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#just let them sell my art and posts like it's their's? or delete it all and never post again
k8katdoodles · 2 months
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I'm fucking pissed, this is bullshit
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FYI artists and writers: some info regarding tumblr's new "third-party sharing" (aka selling your content to OpenAI and Midjourney)
You may have already seen the post by @staff regarding third-party sharing and how to opt out. You may have also already seen various news articles discussing the matter.
But here's a little further clarity re some questions I had, and you may too. Caveat: Not all of this is on official tumblr pages, so it's possible things may change.
(1) "I heard they already have access to my data and it doesn't really matter if I opt out"
From the 404 article:
A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled “What happens when you opt out?” states “If you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.”
So please, go click that opt-out button.
(2) Some future user: "I've been away from tumblr for months, and I just heard about all this. I didn't opt out before, so does it make a difference anymore?"
Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, “Do we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?” Andrew Spittle, Automattic’s head of AI replied: “We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.”
It should make a difference! Go click that button.
(3) "I opted out, but my art posts have been reblogged by so many people, and I don't know if they all opted out. What does that mean for my stuff?"
This answer is actually on the support page for the toggle:
This option will prevent your blog's content, even when reblogged, from being shared with our licensed network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models.
And some further clarification by the COO and a product manager:
zingring: A couple people from work have reached out to let me know that yes, it applies to reblogs of "don't scrape" content. If you opt out, your content is opted out, even in reblog form. cyle: yep, for reblogs, we're taking it so far as "if anybody in the reblog trail has opted out, all of the content in that reblog will be opted out", when a reblog could be scraped/shared.
So not only your reblogged posts, but anyone who contributed in a reblog (such as posts where someone has been inspired to draw fanart of the OP) will presumably be protected by your opt-out. (A good reason to opt out even if you yourself are not a creator.)
Furthermore, if you the OP were offline and didn't know about the opt-out, if someone contributed to a reblog and they are opted out, then your original work is also protected. (Which makes it very tempting to contribute "scrapeable content" now whenever I reblog from an abandoned/disused blog...)
(4) "What about deleted blogs? They can't opt out!"
I was told by someone (not official) that he read "deleted blogs are all opted-out by default". However, he didn't recall the source, and I can't find it, so I can't guarantee that info. If I get more details - like if/when tumblr puts up that FAQ as reported in the 404 article - I will add it here as soon as I can.
Edit, tumblr has updated their help page for the option to opt-out of third-party sharing! It now states:
The content which will not be shared with our licensed network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models, includes: • Posts and reblogs of posts from blogs who have enabled the "Prevent third-party sharing" option. • Posts and reblogs of posts from deleted blogs. • Posts and reblogs of posts from password-protected blogs. • Posts and reblogs of posts from explicit blogs. • Posts and reblogs of posts from suspended/deactivated blogs. • Private posts. • Drafts. • Messages. • Asks and submissions which have not been publicly posted. • Post+ subscriber-only posts. • Explicit posts.
So no need to worry about your old deleted blogs that still have reblogs floating around. *\o/*
But for your existing blogs, please use the opt out option. And a reminder of how to opt out, under the cut:
The opt-out toggle is in Blog Settings, and please note you need to do it for each one of your blogs / sideblogs.
On dashboard, the toggle is at https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/blogname [replace "blogname" as applicable] down by Visibility:
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For mobile, you need the most recent update of the app. (Android version 33.4.1.100, iOs version 33.4.) Then go to your blog tab (the little person icon), and then the gear icon for Settings, then click Visibility.
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Again, if you have a sideblog, go back to the blog tab, switch to it, and go to settings again. Repeat as necessary.
If you do not have access to the newest version of the app for whatever reason, you can also log into tumblr in your mobile browser. Same URL as per desktop above, same location.
Note you do not need to change settings in both desktop and the app, just one is fine.
I hope this helps!
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clarenecessities · 6 months
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He-man.org will close in 5 days.
