Riley 🐲🎶

the Melody of Lost Words, webcomic by Riley (they/them), queer comic artist and illustrator. occasionally dark topics and 🔞

[valtsv]

well maybe my path to getting revenge wouldn't be so bloody and destructive if people didn't keep getting in my way to lecture me about how bloody and destructive a path it is

[valtsv]

you take up a sword to kill one guy and suddenly everyone thinks it's a smart idea to get on your nerves. come on people.

[trickstersmakethisworld]

“It is said that, during the fantasy book in the late eighties, publishers would maybe get a box containing two or three runic alphabets, four maps of the major areas covered by the sweep of the narrative, a pronunciation guide to the names of the main characters and, at the bottom of the box, the manuscript. Please… there is no need to go that far. There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly ‘bad’ races, magic that works like electricity and horses that work like cars. It’s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can’t tell it apart form all the other EFP. Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock-making or the mail coach system. Read with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees. Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works. I can’t stress that last point enough. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously (it can also become a lot funnier, but that’s another story). Taking it seriously means that there must be rules. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local bird life and the need for people in heavily over-flown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all times. Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.”

— “Notes from a Successful Fantasy Author: Keep It Real” (2007), Terry Pratchett. (via the-library-and-step-on-it)

[dr-gaytorius]

um sorry for moaning when you stabbed me. it's been a really long time since anyone touched me like that

[dr-gaytorius]

[shaking, pale, clammy, on the verge of passing out from shock] please canyuou put your fwngers in it

[micromontage]

"playing with my toys" and the toys are concepts

[idlestories]

not just ‘he would not fucking say that’ but ‘he would not, under torture, admit that’

[willowcrowned]

[clarkkantagain-deactivated20260]

miguel calher and ralph.notlauren by hugotgil

[wordfather]

what a beautiful man but☝️he could be beautifuller... guards! cover that man in blood

[goldensunset]

my thing i haven’t made is so good 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[boycorruption]

do you want to hunt me for sport later

[depsidase]

[3liza]

matt just fired half the remaining tumblr support staff lmao

[3liza]

WordPress maker Automattic lays off 16% of staff | TechCrunch

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and a range of other online services, is reducing its workforce. The layo

[3liza]

from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.

[valoisfulcanellideux]

This is important, people. Please don't scroll past this one.

While I don't think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:

Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW

Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW

Follow your moots at their places NOW

I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.

It's a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.

The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.

TUMBLR IS FANDOM. It's where we all are. Yes, many of us probably have random accounts here or there - a Pillowfort, a BlueSky, a website set up at some free, ad-supported place, etc - but if you are active on Tumblr, then this is where your people are. This is where your community is.

Just like my people and community were on LiveJournal. We lived through a lot of shit together (seriously, look up LiveJournal on Fanlore or Wikipedia sometime) but in the end we all ended up scrambling to try and find both a new place and each other too late.

And, when you find your 'backup places' don't just stick a link to your Carrd or Linktree in your Tumblr profile. Actively tell your moots in a post (reblog it occasionally, too) where they can find you, and encourage them to find and follow you there, too. They're not going to have that link in your profile if Tumblr suddenly shuts off the lights, so make sure you actively let people know where to find you elsewhere.

Some suggestions:

Pillowfort and/or BlueSky

If you're the kind of Tumblr user who is a 'thought-vomiter' (i.e., you post a LOT, and it's often random observations and brain farts, short quickfire stuff throughout your day) try either Pillowfort (which is still in open beta and currently has a rolling waitlist to join) or BlueSky. Both are Twitter/X type sites in their layout. (And avoid Twitter/X like the fucking plague. Just, seriously, don't go there.)

Dreamwidth

If you're the kind of Tumblr user who needs more than a couple of hundred characters for some (or many) of your posts, and you really relish community and interaction, head to Dreamwidth. While I have accounts on all three of the platforms I've just linked you to, it'll be Dreamwidth where I make my home if Tumblr goes down the tubes. Yes, its backend user interface looks a bit late-2000s, but that's because it was built out of the LiveJournal diaspora, off the back of (and improved upon) the old open source LJ code, and it has all the incredible features that LJ had (and still has, if you don't mind accepting that hateful ToS and never mentioning anything to do with LGBTQ+ at all over there). Crucially, Dreamwidth is committed to remaining ad-free, and it is incredibly easy to find your fandom/people over there (as long as they are over there) using the interests search. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's well worth it for the incredibly customisable reading list, which acts like the Tumblr dashboard, and the granularity with which you can set your posts. It's had communities since the very start, and you can even set up custom filters for different groups of people you want to post to, so your Marvel-loving moots can see your Marvel stuff, your Minecraft-loving moots can see your Minecraft stuff, and your closest friends who you trust with anything are the only people who can see the deeply personal stuff you've posted to the group you've set up just for them. Want to post with different icons? You've got 15 of them completely free. There is so much to Dreamwidth, and I wish more people knew about it and used it.

But what about Discord?

