pendragyn - Tumblr blog

[pendragyn]

that ‘pakige?’ post but me, a couple hours after posting a fic, like ‘comints?’

[pendragyn]

Thing is, I'm not just anti-fatphobia as in "I don't want people to be mean to fat people"

I am pro fat liberation as in "I want to dismantle the systemic biases against fat people and the diet culture and medical industrial complex that feeds into the very real systemic oppression that fat people face"

I don't see fatphobia as a mere interpersonal issue where if you are being nice to fat people or saying things in a polite way to them you're automatically free of fatphobia. I see it as essential to challenge every bit of diet culture myth that we might encounter and break the unscientific ideas of "health" as defines by weight, fat, calories, bmi, and other nonsense. I see it as essential to view fatphobia as the political issue it is and take it seriously as such, and to unlearn and help others unlearn oppressive baseless ideas we have assumed to be true and natural.

[pendragyn]

Time's calling y'all out. Including me.

Get your rest, folks.

[pendragyn]

But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

[pendragyn]

Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

[pendragyn]

Alright, to ao3's soon to be arriving Wattpad Refugees, a basic guide to general user culture:

1.) Unlike Wattpads vote system that let's you like each chapter, the ao3 equivalent kudos only allows one per work. Everyone is generally quietly annoyed about this. To engage with each chapter, you're heavily encouraged to comment. Trust me, it makes people's day.

2.) Ao3 has no algorithm. By default it's latest updated work first. You can find things to your taste through searches, filters and tags.

3.) 'No archive warnings apply' and 'user has chosen not to use archive warnings' mean two very different things. No archives warnings means the work is free from any content that could require a warning tag (character death, graphic depictions of violence, non-con, etc). User has chosen not to use archive warnings means it could contain any of the warning content, be it hasn't been explicitly tagged. Treat it like an allergen. No archive warnings apply is allergen free. User has chosen not to use archive warnings, may contain traces or whole chunks of the allergen. If you're likely to have a bad reaction, maybe don't take the risk.

4.) Speaking of warnings, ao3 has very few restrictions on the type of work that's allowed. Whatever your personal thoughts or feelings on that are, thats how the site is. You're likely to run across some dark subject matters and a lot of people are uncomfortable with reading that. You're well within your rights not like these works and have your opinion on whether they should be allowed, but harassing the authors of such works (or any works) is more likely to come back on you than them. Ao3 operates on a strong policy of 'don't like, don't read'. Use the tagging system to your full advantage to only engage with the kind of works you want to see.

We look forward to welcoming you all and seeing the fantastic works you create. Happy writing!

[pendragyn]

[pendragyn]

The Places Fandom Dwells: A Cautionary Tale

Just about seven years ago, on 29 May 2007, hundreds of fans with accounts at Livejournal woke uo make the shocking discovery that their blogs, and those of some of their friends and favorite fandom communities, had been deleted without prior notice.

It’s estimated that Livejournal suspended approximately 500 blog accounts. The only notice of this was was the strike through the names of the suspended blogs, which led to this event being called Strikethrough.

At the time, Livejournal was the primary blogging platform for fandom. Its friends list and threaded conversations enabled fans to find each other and have discussions. Its privacy settings allowed fans to share as much or as little as they chose. It was a place to publish and archive fan fic, art, and meta. These features give some idea why the deletions of so many fandom blogs had been so devastating.

Speculation and uncertainty were rampant during the two days it took for Livejournal to finally respond to demands from users for information. At first, LJ stated only that it had been advised that journals listing an illegal activity as an interest could be regarded as soliciting for that illegal activity, which put the site at legal risk. It was eventually revealed that Livejournal and its owners at the time, Six Apart, had been contacted by a group calling themselves Warriors for Innocence, a conservative Christian organization with ties to the militia movement who accused LJ of being a haven for pedophiles and child pornography.