He-man.org has been a staple of the Masters of the Universe community since the early days, originating as an email list that worked to document episodes before anything (not footage, not lists, nothing) was available online. It grew into a sprawling, multi-faceted beast of a thing, including an encyclopedia (an in-house wiki), merch lists, a marketplace, forums, anything you could think of.
Several years ago now, the main site went down for updates/maintenance. For a few weeks, we were told, maybe months. The forums remained open for fans to communicate, and barring a period of downtime earlier this year things were going smoothly.
Yesterday, the owner of the site, Val Staples, announced the site would be closed on November 14th, 2023. Six days later. We are currently attempting to contact him, to see if he’s interested in selling, and if he means closed as in “no new posts” or closed as in deleted entirely. Regardless of its eventual fate, the archiving of these forums is essential to preserving the history of the franchise, the fandom, and the brand.
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TO SHE-RA (and MotU) FANS SPECIFICALLY: I have personally used these forums to answer questions that could be answered nowhere else. Had I not had access to them, I would never have been able to prove that Purrsia was fake, or found so much unpublished concept art, or discovered that Scott “Toyguru” Neitlich personally wrote Catra’s MOTUC bio (even if he’s put off answering my questions about it for over a year now). Forum members have conducted interviews with the likes of Jon Seisa, Cathy Larson, Janice Varney-Hamlin—essential figures in the very foundations of POP, and those interviews revealed and recorded priceless information for future generations (me! you! us!) to find. Did you know Cathy Larson named Adora? That she originally pushed for “Dorian”, after her own daughter? We cannot let this treasure trove disappear into the ether(ia).
TO THE UNAFFILIATED: Please help. Pretty please. If you’ve ever liked my art or my writing or my haphazard blogging, ever, at all, consider archiving just one board. Just one page. Literally anything helps. I am spiraling into madness & this is my library of Alexandria. The mythical one that was totally unique and persevered nowhere else and was destroyed in a single cataclysmic event. Pretty pretty please help.
HOW TO HELP:
Archive.org has several ways to upload shit but most of them are longer term than “a few days” so we’re focusing on two (which can be run simultaneously): Save Page Now, and browser extensions. From their help page:
1. Save Page Now
Put a URL into the form, press the button, and we save the page. You will instantly have a permanent URL for your page. Please note, this method only saves a single page, not the whole site.
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We want to keep outlinks and screenshots wherever possible. The Archive does not keep your IP address, so your submission is anonymous.
2. Browser extensions and add-ons
Install the Wayback Machine Chrome extension in your browser. Go to a page you want to archive, click the icon in your toolbar, and select Save Page Now. We will save the page and give you a permanent URL.
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One plus to installing the extension is that as you surf around, when you run into a missing page they will alert you if we have a saved copy.
More extensions, apps, and add-ons:
Firefox add-on
Safari Extension
iOS app
Android app
I strongly encourage you to use these tools even if you aren’t helping with this project/after it ends. Documenting and preserving information is essential in this day and age & The Internet Archive is at the heart of it. Please support them however you can.
I’m serious about paying you, though I may need more communication with folks I don’t know so we can coordinate/verify shit gets done. I think this is a worthwhile pursuit in itself but I recognize your time is valuable & like, people gotta eat. DM me if you’re interested and we’ll talk. I may need to adjust pay depending how many people bite but I’ll do what I can
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damazcuz · 2 months
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I don't think people responding to the scrambled "uh oh, we got caught" Tumblr AI announcement with "just nightshade and glaze all the art you post guys! it's your own fault if you don't do that small step! It's ok we'll get through this!" are Getting It:
Everything has already been scraped, including the account you haven't been able to access since 2015. Yes even the private, locked sideblogs of all your old art. Did you glaze it? did you nightshade it? in 2015? can you log in and check? no? Opted in.
This also includes any writing, creative or otherwise, posted to Tumblr. Did you nightshade the poetry and fanfiction you posted to Tumblr on your old account in 2018? why not? not a plan-aheader huh? Opted in!
