camwyn

[camwyn]

Surviving the Tumblr Hellfire

A collection of posts with advice for getting you and your blog through whatever this mess is.

Check if your blog has been incorrectly flagged as NSFW (and if it has, get it unflagged before Dec 17th)

See all your blog posts that have been flagged (because tumblr didn’t feel the need to notify you?)

New posts not showing up on your blog and how to fix it (you have not been muted)

Exporting your blog (Tumblr)

Backing up your blog (to WordPress)

Alternative way to backup your blog

Masterpost of Tumblr alternatives

Complaining to Tumblr about this mess

Advice for those who’ve never dealt with a fandom purge before

All of these posts link back to original posts of other blogs, I mostly made this for myself but decided to make it shareable, please respect the following:

If you click through to ANY of these posts, even if you don’t use them, reblog them individually if you’re going to like/reblog this post. 

Share and add to this post if you can <3

[camwyn]

So if anyone’s interested,

I got a Pillowfort account. It’s at https://www.pillowfort.io/camwyn .

I’ll be blundering around there for a while and posting there instead of here, although I may continue to respond to people who ask about the temperature post. Not likely to delete things here, I’m too lazy for that.

see ya, @staff

[camwyn]

@bunnyswanson :

ROOM TEMPERATURE??? 24°??? are u TRYING to SWEAT ME OUT 

*sigh* No, my apologies for that; the short version is that my high school physics teacher, and the textbook we used, straight up said “If a problem says something takes place at ‘room temperature’, use 24 degrees C”.

I do not know where the textbook was written and I do not think Sister Mary Valitzski was from anywhere much farther south than Pennsylvania, but that’s the number we were given to use as room temperature.

A temperature chart for my fellow Americans who can’t do the Celsius-Fahrenheit equation from memory and for people in the civilized countries who’re too busy making fun of Fahrenheit to do the conversions themselves.

[camwyn]

@bernard-black-books replied to your photo post    

51C is not a common Aussie temp like you'd die wtf

You’re quite right, it’s not common at all. It’s just that I wanted to find a world record high temperature from somewhere other than the United States. I had grown up being taught that the other highest temperature was one recorded at 'Aziziyah, Libya, but when I tried to verify that one I found that the World Meteorological Organization had decided that the record there was no longer considered a valid one. The next highest temperature considered valid was 50.7 degrees C, recorded in Oodnadatta, South Australia, in 1960. So that’s why 51 degrees C means you’re in Australia on this chart.

A temperature chart for my fellow Americans who can’t do the Celsius-Fahrenheit equation from memory and for people in the civilized countries who’re too busy making fun of Fahrenheit to do the conversions themselves.

[camwyn]

Quick edit, there’s some specific lots affected. The list of affected lot codes can be found here:

https://kimberlyclark.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/kimberly-clark-announces-voluntary-recall-u-kotexr-sleekr

“The recall is limited to specific lots of U by Kotex® Sleek® Tampons, Regular Absorbency, that were manufactured between October 7, 2016 and October 16, 2018 and distributed between October 17, 2016 and October 23, 2018. Consumers can identify this product by looking for specific lot numbers found on the bottom of the package. A full list of recalled lot numbers is available on the U by Kotex® website. Retailers have been alerted to remove the recalled lot numbers from shelves and post a notification in their stores. “

Heads up to my tampon wearing friends in the US and Canada.

[camwyn]

[camwyn]

Someone I’ve known for 20+ years just posted this on my Facebook wall and I’ve never felt more seen in my entire life.

[camwyn]

@yarnersan replied to your photo post: 

Slight correction, 37 degrees Celsius is already a slight temperature. 36 is the healthy human body temperature.

Erm.

Admittedly, there’s this:

However, please note that 97.7 F = 36.5 C, still higher than 36. Also, according to the info in the article above, healthy body temperature can and does vary by gender, age, and time of day.

36 may be an acceptable temperature for certain individuals at certain times of day, but 37 is the answer that schoolteachers will be looking for.

A temperature chart for my fellow Americans who can’t do the Celsius-Fahrenheit equation from memory and for people in the civilized countries who’re too busy making fun of Fahrenheit to do the conversions themselves.

