#User-Led Content Creation

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

am i the assshole for softblocking a person (and… existing, apparently)?

so this requires a bit of a backstory. recently i realized that i hadn't seen a certain mutual (person A) on my dashboard for a bit. i decided to go check their blog directly. when looking for it, however, no results were returned. curious, i went to check on a reserve tumblr account i made when my main got nuked, and this person did not delete their blog, they blocked my main. that seemed weird, because i don't remember any negative interactions with them, but i can be hotheaded and say things i later regret, so it wasn't implausible i said something to upset them. i decide to check the blog of a different person (person B) who i know is friends with the aforementioned one, and that person has me blocked as well. "that's not a coincidence", i think, and after sitting on it for a bit i decide to ask a third person, who was friends with both of them, and whom i consider my friend as well, whether i have done something that might have upset them at any point. they tell me that no, there isn't anything like that they can recall. after explaining what prompted this, i received an explanation that frankly baffled me.

turns out, person B was quite distressed with things related to me. according to them, i was an incredibly cool person who everyone was friends with, but i blocked them for no apparent reason and everyone kept discussing just how cool i am, which led to them feeling invalidated and upset. i should clarify, that i did block one of person B's sideblogs on which they post fanfiction for the fandom we're both in, because i wasn't quite comfortable seeing the kind of stories they write and it showed up in character name search if i didn't block the blog. i did not permablock their main blog, but i did softblock it a couple times because again, i'm not completely comfortable with what they write and would rather avoid interactions with them after finding out. i did not have any particular feelings about them as a person, because we barely ever interacted. and while i would not say that i am lame or something like that, i am also not nearly as cool as person B felt. there is a non-zero amount of people who either have me blocked or don't follow me back, and i rarely post original content, most of my blog is just reblogs of memes or other people's creations. i am a perfectly ordinary tumblr user. but i caused them enough distress that they chose to leave a discord server they were in because they talked about me so much, and for some other personal reasons i'm not quite sure about.

recently, i joined the guild and the server this person was claiming was so fond of me -- partially to see for myself how much people really mentioned me, but also for unrelated reasons. being the nosy person i am, i ran my name through the search function on discord. there was a total of six messages mentioning me in that server. in a total of four conversations. so i have been individually brought up 4 times. which apparently equates to a three hour conversation about me, according to person B.

to clarify, i am not saying person B's feelings are unreasonable -- i do know what it's like to feel ignored or outshined by someone, but i don't think i have personally contributed significantly to them feeling this way, nor do i think they interpreted any of my actions correctly.

so, aita for curating my dash and being brought up in a discord server half a dozen times? i genuinely can't tell.

What are these acronyms?

[a-very-tired-jew]

The server closes, but the antisemitism it gave is forever

By the time this gets posted from my queue the Dropout Discord server will have officially closed/froze (May 26th, 2024). However, the looming freeze hasn't dissuaded any of the users in a particular channel from posting their wild conspiracies and outright falsities. Take this one that happened on May 24th.

Fig. 1. User states that Jews should be safe around the world and Zionism was invented by anti-semites (their word) to get the Jews out of Europe. Let's break down this picture. It's the same thing we have heard from goys time and time again about this entire issue. Jews should be safe around the world and we should make the world safer for them so they don't need Israel. Here's the problem...we've tried that multiple times. In fact, there was a whole ideology opposite of Zionism called Bundism that pushed for that very thing. Guess what happened? Bundists were exiled, tortured, imprisoned, cleansed, and killed. That's not to say don't make the world a safer place for us. We'd like it to be. But historically speaking, this sort of action hasn't been consistent. Now, the second part of their post: "Zionism was originally invented by anti-semites who wanted Jews out of Europe". Imagine being so confidently wrong in something. Not only does a quick fact check tell you you're wrong, but demonstrably so. The "Father of Zionism" is Theodor Herzl who helped formalize an ideology that was already present in Judaism. His actions were inspired by the Dreyfus Affair. If you don't know what this is, a Jewish officer of the French army was falsely accused of being a spy and imprisoned. The actual culprit was identified and the French army suppressed the evidence and acquitted him, he was not Jewish. Throughout this time there was rampant antisemitism in French society, which had previously been viewed as a liberal bastion of acceptance. If this place that intellectuals viewed as tolerant of differing views, creeds, religions, and so on could become virulently antisemitic, then were Jews actually accepted? That is the underlying thought that led to the formalization and creation of political Zionism as we know it (albeit in a very brief and generalized summary). Hell, this person probably doesn't even know what Labor Zionism is and it would probably break their brain. The most progressive societies in the world can say they're safe for Jews to exist in, but they will turn at the drop of a hat.

So when someone like this says that Zionism was made by anti-semites (and they're using the hyphenated incorrect term which is indicative of other issues) I can't help but think that they know next to nothing about the conflict outside of what they've consumed these past months. The likelihood is that this particular person has only engaged with antisemitic content because that misinformation they're spreading is something that only exists in those circles. It's antisemitic conspiracy wrapped in anti-Zionism. It's reminiscent of things the Soviets would say about Israel while actively killing the Jews in their country. They then followed it with this.

Fig. 2. Same user generalizes a whataboutism regarding safety for everyone, then specifically asks why no one prioritizes the Palestinians in these conversations. In this photo they ask why do we assume that the world is going to hate Jews forever? Because it has. Antisemitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred towards another group. Jewish history is marred with repeated incidents of cleansing, torture, imprisonment, exile, and killing. In no century has there ever been a time when Jews just existed peacefully with our own autonomy. And yet someone like this, who has shown their whole ass with their ignorance of what Zionism is and its origin, asks "why aren't we talking about the Palestinians in these conversations?" Because there is not a specific word that describes hatred of Palestinians like there is for Jews. Nor do they have thousands of years of history regarding that hatred. It's a false equivalency and a pitiful whataboutism to try and make conversations about antisemitism into something they're not. However, considering this user writes "anti-semite/semitism", I would not be surprised if they are of the "Palestinians are Semites" mindset (which myself and others have gone over in other posts, and even the server itself addressed months prior). We can talk about Palestinians and the dangers they face. We can talk about the rights and country they should have. We can talk about how other countries in the region keep them in camps and don't let them become full citizens. We can talk about all the issues surrounding them as a people. But not when we're talking about antisemitism, because it's not about them. The fact that this user is trying to make it that way and was not confronted in any capacity about their outright misinformation and manipulation says everything about the Dropout Discord Palestine channel that you need to know.

[nitearmorweek]

As everyone gets to work preparing for NiteArmor Week, the mods wanted to encourage people to bring their own lived experiences into their creations. You are welcome to write and draw mandalorians in a way that reflects your own life and culture; Bo-Katan and the Armorer do not have to physically resemble their live action counterparts.

For those who may need a little help or are looking for new resources, we have gathered a small list of guides. Some of the below sources came from @lavenderursa's collection of inclusive writing tips. The mods recommend reading through the original post they worked hard to put together! The hope of this new post is to build out their post to include a few more elements specific to Star Wars.

Writing Resources Collectives and authors who have published tips and guides on writing stories that center diverse experiences:

Writing With Color

The History of Black Hair [Words to Describe Hair]

A Guide to Natural Black Hair

How To Write About Trans People

A Primer on Writing Trans Characters

The Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Transgender Characters

Important Tips on Making/Writing Asian OCs

Dear Non-Asian Writer

How to Avoid Asian Stereotypes, Appropriation, and White Washing

​Tips for Inclusivity with Reader Inserts

A Guide to Writing Disabled Characters

A general cane guide for writers and artists (from a cane user, writer, and artist!)

Creating authentic deaf and hard of hearing characters

Art Tips Helpful information on how to draw different body types, skin tones, and hair:

Basic Skin Tone Coloring [part 2]

Kupa's Guide to Skintones

A Guide to Drawing South Asian Skin Tones [part 2]

Protocols When Drawing Native American Hair

A guide to designing wheelchair using characters! [part 2]

Whitewashing in Art and How Colors Work

​How to Draw Disabled People

Drawing East Asian Faces

Plus Size Body Types

POC Blush tones

Afro, 4C hair

Image References Websites that offer images that can be licensed for use and/or inspiration. The below three are highly recommended resources, but some do have a cost:

createHERstock - Your destination for authentic stock images featuring melanated women

Nappy co - Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free

Eye for Ebony - Beautiful lifestyle stock photos featuring people of color

Affect The Verb - This is a disability-led effort to provide free & inclusive stock images from our own perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).

Pixerf - Asia's fastest-growing Asian stock photo market place

Disability: In - Disability Inclusive Stock Photography

Disability is Beautiful - The best free stock images provided by the disability community.