LJ had based the account suspensions on the tags used in LJ blogs. LJ users list their interests in their profiles, and those interests functions as tags. LJ took the blanket view that there was no difference between blogs listing “rape”.”incest”, or “pedophilia” among their interests, and blogs with posts tagged “rape”. “incest”, or “pedophilia”. As a consequence, some of the accounts that were suspended were support sites for rape survivors and gay teens, as well as the fandom sites that posted book discussions, RP, fan fiction, and fan art.

Livejournal grudgingly issued a partial apology to users on 31 May, but it took months for the organization to sort through the suspended blogs. According to Livejournal, most of the suspended accounts were restored. Not all of the suspended accounts were restored, and some of those that weren’t belonged to the support groups and fandoms.

One result of Strikethrough was that many communities and individual fans locked their blogs so the content could be viewed only community members, or those on their friends lists. Other fans opened accounts at blogging platforms like JournalFen, The Greatest Journal, or Insane Journal. There was definitely an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia that hadn’t previously existed, and part of the problem was that Livejournal had not come through with promised clarification about what sort of content violated the ToS.

So, of course, it happened all over again.

On 3 August, Livejournal once again suspended a number of accounts without warning. This time, the account names were bolded, and the event became known as Boldthrough.

These deletions were the result of decisions made by a group consisting of members of LiveJournal’s Abuse Prevention Team, made up of LiveJournal employees and Six Apart staff, that had been set up to review blog content. This group was had been empowered to declare blog content offensive, a violation of the ToS that was defined by the team as content not containing enough serious artistic value to offset the sexual nature of the material. The team was empowered to terminate accounts without warning.

Anxious and angry LJ users waited ten days until LJ issued a response. Eventually, the ToS was changed to state that accounts deemed in violation of the ToS would in future be deleted only if the offender refused to delete offending content.

Just a few days before Strikethrough, LJ user astolat proposed a new blogging platform and fan fic archive, one that would be be created by fans, for fans. This was the birth of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit organization dedicated to provide access to fanworks, and to protect and defend fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. Strikethrough and Boldthrough definitely pushed the project along. OTW opened DreamWidth in beta mode in April 2009, and began open beta testing of Archive of Our Own in November 2009.

In mid-January 2010, DreamWidth came under pressure by an undisclosed group who tried to convince DW’s server and PayPal, among others, that DW was a platform for child pornography. DW refused to give in to the harassment and intimidation, and promptly notifed users about the situation. The only consequence of the group’s pressure was that new requests for paid services were temporarily put on hold until DW was able to find a new payment processor service. DW remained true to its Guiding Principles by keeping users informed throughout this incident, and respecting freedom of expression by refusing to delete any posts or blogs to satisfy the demands of the group of trolls.

Which brings us to Tumblr.

Tumblr was launched in 2007. While not all fans have embraced it, citing reasons like character restrictions in replies and asks and the difficulty of finding others who share one’s fandom, it’s certain that the majority of fandoms are well-represented.

However, in July 2013, fans once again expressed outrage when Tumblr - without warning – removed accounts flagged as “NSFW” or “Adult” from public searches, made those blogs inaccessible to Tumblr users not already following them, and deleted a number of tags from its mobile app, including #gay, #lesbian and #bisexual. In a manner unsettlingly reminiscent of Strikethrough and Boldthrough, Tumblr did not immediately respond, and the response posted 24 hours later was widely regarded as a non-apology apology. Tumblr claimed it had been trying to get rid of commercial porn blogs, and eventually asserted that all the removed accounts had been reinstated.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that which George Santayana proclaimed: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Most blogging and social networking sites are in business to make a profit, and fandoms make them uncomfortable. They inevitably take steps to control the content being posted, to keep outside groups or their new owners happy, disrupting fandoms and deleting material that fans had considered to be safely stored.

The only solution I can see is for fans to copy and back up the things that are important. Maintain active accounts at several sites. Keep a list of your friends’ pseudonyms and emails.

Because the only thing that’s certain is that it’s going to happen again, when we least expect it.

I highly recommed that you read A brief history of fandom, for the teenagers on here who somehow think tumblr invented fandom: by ofhouseadama.