It's opt in by default and by design. People who left Tumblr ages ago will likely not hear about this and won't know to regain account access and opt out. People who have died won't be able to log in and opt out. People who deleted past accounts or sideblogs won't be able to log in and opt out. People whose content is reposted here from Pixiv or other external sources by unrelated third parties won't have any way to say "hey half of that blog is MY stuff. Opt ME out."
Sorry. They just have everything ever put on the site. And you didn't opt out in 2015 when you lost access to your login email, so it's included. This is on purpose because they don't WANT people to be able to opt out, they want people to stay opted in saying "well my art sucks so I'm poisoning the data model 👍" while posting jokes and creative writing, they WANT you to say "well I'm unaffected" and keep posting photos and text and stuff. Midjourney wants that and Tumblr wants to do anything it can to satisfy Midjourney and scrape some cash out of that deal.
I'm sorry because I love this place too, but genuinely the decisions being made here are business decisions being put into place by a company trying to squeeze the last drops of blood out of a stone. Tumblr is not your friend. Staff is not your friend. Automattic is not your friend. The CEO has hopefully PROVEN he is not anyone's friend. This is a business first and a product that they are selling, not to you and me, but to advertisers and partners. Tumblr will ensure that Tumblr users see their ads and supply them data.
Frankly I do not trust this company or this website and I cannot in good faith just believe that they're going to look at my opt out checkbox and say "okay! ^_^ we will remove everything Dama has ever said or done from our AI scrape. we promise to do it!" and then actually do it. They already have the data. They can just claim that whatever is produced through machine learning based in part off of my data is unrelated, came from other sources, etc. I do not have trust in this website. I don't see how anyone could at this point.
I feel like I'm watching a trainwreck from the inside and no one wants to get out of their seats and try hopping off into the safe grassy field. Wait, they say. Let's see if the train just climbs back onto the tracks, they say. The fire and explosions are all part of the process, they say. Eventually people will stop panicking or dying and it'll be a smooth ride, they say. Just look at how bright the horizon is.
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dragongirlsnout · 2 months
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I'm sorry, but if you think you're being targeted because you're trans; You are paranoid. There's been so many users that have had their tumblr's deleted, archive's wiped out or posts/pics hidden/banned for no reason. Users of all different races and sexual identities. And I have know a few of them. And MY original tumblr got deleted a while ago! Don't publish this please.This site couldn't be any more trans supportive. How many pieces of LGBT type art make the radar? A LOT. Or spotlights on the LGBT community? I see your kind of art constantly on my radar and that's not stuff I follow or interested in. You getting pics banned because of violating the community guidelines has happened to lot of people and that pairing with you being trans has got nothing to do with it. You're not punishing tumblr by leaving; You're punishing us.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume this was a very poorly thought-out ask.
Just because you know a few blogs that have been terminated that weren't trans means nothing to the actuality of the situation, especially given that you're implying that you aren't trans or even LGBT+ in the first place. I've known over a dozen blogs over the years who were terminated specifically on targeted mass-report campaigns, including people who kept their content a lot cleaner than your blog. Combined with that, the constant flagging of completely clothed SFW pictures posted by trans women, and the recent admission from this site's CEO himself that there was a transphobic moderator hired by a third-party service who was even selling bans, it seems pretty clear to me that the site does actually have a transphobia problem.
And I'm certainly not paranoid in this case either, as several of my mutuals and my partner have had their blogs deleted without explanation. Add to the fact that I insulted the CEO to his face after he private messaged me, and it seems like he's been getting quite trigger-happy as of late.
I never said I was punishing Tumblr by leaving, and I certainly wasn't intending to punish you, random person in my askbox, but maybe let this be a lesson to actually speak up for vulnerable people instead of calling them paranoid.
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outcaststars · 1 month
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I've been streaming on twitch for over 4 years. I've made a great community and a wonderful group of friends but I've also had to deal with a lot of aweful people. Recently I've been feeling particularly upset about it all so I'm going to air all my grievances here. TW this mentions bullying, grooming, self harm and abuse. If anyone mentioned in this post trys to comment im just gonna delete it, i also dont care if your fav streamers is here, this is my authentic experience. Also dont go attacking anyone i mention here, the whole point of this is to be better then them.