[camwyn]

OneBlood is conducting a worldwide search for extremely rare blood needed by a 2-year-old south Florida child battling cancer.

This very rare blood type occurs only in Indian, Pakistani and Iranian people. Please share if you, or anyone you know, might be able to help.

PLEASE BOOST THIS POST. COULD SAVE THIS LITTLE GIRL’S LIFE.

[camwyn]

Once, I encountered the funny story of an AI image descriptor with a sheep obsession. It had been trained on pictures of fields of sheep. Therefore, it tagged anything in a field as 'sheep', including an empty field, because they work on statistical probability. Therefore, it thinks "ah, a field! there's probably a sheep here." (It's a bit more complicated but basically that.) It also couldn't recognise sheep in places that weren't fields, such as petrol stations or barns. [cont]

Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?

this really does sound like an episode of black mirror

[camwyn]

I’ve opened the message box for the morning. Send me a message if you’re sad and I will send you pictures of Refurb in the hopes that it helps you out.

[camwyn]

lachlanthesane :

Would that just be polished coral? As in, the stuff from the ocean? I know it used to be very popular for carved jewellery and it's usually orange-red.

Possibly, but the thing is that polished coral is still pretty popular in jewelry:

... and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it referred to as ‘coralite’. (Side note: I just searched Fire Mountain for ‘coralite’ and got nothing; I searched Etsy for ‘coralite’ and got a whole lot of Coraline merchandise because they didn’t have any results for coralite and thought I must’ve typoed.) I’ve seen ‘fossil coral’, sure, but that’s brown. If coralite is somebody’s reference to polished coral, it might be a name that’s gone out of style and isn’t as commonly used any more.

Fantastic resource on the stones and their various fakeries. I don't mind if i'm not paying jade prices for not-jade, and if fake stones look nice that's all I want, but the backstory is fascinating. Can you tell me if you've ever heard of coralite? It's orange and reddish. I'm one hundred percent it's fake something but my searches were inconclusive.

I honestly can’t say I’ve ever heard of the stuff, alas.

[camwyn]

Fantastic resource on the stones and their various fakeries. I don't mind if i'm not paying jade prices for not-jade, and if fake stones look nice that's all I want, but the backstory is fascinating. Can you tell me if you've ever heard of coralite? It's orange and reddish. I'm one hundred percent it's fake something but my searches were inconclusive.

I honestly can't say I've ever heard of the stuff, alas.

[camwyn]

Tumblr and flagging, an overview

To start this off, I’m pretty sure this post is going to be flagged because I’m using 1 image that I know gets flagged on its own. I do wonder what score this post is going to get though. (Update: this post scores 0.07455623894929886, aka exactly the same as the image below on its own.)

The following image got sourced from @coeurdastronaute http://coeurdastronaute.tumblr.com/post/179394494479/essays-in-existentialism-ice-and-fire-ii

Quick recap if you’ve missed my previous technical musings on the content of flagging and explicit content: - For each post, tumblr keeps check of a number of variables. One of these is the NSFW score for each post. The score is a value between 0 and 1, and predicts how likely it is that the post is NSFW. for example 0.048 means it has 4.8% probability of being NSFW. In case you wonder, yes that’s enough to get flagged. - Other variables that are stored on the post are checks if a post is NSFW (yes or no), if a post is NSFW based on the score (yes or no; I’m not sure what the exact difference is, as I’ve only seen them both being no or both being yes), the classification of the post, and here it’s getting interesting, because a classification of ‘explicit’ means it gets flagged, and ‘clean’ means it won’t get flagged. Easy as that.

Very early this morning I wrote a small tool that lets you see the score and the other variables for the last 10 posts of any user. Instructions are meagre, but the tool is located here.

