its-actually-withered - Tumblr blog

[its-actually-withered]

Hey everyone, so I'm making the move to PillowFort. I've only been there three days but I find that it's easier to engage with what people are posting which I like. It's definitely a social networking site as opposed to social media.

Anyway, if you aren't on there and can't do the $5 sign up, I've got invites.

Even if you don't want to join another site, my fort is accessible to everyone.

If you're already there, hi - hello, let's hang out! I've created an ichiruki community as well as a writeblr community on there, and while for now, its just me, I'm actually really excited about it.

[its-actually-withered]

Why do people keep recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative, when Dreamwidth and Tumblr are so different?

To be flat-out honest, it's because Dreamwidth has so many things that Tumblr users say they want, even if it's also lacking a lot of features that Tumblr users have come to love:

Dreamwidth has incredibly lax content hosting rules. I'd say that it's slightly more restrictive than AO3, but only just slightly, and only because AO3's abuse team has been so overwhelmed and over-worked. Otherwise, the hosting policies are pretty similar. You want to go nuts, show nuts? You can do that on Dreamwidth.

In fact, Dreamwidth is so serious about "go nuts, show nuts", it gave up the ability to accept transactions through PayPal in 2009 to protect our ability to do that. (It's also one reason why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app: Dreamwidth will never be beholden to Apple's content rules this way.)

Dreamwidth cares about your privacy; it doesn't sell your data, and barely collects any to begin with. As far as I'm aware, it only collects what it needs to run the site. The owners have also spoken out on behalf of internet privacy many times, and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

No ads. Ever. Period. They mean it. Dreamwidth is entirely user funded.

Posts viewed in reverse chronological order; no algorithm, opt-in or otherwise. No algorithm at all. No "For You" or "Suggested" page. You still entirely create and curate your own experience.

The ability to make posts that only your "mutuals", or even only a specific subset of your "mutuals", can see. Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie, Clyde, Butch, and Cassidy? You can do that! Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie and Butch, but Clyde and Cassidy can't see shit? You can do that, too!

The owners have forsworn NFTs and the blockchain in general. Not as big a worry now as it was even a year ago, but still good to know!

We are explicitly the customers of Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth wants to make us happy, so any changes they make (and they do make changes) are made with us in mind, and after exploring as many possibilities as they can.

Dreamwidth is very transparent about their policies and changes. If you want to know why they're making a specific change, or keeping or getting rid of a feature, they will tell you. You don't have to find out ten months later that they're locked into a contract to keep it for a year (cough cough Tumblr Live cough cough).

So those are some things that Tumblr users would probably love about Dreamwidth.

Another reason Dreamwidth keeps being recommended is that a significant portion of the Age 30+ crowd spent a lot of earlier fandom years on a site known as LiveJournal. Dreamwidth may not be much like Tumblr, but it it started out as a code fork of LiveJournal, so it will be very familiar to anyone who spent any time there. Except better.

Finally, we're recommending Dreamwidth because some of the things that Tumblr users want are just... not going to happen on the web as it is now. Image hosting is the big one for this. Maybe in the future, the price of data will be much cheaper, and Dreamwidth will be able to host as much as we all want for a pittance that a fraction of the userbase will happily pay for everyone, but right now that's just not possible.

Everywhere you want to go that hosts a lot of images will either be running lots of ads, selling your data, or both.

Dreamwidth knows how much it costs to host your data, and has budgeted for that. They are hosting within their means, within our means.

Dreamwidth is the closest thing we may ever get to AO3 as a social media platform. One of the co-owners is from, and still in, fandom; she knows our values, because they are also her values. It may as well be the Blogsite Of Our Own.