Rat_emoji
The first streamer I ever had an issue with was Rat_emoji. It all started when I tuned into one of their DbD streams only to find him streaming another, younger, streamers live content.
He had just died to this kid playing Myers, he had TTV in his name and Rat was so mad about what had happened he streamed this kids twitch live to his viewers, all the while making fun of his appearance and stream quality.
A day later I would go back and screen record this whole interaction so I can share that if you want to see it. It felt so disgusting to watch this happen live, he has 100 viewers in chat and they were all being nasty. The only person who told him to stop was drag streamer Suttonfister (i think, 90% sure) who was in the same game and discord call at he time. the whole scene was aweful to witness, it felt like such an abuse of power. Rat didnt directly say anything mean but they made a lot of mean girl comments and didnt moderate anything cruel their chat said, it was obviously intentional.
After this I blocked Rat, it would have been easy to avoid him if he didn't found the stream team "Aussie pride", he got a lot of attention for that and a lot of praise and all of it made me sick. Funnily enough I heard that Aussie Pride was an aweful team to be in. The creators didn't care about the smaller members, planned no events and then disbanded the team with the release of Hogwarts legacy because they didn't want to take a stance on JK Rowling. Honestly it seems like the whole thing was a vanity project. That's why I don't like Rat_emoji.
Dcypherpup
DCpup was the first streamer I tried to network with. He hired me to make some art for him. He wanted me to work on merch for his channel, I declined, saying that I wasnt comfortable with the idea of someone else selling my art. I counter offered to just make him a profile icon, this way we could see how my style suited him and i could work out how to tackle the idea of eventually doing merch.
When the icon was done I sent him the high res file, he asked for my signature (my artist tag, a very small "outcaststars" in the corner) to be removed. When I asked why, he told me he needed it gone in order to upload it as merch.
Naturally I was upset. I explained that we had already made a deal not to do merch yet and I also explained that I was uncomfortable with the idea of removing my tag. I went on to explain why visibility was so important for artists. At the time I was a much smaller content creator and DCpup platform was much bigger.
He apologized and said he would give me a cut of the sales. I said don't bother and reluctantly let him do what he wanted. At the time I was too scared to make enemies so I fell into people pleasing.
I took more work from DCpup because I needed the money and I hoped it would be good for my channel growth. He would upload my work to his store and wouldn't credit me. I was frustrated.
The tipping point was after the final comm I took from him. An animated ending screen. During this process DCpup would message me everyday asking for updates which was annoying. When I delivered the final product he once again asked for my tiny, half transparent signature to be removed. I was so upset and defeated, I told myself I'd fight it but I didn't. I removed my sign from every layer, reanimated the whole thing and vowed not to take work from him.
After the piece was done he wanted to commission me again. I left him on read, then I found out what he was saying about me to other people. A good friend of mine showed me a message he had sent in his stream, telling him not to bother commission me, because I would be too busy doing work for him. I was furious.
Another week later I got raided by someone and told the new viewers to check out my work, it broke my heart when someone who looked at my insta, told me he had no idea I made all of DCpups stuff. Why would he? Dcypherpup went to ridiculous lengths to hide my credit. He was telling people not to contact me and not tagging any comm work with my name. One day he came into my live stream and I was so mad I banned him on the spot .
I wish I had done more to be assertive, live and learn. Funnily enough I found out he posted a big rant, telling people off for supporting JK Rowling when Hogwarts legacy released. Only to be called out for buying it and playing it on his steam, which he had forgotten to make private. He deleted the tweet. What a cunt.
Undertheredmoon and Greenypika
Redmoon is furry streamer that I use to really like. They were funny, had great energy and I would even go as far to say that they were a friend.
All this came to a grinding hault the day he invited furry artist and accused child groomer Daveoverlord to join us on Monster hunter rise live on stream.
