabric. You can also sew your patch on the inside of your garment and have it peek out from beneath the hole you're trying to fix. Fun ideas for this are lace or superheroes.
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Darning:
Darning is a technique used to repair holes in fabric by using running stitches to weave extra fabric over the hole as to fill it up again. While traditionally darning is done in an invisible way by using the same colour of thread as your fabric, you can also use contrasting colours to accentuate your fix. Check out this written tutorial on darning by TheSpruceCrafts.
(Image source)
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Conclusion:
Visible mending is a creative way to fix up your clothes and give them some personality at the same time.
You should be proud of the fact that you took the time and learned the necessary skills needed to mend your clothes! Show off what you did!
A fun side effect of wearing these obvious mends is that people will notice them. They'll remember your fixes the next time they're faced with a hole in their wardrobe, and it will make them more likely to try it for themselves.
These are just a few ways to visibly mend your garments. Want more inspiration? Check out Pinterest or r/Visiblemending on Reddit.
