randomoverwatt

[randomoverwatt]

Bye

I am sad. I struggle with leaving, but staying puts money in their pockets. To stay is to reward belligerence. @support, how awful for you. @staff, how awful of you. There is much good left in this world and on the internet; go find it or make it or however it is you interact with it. I came here for the welding and learned more than a shitload about people.

[randomoverwatt]

Too fast mark two

For whatever reason, T isn't letting me reblog my own post. Now I'm off to the dojo to attempt to put together your helpful suggestions. I sure hope I come off as the best of you doing so, I'd hate to make you look bad on our last day.

[randomoverwatt]

Too fast

For the past few months, we have occasionally and/or regularly a high ranking instructor visiting our dojo on Saturdays. Our Sensei defers to them to lead the class, but those classes are presenting a problem for me. Sensei will show something, direct us to practice, and then...interrupt at best, just as likely on to something else. It is rare indeed that anyone gets to finish four waza, and I've never seen a full four and four through without interruption. Weirdly, this is only for the open hand practice. For the weapons practice, the pace is normal and flow is possible. It is discouraging me, and this morning I was seriously tempted to just leave. I do not believe it is good instruction, but I also believe walking out can be interpreted as insulting. What this is doing is definitely teaching me something. But the lesson is absolutely not aikido. Suggestions?

[randomoverwatt]

[randomoverwatt]

I would maim a co-worker for saying that to a customer.

[randomoverwatt]

its 2018 can we please stop pretending twitter threads are a reader-friendly way to communicate an idea

[randomoverwatt]

achilles: when I die, mingle our ashes together so that we may be together for eternity

historians: f is for friends who do stuff together

[randomoverwatt]

Hey @staff

You’re focused on things like ‘female presenting nipples’ and sex educators while you have totally forgotten about the reasons your app was deleted off the app store. Why don’t you guys actually get rid of content that encourages self-harm and outright endorses it? You change one letter in a tag and you can avoid a lot of the rules you guys have set in place for content like that. Just change one letter in bulimia or anorexia and there is so much content that you haven’t flagged as inappropriate for this website. That and thinspo. If you type in anorexia into the search bar you get the classic ‘are you okay?’ message, but if you type in anorexya, you don’t. People glorifying these mental illnesses are avoiding being flagged by using tags just like that one. And no, these aren’t people telling their stories and how they’re working to get better. These are people who are actively endorsing it as a legitimate way to lose weight and that is an extremely harmful thing to put into someone’s mind. If you really wanted to create a more positive Tumblr you would have taken down the things that made it negative in the first place. 

[randomoverwatt]

They intend to piss it away and pocket a bonus. @staff, how does it feel to be complicit in the theft?

Is now a bad time to mention I actually don’t hate this site? I hate the owners. Hate the staff. Hate the incompetence of whoever is in charge here.

But I love the site, love the format, love my mutuals, my followers and all of the amazing content creators here. I don’t know what I’ll replace this with if anything.

[randomoverwatt]

[randomoverwatt]

Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa? Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now? 

[randomoverwatt]

Yes, Virginia, Tumblr is important for all those other reasons and also...

There is a particular take on the destruction of Tumblr that I keep waiting for someone to write, but no one has yet. Which means I apparently need to do it myself.

The take is, essentially, that not only should adults have access to adult content – in itself, valid and true – but also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual. (Not all spaces; I still think it should be illegal to have sex on the sidewalk. But SOME spaces that enable the sexual and the non-sexual to exist side-by-side)

Part of what I think leads to the dehumanization of sex (and subsequently allows the stigma and shame to cling so heavily to it) is the complete bifurcation of life into SEX and EVERYTHING ELSE and never the twain shall meet. When we – at every turn – put all aspects of human life into one sphere, and sex into another, we dehumanize it. We remove the full subjectivity of people from it, which is a problem. 

