this blog is a temporary reblog blog for video game art and fic! my skyrim and other video games blog unobtainableitem was restricted; i sent in my first support ticket a month ago and the second a couple weeks ago, so at this point it looks like i might be waiting a while
to be clear not about ban-evading; i haven't even gotten in any arguments on the relevant blog so it just got got by the automoderation somehow
apparently it's common these days and I've seen people say it took between one day and several months to get their blog back
i'm doing it this way instead of just making a temporary blog because how i think blog restriction seems to work*
getting restricted means you can't message, your posts don't appear in the tags, and your likes, reblogs, and comments are not visible to the op or on the post at all (except on your own blog)
the last one is the problem because frankly the main reason i am on tumblr instead of just jabbering away on dreamwidth or somewhere is to reblog/comment on people's work! so i decided it was worth it to try to figure out how to comment visibly again
most of my comments are along the lines of "ough this cat person is so fluffy! and i love their shirt." we're not the paris review here. it does feel kind of like I am displaying hubris by caring about my comments but haha jk i am also a fanwork creator i know my mediocre comments spark enough joy to be worth extricating from the shadowlands
*for why i think this is the best way to do it:
my podcast blog has remained completely fine throughout all of this
instead of making this new blog that you are currently reading, i was going to use my old book blog as a temporary blog. this week when i logged onto it for the first time in a while, i was delighted to see that it had messaging and wasn't restricted...but then, a sideblog (in this case an empty blog tumblr had made me with the book blog's initial url when i first made the account) seemed to be causing an unrelated glitch. i deleted the sideblog. as soon as i came back from that delete sideblog confirmation page, my blog was restricted and no longer had messaging. BECAUSE OF THIS, my hypothesis is that the automoderation is on hair-trigger for very small things - like logging in for the first time in a while and immediately making a big change like deleting a sideblog, which you can Kind Of see as something that could indicate someone else is using the account - IF a blog has a very low number of followers. my podcast blog has remained fine this whole time, so it's not an IP address issue or an issue with me logging in and out frequently because I believe in getting to browser tab zero (which i do) or an issue with having posts with art or links or lots of tags or anything else like that...since i do all those things on the podcast blog. but both the blogs that have been restricted have fewer than five followers, while the podcast blog has sixty-three. so i think my podcast blog is protected from the especially hair-trigger automoderation either because it's older (which i can't do anything about) or because it has more followers.
since it has sixty-three followers, i'm hoping that once my video game blog gets to...an unknown number between five and sixty-three followers...it will be more protected against being restricted in the future! (assuming the support tickets ever go through in the first place)
that means i'm going to be neurotically careful with this blog since i really did not want to make a fourth !! fandom email address for this, and i want even less to make yet another one. no links.
i haven't decided whether i'm going to mirror original posts or i'll just have it be the reblog blog
(so if you'd like to follow me, follow the other one to see everything! and get it closer to the hopefully-low mystery number i guess)
in the latest LOONEY TUNES SQUASHED BY A RUBBER ANVIL shit around here, my backup blog, the blog i created after my original tiny video game blog got restricted by the automod, got restricted.
tl;dr please follow @unobtainableitem if you want to follow me, i'm keeping all my stuff there and hoping a support ticket will someday be answered if it has an unknown number of followers between seven (current) and 63+ (podcast blog that is still fine).
i was just whining about making myself feel silly continuing to back stuff up on the original blog, so now i at least get to feel smug against the self-conscious part of myself since my reasoning against "why not just move blogs?" was "if the first blog could be restricted with no reply to support tickets then nothing's stopping that from happening to the second blog." and! well.
seems increasingly plausible automoderation is on hair-trigger for blogs with less than [an unknown low number] of followers
possibly newer blogs? can't do anything about that though
it almost definitely can't be an IP address issue, or any troubleshooting of my browser itself, since my podcast blog is STILL fine
even though i don't know what specifically tripped the automod this time, i did at least notice soon enough to get more data: blog was fine friday. on saturday i liked things and reblogged a screencap, a meta, and two fanarts. after that blog was restricted.