Cosplayers Artists and content creators that have posted amazing Star Wars cosplay! Their hard work and attention to detail in costuming is a wonderful source of inspiration and reference. If you are inspired by any of their photos, please make sure to credit them and send your love. Here are just three examples of cosplayers within the fandom:

Jahara Jayde | twitter | ko-fi

arseniccupcakes | twitter | patreon

cutiepiesensei | twitter | instagram

Further Reading Additional articles, studies, and analyses that discuss racism and ableism within the Star Wars fandom specifically:

Racism In Star Wars: A List of Resources

Star Wars Franchise: Stitch's Media Mix Analyst

Star Wars: A Tale of Racism

Disability In Star Wars

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno-Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

What's the Problem, Papi?: Internet Daddy-ism and Coddling, Fetishization, and what "Latino-looking" actually means.

Sinophobia in SW Animation

Thank you for making it to the end of this post! Please do not consider this a definitive list or a replacement for anti-racist work in the real world. Keep reading, stay curious, and seek out new perspectives from voices you may not have been listening for.

Do you have any additional recommendations, sources, or guides to share? Feel free to drop them in the comments of this post ❤️

[soundlycunninginsignia]

Luma Ray 2: The Next Generation of Advanced Lighting Technology

Lighting technology has evolved dramatically over the past decade, and Luma Ray 2 stands at the forefront of this innovation. Whether for professional photography, cinematic production, or everyday lighting solutions, Luma Ray 2 offers unparalleled brightness, efficiency, and versatility. In this article, we will explore its features, applications, and why it is a game-changer in modern lighting.

What is Luma Ray 2?

Luma Ray 2 is an advanced lighting system designed to deliver superior illumination with minimal energy consumption. Building upon its predecessor, this next-generation model incorporates cutting-edge LED technology, enhanced color accuracy, and intelligent control systems. Unlike traditional lighting solutions, Luma Ray 2 provides consistent, flicker-free light, making it ideal for high-demand environments.

Key Features of Luma Ray 2

Ultra-Bright LED Array

The Luma Ray 2 utilizes a high-density LED matrix that produces intense, uniform light. With adjustable brightness levels, it can be tailored for various settings, from studio shoots to outdoor events.

Precision Color Rendering

One of the standout features of Luma Ray 2 is its exceptional color accuracy. With a CRI (Color Rendering Index) of over 98, it ensures true-to-life colors, crucial for photographers and videographers.

Smart Connectivity & Control

Equipped with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi compatibility, Luma Ray 2 can be controlled via a smartphone app. Users can adjust brightness, color temperature, and even create dynamic lighting effects remotely.

Energy Efficiency & Longevity

Thanks to its advanced thermal management system, Luma Ray 2 operates at lower temperatures, extending its lifespan while consuming less power than conventional lighting systems.

Portable & Durable Design

Designed for professionals on the go, Luma Ray 2 is lightweight yet rugged, with a weather-resistant build that withstands harsh conditions.

Applications of Luma Ray 2

1. Professional Photography & Videography

Photographers and filmmakers rely on consistent, high-quality lighting to capture stunning visuals. Luma Ray 2 provides studio-grade illumination, eliminating shadows and ensuring perfect exposure in every shot.

2. Live Streaming & Content Creation

With the rise of digital content, creators need reliable lighting setups. Luma Ray 2 enhances video quality with adjustable color temperatures, making it perfect for YouTube, Twitch, and social media broadcasts.

3. Architectural & Event Lighting

From stage performances to architectural highlights, Luma Ray 2 offers dynamic lighting solutions. Its programmable effects can transform any space into a visually captivating environment.

4. Industrial & Medical Use

Beyond creative fields, Luma Ray 2 is also used in medical and industrial applications where precise lighting is critical. Surgeons, engineers, and researchers benefit from its high-intensity, shadow-free illumination.

Why Choose Luma Ray 2 Over Competitors?

While there are many lighting solutions available, Luma Ray 2 stands out due to its:

Superior Build Quality – Made with premium materials for long-term reliability.

Versatility – Adaptable to various industries and use cases.

User-Friendly Controls – Intuitive app-based adjustments for seamless operation.

Future-Proof Technology – Designed to stay ahead of evolving lighting demands.

[jacobduquet-blog]

What is Social Media?

Social media, judging by the varied interpretations and users of it, is not easy to define.  As for what I believe it means, I believe it can be best defined as a platform where anyone, from individuals and companies, can express their ideals, goals or products.   Depending on the site, this can come in many forms, via the use of text, image or video content.  The advent of social media has also led to far greater connectivity when it comes to communication.   The creation of chat rooms and designated communities has allowed for groups dedicated to specific niches to become prominent.  On the other hand, the development of direct messaging allows for simple contact with specific individuals or businesses in private, in a manner that is faster and more responsive than e-mail. 

As a social media user, I would characterize myself as someone who is primarily a viewer but produces content that is meant for entertainment.   As for my viewing habits, they reflect the content I create, mainly consisting of entertainment videos.  Rather than receiving certain information such as financial advice or news from social media, I would rather attain such information from other sources, such as the news, trusted websites, and books.  In short, I use social media exclusively for light-hearted/comedic content, as opposed to more informative posts. 

Given the fact that I have used social media for several years, I have a fair amount of knowledge of it.  My strengths in it generally lie in being able to determine the validity of posts when it comes to sensational topics, as I have grown accustomed to fact-checking details explained in posts.  I also tend to be aware of trends and recent news thanks to widespread coverage through posts.    My challenges come in the form of maintaining an audience through my content.   With the amount of competition that is present in modern social media, it can be very difficult to establish oneself as a creator.   Furthermore, with the speed at which new trends and ideas come and go, it is rather difficult to establish a brand without delving into current events or involving topics that have already been well-established themselves.  This leads to an issue where a great deal of popular content is seemingly “samey”, due to it all focusing on the same trending topics. 

As for the future, I would like to learn how to create an effective social media brand that attracts an audience.  Ideas such as search engine optimization, keywords and trend research that generally dictate audience growth would be examples of topics that I would be eager to learn.  It would also be interesting to learn how social media has indirectly influenced other forms of communication.   With the increasing prevalence of texting and direct messaging, physical forms of communication such as letters have become more obsolete.   Overall, I would like to be aware of how social media has been integrated in our society and how one can thrive in its atmosphere. 

[freakblrbookkeeperofficial]

Blog Name: Tmf Confessions Blog

Username: @tmf-confessions

Aliases: Freakblrs Beloved Canon Event

Type of Blog: Confessions Blog/Gimmick Blog

Date created: July/August of 2023

Reason Created: To give people a space to share their opinions of the show and the fandom

Last Active: 5/4/2024; still currently active

Identity: @strawberry-pretzels

--------------------------------------

The Tmf-Confessions blog is one of the more iconic blogs on Freakblr. It has been used by almost everyone at least once and has remained very neutral in any instances of infighting on Freakblr.

It is, after all, a convenient way to politely air grievances and spread opinions. It is the first place many people in this fandom think to go to with their hot, cold, and luke-warm takes.

Over it's lengthy existence, people submitting confessions have sparked many inter-fandom controversies. Nothing so severe though, that it is worth making note. Most fighting was shut down through calm conversation and back-and-forth's on the confessions blog.

When asked about enemies, the confession blog simply responded, "i don't think this blog has any enemies cause it's a welcoming space for everyone frl."

A huge running joke of the confession blog is the idea of, "Rat's Laying Eggs." This begun when the Confession blog came back from a semi-long hiatus. They posted the following: "yall i died my bad. sorry guys my rat gave birth and laid two or three eggs."

This post sparked outrage amongst many of the confession blog followers. Freakblr Original user @creelby reblogged saying, "IM???????" Another Freakblr Original user, @cringelordofchaos similarly stated, "YOU'RE???????" Finally, Freakblr Original user @rextile sums up everyone's thoughts on the situation. Asking the important question of, "rats lay eggs????"

This one post led to several asks wondering about the state of the confession blog's rats. Led to multiple google searches about whether or not rat's can actually lay eggs. In the end it was determined that no. No they cannot. And the confession blog had been eating eggs from what they thought was a rat for months.

Eventually Freakblr Original user @sobeksewerrat posted this on their other alternate account, @andrew-the-drew-defender: "rat eggs should become a new inside joke on freakblr. We should make it a password or a secret code of sorts so we know who to gatekeep"

While many agreed and liked this idea, it never actually became a secret code. It did however remain an inside joke and led to the creation of the Freakblr discord server.

The confession blog's main account is @strawberry-pretzels. A Freakblr Original user. They post a wide variety of content there, including Music Freaks content.

When asked about blogs of note, they mentioned The Original Freakblr Seven, as well as any other blogs who'd submitted asks. Continuing their pattern of being a safe space for all on Freakblr.

