Welcome to the shared writing blog of Don, Sili, and Harle! You can follow us on our individual blogs too: https://piratelorddoflamingo.tumblr.com https://silmil-p-ain.tumblr.com https://a-redharlequin.tumblr.com
Is adult content allowed on Tumblr?
Starting Dec 17, adult content will not allowed on Tumblr, regardless of how old you are. You can read more about what kinds of content are not allowed on Tumblr...
So far the wording of this seems to imply that it’s only depictions of real people that Tumblr cares about, and all forms of written erotica are still allowed.
Buuuut
Let’s talk Tumblr replacements.
Now, when these sorts of shifts happen, there’s usually a transition period, and in my experience, the replacement is something that is found in that time. However, as of now, there are a few possible replacements.
1) Twitter
Pros - ease of access, easy to share content, lots of people already have one, good for artists
Cons - Back and forth conversations are hard to follow, especially with multiple people, extreme lack of tagging, lack of conversation space, bad for fic writters
(I have a twitter, but if it becomes the Site of Fandom then… IDK what I’m going to do, because this screws me. I use Twitter as a means to keep my ear to the ground, not to distribute content or engage people. I hate it for both, and I HATE the lack of tagging. I don’t want to see that progress lost because of a bad platform)
2) Dreamwidth
Pros - Similar to Livejournal, provides opt-in communities for distribution of content, nested comments make it easy to talk to each other, plenty of space for art and for fic, Kinkmemes will be popular again (I can dream)
Cons - No internal image hosting (you have to throw it on imgur or something, then post it to DW), no sharing capabilities (you can’t reblog/retweet anything), something of an outdated model
(DW is modeled after pre-Social Media 2.0 functionality. It means that you can only see the original posts of your subscribed communities/journals, which makes mass-distribution difficult. Nothing goes viral on DW. There’s also no tagging/blacklist/block functionality that I know of, but this matters less than on other alternatives because you have to opt-in to all the content you see)
3) Pillowfort.io
Pros - Marries the sharing functionality of Tumblr (and the image hosting) with the nested comments and communities of Dreamwidth. Very likely built with fandom in mind. Good tagging system. Rules and policies are designed around preventing Tumblr-style witch hunts
Cons - Requires payment currently for an account while it’s still in beta. Is in beta. We know very little about the ownership. Servers currently hosted by Digital Ocean, who also don’t allow porn, though it’s not in the ToS right now and they can still move servers if needed (big thank you to the two who did this research, who I won’t name in case they don’t want that attention). Currently offline while they do security checks. Very young.
(Personally, of the options, I like this one best. The five buck payment suuuucks but hopefully that’ll end soon, especially if they realize this is a huge opportunity. They needs some real back-end engineers to actually get the site functional, but if they can, this has all the elements needed to be a good fandom platform for everyone, artist, editor, author, and all. I’m Bosstoaster on there as well rn b/c I got on it early)
This isn’t going to happen overnight. The ToS changes don’t even happen for a couple of weeks. But please, please, can we not go to Twitter? Please?
And you thought Instagram's policy on nipples was ignorant
One week ago, the worst possible legislation curtailing free speech online passed and sex censorship bill FOSTA-SESTA is on its way to be signed into law by Trump.
Hours after the announcement, everything from the mere discussion of sex work to client screening and safe advertising networks began getting systematically erased from the open internet. Thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of women, LGBTQ people, gay men, immigrants, and a significant number of people of color lost their income. Pushed out of safe online spaces and toward street corners. So were any and all victims of sex trafficking that law enforcement might’ve been able to find on the open internet.
The Senate has passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, and tacked-on FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), by a vote of 97–2. Lawmakers did not fact-check the bill’s claims, research the religious neocons behind it, nor did they listen to constituents. Significant organizations, including the Department of Justice, ACLU, EFF, and more had assembled to object to the bill both publicly and in letters to elected officials. In the process, law professors and anti-trafficking groups, along with sex work organizations, unearthed the bill’s many alarming legal, constitutional, and human rights disqualifications.
It’s dubbed the “anti-trafficking” bill for the internet, but it’s really an anti-sex sledgehammer. The bill removes protection for websites under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and makes sites and services liable for hosting what it very, very loosely defines as sex trafficking and “prostitution” content. FOSTA-SESTA puts into law that sex work and sex trafficking are the same thing, and makes discussion and advertising part of the crime. Its blurry interpretation of sex and commerce, as well as the bill’s illogical, incorrect conflation of sex trafficking and sex work is straight out of a bad movie.