...which is freeing, frankly, because i'd assumed the automod might have tripped on the first blog because of posting links or something obviously "botlike"...but now i know there's nothing i can do to stop the automod tripping during normal use lmao so i simply do not have to worry about it.
and yes, all of this happening after i named my original blog unobtainable item is [through gritted teeth] objectively funny.
The good news is I figured out - mostly - how both of these blogs got restricted even though the podcast blog is not! The bad news is that it happened by way of this blog also being restricted. I shall explain below for the benefit of anyone else dealing with this, but the tl;dr is still that I'm keeping my video game blogging life at @unobtainableitem for now
So after all these months of confidently thinking it couldn't be an IP address issue since my podcast blog kept being Literally Fine...........it turns out it was indeed Tumblr's wellest-known VPN blog restriction. (For anyone who hasn't seen the more popular posts, some VPN IP addresses get autobanned because a lot of people are out there using them for spam and such - most VPNs use a different IP address each time you connect unless you pay for it personalized, so at some point you end up at one a spammer also used - and then Tumblr doesn't have a reliable process to unban real accounts, much less put them on a don't-ban-again list). All of which I vaguely remembered, but this week when I was wailing about not knowing why this kept happening (because the above would have also restricted my podcast blog! and it didn't!) a friend dug up the old popular VPN post and it turns out I was missing something that I could call obvious in hindsight, but is it? is it really??
✨According to the OP, VPN autoban hits when you reblog a post. Even though I've been liking, replying, messaging, and even sending asks on the podcast blog, I haven't reblogged anything there since before the week my video game blog got restricted. If I'd reblogged anything there when I was on whichever IP address had been spam flagged, it probably would've gotten restricted too. ✨
tbf most Actual Bots I've encountered like and reply to posts, so even though it feels like an "obvious" difference it wasn't intuitive that not having reblogged shit lately could be what was protecting it from getting automoderated for being a bot.
Not only does this not happen with all VPN IP addresses, the kicker is that some shared WiFi will end up also getting IP address banned if a spammer has ever used it. You know where this is going. I thought now that I figured out what happened, my looney tunes saga could be fixed by not using a VPN on shared WiFi and just taking on the miniscule risk that my blog would be hacked for boner pills. Unfortunately. The shared WiFi at my temporary apartment building is possibly...also banned?? Maybe??? It's been fine for other websites, but when I tried creating a new Tumblr, Tumblr wouldn't even let me make an account (which I haven't seen before even with a VPN on!) This could be an unrelated issue - according to Reddit sometimes Tumblr account creation goes down? - but at this point I'm giving up and accepting blog restriction until I move and can go to the library more and can maybe get unrestricted on new, hopefully never seen a spammer WiFi. And then get hacked to advertise boner pills, but I'll chance it.
fyi!! if you want to continue to follow my perfect and brilliant/s skyrim posting i'm only using my original blog now (which is still restricted but at least has a chance of not being soon)
I am thinking about magelight again (everyone politely pretends to be shocked) and think another difference between an illusion magelight and an alteration magelight is. light = energy. because with illusion the light is merely the ILLUSION of a light it's a one and done type of spell, but with alteration you're actually going to need to be expending energy to keep it going... probably a pretty negligible amount for a single small light, but still. very low concentration spell
YES EXACTLY YES YOU'RE PICKING UP WHAT I'M PUTTING DOWN YES
same as energy, not a HUGE amount, but it's there!! alteration being focused on drawing out or changing specific properties while minimizing others, I absolutely think you could manage something akin to a handheld flashlight in terms of "bright light, minimal heat unless you're touching it". I'd like to imagine it can also build up gradually the longer you leave it going... exhausted wizard going to swat at their magelight after an all-nighter and going "ow" because it got hot from sitting too long
(only illusion-based magelights are allowed in the library. we can all thank one specific student from many many years ago who tried to argue their innovative hovering ball of fire [undeniably destruction-based] was totally the same as a magelight.)