The Tmf Confessions blog continues to post and be active, a bright spot in the lives of many Freakblr users. It inspires discourse and thoughtful discussion of the show. It keeps us entertained in the wait for new content. A pioneer of Freakblr, in my opinion.

And, when asked to sum up their time on Freakblr, this is what they had to say:

"Freakblr is many things. It's a group of 20 people joking around and telling stories. It's a space for so much interesting lore and fandom icebergs. It's a place where creativity and roleplay runs rampant. But above all, it is an amazing home with many memories, that I hope will be remembered even years later."

[mariacallous]

Jay Graber, the C.E.O. of the upstart social-media platform Bluesky, arrived in San Francisco the Sunday after Donald Trump’s reëlection and holed up in a hotel room. She’d spent the previous days road-tripping down the West Coast from her home, in Seattle, stopping at beaches and redwood groves along the way, and in San Francisco she’d hoped to remain half in vacation mode. But now Bluesky was seeing a surge in new users, and it was looking as if she’d need all hands on deck. “There was momentum,” Graber recalled recently, adding, “It was just picking up day by day.”

Since launching, in early 2023, Bluesky had positioned itself as a refuge from X, the site formerly known as Twitter. For nearly two decades, Twitter had been considered the internet’s town square, chaotic and often rancorous but informative and diversely discursive. Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals began fleeing, and Bluesky in turn accumulated more than ten million users by the fall of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks. But the post-election influx proved to be of a different order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger compared to a Macy’s at the start of Black Friday sales.

Graber put in sixteen-hour days overseeing Bluesky’s twenty-person staff, taking calls with prospective investors, and recruiting new hires, leaving her hotel room only to pick up DoorDash deliveries in the lobby. In Seattle, Bluesky’s chief technology officer set up an automatic “failover” so that if one of the company’s servers crashed another would take its place. A team of engineers took shifts to insure that someone was on duty at all hours, battling to keep the overwhelmed servers online—“like firefighting,” as one put it. On November 14th—two days after Trump announced the creation of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency—Bluesky staffers stayed late, in a virtual “situation room,” to watch the day’s sign-up ticker hit a million. In a matter of two weeks, Bluesky’s population doubled. Today, it has a user base of more than thirty million.

Disaffected X users gravitate to Bluesky as a throwback to a gentler, saner social-media experience. Being on the site feels like a mixture of Twitter in 2012, when it was a haven for internet nerdery, and in 2017, when it was a seedbed of anti-Trump #Resistance. The Bluesky interface reassuringly resembles Twitter’s, down to the winged blue logo (a butterfly instead of a bird) and the character limit on posts (three hundred rather than early Twitter’s hundred and forty). The platform is theoretically open to all, but some MAGA trolls have reported that their accounts have been blocked. Discourse is solidly left-leaning, and disagreements tend to be internecine. The most followed account belongs to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As if to consummate Bluesky as a successor to the liberal Twitter of yore, Barack Obama recently joined and, in his first post, celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.

The platform is not yet populated enough to qualify as the internet’s new town square. Even after the Musk-induced exodus, X reports that it has more than five hundred million active users per month; Threads, Meta’s self-fashioned Twitter alternative, has around three hundred million. Yet Bluesky wields outsized influence in the social-media landscape because of the innovative infrastructure on which it’s built. All the giant social networks are what’s known as centralized platforms: most aspects of user experience, from content moderation to algorithmic recommendations, are dictated by the corporation that runs the platform. Bluesky, by contrast, originated as a radical side project within Twitter under its co-founder and former C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, to create a decentralized social-media model. Where X or Facebook runs primarily on proprietary technology, Bluesky is powered by an open-source protocol, a sort of instruction manual and set of data standards that allows anyone to build compatible software on top of it. As a result, users can customize the algorithms and content-moderation rules that govern what appears in their feeds—and, if they don’t like Bluesky, they can take their followers and their archive of posts and build or join another site running on the same protocol. The power that typically lies with corporations is thus redistributed to the users themselves.

With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as “around thirty-three”) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men. With Trump and Musk in power, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward turn. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has cut back on fact checking, abandoned D.E.I. efforts, and said that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish only pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that subjects users to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wanted to, could just delete the whole X time line—just do these totally arbitrary things,” she said, adding, “I think this self-styled tech-monarch thing is worth questioning. Do we want to live in that world?”

The Seattle area, home to Microsoft’s and Amazon’s headquarters, is perhaps the most significant American tech hub outside the Bay Area. You can’t throw a Starbucks venti there without hitting a software engineer. But Graber told me that she chose the city in part for its separation from Silicon Valley, and for its “moody and majestic” landscape: “Some people said I moved here because I’m a moss maximalist, and they’re not wrong.”

Graber and several Seattle-based employees have desks in a co-working space with views of Puget Sound. One day in January, I met Graber there. Tall and willowy, with a halo of tight dark curls, she wore a hooded black coat from the Chinese brand JNBY which gave her high-cheekboned face a slightly witchy aspect. The workspace was bright and sparse, with motorized standing desks and scattered beanbag chairs. Graber’s station was in a pod of four cluttered with external monitors, Annie’s crackers, and spent coffee cups. Compared with most tech leaders, she has a low-key digital footprint. On her Bluesky account, one representative post features a photo of her arms cradling a hen, captioned “My favorite chicken.”

“Jay” is an adopted moniker. Bluesky was named before Graber became involved, but by coincidence her given name is Lantian—Mandarin for “blue sky.” Graber likes to say that her mother, an émigré from China, chose it to lend her daughter “boundless freedom.” Her mom, who worked as an acupuncturist, and her dad, a math teacher and a former lieutenant colonel, met at a Christian university in Oklahoma. They raised Graber, an only child, in a Baptist community in Tulsa. Growing up, Graber looked forward to Friday nights after church, when she was granted unfettered access to the family’s desktop computer. A formative internet experience was a game called Neopets, in which users raise digital creatures and connect with other players in a shared virtual village. As an adolescent, Graber kept a blog on Xanga, an early social platform, and taught herself rudimentary code so that she could customize her page with music and a zebra theme.

At the time, Graber identified less as a computer kid than as a bookworm, reading stories of scientific and mathematical discovery. “One thing that interested me was how a lot of inventions came through ordinary people trying things,” she said. “It wasn’t just the lone genius.” She read the children’s fantasy series “Redwall” and every “Robin Hood” book in the library; she grew to love such feminist sci-fi authors as Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, who, as Graber put it, excelled at reimagining “how society could look.” To this day, she remains an avowed fantasy devotee.

In one corner of the Bluesky office sat a pile of padded training swords. Graber belongs to a club that re-creates medieval sword-fighting tactics, and the office had recently staged a tournament. She picked up a mock shortsword and extended it expertly in one hand. I grabbed another, plus a small plastic shield, and she led me in an impromptu battle. “A lot of men just rely on brute force to get through things,” she said. “When you learn that, you can still win, with better leverage and technique.” She raised her sword and mimed slashing it down toward my exposed neck.

After high school, Graber enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, figuring that its combination of liberal-arts, engineering, and business programs would allow her to “maximize optionality.” She chose an interdisciplinary major called Science, Technology, and Society, and as part of her senior thesis designed an online time bank through which students could swap labor—taking photos for another person, say, in exchange for cooking lessons. Graber told me, “In some ways, it was like a social network.” When she graduated, she moved to an all-female coöperative in West Philadelphia and volunteered for local tech-policy projects, which led to a job as an organizer at Free Press, a media-advocacy nonprofit. But the policy world operated “at a high level of abstraction,” she said, and she found it unsatisfying: “Being able to make change directly has always been really appealing to me.” On work trips to San Francisco, meeting with tech activists and hanging out in “hackerspaces,” she was drawn to the tech industry’s nimble immediacy.

In 2015, she enrolled in a coding boot camp in San Francisco, then landed a job at a startup that employed blockchain cryptography to track inventory for corporate clients. But she was restless there, too. According to Graber, her mother had hoped that she would become a doctor, and would tell her, contra the name Lantian, “You have too much freedom. You have to learn how to be more grounded.” In San Francisco, Graber started going by Jay. A blue jay, she reasoned, could navigate both sky and land.

A new crypto opportunity soon arose: a friend’s brother was running a bitcoin-mining operation in a defunct ammunition factory in rural Washington and needed help from someone with technical prowess and an appetite for grunt work. Graber moved to a house near the factory and, between shifts, spent hours studying code on her own. She described this to me as her “cocoon period”: “There were no distractions—no place to go, no parties, no friends.” Even in isolation, Graber displayed a future tech founder’s knack for self-invention. She wore earrings made out of salvaged memory sticks and dyed locks of her hair electric blue and purple. She began lifting weights and, for a brief time, tried an all-meat diet. “I’m pretty experimental,” she said. “I’ll try anything once.”