[its-actually-withered]

did he forget that we could, like, fact check

[its-actually-withered]

shout out to everyone who participated in the january-february mass depressive episode

[its-actually-withered]

this is a long shot but i’d like to beg and plead someone to draw like an aerial view of sydcarmy sleeping like this shot of nora and her husband from past lives??

i think it’d be cute to see carmy in full koala mode just totally at peace in bed with sydney LMAO

[its-actually-withered]

The Thom factor

Thom Browne is Carmy's favorite designer, and those short pants he used to draw at school, were the kind of short pants Thom Browne designed as he mentioned to Claire in the car, he also told her that this designer started going to one of his restaurants in NY, he didn't tell her that they actually became friends, though. But later on, we find out that that "friend" is the one who designed Sydney's Chef jacket (on such short notice as it takes about 6 months to get one IRL and he got it in under 3 months).

IMO Carmy noticed that Sydney was wearing one of Thom Browne's shirts when they first met. I'm positive he picked up on that detail as soon as he laid eyes on her, even before reading her resume, which contributed to his forgetting what UPS was.

I mean this beautiful young lady, a CIA alumni, with some "serious heat" in her resume, shows up all smiley and WEARING THOM BROWNE!?! He died. I bet my ass on it.

[its-actually-withered]

Btw when someone says "don't talk to me like that, I don't know you" the normal thing to do is apologize for the perceived overfamiliarity and correct the behavior. Just in case anyone was wondering

[its-actually-withered]

If the internet wasn’t anonymous anymore i would stop writing/posting fic and a part of my soul would die. I don’t want to post fic under my real name i don’t wish to be perceived i wish to be known on an incredibly deep level without something superficial like my name attached. Writing fic is like stripping naked but leaving your face out of the shot

[its-actually-withered]

So do we wipe our blogs or what?

[its-actually-withered]

From The Atlantic: Substack Has a Nazi Problem

[that link is to an archived version, so no paywall]

Bottom Line: the CEOs/leaders of Substack aren't just being laissez-faire about the fascists and open white supremacists on the platform, they actively boost them by having them on the company podcast, featuring them, mentioning them, and boosting them. Because the newsletters bring in LOADS of money and they love money. Even newsletters that repeatedly violate the basic, useless guidelines of Substack, they do not get punished.

This isn't a huge surprise for anyone who has been following the major issues with Substack that have come up in the past few years. There was the whole scandal where the public discovered that Substack had been paying people secretly to be on the service while advertising that anyone can make it on their own here! Plus, they were paying bigots directly to put their newsletters on the srvice.

Good breakdowns of that from Annalee Newitz and Grace Lavery.

Then there was the disasterous interview one of the CEOs (Chris Best) did with Nilay Patel of The Verge when Substack's Twitter clone launched. Nilay -- who is, if you hadn't guessed, of Indian descent -- asked him pointed questions about content moderation and... well...

[Nilay] I just want to be clear, if somebody shows up on Substack and says “all brown people are animals and they shouldn’t be allowed in America,” you’re going to censor that. That’s just flatly against your terms of service. [Best] So, we do have a terms of service that have narrowly prescribed things that are not allowed. That one I’m pretty sure is just flatly against your terms of service. You would not allow that one. That’s why I picked it. So there are extreme cases, and I’m not going to get into the– Wait. Hold on. In America in 2023, that is not so extreme, right? “We should not allow as many brown people in the country.” Not so extreme. Do you allow that on Substack? Would you allow that on Substack Notes? I think the way that we think about this is we want to put the writers and the readers in charge– No, I really want you to answer that question. Is that allowed on Substack Notes? “We should not allow brown people in the country.” I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation. This is not a gotcha... I’m a brown person. Do you think people on Substack should say I should get kicked out of the country? I’m not going to engage in content moderation, “Would you or won’t you this or that?” That one is black and white, and I just want to be clear: I’ve talked to a lot of social network CEOs, and they would have no hesitation telling me that that was against their moderation rules. Yeah. We’re not going to get into specific “would you or won’t you” content moderation questions. Why? I don’t think it’s a useful way to talk about this stuff.

Best wasn't willing to get into these "gotchas" around their new social network, which is a pretty clear indication that they won't get into it around content moderation on the original platform. (Their statement after the fact did nothing to make things better.)