If only the politicians who voted this Morality in Media (NCOSE) mess into law had fact-checked it with Freedom Network USA, “the largest coalition of experts and advocates providing direct services to to survivors of human trafficking in the U.S.“ Freedom Network unequivocally states that protecting the rights of sex workers, and not conflating them with trafficking victims, is critical to the prevention of trafficking. They also have the data to back up the fact that “more people are trafficked into labor sectors than into commercial sex.”
It’s already an unmitigated disaster for free speech in America. Which was, of course, predicted. The Technology and Marketing Law Blog wrote that there’s no mistaking that FOSTA-SESTA violates the First Amendment; it plainly stated that “this statute implicates constitutionally protected speech.”
It’s unconstitutional, but the damage is already being done. Despite the fact that FOSTA-SESTA isn’t even law yet – it could take anywhere from 90 days to until 2019 to take effect – online companies, always dangerously prudish with their algorithms, or hypocritical with their free speech rhetoric, appear to be in a rush to proverbially herd sex workers (and all us people who talk about sex for a living) out of the airlock into places where no one can hear us scream.
Safety resources disappear overnight
Websites are removing content and communities wholesale, the result of FOSTA-SESTA making safer working conditions more difficult by criminalizing digital conversations about sex work, screening tools and discussions about how to be safe doing it.
By way of its ambiguity, FOSTA-SESTA has begun the largest wave of censorship the open internet may ever see.
Craigslist removed its entire Personals section. All these amazing moments can never happen again.
As some may recall, Craigslist already voluntary closed its Erotic Services section in 2010 under pressure from conservative groups. This is despite a study from Baylor and West Virginia Universities, which found that Craigslist’s erotic services page directly reduced female homicides in the US by 17 percent, “principally because sex workers were able to use the free advertising service to move into safer indoor environments and screen clients more carefully.“ Request for comment to Craigslist and our queries asking why Personals was removed ahead of the bill’s signing were not responded to by time of publication.
Within days, Reddit removed entire communities. Notably, its r/escorts and r/sugardaddy subreddits. We asked Reddit for comment about its pre-emptive removal of those subreddits, and how that lines up with the company’s controversial philosophies regarding freedom of speech, but did not receive a response by press time.
Right now, sites and safety resources are falling like dominoes. In short order, sex work networks NightShift, CityVibe, and furry personals site Pounced shut down entirely. Sites that facilitated safety in sex work including The Erotic Review, VeryfyHim, Hung Angels, YourDominatrix, and Yellow Pages shut down their discussion boards, advertising boards, and community forums. Other sites, like MyFreeCams, have changed their policies to ban any talk about transactions of any kind.
FOSTA-SESTA’s timing puts a dark spin on recent Terms enforcement by Google Drive and changes with Microsoft products.
On the Survivors Against Sesta shutdown list of services, growing every day, Google Drive is listed as “deleting explicit content and/or locking out users.“ Google declined to comment on the record, but Engadget was assured via email from a source with knowledge of the situation that the enforcement wave on Drive has nothing to do with FOSTA-SESTA.
Similarly, Microsoft released a Terms update this week that got the company put on the FOSTA-SESTA censorship list as well. A spokesperson for Microsoft told Engadget in an email that the changes are not related to FOSTA. Further, the spokesperson told us, “The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement’s Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content.”
Human canaries in the free speech coal mine
The hashtag #LetUsSurvive is a current rallying point on Twitter, directing attention to the sex work community’s determination to get out of this insidious wave of conservative anti-sex silencing alive. To that end, sex work websites feature guides to self-censoring, the kind of thing you’d expect belongs more in Weimar-era Berlin than coming out of modern-day San Francisco.
Sex workers are right to be scared. They’re facing all this sudden and casually disastrous censorship as a threat to their safety and livelihoods, and are well aware that few are willing or brave enough to fight for their free speech and human rights. Even sex writers such as myself know this; any of us who’ve tried to make a living off anything relating to sex online has a list of products, services, banks and payment processors, social networks, companies, and business tools that everyone else takes for granted — that we are expressly prohibited from using.