In mid-2016, Graber went to San Francisco to attend the first annual Decentralized Web Summit, hosted by the open-web organization Internet Archive. There she met Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, who was developing a cryptocurrency called Zcash. Wilcox-O’Hearn told me that Graber stood out for the contrast between her “youth and her seriousness,” and for her emotional intelligence. He hired her as a junior engineer, and she eventually rose to oversee developer operations. One early Zcash transaction became something of a legend within the blockchain community: in the memo field, the sender had encrypted a romantic message. Though people didn’t know it at the time, the note was for Graber, from a programmer paramour.

San Francisco was good for networking and dating, but Graber was spending all her money on rent. She founded her own startup, Happening, a kind of social network for event organizing, but it didn’t take off. “I was trying to figure out how to get people to use a social app,” she said. “But starting from zero was really hard.” Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. “If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it,” she said. “You can follow things that seem synchronous.”

On the internet, protocols are a bit like a city’s electrical grid—crucial to its functioning but invisible to most civilians. When you send an e-mail, you are making use of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). When you visit any website, you are using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (hence the letters at the beginning of every address, HTTP). Because of SMTP, your e-mail account can send messages to any other e-mail account; you don’t have to be a Gmail user to e-mail a Gmail user. Daniel Holmgren, one of Bluesky’s head engineers, likened the company’s protocol—called the Authenticated Transfer, or AT, Protocol—to an “open data lake”: whatever is in the water is public property, and any boat on the lake can dredge it up. Conventional social media, by contrast, is siloed: a Facebook account cannot follow or message a TikTok account. In recent years, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple have all been targets of antitrust lawsuits. Protocols are anti-monopolistic by design, allowing stakeholders to build coöperative systems that run side by side. As the founder of Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, put it in an influential talk in 2015, decentralized technology has the power to “lock the Web open.”

What piqued Dorsey’s interest, though, was a long 2019 essay by Mike Masnick, the founder of the blog Techdirt, titled “Protocols, Not Platforms.” The piece summed up a “crisis” that social-media companies faced with content moderation: caught between complaints that they allowed the spread of hatred and disinformation and complaints that they stifled free speech, they managed to please “almost no one.” The solution, Masnick argued, was to develop social-media protocols, which would allow individuals to design filtering tools based on “their own tolerances for different types of speech.” At the time, Dorsey was facing accusations that Twitter “shadow banned” content from conservatives; he’d been questioned by Congress about the company’s content-moderation practices. If Twitter were on a protocol and the work of content moderation were decentralized, then the company’s leadership would no longer be the target of blame. (Dorsey did not respond to requests for comment.) Several decentralized social networks already existed, among them Mastodon, another Twitter-like platform, but none had broken into the mainstream. Masnick, who today is a Bluesky board member, told me that Dorsey contacted him out of the blue and said, “I’m convinced by your paper. I think we’re going to do it.”

Graber likes to compare Bluesky’s decentralized structure to a hotel. Users are “going off and exploring custom rooms that people built, and maybe there’s another hotel out back.”

Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund the development of a “decentralized standard for social media” which Twitter would eventually adopt. To kick-start the project, his team created a group chat on Matrix, another open protocol for digital communication, and invited select people who expressed interest in joining. Then Twitter’s C.T.O., Parag Agrawal, kept tabs on the group to see who would emerge as its leader. Graber joined and was struck by the rudderlessness of the conversation. New people would pop in, make a few unsupported suggestions, and then drop out. No broader vision seemed to be coalescing. She began collating papers that other group members mentioned and wrote an overview of existing open-source social-media protocols. She told me, “The way that you become a leader is you just add value—you just do things.”

In early 2021, Dorsey and Agrawal started conducting interviews with prospective Bluesky heads. Jeremie Miller, who created the pioneering open-source instant-messaging system Jabber (and later became a Bluesky board member), sat in on the interviews as a consultant. He recalled that Graber easily became his pick. The Twitter heads had preconceptions of what Bluesky should be, he told me: “She didn’t give in to those and just propose the things that they wanted to hear.” Still, the search dragged on for months. In the meantime, Graber accepted a position at Twitter itself, working on blockchain technology. Then, in the summer of 2021, during onboarding, she got a call from Agrawal, offering her the role of Bluesky C.E.O. Put off by the protracted hiring process, Graber said that she’d accept only if Bluesky could exist separately from Twitter. Negotiating independence took another few months, but the decision proved pivotal. That November, after years of pressure from an activist investment firm, Dorsey resigned as C.E.O. and was replaced by Agrawal. Then, in January, Musk began buying up Twitter stock. By that April, he’d become the largest shareholder. Encouraged by a disaffected Dorsey, he offered to buy Twitter outright, for forty-four billion dollars.

Twitter had agreed to compensate Bluesky for constructing a protocol, with twenty-five million dollars over five years. Following a brief period during which Graber paid her first contractor out of her own pocket, Twitter executives made sure that an initial twelve million dollars went through. But Graber knew that, with Twitter’s leadership in limbo, she now had to think beyond Bluesky’s original goal of hosting Twitter. She put out feelers to other companies, including Reddit, about the idea of using Bluesky’s protocol. Then, in August, 2022, noting the dread on Twitter at the possibility of Musk’s takeover, she made another crucial decision: Bluesky would build not only a protocol but a social network to run on it. Doing so would offer a proof of concept, Graber said: “But it was also important in case we’re on our own and need to lean in on Plan B.”

That October, Bluesky débuted a landing page with a sign-up box. Within days, driven by word of mouth on extant social media, it had a wait list of more than a million e-mails. The next week, Musk officially became Twitter’s owner. When Masnick heard the news, he texted Graber some friendly advice: “Work faster.” The Bluesky team reached out to Twitter to ask whether Musk would continue to fund the protocol. Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board, had urged Musk to make Twitter open source, so Graber held out hope that Musk would support the project. But they soon received an e-mail from a “random dude with no Twitter e-mail address,” stating that their contract would be cancelled.

In late 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe how social-media companies make changes that benefit them but gradually, inevitably degrade user experience. In recent years, Facebook and X have buried news by deprioritizing links to articles. Instagram and Pinterest have flooded feeds with surreally inane A.I.-generated content, making it harder to find posts of interest. Social-media users who voice dismay at such changes are accustomed to feeling as if they are petitioning uncaring gods. Bluesky staff members, by contrast, like to describe users of decentralized technology as “agentic,” a jargony way of saying that they get to choose what they see.

One January day, I met in San Francisco with Rose Wang, Bluesky’s C.O.O., and Emily Liu, its head of special projects, who spoke about the average social-media user in a way that evoked a factory-farmed chicken resisting going free range. With the advent of platforms such as Bluesky, users “don’t have to petition the mods or complain about the algorithm,” Liu said, using a shorthand for moderators. She added, “Hating the mods is an artifact of when mods had all the power.”

Wang, a longtime friend of Graber’s (and the co-founder of a line of snacks made with cricket flour), said, “Success is when users ask us to build tools so that they can go and create whatever experience they want.”

Decentralized social networks can take several forms. The most complex are peer-to-peer systems, in which each individual connects her computer directly to others using her own private server. Perhaps the most prominent example is Urbit, a blockchain-linked platform founded by the neo-reactionary programmer Curtis Yarvin, which has only around sixteen thousand accounts. A more accessible approach, employed by platforms such as Mastodon, which has some ten million registered users, is the federated model, in which some people build servers to host groups of accounts, forming a “federation” of user-hosts. (Last year, looking to break into the so-called fediverse, Meta took its first step into decentralized social media and began integrating some of Threads’ functions with the protocol that Mastodon runs.) On Bluesky, any user can host her own account on a private server or join the server of another user-host. But the vast majority of users choose a default option that lets Bluesky’s servers function as host. As a result, creating an account on Bluesky can be as easy as signing up for Facebook or X.

In the spring of 2023, Bluesky rolled out an invite-only beta version of its app. The first batches of invitations went out to just a thousand people from the wait list each week, but each new user was given invite codes to recruit others, and the population quickly diversified. Wrestlers formed an enthusiastic niche and soon attracted other sports subcultures. Brazilian Taylor Swift fans established a community. Early adopters came disproportionately from the groups most negatively affected by Musk’s right-wing makeover of X—sex workers, trans people, people of color. X users in the media and progressive politics traded invite codes like passengers on a ship hijacked by lunatics, offering spots on the only lifeboat.