This article is still being revised. I intend to eventually make proper footnotes at some point, but until then, here’s a list of sources I used in writing this article:

http://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html

http://astridv.livejournal.com/84769.html

http://boingboing.net/2007/05/31/lj-purge-drama-who-a.html

http://www.dailydot.com/culture/livejournal-decline-timeline/

http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/tumblr-nsfw-content-tags-search/

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/tumblr-statement-banned-hashtags/

http://www.dailydot.com/society/pros-cons-tumblr-livejournal-fandom/

http://www.dailydot.com/society/tracking-livejournal-fandom-diaspora-infographic/

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/16590.html?view=top-only#comments

http://elke-tanzer.dreamwidth.org/951013.html

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Archive_Of_Our_Own

http://fandom-flies.livejournal.com/profile

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Boldthrough

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Dreamwidth

http://fanlore.org/wiki/LiveJournal

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Tumblr

http://fanthropology.livejournal.com/374988.html

http://hatteress.tumblr.com/post/55834911159/tumblrs-new-nsfw-restrictions-and-why-turning-off-safe

http://innocence-jihad.livejournal.com/159327.html

http://innocence-jihad.livejournal.com/31786.html

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/283323.html

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/283781.html

http://metafandom.livejournal.com/114942.html

http://www.metafilter.com/61636/livejournal-suspends-hundreds-of-accounts#1712054

http://missmediajunkie.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-i-dont-use-tumblr.html

http://news.cnet.com/Mass-deletion-sparks-LiveJournal-revolt/2100-1025_3-6187619.html

http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from-a-bunch-of-you-who-are

http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=LJ_Strikethrough_2007#After_the_Strikethrough_-_On_to_Boldthrough

http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-death-of-the-blog-and-the-rise-of-tumblr-210071.html

http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/OTW_Annual_Report_2007.pdf

http://www.dailydot.com/business/yahoo-tumblr-fandom-lessons/

https://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2012/fandom:-open-culture-vs.-closed-platforms

http://www.zdnet.com/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-quietly-restores-adult-nsfw-blogs-7000018342/

[pendragyn]

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

[pendragyn]

If people were too mean to you when you were growing up, a newborn animal will materialize inside your brain and it’s so so scared and shivering and it will stay there for years. Decades, even. And whenever you say something kind of weird but true to your heart the animal will tell you “Noo! You can’t say that! If you say that, everyone will hate you!”. The animal means well. It’s so so small and everything is so scary for them and it’s just trying to protect you. But listen to me. Listen to me. Whenever this happens, you can’t do what the animal says. You can’t. If you do, you’ll become as scared as the animal. You have to keep saying weird shit. You have to keep doing things the animal wouldn’t approve of. If you do enough things that scare the animal, maybe one day it’ll go to sleep.

[pendragyn]

[pendragyn]

3 seconds into dungeon meshi and they’re already living my dream. i love eating things I ought not in unfamiliar ecosystems

[pendragyn]

Its more likey the metaphorical gate to heaven, where only the pure can enter. "wellness" and diet influencers like to vilify everything and can be very cult like. It could also be alluding to an eating disorder; eating only the "right" foods and intensely scrutinizing her body for any flaw, real or imagined.

i found the tenth circle of hell: it's where your fave blows up on tiktok

[pendragyn]

take my quiz boy

[pendragyn]

The fact that Microsoft Word has to be a subscription is upsetting. I already paid for it why do I have to pay again

[pendragyn]

such a huge relief that hillary’s so ahead in the polls and trump has such a small chance of winning, right? WRONG. DO NOT GET APATHETIC OR COMFORTABLE. DO NOT DECIDE YOU DON’T NEED TO VOTE BECAUSE YOU’RE SURE HILLARY WILL WIN. the only way trump can win now is if so many people expected to vote for hillary don’t show up to the polls. because you BETTER believe ALL of his supporters will be at the polls.

brexit passed in the UK because young people grew apathetic because they were sure it wasn’t going to pass. and it did, because old racists and xenophobes showed up in DROVES to vote.

tl;dr: VOTE, PEOPLE. VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. IT MIGHT.