I think we need to actively cultivate spaces LIKE before-time!Tumblr where we can be people, and talk about what happened at work today, and the funny thing our dog did, and how our parents make us crazy during the holidays, and how dare they do X thing on Supernatural, and here’s a great version of that distracted boyfriend meme, and ALSO be able to talk about being horny on main, as the saying goes, and find the right porn clip to fap to. Or post nude selfies. Or hunt down that sweet, sweet NSFW Symbrock fanart. 

Having spaces where the explicitly sexual and the non-sexual overlap is important to humanizing sex and, subsequently, de-stigmatizing it (which, it should go without saying, is particularly salient for marginalized people who often suffer way more heavily from sexual stigma) 

[randomoverwatt]

Bet money that the mofo cycling down a mountain cliff at 60 km/h on a Rocky Mountain R-9 started out riding a generic CCM. It's almost as if there's a pattern.

okay, most of what i do re: harry potter is criticism, and hp is flawed in such a number of ways, but sometimes i just sit here and

i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.

so many people on tumblr were born in the ‘90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.

it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives– for so many of us, the first books we ever loved

the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.

it’s not even about liking it or disliking it. it’s just a part of us.

[randomoverwatt]

Why Tumblr’s NFSW-ban is a cautionary tale for why we need Net Neutrality

Well, here are the salient points, and you’ll have to forgive the America-centric lens despite the wildly international community that’s on Tumblr. The ~reason~ that Tumblr went into panic mode re: nudity and adult content was because Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the store due to child pornography on the website. Or at least, that’s what they’re telling you - the single largest paragraph in the Staff update re: this change was on child pornography, how abhorrent it is, what all they’re doing to combat it, etc. But that’s honestly bullshit. That’s not why they’re /really/ doing it, though it’s certainly a flashpoint. 1. They’re rolling it out /now/ because Apple removed their app from the store. Which is on brand for apple. They have a history of removing “adult content” from their products. Here are some posts on Apple and it’s so-called “Walled Garden.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/24/apple-explicit-app-catego_n_475231.html https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78k8yb/reddit-ios-apps-disappear-nsfw-content https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mjxg/apple-tumblr-porn-nsfw-adult-content-banned Which is fine, if Apple wants to purge adult products from their content (ie things they own and moderate, such as a social media network), that’s their prerogative. But what Apple is ALSO doing is policing what kind of content developers and companies are allowed to have on their own websites that might be accessed by users of Apple technology, which is in exact opposition to principles of net neutrality. Apple preventing users from seeing certain content on their iphones or imac computers, or the safari browser, and preventing them from accessing certain apps/websites that don’t meet their approval, is part of a technology monopoly that controls how certain aspects of the internet are going to develop. IE, Tumblr purging its nudity content to get back on the Apple apps store, because they want to make money. There was a lawsuit over this in 2014, which resurfaced in 2017. Here’s the court case on Apple Inc vs. Pepper, if you wanna read more on it: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/apple-v-pepper/ But the big issue here is, when Apple begins to create a monopoly, net neutrality laws are part of what helps combat this. And if there are no net neutrality laws in place, it’s an awful lot harder to deal with corporations like Apple throttling ~sensitive content.~ A heading under which Apple has notoriously included stuff like LGBTQ+ content (see: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/08/31/apple-censors-pride-watch-face-in-russia/), which is obvious unethical on a number of levels. 2. They had been planning on doing this for a while. You may have seen the vox interview article re: this, but I’ll post it below: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn-ban-verizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom The NSFW ban had been underworks for 6 months already. Six months! They were planning on doing this with or without the CP issues that got them kicked off the Apple app store. And here’s the thing. Tumblr was bought by Yahoo in 2013, with the intent of making $ through advertising, a goal which was not met. Marissa Mayer was at the helm of this project, and reportedly she was mocked and belittled for a lot of the ideas she had re: Tumblr, and insiders have reported that in general Yahoo really failed to do anything with Tumblr because they didn’t understand how it worked and really didn’t care to learn. Here, we have a case of a MAJOR communications company purchasing an internet social media platform, and basically stagnating it. Every report that we’ve had about Tumblr post Yahoo purchase is that they’ve been hemorrhaging staff - esp senior staff - because they won’t do anything with them, or they’ve actively pushed them out of leadership roles to push their company agendas onto the already existing culture of Tumblr. Basically, they’ve been strangling Tumblr as a website. We joke about @staff being terrible with coding, but from 2014-2018, pretty much all of the dysfunction we’re seeing is in tandem with the Yahoo takeover. Here’s an article that describes some of these problems, though it’s by no means comprehensive: https://digiday.com/marketing/tumblr-is-neglected-by-marketers/ Even with all that, Yahoo did somehow manage to mostly leave Tumblr alone, and