By all means find and join Discord servers for your fandom, but please do not let fandom disappear into thousands of completely separate, unsearchable, unfindable Discord servers. Find a place where people can find you easily, and where you can find other people easily if/when you leave your current fandom for whatever reason at some point in the future and get into a new fandom. Imagine if there was no Tumblr right now. It's just gone. Poufs overnight. And you've just got into an incredibly good new TV show/movie/book/etc., and you need to find your people for it. How would you do that, if they're all sitting in their own private Discord servers, possibly invite-only and not listed anywhere like Disboard? You can't. So - while Discord is great if you already have that all-important URL to join the server - it's a lot harder to find your people if you've no idea where to get that URL.

Image hosting

It's important to note that none of the sites I've linked to have native image-hosting (as yet - that's why Tumblr is ad-supported, because image hosting costs a shit ton of money), so you'll need to find some kind of image-hosting site out there if you're someone who posts a lot of visuals. Fandom artists will likely already have their spaces for that, but there are plenty of free image hosts out there.

Closing thoughts

Did this post (and the linked article - if you even read it rather than just glancing at the headline) alarm you? Make you feel anxious? Well, I'm sorry for that, but honestly? It should. Anxious is how I felt, as well as completely lost and cast adrift, when I lost my online home and my fandom peeps all those years ago. And this long-arsed post is my way of trying to help you prevent those feelings for yourself if this latest round of layoffs at Tumblr and other places owned by Automattic eventually leads to our current fandom home shutting down.

Do I think that Tumblr will close anytime soon? No, I don't. I think it would continue limping along until it came to the point where it's making too much of a loss to make any kind of business sense for it to be kept on life support any longer. After all, fanfction.net is still struggling along - riddled with bot and scam comments and with absolutely no support for any of its users who are enduring them - to this day. But is it a home? Hell no.

Don't let apathy take the wheel for you over this. Don't think, "I'll get around to doing that later. Tumblr's not going anywhere soon," and then forget about it until that point where you wish you had done it all that time ago. It takes a handful of minutes to secure an account (or, in the case of Pillowfort, to get on the waitlist) so get your accounts set up now, even if you never use them afterwards.

If you do, then you may be very grateful to your current self sometime in your future.

Better to have them now, with all your friends and moots already following you and knowing where to find you, than to be left standing there like Confused Travolta with your coat over your arm and wondering where the fuck you find your fandom home again as it once again enters a new diaspora.

To my own moots who may be reading this, look out for a post from me shortly, where I'll let you know my other online locations.

Love to all, no matter who or where you are. <3

[tempural]

I'll be the one guy to say "hey Mastodon/fediverse is also an option!" for the casual and quick microblogging aspect.

I am on blorbo.social, and I can give invites if yall ask 🤗 seriously, just message me here or email me. you can also sign up yourselves and wait in the queue. I like blorbo cuz the TOS is good for my art, and the mods are very good at shutting down racism/transphobia/harassment in my experience.

The cool thing about fedi is that any of the connected sites can talk to each other. So if I'm on blorbo.social, and you're on mastodon.art, and we have a silly friend on aethy, we can still see each other's posts and comment! And they're all mostly independently owned by people just like you n' me, so we can actually talk to the admins when there are issues we want to change, and donate for the relatively smaller server costs 😺

BSky has a very restrictive TOS and moderation for my taste - they can and will delete users for art (including noncon and guro), as well as marking accounts as "spam" if they are posting requests for mutual aid (as I have seen with Palestinian users).

Not to mention that the same trolls on twitter are on bsky too lol cuz bsky doesnt have rules against million follower accounts spewing racism/transphobia/etc. (also it's another one of those venture capital socmeds that has no monetization plan so I fear it will inevitably start sucking the souls out of the users with forced LLM scraping and web3 crap)

Like bsky is the same as twitter to me - big audience, I have an account that mirrors my fedi posts, but I never log in to look at things cuz there's too much nonspecific crap going on. I don't fault people for using it cuz some people like performing for big audiences. I personally just prefer yapping to the one guy (shane) i have trapped in my basement.

[themolw]

maybe this place can have rights again if i can use it to reblog shitposts that remind me of my ocs

[sapphic-luthor]

i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.

make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.

spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.

[wiiwheel]

In the gay sex dungeon doing my crossword with a coffee, occasionally looking up with mild interest

[spock-shock]

I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.

[spock-shock]

Salute to our troops (70s careerwomen who put their hard-earned dollars into homemade gay erotica)

[mrsmarymorstan]

It was women with secretarial jobs doing a lot of the heavy lifting, if memory serves correctly.

They had training in type setting, could churn things out quickly, knew how to organise mailing lists, and had easy access to Expensive High Tech like photocopiers.

Boss make a dollar, she makes a dime. That's why she's printing Kirk X Spock zines on company time.

[winterstaryu]

"I did it for you" has gotta be my favorite form of betrayal. You gave me a gift I never asked for, and now I have to look around at the world you destroyed with the knowledge that it was gift wrapped and addressed to me.

[life-on-our-planet]

A keen sense of smell enables the pangolin to detect the presence of ants and termites in their nests beneath the sand. Her sticky tongue, some 30cm long, enables her to collect them from deep underground. David Attenborough | BBC Earth