When I joined Bluesky, in April of 2023, the scene was underpopulated and raw. Content moderation was minimal. An optional What’s Hot algorithmic feed collected content that was popular across the platform. The posts that qualified had as few as a dozen likes and were, as one user observed, roughly “1/3 nudes, 1/3 technical discussion of federated networks, and 1/3 pet photos.” Posts were dubbed “skeets,” for “sky tweets,” a term that has a double meaning as vulgar slang. Without the possibility of going viral (or attracting much attention, period), users’ only incentive was to entertain their fellow internet addicts. The poet and author Patricia Lockwood, a maestro of tweeting, had departed Twitter after Trump used the platform to incite the January 6th riot. She joined Bluesky in May of 2023 and began skeeting in her signature absurdist style. In one brief prose poem, she narrated tumbling down a hill: “haha—Yes! it will be the job of sisyphus, my sexual partner, to roll me up again.” Lockwood told me that Bluesky felt a bit like “returning to a second childhood,” striving to reclaim a social internet that was fun and freeing.

The early enthusiasm allowed Graber to raise eight million dollars in seed investment that July, providing the team with the runway to keep growing. Then Bluesky’s sign-ups slowed, in part because of competition from Threads, which débuted that month. In February, 2024, Bluesky’s social platform became open to the public, yet it continued to feel like a digital backwater. I checked in sporadically that spring and summer and found little action; periodically, I posted messages into the void such as “btw I’m still on this site.” In August, when X was briefly banned in Brazil for refusing to follow local moderation laws, a wave of Brazilians (among the world’s most internet-savvy people) migrated to Bluesky. But the platform may well have remained as niche as Mastodon, which stalled out after experiencing a bump in popularity when Musk acquired Twitter. One feature that helped make Bluesky a viable X replacement was its “starter packs,” offering user-curated lists of accounts to follow in certain areas of interest, so that new members didn’t have to rebuild their online communities from scratch. Threads soon added the same feature.

When a user logs on to X, two tabs appear at the top of her feed: For You, which shows algorithmically recommended posts, and Following, which shows posts from accounts that you follow. The analogous features on Bluesky differ in significant ways. Where X’s Following feed is crowded with ads and recommendations, Bluesky’s contains only the things that people you follow have posted, in reverse chronological order, as on early Twitter, giving Bluesky users a clearer sense of the conversation happening in real time. A Discover feed, meanwhile, custom-selects posts for each user according to an algorithm designed by the company; one of its advantages over X’s For You is that you don’t have to see Musk himself spouting an endless stream of MAGA propaganda and proudly puerile memes. But the site’s biggest departure from X is its My Feeds tab, which allows users to select additional algorithmic feeds designed by fellow-users. At the Bluesky office, Graber opened her laptop, which bore a large sticker of a vine-wreathed sword, and pulled up a test account, then navigated to the menu of feeds. She clicked on one called Science, moderated by a self-vetted crowd of science professionals, then on one called Fungi Friends, which filled the feed with photos of mushrooms. A Popular with Friends feed shows posts getting engagement from people you follow; Quiet Posters, conversely, brings up messages from accounts you follow that don’t post very often.

Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, previously worked at Twitter, until Musk dismantled its content-moderation team and eventually forced him out. Rodericks told me that Bluesky performs “a foundational layer” of moderation, with more than a hundred contractors working to remove such things as child-sexual-abuse material and threats of violence. But more fine-grained filtering decisions are made at the individual level. In Settings, users can choose from among hundreds of homespun labelling tools that flag or block certain posts in their feeds. The labels range from the straightforwardly functional (a red check mark for authenticated power users, akin to Twitter’s old blue checks) to the idiosyncratically satirical (a label that identifies landlords, private-school graduates, and associates of Jeffrey Epstein). One of the platform’s most prominent feeds, Blacksky, which draws more than three hundred thousand users a month, offers a tool to identify and block racism and misogynoir. Bluesky as a company can afford to enable free speech because the platform’s smaller, optional communities have the power to police speech however they choose. Blacksky’s founder, Rudy Fraser, told me, “If anyone uses a slur anywhere—in a username, bio, in a post—we can get automatically alerted and take action.” He added, of moderation decisions, “If you’re making everyone happy, you’re maybe not serving a community.”

If there’s a trade-off to nurturing insular online communities, it’s that Bluesky as a whole still lacks the kind of cacophonous urgency that defined Twitter in its heyday. The dominant discourse tends to take place in a tone of cosseted aggrievement. On a typical day, a litany of posts might ask why “nobody is talking about” a given issue—the death toll in Gaza, the threatened defunding of NPR—although people are in fact talking about those very things on the same website. Even when it’s politically diverse, social media too easily creates echo chambers. In time, if Bluesky wants to remain relevant, it will have to evolve beyond its relatively monocultural milieu.

Graber likes to compare Bluesky to a hotel: “We’re trying to create a good time for people who step into the lobby,” she said—though the lobby also contains construction materials, left there as a community resource. Users are “going off and exploring custom rooms that people built, and maybe there’s another hotel out back.” If the system proves successful, there will eventually be many hotels operating on the protocol. In the eyes of some of Bluesky’s original supporters, though, the success of its social network has undermined its decentralized vision; its hotel grew so lively so fast that people didn’t venture off to build their own.

Aaron D. Goldman, a former Twitter engineer who worked for Bluesky in its first year, told me that hosting millions of accounts on Bluesky’s servers is costly and creates pressure for the platform to monetize its user base. “If we’re going to have huge hosting costs, then we need a toll booth somewhere,” he said. Graber has resisted replicating Twitter’s advertising-driven model, and Bluesky’s open-source structure obviates the possibility of licensing the platform’s content to train A.I. programs, as companies such as X and Reddit have done. Bluesky currently has only one revenue stream, from hosting accounts on custom domains, but Graber envisions sustaining the business by eventually charging subscription fees, and by monetizing its marketplace of custom tools—users would pay, say, five dollars a month for Blacksky, and Bluesky would take a cut. Still, Goldman said that Bluesky, even with “the bones of a good decentralized system,” has ended up with “the same incentives that led Jack to make Twitter very commercial.” Goldman helped design Bluesky’s protocol, but he and Graber later came to an impasse; he was let go in late 2022. (Graber ascribed their parting less to ideological differences than to Goldman’s lack of productivity; he was “not shipping like an engineer,” she said, and was “treating this more like a research project.”)

Last May, Dorsey revealed that he’d left his seat on Bluesky’s board. In an interview, he complained that Bluesky was “repeating all the mistakes” that Twitter had made, becoming “a company with V.C.s and a board.” He recommended Nostr, an obscure “censorship-resistant” social protocol to which he had donated five million dollars. Graber told me that Dorsey’s departure actually “freed up” the company somewhat. Some prospective users had grumbled that Bluesky was still the pet project of a billionaire; without Dorsey’s involvement the allegation was moot.

Even on the decentralized internet, founders are not above competing for the primacy of their tools. Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, told me that last year he and Graber discussed a collaboration that would have allowed their two protocols to interoperate, but each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol. Rochko did not see the point in Mastodon using AT Protocol, given that Bluesky already dominates it. “There isn’t really a lot of benefit to running your own app on it,” he said. “There would just be no place.” If the decentralized-social-media vision is realized, a single protocol might, like SMTP for e-mail, one day host an entire mainstream social internet: the next generation of Facebooks, Instagrams, and TikToks.

In January, Mallory Knodel, the executive director of the nonprofit Social Web Foundation, co-founded an initiative, Free Our Feeds, to foster the construction of more social networks on Bluesky’s protocol. The goal, as Knodel put it to me, was to “take them up on their offer to make it a truly decentralized platform.” Perhaps there will soon be a proliferation of other popular social apps operating alongside Bluesky. In the meantime, there are signs of growth. Flashes, an Instagram-like site that launched in February, has so far been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times. My favorite project besides Bluesky is a tiny site called PinkSea, a version of Japanese oekaki, bulletin boards for sharing digital drawings. I can log on to PinkSea using my Bluesky account information and post what I draw on both platforms simultaneously. In the Bluesky office, I pulled up PinkSea on Graber’s laptop, and she said that she had never seen it before. It is not a digital town square; with perhaps a few hundred active users, it’s barely even a digital dive bar. But its existence suggests the possibility of other creative projects on the protocol to come. Graber scrolled through the feed, which showcased both sophisticated anime figures and crude doodles, and her eyes lit up. “What excites me is new worlds emerging that I can’t imagine,” she said.