The above story by Coeur got the following scores: post type: text is NSFW based on score: false is NSFW: false classification: explicit score: 0.07757801562547684

As you can see, the score for the post was 0.077…, otherwise known as 7.7% probability that the post is/might contain NSFW content. I did some more testing. First, I copied all the text of the fic, and put it in a new post and had it tested. The score was 0, and classification “clean”. So the text was not the problem. Next I posted the image as both a text post and a photo post for comparison. Both returned the same result: not NSFW, classification explicit and a score of 0.074…

The next step was do a comparison of image moderation tools. I’ve prior experience with Microsoft’s cognitive API, in fact I’ve used it to create a porn blog blocker that would screen new followers and block them if they were a suspected porn blog (unless I was already following them). Here are the scores for several major image moderation providers: Microsoft cognitive: “adult”: {    "isAdultContent": false,    "isRacyContent": false,    "adultScore": 0.023388456553220749,    "racyScore": 0.037842851132154465  } Google Cloud Vision: “safeSearchAnnotation”: {    "adult": “UNLIKELY”,    "spoof": “POSSIBLE”,    "medical": “UNLIKELY”,    "violence": “UNLIKELY”,    "racy": “LIKELY”  } Amazon Rekognition failed to find anything in the image that could be suggestive or explicit adult. Since there was nothing found, there weren’t confidence scores given either.

The last one I tested is far less known: it is called open_nsfw and was actually created by Oath/Yahoo itself, which based on the scores above makes it the most probable to be in use at Tumblr. There is a lot of information not known about it, but here’s a description with references to the paper. I downloaded the model that they released, didn’t fine tune it, and ran it over the above image: NSFW score:   0.02013823203742504

So in conclusion, I have absolutely no clue how Tumblr is able to come up with a score of 0.077 for this image, if the highest score found by other content moderation providers is at 3.7%, barely half of the score tumblr gives it. And that’s not even the actual problem, because this just brings me to the next part.

As I mentioned before, each post gets a couple variable flags for content, including “is_nsfw_based_on_score”. The interesting part here is that this flag appears to only be true, or “yes” if you prefer, when the score is above 0.98. So even when the moderation is 97% certain the image is NSFW, it won’t be flagged as NSFW. However, if your post is only having a score of 0.048… the lowest I’ve seen so far, equaling to 4.8% probability of it being NSFW, it will be flagged as explicit. Keep in mind that the Yahoo paper had the following paragraph:

Our general purpose Caffe deep neural network model (Github code) takes an image as input and outputs a probability (i.e a score between 0-1) which can be used to detect and filter NSFW images. Developers can use this score to filter images below a certain suitable threshold based on a ROC curve for specific use-cases, or use this signal to rank images in search results.

I know that it got pretty technical there, but what they’re saying is that the score on itself is just as-is: a score, a probability. Tumblr’s implementation of the flagging of content however appears to have all content with a score higher than 0 as flagged. I’m not sure if any of you have seen the post about deep learning and unexpected results recently (http://psychopathic-bandaid.tumblr.com/post/180751390174/squiddity3-rubitrightintomyeyes), but tumblr managed to one-up this entire post with the new flagging: Tumblr doesn’t set a threshold, they just decide that if their content moderation says that a post could potentially have a more than 0% chance that content is NSFW, it will flag the post, and that’s it.

Machine learning 101: Even if you’ve created a model that is working pretty decent, you’ve to figure out how to use it. As for tumblr, your model might work decently, the way you use it does not. If content is 90% likely to be NSFW, please flag it as such. If it does not even reach the 30% yeah it’s likely not going to be explicit.

Actual example of a post captioned “caught giving daddy a blowjob”, featuring a single image of a topless woman holding a man’s penis in her hand, the man just wearing a tshirt and socks and that’s it. I got this from an old log file, old meaning September this year, so before the flagging got introduced. As a result I only have the score and NSFW values. The score for this post was 0.92, otherwise known as 92% probability that the post has/is NSFW content. The conclusion with the “is_nsfw” and “is_nsfw_based_on_score” flags was that it was not NSFW. I’ve seen other posts with a score of 0.99 and 1.0 finally getting flagged as NSFW, however, I haven’t seen a single post with a score below 0.98 being marked as NSFW.

Thus concludes this long overview on tumblr’s new flagging system.

@staff Watch and learn

[camwyn]

So I made a tweet about how Maciej Ceglowski (aka Pinboard guy) should consult with fandom on how to build a new fandom platform inclusive of not just text, but images and multimedia. 

And then Maciej DMed me and said if fandom (I realize this does not include all parts of fandom) can get a consensus spec of what this platform should consist of, he’ll see what we can do. I have split the document into requirements and nice to haves. I know I’m not going to get everything, but hopefully this is a good enough start to get the ball rolling.