relatively functional. Yahoo actually wrote Tumblr down for something like half the value that it was worth, counting it as a loss. The real issue is that Verizon acquired Yahoo in June of 2017, about a year and a half ago. Like Yahoo, Verizon laid off tons of people involved with the programming and management of the website. Then in early 2018 they implemented to “Safe Search” filtering of ~sensitive content~ which was something users could opt out of it they chose. Which, most of us did. It seemed silly at the time, but in hindsight it was very obviously a test run of this current plan to implement the NSFW ban. For the purpose of Verizon and Tumblr under Verizon, “sensitive content” was defined as “anything that might not be suitable for some members of the Tumblr community” such as “nudity, //////including/////// in an artistic, educational, or photojournalistic context. INCLUDING. For all that Tumblr @staff’s “A better, more positive Tumblr” said that the ban wouldn’t include, say, expression of political nudity or artistic nudity, it’s quite clear from the TOS that this is something they’re slanting against, and I really don’t think it’s purely from the ~bad algorithms~ that posts with topics dealing with sexuality, nudity, LGBTQ+, trans issues, disability issues, body positivity, and etc are being targeted. It’s not a coincidence that the NSFW ban included the language of “female presenting nipples” - as if women’s bodies are inherently sexual in nature. And it’s sure as hell not a coincidence that Verizon was one of the telecommunications and media corporations that was actively lobbying against net neutrality along with Comcast. Verizon wants to control what kind of content you see, and wants to charge you for the kinds of content you can see. Verizon is a company that has admitted to actively throttling the content of its competitors. And the fundamental issue here is that, with a large corporation that doesn’t care about its userbase, it’s trying to streamline a website like Tumblr into being something that it wants, instead of trying to work with the website culture that’s already in place. Where Yahoo was at a standstill, Verizon is actively dismantling parts of what make Tumblr so successful and tight-knit as a social media and blogging platform - particularly with content that might otherwise be deemed as “inappropriate” / “sensitive content” in other places like Facebook - talking about trans issues, talking about sexuality, etc. And the fact that this is actively harming sex workers and targeting quote unquote the female form suggests that they want to throttle freedom of expression. So when we talk about fandom leaving FF.N, and LiveJournal, and the kinds of fandom history that younger folks have maybe even only vaguely heard of (the infamous “What’s a lemon?” question comes immediately to mind) we’re talking about how a major mainstream corporation is looking at how to turn its userbase (which is just numbers to them!) into a profitable scheme, and it’s always going to be an upward ladder that harms the communities down below. Those of us that are looking at the situation and going “Why don’t they do x, y, z? And make it actually functional?” are underestimating in a big way the fact that they want to spend as little money on this project as possible while still trying and double their userbase and profits. The fact that they mentioned BLM as a marketable niche suggests the fundamentally misunderstand why these movements exist in the first place, and the fact that BLM was mentioned in tandem with Game of Thrones fans and Manchester United Fans means that all they’re seeing is demographics and theoretically untapped markets. Making the website more palatable to quote unquote the mainstream is an attempt to bring in more advertisers, which is why they were more than happy to put together the NSFW ban. The NSFW ban is also probably a response of SESTA, which caused a lot of website platforms to double down on their TOS without actually doing anything meaningful to help combat sex trafficking and child pornography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act With that said - they’re also probably not unhappy to have a left-leaning, pro-net neutrality website like Tumblr die, which is honestly what it’s heading toward. Tumblr spent over a decade building the communities that it has, and a lot of people use it as an alternative to “mainstream media” and as a way to get a lot of information on politics and current events, as well as on obscure topics. It’s been a way to connect social justice activists, queer people who often didn’t have anywhere else to connect with other queer people in a way that wasn’t inherently sexualized (looking at grindr, fetlife, etc), academics, and more. The amount of information dissemination on Tumblr is truly incredible, and, if you’ll excuse the tin hat for a moment, it’s the antithesis of how the media currently functions – with about just 15 billionaires controlling most of America’s media corporations. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/#41268a10660a A similar thing actually happened with Polyvore, which was owned by Oath, which was [hold your breath, wait for it] owned by Verizon. https://www.racked.com/2018/4/6/17207450/polyvore-ssense-shutdown-mood-boards-collage I don’t trust Verizon to do right by the userbase. They’ll do whatever they can to make it profitable and fit their company vision. And if you want a reminder of how utterly evil Verizon is, just refresh yourself on the fact that they were manipulating firefighter cell plans to make $ on them while they were actively in the process of combatting California wildfires. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/ And to cap it off, it’s 100% not a coincidence that some of the posts that were initially getting throttled on Tumblr were Tumblr/Staff critical posts. Not even on bit. Companies, particularly large companies with huge financial resources, actively scrub their internet presences so that only positive things come up.