It has been a speech issue for a long time, one most people have turned away from as Instagram censors more nipples, as PayPal freezes and shutters the accounts of sex bloggers and book authors, Tumblr deep-sixes erotic artists, and more.
Hateful gamers? No problem. Death threats toward women? Here’s a form to fill out. MAGA racists terrorizing women and people of color off the platform? Gotta hear both sides. But expose a nipple in artwork, discuss non-reproductive sex ed, or talk about making sex work safer by screening clients? Now that’s a misguided business plan guaranteed to create lasting cultural harm. Let’s definitely keep Peter Thiel on the board. If you thought all that was bad enough, just you wait. FOSTA-SESTA is making us disappear before your very eyes — and it will affect you, too.
Under FOSTA-SESTA, we’d most likely have no Stormy Daniels. That Stormy Daniels is making headlines while the absolute worst is happening to sex workers online is not lost on anyone.
“In a titillating cross-section of lawmaking and scandal,” wrote sex worker Morgan Claire-Sirene, “we have on one side Stormy Daniels suing 45 for unlawful payoffs and calling him to account publicly for his associates’ threats against her, and on the other side, legislation that has already silenced common sex workers, with the overlaying intersections of race and class; good whores and bad whores; victims and perpetrators; and misinformation all around.”
Daniels is a perfect lens with which to view the exact way FOSTA-SESTA harms one of America’s largest at-risk populations. Writer Ben Udashen points out, “The level of sex worker whose lives will be harmed by SESTA are not at the same level of fame and notoriety as Stormy Daniels”
“Daniels won’t be caught up in a sting sending her to jail because she had to work as a streetwalker to help pay her rent and feed her children. Daniels won’t have to carry a weapon to defend herself when she meets with a new client.
“Most importantly, Daniels’s children won’t be woken up to the news that their mother didn’t come home last night because she was murdered by a serial killer, a class of criminal who have always targeted sex workers from Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer. Poor and working class sex workers, regardless of gender identity, will pay that price.”
And for a short moment in history, the advent of the open internet reduced that horrible cost.
- weighted a grapefruit in my hands to see if i could justifiably describe something as “weighing as much as a grapefruit”
- done jumping jacks for 5 minutes straight so the memory of how exertion feels would be fresh in my mind
- googled images of butterscotch to see if “butterscotch” could be a hair colour
- casually stared at people at bus stops trying to figure out how i would hypothetically recreate their image in words
- written 7 different beginnings for a story to see which one i liked best
- gone to venice
- enthusiastically spoken dialogue aloud to myself to see how it sounds
- tried to read 3 books in one day
- experienced terrible things, reacting with “i can write about this”
- screamed incoherently at someone for turning on the tv while i was in the room, writing
- sat there perfectly still staring into space trying to imagine what getting a boner feels like
- “hey re-enact this scene with me”
- sat upside-down for ten minutes trying to get my brain to work
- squandered schoolwork and free time alike for years
- written
I love people that read. I think it screams humility. When someone reads, they are essentially admitting they want more, that the world is not enough for them. They want more knowledge, more experience. Whatever this life is, they want more of it.
I was once rereading a manuscript before editing it and discovered that in an early chapter I’d put in a line without any forethought that ended up aligning perfectly the plot and is now my favorite line in the entire book even though when I wrote that sentence I hadn’t even come up with that plot point yet.
In my book series, I have done various things on accident and then, looking back, yelled BRILLIANT and went with it. And, often times, my characters just DECIDE things, like one character was in love with another and I was “WHAT?” but went with it because it was actually a VERY good story and made some of the plot stuff that much more interesting.
There’s an author’s note in an Isaac Asimov short story collection - Isaac Asimov, mind you - and I can’t for the life of me remember which it was because my mom has a billion of them, but basically he went to a lecture on his books where the teaccher was lecturing on all the symbolism and themes and such and Asimovewent up to him and was just like “Uhhhh…. I didn’t put any of that in? It just…. no? Not really?”
And the lecturer legit looked ISAAC FUCKING ASIMOV straight in the eye and said, “What do you know, sir? You’re just the author.”
And Asimov described it as being a fairly profound moment in his career.
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
Drabble: A fic that is EXACTLY 100 words. Often used as a creative exercise in telling a story in a very small constraint.