It's also really clear from the Atlantic article that the Substack CEOs/Owners are, at best, more interested in making money than in keeping white supremacists and Nazis (literal ones) off their platform. At worst, the Substack CEOs/Owners are supremacist/Nazi sympathizers. Either way:

Substack Directly Supports the Alt-Right, Nazis, and White Supremacists

Openly, brazenly, and without remorse.

[its-actually-withered]

The new funding that it’s raised, a Series C, will be used to expand the kind of content it produces: AI to write stories based on your original ideas and to produce versions of its fiction personalized for specific readers; a move into games and audiobooks; and more video content adapted from fiction published on its platform — video that is produced with humans today but will, eventually, also be generated using AI.

Link

[its-actually-withered]

So what we're NOT gonna do when James Somerton inevitably starts releasing new videos is hatewatch them, okay? Because a view is still a view whether or not it was watched with rage and disdain in your heart, you KNOW they'll be monetized, and at this point I'm sure he's doing this precisely TO bait in hatewatchers

Don't fund his comeback arc. Let him fade into obscurity like he deserves

[its-actually-withered]

i don’t trust people who don’t like sydney adamu.

[its-actually-withered]

The intense eyecontact- goodbye, mister I'm moonwalking so we can keep chatting away.

My babies, congrats 🥹✨️

[its-actually-withered]

vacation sydcarmy

[its-actually-withered]

Happiness Will Come To You.

[its-actually-withered]

I'm doing a rewatch, as you do, and I never really noticed how differently Sydney behaves between the awkward af scene with Marcus at the beginning of s2, epi1, and the awkward af locker scene with Carmy towards the end of that same epi.

Cut for a bunch of gifs and talking...

Marcus and Sydney

Marcus comes in to the kitchen while Syd and Tina are talking, and after both ask after his mom, Sydney offers if he needs anything. Then this happens:

You can tell there are things Marcus wants to say, but doesn't. Maybe it's because Tina is literally right there, but what interests me the most is how you can also tell that Sydney clocks it too. And she just looks at him, sort of hesitantly and... hmm, I'm trying to decide, like with maybe some trepidation, and a little curiosity? Not quite invitation, but definitely with that awareness a person gets when they know someone likes them - but she also looks away mostly. She's so Clearly aware of the weird undercurrent there. Right? You can just tell by the way she's looking at him, silent, that it seems like she'd already said what she meant to say, which was if he needs anything regarding his mom - and that was it. It's a pretty fast scene though. And it's shot in close up, so we see their expressions very clearly. Usually close ups in media are used to create intimacy. But instead, it highlights the awkwardness. And given how Syd reacts later in the season when he finally does ask her out, I think it's safe to say she wouldn't have been into it in the way he'd been hoping anyway at this point either.

Carmy and Sydney

This scene *shakes fist at sky* What gets me is how Long it is. How Slowly they both move through it. The undercurrent is currenting definitely, but what sticks out to me now is how throughout the whole thing Sydney just seems so open and hopeful, while also being completely unaware of Carmy wanting to say anything more than what he actually does. He's really such a closed book so much of the time.

She doesn't know he sneaks 2 peeks at her while her back is turned. But we see it...

Look at her standing there waiting for him to turn towards her...

She's so hopeful. She stands there a long friggin time, honestly. Her waiting on him, then them just Staring, after he says, "no idea". It's a moment...

Then it passes. And because he's such a brick wall really, giving no indication that he has any interest in anything, honestly. She does what any normal person would, which is move on with things. And she doesn't seem disappointed, because it's like, why bother? From her perspective, maybe there was no moment at all. It's just Carmy being Carmy, yet again.

She doesn't see how he just stands there in defeat. And maybe he doesn't even really know what he should've or could've done, but the fact the entire scene is shot from afar, with a literal barrier between them, then only pushes in closer after she's gone, and he's staring into space? Well. Only we know that. Only we realize there actually was something more going on with him internally than was being shown and not said. You know that man will regret it forever. As will I.