Dave wasn't in voice chat and I wasn't reading Redmoons twitch chat at the time, so although I was aware of who Dave was, I didn't realize it was them. When someone messaged me about it a few days later I was mortified, I assumed Redmoon didn't know and I messaged them immediately.
I asked Red if he knew who Dave was and what he had done and the kind of artists he was friends with (cub artists). Redmoon ghosted me, left me on read for a week. I messaged again asking why he wasn't talking to me. He said he was too stressed to deal with this "drama" and didn't care to get involved. He mentioned that if Dave was guilty cops probably would have gotten involved and said he just wanted to focus on his own work.
When I asked Redmoon where he stood on cub porn, he stopped replying. We haven't spoken since.
The same person who told me about Dave joining stream also pointed out that Greenypika was inviting Dave onto his stream. They dm'd greeny and asked them if they knew and greeny said he had no idea and that he'd look into it. Greeny hadn't responded for a few months so I dm'd him with the same message and got the same copy paste reply. TLDR greeny knew and was just lying about it so I blocked him too.
Daveoverlord
Dudes a fucking groomer and now he streams. Blocked.
Cidermarten
Cider and I got into an argument once, the topic of which is no one's business.
His bf weyland got mad at me for it and vague tweeted about it so I decided to start a group chat with them to sort it out. And we did.
I apologised for what I did and cider took some time away from interacting with me. Everyone in this situation wanted what was best. And weyland is now one of my best friends.
Cider and I aren't as close as we could be but that's my fault. They're honestly a wonderful person and I appreciate their friendship. There inclusion in this list is to prove a point later but they're also the only person here who I think deserves success.
Stripeydragon and Break trail.
This one is complicated because it involves someone who ment a lot to me.
Back when the exclusive stream team Break Trail formed, my good friend Marsh joined the team. Being an artist he did a lot of the teams promo art of all it's members. Marsh had a lot of anxieties about the team because he was one of its smallest members and often told me he felt underappreciated or out of place. This feeling for worse when artist/streamer and fellow team member Stripeydragon decided he was going to do a redraw of all of marsh's promo work.
I didn't see Marsh much at the time but when this began he spent the better part of a week in my mod chat expressing how upset he was about it. It didn't help he was already anxious but he felt stripydragon was replacing him and even mentioned a time when he tried to give feedback on stripys work only for him to disregard it. Marsh was really fucking upset.
After stripeydragon posted the work my moderator, Ibn, who had been listening and consoling marsh for a week, decided to comment on the art publically. He said he didn't think stripyes version of the art was better and criticized him of slimming down the fater characters.
I wanna pause this to say I don't condone what Ibn did. He ment well but it wasn't his fight and he shouldn't have commented a critique on something no one asked him to judge. Don't do this. Anyway...
Stripeydragon fucking hated this. Not only did he respond to every tweet, he went into the break trail discord and rallied everyone to defend him and attack Ibn, a lot of break trail members also rushed to the comments to defend stripey and attack ibn. He also posted ibns comment in his own discord to encourage others to dog pile on. This shit got out of hand super fucking fast. Ibn was crying and marsh was pissed. It was betray of trust on Ibns part, but the way stripey responded was downright scary.
Shit was at its peak by the time I woke up (Australian timezone) and I immediately went into damage control. I gave Ibn a huge lecture, I was mad af and told him to apologize. I dm'd breaktrails stream team manager Mari, and tried my best to defuse the situation so that both parties could stop. Everyone deleted their tweets. Ibn apologised a dozen times and Marsh told everyone that ibn was just an asshole.
So the story everyone believes now is that marsh actually loves stripydragons work and Ibn is just a weird jerk. There where no consequences for stripydragons weaponizing a stream team and their fan base against someone on twitter. They're still a member of break trail but the team has been dead for a long time. I understand that Ibn was in the wrong and marsh should have just talked about his issues with his team. But this is another case of someone with a big platform and bigger ego not hesitating to use that to attack others.