Ficlet: Fic that clocks in somewhere between 100 to 2.5K words.
Crossover: A piece of media in which two or more source materials are treated as the same universe. Characters from Fandom A can meet characters from Fandom B. (The Doctor Goes To Hogwarts And Meet Harry Potter!)
Fusion: A fusion takes the characters of one source material and *surplants* them into another universe entirely. Characters from Fandom A cannot meet characters from Fandom B. (Dave Strider is part of an Inception team!)
TPTB: The Powers That Be. Almost always redundantly referred to as “the TPTB.” A collective term for showrunners, actors, producers, writers, et al, anyone who is part of the team that creates the source material.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary. A shorthand way of saying “this is how I see it/have experienced it though I realize others might have a different perspective.”
Tinhatting: Often used in RPF fandoms, the situation where some fans are convinced two celebrities are in a relationship but its being kept a secret.
Filk is STILL not a combination of “Film” and “Folk.” It is the result of a typo on a convention program. (This was was told to me by Filk singer Cecelia Eng.)
Lime - There may be some sexual content, allusions to sexuality/sexual interaction but without graphic detail. Depending on the fan everything up to and before ‘fourth base’
Lemon - You are about to read in lovingly rendered detail about sex.
* Citrus categories are a bit subjective and depending on the fandom/population/readership mix did not take into account alternate sexuality. They have fallen out of fashion as more specific tagging and terminology has arisen around particular kinks/practices/lifestyles.
** There was definitely drama regarding platonic queer interaction being described as sexually explicit in some circles. That is for another post/conversation.
We are gathered here today to celebrate the beautiful bloody tulip pirate known as Eustass ‘Captain’ Kid! I for one am grateful to this character for the inspiration in writing he has given me and the friends it has led me to!
Happy Birthday and I hope you’ll all celebrate with us today!
Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
The Boy Who Lived Forever | Time Magazine
This is probably the best, non-judgmental description of fan fiction I’ve ever heard of in main stream media. (via concerninghumans)
“I want to give you a present. Do you prefer frottage or anal penetration? Should one of them be wearing lingerie? How do you feel about spanking? Spitting?…Ah, excellent; I shall make you a glorious, wondrous thing of roughly 3000 words!”
Warnings: Language, Sexual Tension, Sexual Themes, Mentions of past homophobia
Rating: M
Summary: On a voyage to a new land where he hopefully can start his new life in earnest, Eustass Kid, a blacksmith, is looking forward to living his life freely.
He had never expected to wash up on the shores of an island he has heard nothing about. And things only go further down into a wild descent of magic and mayhem from there.
In This Chapter: They arrive to a new town, Kid explores, and there is drinking
Summary: Eustass Kid was only a child when mad creatures stole him and his family for experimentation. Somehow, Kid survived the decade of torture and pain in all its forms. But now that he is free, it is only to realize that he can’t control nor escape the instincts forced onto him by the experiments, and what those experiments made him become.
The very clan that liberated him from his tormentors are now looking for him. Will he be able to learn what he needs to survive in this world, or be put down as an abomination once found?
It’s a race against the clock and his chasers have all the time in the world.
In This Chapter: Cora joins in welcoming Law home and a connection is made.
Summary: Four crime Families hold the country of Neworld in steady balance, with the heads of all four living in a single metropolis known only as the Grand Line.
But two of the Families are now moving, and the other two are going to be on the defensive before long.
As the stakes get higher and double-agents start making their plays, new love and loyalties will be forged and tested to its limits. Nobody can be sure who will win, or even how many bodies will be dumped into the Red Line River before it’s all over.
@a-redharlquin here, and yes, it’s that time of year again!
Above we have the GORGEOUS artwork made by this year’s banner artist and fellow Eustass Kid fan @ramesari ! Go follow her for more amazing art~
The third annual Eustass Kid Week event is coming up! Officially, we do a week, starting on January 4th until Kid’s birthday on the 10th, one day each for E-u-s-t-a-s-s~
But we know that this time of year is busy for everyone! Running a little late? No problem! We’ll still accept admissions until the 20th!
Want to know more about the rules and general FAQs? Go to our blog and check it out! We have a page just for that, and of you have any extra questions, do not be afraid to ask!
Hope to see you all then! Remember, all participants should just tag us at @eustasskidweek so we can see and count your contribution!