this is the first one i made; i didn't know they listed individual takers' answers. i've seen quiz makers joking about names, e.g. "pls let me get [character]" people, but i thought that was it!
i'm making an ethical commitment not to look through the full answers of anyone i know (if i can tell it's you); anonymous data only. (i typed "metaphorically aggregate data only" but that is not what aggregate data means even metaphorically. aggregate data is what I'M giving readers of this post)
there is still one whole result no one has gotten yet
there are two results received by one person each and both of those results are wizards. (are they the only two wizards? no, there is also a third wizard, but falion of morthal is proving slightly more numerous!)
almost no one has picked spicy carrot soup
a lot of you are looking for your lost keys
for choose an npc who is not a result…….did you know that mjoll the lioness is an extremely popular npc. (this is a joke but frankly: until now i did not realize the extent of her popularity)
out of all the questions, there's maybe the most variance in replies to the query of what people are doing after waking from nightmares of dragons
a lot of you, way more than anticipated, are choosing to give the dragonborn a sweetroll
on a lighter note i think it's interesting to think about how communication difficulties could play out with dragonborns regarding the Voice. i'm sure other people have done stuff with this (links??) and for my part i have two, maybe three dragonborns whose communication difficulties interplay with how they use the Voice and regular speech. because it's always worth beating this drum, thud thud don't assume things about writers' life experience based on their writing and for my part none of my guys are meant to mirror my own experiences exactly, but it's fun to play around with communication difficulties in a game where one of the magic systems is actually a form of "speaking."
bjorn: one of the dragonborns with an intro scene traumatic brain injury, he also has recent traumatic experiences that have shattered his conceptualization of the nature of reality. as his ease of communicating in regular speech declines he spends the first part of the story with the voice as the only thing that "makes sense."
ôïvra: coming from a "world" that is different from the life experiences of most of the people around her, she finds herself unable to satisfy some of her companions' questions in conventional speech in a way that they can understand; ends up writing poetry in dovahzhul to try to articulate her life experiences to them
?: both above are stories where dovahzhul and the nature of the voice - speech that is a dialogue with reality - help a dragonborn who has difficulties with typical speech. i'd like to also explore how a dragonborn with communication difficulties might struggle to use the Voice in the way they "need" to to be able to complete the main quest (or even "be dragonborn.") haven't decided which dragonborns to do it with yet - about half my ten dragonborns (how did i end up with ten dragonborns) are completely fleshed out, so i might ponder on this while doing character development for the remaining few
whine moment - just need a minute to :/ about not improving much, yet, in my ability to write fandom meta-analysis type posts because my communication difficulties hit hardest with this kind of thing. (i'm reading over the thane post i wrote last night and i actually think this one came out fine, grammar is fine, but it's only fine because after i wrote it i edited it multiple times and caught all the grammar issues. so many of my other meta posts go through all that editing and still don't read "normally.") if my prose comes across "mostly normal" i can't emphasize enough that that is because i edit each post multiple times to catch all the grammar errors and sentences that completely nosedive. (editor's note: like i'm doing right now. waves to past me.) which is, um, time i'm going to assume most people without communication difficulties don't put into writing a fandom post.
i do find it a little darkly funny that so many other people in fandom talk about struggling to write fiction but can write tumblr meta as a substitute "instead" of working on fic and I'm dealing with this silly-sounding inverse where composing fiction or something like the uquiz i made this week are much easier. (i think the explanation for that is just practice: i've been enthusiastically writing fiction and giving myself technical challenges for so many years that even when my communication difficulties increased in adulthood the work of adapting to them for fiction writing melted unnoticed into all the other fiction writing challenges I was enjoying. I also think "ordinary" fiction, not to mention short comical writing like a uquiz, are in some ways more formulaic: my fiction writing comes from a vast accumulated mental toolbox of how to construct narration and dialogue, but to write nonfiction i flounder in a sea of every sentence construction that could exist.)