[camwyn]

Chanukah 2018

For most North Americans, Chanukah is a sort of “us vs. them” affair: the foe wanted to obliterate us (or, depending on who’s telling the story, our faith or our culture or our way of worship) but the Jews of that time were unexpectedly, even perhaps miraculously, able to resist the enemy’s dastardly plans and to chase the minions of the evil king back to wherever it was they came from before they could bring their despicable plan to fruition. Doesn’t that sound about right?

Like all (or at least most) oversimplifications, this one is not entirely incorrect. There really was a King Antiochus on the throne of the Seleucid Empire—the Greek-speaking kingdom with its capital at Antioch in today’s Syria that ruled over the Land of Israel in the second century BCE—and he did promote the eradication of traditional Jewish norms of worship even in as sacred a space as the Jerusalem Temple to make them more universal and less ethnically distinct. There was every reason to expect the ragtag group of guerilla warriors who gathered around the Maccabees—who seem to have come out of nowhere to do battle with Antiochus’s legions—there really was every reason to expect them to go down to defeat, yet they were successful and managed against all odds to expel the king’s armies from what was in those days, after all, a province of his own empire and—even more unimaginably—to wrest some version of autonomy from the central government and thus to install a kind of self-rule that lasted for almost a century. And if the darker part of the story—the one we generally ignore featuring large numbers of Jewish people more than eager to make Jewish ways less particularistic and more in step with the great cultural tide of the day (called Hellenism, literally “Greekishism,” because of its origins in the culture of classical Greece) and very happy to have the king’s support in their effort to reform the Jerusalem cult and make it more appealing to themselves and to outsiders looking in—if that part is generally ignored, that’s probably all for the best. Who wants an ambiguous yontif anyway? Much better to stick with the Hebrew School version and not to stir the pot unnecessarily! We don’t have enough to deal with as it is?

This week, therefore, I would like not to talk about the well-known part of the Chanukah story and its key players at all. (Shelter Rockers will hear me speak about that part of things in shul on Shabbat anyway.) Instead, I’d like to start the story in media res and begin to say why Chanukah really does still matter by introducing a personality that almost no readers will ever have heard of, one Judah Aristobulus.

And here he is, at least as Guillaume Rouillé, the inventor of the paperback, imagined him in sixteenth-century Lyons. 

But who was he really? And why do I want to start my peculiar, start-in-the-middle version of the Chanukah story with him of all people?

Everybody has heard of Judah the Maccabee and most know that he had several brothers as well as a famous father. But what exactly happened to them all—that is the part no one knows. And more’s the shame, that—because the most profound part of the story is precisely its least-well-known part.

Jerusalem was taken in the year 164 BCE, but the fighting continued for years and, indeed, Judah himself died in battle in 160 and was replaced as commander-in-chief of the Jewish army by his brother Jonathan, who at the time was already serving as High Priest. Jonathan was as much a politician as a general or a priest, however…and he made a fair number of enemies by attempting to transform an autonomous Judah within the larger Seleucid empire into a truly independent state by signing treaties with any number of foreign countries. He lasted for almost two decades, but was finally assassinated by someone who apparently found his politics intolerable and was succeeded by his brother Simon, the last of the original Maccabee brothers.  The inner politics of the day is interesting enough, but what fascinates me in particular is the way that the Maccabees, who started out only wishing to prevent the Seleucid emperor from disrupting traditional Jewish life, became more and more intoxicated with the power they saw themselves able to seize. Judah was a kind of a general. Jonathan was a general and High Priest. And Simon convened a national synod that formally recognized him as Commander-in-Chief, High Priest, and National Leader. Most important of all, he negotiated a treaty with the Roman Senate that cut the Seleucids out of the action entirely and acknowledged solely the Maccabees as the legitimate rulers of their land.