[randomoverwatt]

randomoverwatt supports this! 181217 @staff @support @abuse No claim of "We didn't hear you" shall be believed.

Call to Action (again)

We got Tumblr’s attention with our past peaceful protest campaigns

Protect the Creators

Bring Back Reply

Protest against hate speech

Bring Back Arch Atlas

Maybe it is time we use our beloved Tumblr to protest this sexist policy that marks female nipples as porn. Tumblr is being extreme in what its decision and policies, and is using a useless algorithm that sees Rothko paintings (see @dailyrothko) and flowers and all kinds of non-porn images as porn.

So, on Monday, 12-17-18, we should not post anything on Tumblr, except the above photo, which is available here. NOTE: You can also add these to your avatar to let anyone who visits your site know about this.

As this post suggests, if we have a queue with images, we should add this one to 12-17-18. As part of our protest, we should not do anything on Tumblr for the whole day: no dashboard, no posts, no comments, chat, replies. We should also, as recommended by @jtmportland, we should also completely log out to show a physical drop in traffic/use.

Nothing on Tumblr, all day, M, 12-17-18. Even log out completely for the day so there is a drop in traffic/use.

Also, please think about putting @staff & @support​ on any and all reblogs of this and any on any posts about this, since this will send them a direct notification of each and every post about this. We need to flood their dashboards so they see we are upset.

Also, please use the staff and support tags.

Again, here is the link to the above sign: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CWHndyT6EUu1ZKzS_CCUZ4yEJlS6vhcI

[randomoverwatt]

So I have another ear infection and until I finish my antibiotics I’m not going to be training or exercising (outside of physical therapy stuff) and I’m going to be focussed on getting healthy. 

My body needs the energy to fight off the infection. 

When you’re sick don’t do something that puts stress on your body such as training or exercising. It will make your recovery longer in the long term and slow down your Epic Gains. 

-FemaleWarrior 

[randomoverwatt]

“If men don’t know how to interact with roughly half the human population in a professional setting, they are - simply put - unqualified for the jobs they hold.   They don’t deserve a pass, our sympathies, or special treatment for their incompetence.”

- Fannie Wolfe, responding to Bloomberg headline, “Wall Street Rule for the #MeToo Era: Avoid Women at All Cost”

CURRENT MOOD: “Excuse me, which way to the “no girls allowed” boardroom?”