i do love writing meta and analyzing things, which is why i've been doing it more, thinking it would be a fun activity even it didn't get easier (but hoping it would get easier). also, i do like the idea that my hanging around creates more space for other people with communication difficulties, so that no one has to be "the only one." (but that aspiration does create all kinds of brain weasels. like...i'm not good anything representation, so what if my very presence makes it worse for others? but that is too much pressure for anyone to put on themselves - you have to hold onto some amount of "man, who cares")
on one hand i do wonder if i would enjoy myself more if i lean toward fanfic and maybe more uquizes and other creations where the structures of form make creating so much more easy and fun for me. on the other hand the idea of giving up a type of writing i want to do turns me into a beagle with a tug-o-war toy - i don't want to let go of it just because it pulls in the other direction
I'm wondering - okay back up. If one of the major differences in real life Europe before and after the fall of the western, not-Byzantine half of the Roman empire is that the Romans had an entirely paid army, whereas the nobles of post-Roman kingdoms were supporting their king militarily in exchange for ownership of land (which got them their $$ by taxing peasant farmers)...can we extrapolate that to Tamriel and assume that the Cyrod empire having their entirely paid army in 201 4E is unusual compared to everywhere else? (Do e.g. Morrowind or Black Marsh have the equivalent of a standing army in the 100s? Checks uesp. Okay Black Marsh sent their military into Morrowind so clearly they have one.)
If so - I don't actually know how similar medieval Scandinavia was to western Europe in this respect so there could be real!history differences there, but rolling with it for now - if so, then Ulfric and Tullius's relationships with their top military officers would be very different from each other. (Rikke has her Season Unending joke about "giving a week's pay" to see the look on Ulfric's face again. This is definitely her work job.) Per uesp, all the Stormcloak commanders are "soldiers," who we can then presume ? got their ranks by being good at fighting and/or well-connected, so maybe they too are still being paid a wage like other troops (Ulfric's regular troops are being paid, right? this isn't a volunteer army?) But is it possible we can also hypothesize the existence of some thanes who are loyally giving their jarl military service in exchange for their land and standing in Eastmarch? I think it's plausible.
To get to what I'm wondering about: Throughout all the holds, both Imperial-aligned and Stormclock-aligned, how...much...involvement do we think most thanes have in The War That Is Currently On?
The thanes are kind of...one thing in gameplay and another in narrative. Checks uesp again. "Thane is an honorary title presented by the jarl of a hold to individuals of high esteem," which you, the player character, can receive by being cool to people in the hold, and then you can go back to doing whatever you want somewhere else. In narrative, though, the thane NPCs are members of court who seem to hold property and serve their jarl on an ongoing basis. Checks actual definition of "thane." Merriam-Webster: "a free retainer of an Anglo-Saxon lord, especially: one resembling a feudal baron by holding lands of and performing military service for the king." Aha. So we do have support for the idea that the NPC thanes fill that real!history post-Roman role of a noble who does military service in exchange for their land.
You can go in a lot of directions with that - are thanes of other Stormcloak-aligned holds a part of Ulfric's army leadership that we're simply not seeing, or is he freezing other jarls' thanes out in favor of men he is more connected to? Do thanes of Imperial-aligned holds have a role in the Legion that we're simply not seeing, or are they completely limited to the day to day backup defense of their holds? Even then, as the local military leadership, what kind of cooperative or uncooperative relationships would they have with the Legion? Much to ponder but also when I first saw Bryling's name on uesp I assumed she was a man because she's only referred to by (presumably?) her surname and I thought that was her given name, and I think she and Rikke should have something gay going on.
Had a very weird experience today while making potions in the College of Winterhold where Colette Marence was practicing in the next room, but rather than the tinkling of Restoration spells, I heard some kind of hacking and slashing. This is my artistic interpretation of what I imagine was happening behind me.
[ID: An animated gif of a man making potions at a Skyrim alchemy lab. Behind him, a beam of yellow light turns into crackling lightning. His eyes widen as the lightning grows]