The story only gets bloodier. Simon was murdered in 134 BCE by his son-in-law, a fellow named Ptolemy, and thus became the first Maccabee to be succeeded not by a brother by his own son, a man known to history as John Hyrcanus. In his day, the war with the Seleucids flared up again. The details are very confusing, but the basic story is simply that the Seleucids took back all of Israel except for Jerusalem itself, then abandoned it all when Antiochus VII died in 129. Indeed, as the Seleucid empire slowly fell apart, John Hyrcanus embarked on a military campaign to seize what he could of the adjacent world. And he was successful too, conquering a dizzying number of neighboring states, in the course of at least one of which campaigns, the one against the Idumeans (the latter-day Edomites), he forced an entire nation to convert to Judaism. Most important of all, he cemented the nation’s relationship with Rome, agreeing to work only in the best interests of the Roman Republic in exchange for their agreement to recognize Judah as a fully independent state. He established relations with Egypt and Athens too, thus making Judah into a real player on the international scene. And then he died in 104 BCE, one of the very few Maccabees to die of natural causes.

His eldest son was Judah Aristobulus. The original plan was for Judah to become high priest and for his mother to become the political leader of the nation. Judah Aristobulus (also sometimes called Aristobulus I) found that irritating, however, so he imprisoned his mother and allowed her to starve to death in jail. Then, for good measure, he also imprisoned all his own siblings but one. (He had that one killed eventually too.) And it was this Judah Aristobulus who, not content with just being High Priest, commander-in-chief, and political leader, also named himself king.

It didn’t last. He himself didn’t last—he was sickly to start with and then, after one single year on the throne of Israel, he too died and was replaced by his oldest brother, known to the Jews as King Yannai and to the rest of the world as Alexander Jannaeus.

It’s easy to get confused by the details. I’ve read the part of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews that covers the Maccabean years—the only sustained, detailed narrative covering the entire period—a dozen times. It couldn’t be easier to get lost in the forest amidst so many different trees—and the fact that there are so many different people with the same names only makes it more confusing. But when you step back and look at the larger picture, you see something remarkable…and deeply relevant to our modern world.

The Maccabees—known to history more regularly as the Hasmoneans—started out as highly and finely motivated as possible. They had an emperor ruling over them who held their national culture in disdain, so the Maccabees rose up and somehow won a measure of autonomy for their people that most definitely included the right to run their own cult and to pursue their own spiritual agenda. But the power they won on the battlefield corrupted them from within, leading them not only not to act in the nation’s best interests but to cross a truly sacred line when Judah Aristobulus finally broke with the very religious tradition his family came to prominence to protect by declaring himself king.

He wasn’t from the tribe of Judah. (The Maccabees were priests, so of the tribe of Levi.) He wasn’t descended from David. He had no legitimate or even illegitimate claim to the throne. But he took it anyway…and that act of self-aggrandizing sacrilege set the stage within just a few short decades for a massively blood civil war undertaken by two of his nephews who were vying for the crown, which disaster opened the door to the Romans who saw in it an opportunity to occupy Judah and make it part of their empire, which they did in 63 BCE. The next time Jews managed to declare in independent Jewish state in the Land of Israel was in 1948 CE, a cool 2011 years later.

It is never a good thing when a nation’s leaders see in public service not a way to contribute to the welfare of the nation but an avenue for self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment, and self-promotion. The Maccabean descendants became wealthy and powerful. They hobnobbed with the delegates from the world’s most important nations, including the world’s sole super-power at the time, the Roman Empire. They reduced even something as innately sacred as the office of High Priest to a mere stepping stone capable of leading to still greater authority. As they became more and more entangled in their own inner-familial struggles, they relied increasingly on generals who themselves had a wide variety of personal agendas to pursue. And then they crossed the line and, in an act of spiritual madness, made themselves the kings of Israel despite the fact that they had no justifiable claim to the crown.

Public service is a burden and a privilege. Our greatest political leaders have always been people who saw that clearly and who allowed themselves to be saddled with the millstone of public office out of a sense of personal honor and deep patriotism. We have had American leaders that like—Abraham Lincoln, I believe, was such a man—and our nation is the richer and better for their service. But the larger story of Chanukah—the one we never tell in Hebrew School—has its own deeply monitory lesson to teach: that greatness in governing is a function always of personal character…and never one of mere opportunity.

[camwyn]

Dear people planning to move to pillowfort:

As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.

Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that. 

Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult. 

If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there. 

If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably. 

We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more. 

Tumblr once upon a time was what Pillowfort is today, but this time, let’s make sure Pillowfort can stay independent from mega corporations.