As the sun began to set, we walked from the Bluesky office to a pub. Graber, who doesn’t drink, settled into a dark nook and ordered a non-alcoholic Guinness. As Bluesky has become more mainstream, Graber has asserted herself more pointedly as a nemesis of social media’s Old Guard. For an appearance at South by Southwest in March, she wore a custom T-shirt that parodied one of Zuckerberg’s own design. Where his is emblazoned with the phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a riff on the Latin “either a Caesar or nothing,” hers read “mundus sine caesaribus”—“a world without Caesars.” (The company started selling the shirts for forty dollars apiece and made more money in a day than it had in two years of selling domains.) In Bluesky’s founding documents, taking a lesson from Twitter’s history, Graber introduced a slogan: “The company is a future adversary.” In other words, they must design their platform today in such a way that, even if new leadership eventually jettisons their guiding principles, the thing they’ve created will remain impossible to abuse.

Graber seemed almost to welcome the idea that Bluesky’s legion of thirty million-plus users could someday disband; if people migrated elsewhere on the protocol tomorrow, it would only prove the viability of her vision. “Every centralized system faces the problem of succession, because leadership changes, and you eventually get someone not smart or not good,” she said. “Then users can vote with their feet, because they have their relationships and their data and their identity. Somebody else can come along and say, ‘Hey, I’m doing it better. Come over here.’ ”

[slimetutorialanalysis]

1. Introduction: Slime Tutorials and the Musical Theatre Fandom on Tumblr

Musical theatre exists in a strange meridian:

It's too extravagant for people who don't enjoy live performances, but it's too commercialized for theatre-goers.

Tickets (especially to Broadway and West End shows) are ludicrously expensive, so all its biggest fans can't afford them.

It's incredibly localized and time-restrained (shows only run in one place for an allotted time) and yet fans remain interested despite when or where they are.

The industry relies on fan support, but discourages the circulation of the very content that attracts new fans.

How, then, are new fans entering the musical theatre community so consistently? The short answer: online fandom. The advent of social media allows for constant engagement, even if a show has stopped running. Online fandoms, however, are largely occupied by young people, many of whom have never seen their favourite shows live. How is this possible? Bootleg videos, shared on YouTube or online drives, allow for fans who can't access live theatre to experience the magic of a recorded show from their own homes. The catch? It's illegal. In order to bypass YouTube's copyright flagging system, many bootlegged recordings make up coded titles for their videos, with a common theme being the use of the words "Slime Tutorial."

This research will focus on the emergence of bootleg recordings of musical theatre, colloquially “Slime Tutorials” on YouTube, and their ties to the digital age/Web 2.0, the inaccessibility of theatre, and fandom culture. It also delves into the interplay between these bootlegs, online fandom, and their implications for the future of live theatre.

In “Tap, Tap, Tapping on the Glass”: Generation Z, Social Media and Dear Evan Hansen by Bethany Doherty, the notion of paratextuality is frequently mentioned when examining current trends within the musical theatre fan community. "The term paratext refers to materials that have been created to aid the promotion of a performance." When considering this definition outside of its traditional context of marketing (though this angle will be explored later), it's easy to make connections between paratextuality and bootlegs. While not created by the theatre company themselves, fan-curated video databases and other forms of online circulation are often how prospective fans discover new shows, thus intrinsically linking a show's success to its social currency through word-of-mouth marketing.

This model is particularly effective with younger audiences who can't afford tickets or travel, and thus the shows with a younger-leaning demographic are more likely to achieve online virality:

"Social media is facilitating this shift towards a more collaborative relationship between production and audience, as social media users become more apparent as content creators. Younger audiences delight in such interactions, which have led to critically engaged and creative responses to the musical. Widespread access to online, interactive platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr bring new opportunities for paratextual creativity and for re-experiencing the feelings and euphoria associated with the fleeting nature of performance. There is also something to be explored in the nature of sharing the fan-established paratextual creations for those who are yet to experience the performance moment. The relationship between fandoms is beginning to expand, in an attempt to replicate and share this ephemerality with those unable to witness the performance first-hand" (Doherty).

Tumblr is the ideal platform for this research, as despite its dwindling userbase, it has become the website of choice for niche fandoms and individually curated content, especially considering its lack of algorithm. It's also a multimedia blogging platform, which allows for photos, videos, gifs, text, audio, polls, and many more features which diversify the fan experience. This research pulls examples from all of these features. The following analysis posts include clickable links to all content referenced, which have all been previously "reblogged" by this account.

Let's embark on a journey through musical theatre bootlegs and how they affect the online fan experience!

Next>>

[mcwizardcz]

Blog Post #4 2/27

1.How are games exploiting racial stereotypes for profit? The gaming industry is a billion dollar industry whose primary audience are middle aged white men. Many games implement these stereotypes by making the criminal or villain a person who falls into a minority group. This character can have characteristics and physical features that are often exaggerated to perpetrate a certain stereotype. They will then make the character create a crime such as theft, rape, and terrorism. Exploiting racial stereotypes in video games can be harmful as games have a big audience. It also reinforces racial prejudices.

2.How is the internet impacting the way society sees race? The internet has slowly changed the way people perceive other races. The media is far more widespread and allows for disinformation. People have begun creating content on the basis of stereotypes. Big companies also use these stereotypes to generate more engagement which then leads to a bigger profit. Moreover, social media gives a false sense of anonymity to its user. This has led to the creation of digital blackface. Digital blackface is when people use images of primarily black people and post offensive stuff on social media.

3.What does white supremacy look like on social media and why is it harmful? The internet has made it easier for members of White supremacy groups to interact with one another and spread their hateful propaganda. White supremacists take advantage of the “anonymity” of the internet and spread hateful messages on social media. According to Daniels, in the “White Supremacy in the Digital Era” he states, that white supremacies online presence can be harmful in three ways which are its “easy access and global linkage, harm it may precipitate in real life, and the challenge it presents to honoring racial equality.”(Daniels 2009) These white supremacist groups are simply redefining the ways that people can demonstrate racial biases.

4.Is race a social construct or rooted in nature? The concept of race has been widely debated by people for many years. There have been many scientists that have struggled to prove their hypothesis with concrete biological evidence. People who argue that it is a social construct believe that race is a direct product of culture. Especially since it can change depending on which culture is talking about race. Race has historically been used as a tool to categorize humans and discriminate towards them.

References: Daniels, J. (2009). Cyber racism : white supremacy online and the new attack on civil rights. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. B. (2000). Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction. In B. E. Kolko, L. Nakamura, & G. B. Rodman (Eds.), Race in Cyberspace (pp. 1-13). Routledge.

[purechaoswitch]

Digital Community: A Case Study in Enchantment – The World of Tumblr

Welcome, wanderers of the mystical web. As you step into the crimson glow of this space, I—the Pure Chaos Witch—invite you to unravel the threads of an enchanting digital realm: Tumblr.

Tumblr is a unique platform, like a cauldron filled with creativity, individuality, and community. It is considered a place where creators and dreamers come together to share their work, spark ideas, and form unbreakable bonds that go beyond the ordinary.

After centuries of living and a lifetime of mastering chaos magic, I have gathered some valuable insights about the world and the community on Tumblr, which I have summarized in this post. So, what are you waiting for? Grab your spellbook and start taking notes, people ~~

The Veil of Anonymity: Pros and Cons

Anonymity on Tumblr serves as a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows users to express themselves freely without fear of judgment, fostering honest feedback and reducing social pressure on various topics. This veil can be empowering, enabling individuals to share their deepest thoughts and creations without revealing their true identities (Metraux, 2022).

However, this cloak of invisibility can also be misused and enable harmful behaviors. The option to send anonymous messages, for instance, has sometimes been abused, leading to instances of cyberbullying, trolling and spreading misinformation (Omernick and Sood, 2013). Moreover, artists may find their work stolen or republished without due credit, as anonymity can obscure the trail back to the original creator.

Casting the Circle: The Power of Digital Communities

A digital community is not unlike a coven - a sacred space where like-minded individuals gather, united by shared purpose and passion. The magic of Tumblr lies in how it brings together diverse voices into one single vibrant and creative community. From fan art to political discussions, it offers a safe space for us to create our own personal havens within the vast expanse of the internet (McCracken, 2017).

But the real question is: What makes Tumblr so distinct from other platforms? It must be the ethos of co-creation. Unlike traditional social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, Tumblr encourages reblogging, remixing, and reimagining content - an infinite loop of shared spells that amplify their power (Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Abidin, 2021).

The Evolution of Tumblr

Since its launch in 2007, Tumblr has evolved significantly. It began as a platform for microblogging and sharing multimedia, fostering a distinctive culture centered on creativity and fandoms. Over the years, features like reblogging and tagging were introduced, making it easier for users to engage and explore content. A major turning point in its evolution came with the rise of fandom culture, where Tumblr became the go-to hub for fan communities to thrive, collaborate, and share their passions.

(e.g., Supernatural, Sherlock, or Harry Potter fanbases).

However, policy changes, such as the 2018 ban on adult content, led to shifts in user dynamics and community structures (Sybert, 2021). Despite these changes, Tumblr continues to be a vibrant tapestry of diverse communities, adapting and evolving with the digital tides.

The Scarlet Insight

As a witch, I see Tumblr as a grimoire - each post a spell and each tag a rune. The platform thrives on the interplay of voices, where one person’s musings become the spark for another’s inspiration. Here, collaboration becomes empowerment, and anonymity offers great safety to express the unspoken (Nixon and Düsterhöft, 2018).

In this sacred digital space, the balance between individual expression and communal engagement fosters a unique kind of energy - a reminder that in unity, there is strength.

#BlackLivesMatter campaign or LGBTQ+ representation.

And, here are some notes and tips for our brilliant Tumblr creators (only if you are ready to start practicing magic on this platform *wink):

Tags: Think of tags as sigils. They guide others to your posts and make your content discoverable. You shall use them wisely.

Visuals: A picture paints a thousand spells. Accompany your words with captivating images or gifs to evoke a mood :)

Community: Engage, reblog, and interact as much as you can!!! The more you weave into the tapestry, the brighter your thread will shine.

As we walk hand in hand on this treacherous road, let us remember the core of Tumblr’s enchantment: the celebration of diversity, creativity, and unbridled passion. This is a space where magic thrives, and each of us is a sorcerer of our own making.

Until next time, or next week, my fellow mystics.

Your beloved chaos witch.

References

Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Abidin, C. (2021). Tumblr. Cambridge Medford, Ma Polity.

McCracken, A. (2017). Tumblr Youth Subcultures and Media Engagement. Cinema Journal, [online] 57(1), pp.151–161. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/44867867.

Metraux, J. (2022). How Tumblr Helps Youth Continue to Be Seen and Heard - JSTOR Daily. [online] JSTOR Daily. Available at: https://daily.jstor.org/how-tumblr-helps-youth-continue-to-be-seen-and-heard/?utm_source=chatgpt.com [Accessed 20 Jan. 2025].

Nixon, P.G. and DüsterhöftI.K. (2018). Sex in the Digital Age. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Omernick, E. and Sood, S.O. (2013). The Impact of Anonymity in Online Communities. 2013 International Conference on Social Computing. doi:https://doi.org/10.1109/socialcom.2013.80.

Sybert, J. (2021). The Demise of #NSFW: Contested Platform Governance and Tumblr’s 2018 Adult Content Ban. New Media & Society, p.146144482199671. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444821996715.

[siliconsignalsblog]

Configuring Zephyr: A Deep Dive into Kconfig

We presented The Zephyr Project RTOS and illustrated a personal best practice for beginning with "Zephyr" in an earlier blog post. A custom West manifest file is a great way to guarantee that your code is always at a known baseline when you begin development, as you saw in that blog post. Following the creation of your custom manifest file and the establishment of your baseline repositories using West, what comes next in your Zephyr journey?

Enabling particular peripherals, features, and subsystems is one of the first steps in putting embedded software into practice. Some MCU manufacturers, like STM32, Microchip, and TI, have tools in their IDEs that let developers add subsystems to their codebase and enable peripherals in their projects. These tools, however, are closely related to the MCUs that the vendors sell. Applying these tools' functionality to other MCUs is challenging, if not impossible.

However, we can enable a specific MCU subsystem or feature using a vendor-neutral mechanism provided by The Zephyr Project RTOS. For people like me who don't like GUIs, this mechanism can be used with a command line. The name of this utility is "Kconfig." I'll go over what Kconfig is, how it functions, and the various ways we can use it to incorporate particular features and subsystems into our Zephyr-based project in this blog post.

WHAT IS KCONFIG?

Kconfig is still utilized today as a component of the kernel compilation process, having been initially created as part of the Linux kernel. Kconfig has a particular grammar. Although fascinating, the specifics of how Kconfig is implemented in the Linux kernel are outside the purview of this blog post. Alternatively, if you're interested, you can read my article here: (https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/244/Kconfig-Deep-Dive), which walks through the Kconfig source code. However, after seeing an example, it's simple to become familiar with the format of a "Kconfig"—the slang term for a specific configuration option. The Kconfig system consists of three primary components.

First, there is the collection of Kconfig files scattered across different OS codebase directories. For example, if we look under "drivers/led" within the Zephyr codebase, we see a file named Kconfig with the following contents:  menuconfig LED     bool "Light-Emitting Diode (LED) drivers"     help      Include LED drivers in the system configurationif LED...config LED_SHELL    bool "LED shell"    depends on SHELL    help      Enable LED shell for testing.source "drivers/led/Kconfig.gpio"...endif # LED

Using the if statement, the line that begins with "menuconfig" tells the Kconfig system that "LED" contains a number of feature options that are only visible if the "LED" feature is enabled. The user can then activate the "LED_SHELL" option if the "LED" feature is enabled. The result of this configuration option is a Boolean, which determines whether this feature is enabled or disabled, as the line that follows shows. If a configuration option refers to a particular configuration parameter, the result can also be an integer in addition to a Boolean. The line that starts with "depends" indicates that in order for the "LED_SHELL" feature to be visible, the "SHELL" feature needs to be enabled. As a result, only after the "LED" and "SHELL" features have been enabled will the "LED_SHELL" feature become visible. A more detailed explanation of the feature can be found in the two lines that begin with "help". Last but not least, the final line before the "endif" lets us refer to additional Kconfig files, which aids in classifying components. As though they were copied and pasted, the features of the referenced file are present in the current file. It is crucial to remember that the path to "source" comes from the Zephyr codebase's root.

HOW SHOULD YOU USE KCONFIG?

A collection of applications that enable users to enable or disable the features listed in all Kconfig files make up the second component of the Kconfig infrastructure. Zephyr provides a Visual Studio Code extension that enables users to carry out this task with a graphical user interface. For command line enthusiasts like myself, the VS Code extension provides an alternative to utilizing a graphical user interface. In order to configure Zephyr appropriately, the extension can accept a file, which is the final component of the Kconfig infrastructure and contains a set of configuration options that can be turned on or off. The following snippet shows an example. CONFIG_BT=yCONFIG_BT_PERIPHERAL=yCONFIG_BT_GATT_CLIENT=yCONFIG_BT_MAX_CONN=1CONFIG_BT_L2CAP_TX_MTU=250CONFIG_BT_BUF_ACL_RX_SIZE=254

There is nothing complicated about the file format. "CONFIG_" appears at the start of each line, and then the configuration option's name. After the "=" symbol, the line either ends with a "y" to activate the feature or a "n" to deactivate it. In the example above, we configure the stack parameters and activate the Bluetooth stack in Zephyr along with specific stack features. "prj. conf," which contains user-defined features, is the default file in the majority of Zephyr-based applications.

 

CONCLUSION

The Zephyr Project RTOS provides a robust, vendor-neutral mechanism called the Kconfig infrastructure that allows us to fully configure our entire application. It can be used to control particular subsystems and peripherals within the MCU in addition to turning on or off individual stacks within the RTOS and setting configuration parameters.

Ready to bring your embedded systems to life with optimized configurations and robust solutions? We specialize in hardware design and software development tailored to your project needs. Whether you're configuring peripherals or diving deeper into Kconfig for your Zephyr-based applications, our experts are here to support you every step of the way.

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[channelsdotbiz]

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[emon-khalid]

The Evolution of Web 2.0

The Evolution of Web 2.0: Transforming the Internet Experience

The internet has come a long way since its inception, and one of the most significant milestones in its evolution is Web 2.0. This term, first coined in the early 2000s, represents the shift from static web pages to dynamic, user-driven platforms. With the rise of social media, user-generated content, and interactive online services, Web 2.0 has revolutionized the way we connect, communicate, and create.

What is Web 2.0?

In simple terms, Web 2.0 refers to the transformation of the web into a more interactive and collaborative space. Unlike its predecessor, Web 1.0, which primarily consisted of static websites where users could only consume content, Web 2.0 allows users to actively participate in the creation and sharing of information. This paradigm shift has led to the rise of social networks, blogs, wikis, and other platforms that encourage collaboration and community building.

Key Features of Web 2.0:

User-Generated Content: Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia have made it easier than ever for users to create and share their own content, whether it's videos, articles, or social media posts.

Social Networking: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are prime examples of Web 2.0's emphasis on building online communities where people can connect, share experiences, and collaborate.

Interactive Interfaces: Technologies like AJAX and APIs enable more dynamic, responsive web pages that allow real-time updates without refreshing the page. This has greatly enhanced the user experience, particularly on social media platforms.

Rich User Experiences: Web 2.0 applications are designed with the user in mind, making it easy to navigate, interact with, and personalize their online experiences.

The Impact of Web 2.0 on Digital Culture

Web 2.0 has empowered individuals to have a voice in the digital world. Blogs, forums, and social media platforms have democratized content creation, giving anyone with an internet connection the ability to publish their thoughts, ideas, and creations to a global audience.

For businesses, this shift has created new opportunities for engagement with consumers. Brands are now able to interact with customers directly through social media platforms, fostering a sense of community and loyalty.

Moreover, the rise of influencers and content creators on platforms like YouTube and Instagram has changed the landscape of marketing. People trust recommendations from peers and influencers more than traditional advertising, and brands have quickly adapted to this new form of communication.

What’s Next After Web 2.0?

As technology continues to advance, discussions around the next phase of the web—often referred to as Web 3.0—have begun. While Web 2.0 focuses on user interaction and community-driven content, Web 3.0 promises to take things even further by incorporating artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decentralized technologies like blockchain. In this new era, the web could become even more personalized, secure, and user-centric.

Conclusion

Web 2.0 has truly transformed the way we interact with the internet, bringing about an age of collaboration, connection, and creativity. As we look forward to the future, it's exciting to imagine how the web will continue to evolve and shape our digital experiences.

What are your thoughts on the future of the web? Share in the comments below!

For more details on the history and significance of Web 2.0, check out these sources:

The History of Web 2.0

Understanding Web 2.0 Concept

[omgmacia-blog]

AI: The Missing Piece of the Memecoin Puzzle

Once upon a time, in the wild west of cryptocurrency, a memecoin rose to stardom overnight thanks to a hilarious viral meme. It was the talk of the town, everyone was buying, and the price was skyrocketing. But just as quickly as it rose, it crashed and burned, leaving investors holding the bag. Sounds familiar?

These wild fluctuations and the all-too-common rug pulls in the memecoin world have left many investors wary. But what if there was a way to bring some order to this chaotic market? Enter AI, the digital superhero we didn't know we needed.

Memecoins

More Than Just a Joke Memecoins, born from the internet's love of funny images and catchphrases, have taken the crypto world by storm. Their appeal lies in their community-driven nature, the thrill of the unknown, and a dash of FOMO (fear of missing out). However, the unregulated nature of memecoins has led to a host of problems, including scams, pump-and-dump schemes, and a general lack of transparency.

AI

The Memecoin Savior Artificial intelligence, with its ability to process vast amounts of data and identify patterns, is poised to revolutionize the memecoin space.

Data-Driven Decisions

AI can analyze market trends, social sentiment, and on-chain data to identify potential red flags and predict price movements.

Community Building

By understanding communities user preferences and behaviors, AI can foster stronger, more engaged around memecoins, leading to increased loyalty and longevity.

Content Creation

AI-powered tools can generate creative and engaging content, such as memes, videos, and articles, to keep communities entertained and informed.

BUSAI: The Future of Memecoins

BUSAI is a new kind of memecoin that leverages AI to address the challenges facing the industry. In the often chaotic world of memecoins, BUSAI stands out for its commitment to security, trust, and community.

Uncompromising Security

With AI acting as a vigilant guardian, BUSAI is able to detect and prevent fraudulent activities, such as rug pulls and hacks. This level of security ensures that investors can feel confident in their investments.

Building Trust

By prioritizing transparency and accountability, BUSAI is building a reputation for trust within the crypto community. The AI-driven governance model ensures that decisions are made in a fair and equitable manner.

A Strong and Supportive Community

The BUSAI community is more than just a group of investors; it's a thriving ecosystem where members can connect, collaborate, and learn. AI is used to foster this community by providing personalized recommendations, organizing events, and facilitating discussions.

The integration of AI into the memecoin space is a game-changer. By providing greater transparency, security, and community engagement, AI can help to legitimize memecoins and attract a wider range of investors. BUSAI is at the forefront of this movement, offering a vision of a more sustainable and equitable future for the memecoin industry. So, are you ready to join the AI-powered memecoin revolution? BUSAI is more than just a meme; it's a Community.

Source: Compiled

The BUSAI Official Channel: Website | Twitter | Telegram 

[jaycrr]

How does the lack of ethnic representation in digital/online spaces contribute to the digital divide

The lack of ethnic representation in these spaces limits access for African American and also Hispanic communities. Although these communities have similar income levels and education, these two groups face significant disadvantages when it comes to access to technology because of racial factors. Lack of representation in content and communities can also discourage those with internet access because of them viewing the web as irrelevant to them, their experiences and even cultural background. A repeating cycle of exclusion that keeps on reinforcing social issues.

2. How does the creation of ethnicity based online communities, like for example AsianAvenue.com, reflect the strengthening potential of virtual homeplaces for marginalized groups?

The creation of ethnicity based online spaces like AsianAvenues.com reflects the empowering potential of virtual homeplaces by giving marginalized group spaces to connect, express identities that are shared, and one most importantly, build relationships through common cultural backgrounds. It allows users to create a sense of belonging and know that they have people to support them. By focusing on race and ethnicity, communities empower members to foster cultural pride.

3. How do ethnic online communities create a sense of identity and support for their members?

Ethnic online communities create a sense of identity and support by allowing users to have a digital space, where members with the same cultural background connect in personal and impact ways. These spaces/platforms allow people to engage in conversation, share memories and participate in events that reflect their cultural background, something that is not true/seen in other platforms. By having this environment that is tailored to them, it helps reinforce identity, ultimately creating a virtual homeplace where members feel valid. By there being a priority in your cultural background interactions, these types of spaces promote a supportive space that allows users to engage more confidently and openly.

4. How did online spaces like those involved with gamergate show both a supportive and conflictive side of virtual spaces?

Online spaces involved in Gamergate showed both support and conflictive sides of digital/virtual spaces. On one hand, these types of communities offered people to feel welcomed, it was where people could discuss gaming culture, and where people had a shared identity. On the other hand, it could be conflictive when there are opposing views in the air. People argued over harassment and gender rules that led to a divided community ultimately showing how online spaces bring people together when critical social issues are in the picture.

Hathaway, Jay. "What is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks".

McLaine, Steven. Ethnic Online Communities

[xoxovalerie-c]

Blog Post Week 2: Due 9/6

How can modern social media platforms better amplify diverse voices to foster a more inclusive environment? 

What strategies can be employed to ensure that stories are being given a fair representation?

Social media has a long and evolving history, continuously shaping and impacting society in numerous ways. In the book, News for all the people: The story of race and the American media, by Joseph Torres and Juan Gonzalez. Discussed how racial segregation has been a prominent topic in media coverage. Writers would publish their works with the intent of reaching a targeted audience. For instance, if the general population was white people, stories portraying non-whites as dangerous were often propagated to justify and enforce new government policies. It’s important to note that the spread of such news often led to changes that were designed only to protect one specific racial group. Minority groups were marginalized, so they decided to take action by starting their own small newsletter businesses to speak out about the issues they were facing. This made a significant impact, as people from other groups began reading these newsletters for alternative perspectives. Today, this is one of the reasons so many newsletters exist. In the industry, professionals are taught the importance of telling stories that resonate nationwide, as it helps bring greater attention to important issues. In the hope of creating an inclusive environment on social media.

How does the concept of critique of domination and exploitation described by Fuchs manifest in the business practices?

Critical thinking has been essential for social media because it helps users spot fake information and avoid being misled. It also allows for social users to understand how recycled information works because media ownership is a huge thing. Once users see information in numerous sites they confirm the information as factual. It enables people to have a more meaningful and respectful discussion by questioning and considering different viewpoints. In the article, Social Media a critical introduction, by Christian Fuchs, mentions the different roles that critical thinking sets up for media. One dimension of critical thinking theory is critique of domination and exploitation. Domination means that one group benefits at the expense of others and has the means of violence at hand that they can use for upholding the situation where the one benefits at the expense of others. Exploitation is a specific form of domination, in which one group controls property and has the means to force others to work so that they produce goods or property that they do not own themselves, but they owning class controls (Fuchs, 2014). I think Instagram is a clear example of this theory in action. It offers a variety of features similar to those found on  other platforms—such as stories like Snapchat, videos like YouTube, and short clips called Reels like Tik Tok. However, it can be likely that Instagram can collect users data and sella it for targeted advertising. Users may not even realize their content is being used for marketing purposes and do not receive compensation for it.

How can increasing awareness of domination and exploitation help users today?

Today it affects the world as many of us are users of many different platforms. It can help us be more informed on how our privacy is being invaded or how we are choosing to put it out there. Overall, this awareness helps us navigate the digital landscape more responsibly and advocate for better practices in social media and digital content creation.

Gonzalez, J., & Torres, J. (2021). News for all the people. Power and Inequality, 223–231. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315201511-28

Fuchs, C. (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446270066