Starkymorph
this one is fucked up.
Starky mods for a bunch of break trail members, so he had an inside look into the whole stripeydragon thing. Keep that in mind.
About a year after the stripey incident, I woke up to a message from starky. I had recently finished a commission for starky but apart from that we didn't know each other well.
He claimed that ibn had harassed him on stream by bringing up controversial topics and that because he was my mod he wasn't going to support me any more. I was pretty angry, Ibn was causing trouble again. I dm'd ibn and told him I didn't want to hear what he had to say and instead I just wanted the timestamp on Starkeys VOD so I could see what he did myself.
I watched the VOD and what I saw didn't line up with anything starky had said. He made the whole thing up.
What really happened was, starky decided to bring up "cancel culture" and went on a rant about how it was inherently bad and that anyone who participates in it only does it for "self-aggrandizing reasons". A lot of the shit he said was very thinly veiled right wing bullshit dog whistles.
Ibn asked him to elaborate and said something to the likes of "what about people who cancel pedos and rapists" and starky banned ibn and ended the convo.
Ibn didn't start the controversial topic and he didn't harass anyone. But starky was mad and wanted to attack him, he knew Ibn had a history of starting shit so he came to me with a bullshit story thinking I'd believe him and Ibn would lose his friends. And it almost worked.
I tried to talk some sense into starky, I pointed out that his original message was dishonest. Starky doubled down and made up more lies. He continued to claim that things happened during the stream that aren't in the VOD. He even bought up weylandshere and claimed he was harassing him too, out of nowhere! which if you watch the VOD is also completely made up. He said some ablist shit about "high functioning autism" aswell, its all really incoherent. Non of this is true and I downloaded the VOD so he couldn't hide the evidence.
Starky tried to use my argument with cider and Ibns argument with stripy as evidence that we were bad people. I found this really sinister, because my initial reaction to Starkys story, was that i believed him, pretty much everyone reacted this way. It upsets me that i was almost convinced to distance myself from my best friend because of a lie.
A ton of people didn't watch the VOD and took Starkeys word. Starky blocked me and started asking all his followers and mutuals to do the same. A whole bunch of people sub tweeted about ibn being an abuser and me being an enabler. It was fucking aweful. It went on for days.
This only stopped when Kyziethewolf stepped in and defended me. Even tho starky was one of his best friends, he had watched the VOD and told everyone he was lying. Starky doesn't talk to kyzie now and it really broke his heart.
A lot of people still believe starky and I lost a bunch of mutual streamers support because of this. It's one of the worst attacks I've suffered on twitter/twitch to date.
I found out a few months later he's added "outcast is racist" to the narrative he tells people and there's nothing I can do about that
This also basically ended my friendship with Marsh. I've known marsh for 7 years and hes a friend of Starkeys too. During this whole ordeal he never spoke up, it was only kyzie. I was really upset about this because i feel that Marsh could have made a significant change to how this played out if he had of just stepped in.
When he dm'd me a few weeks after asking if I'm make some free art for his project I told him no. I told him I was hurt. He said he just didn't want to get involved in drama. i think its really harmful to reduce harassment to just "drama". We've stopped talking.
Jayedskier
I met jayed though my friend weyland. I needed a 3D artists and he needed work.
Jayed had recently lost a lot of friends because during COVID he tweeted that people not social distancing at a furcon where putting disabled, high risk, people's lives in danger. Totally righteous imo.
He however also tweeted that anyone who doesn't where a mask should kill themselves and deservingly got a lot of hate and backlash. Lost a lot of friends. Since then he was pretty unwilling to comment on any political shit. Publically that is.
The first fight I got into with jayed was when Ibn reposted a Tumblr thread about the YouTuber keffals, and some of the problematic things she'd done. Jayed loves keffals so he dm'd Ibn about it and started a huge fight defending his favourite YouTuber. I stepped in to try and resolve the fight but no one was really happy.
This argument made jayed realise that he didn't have the same values as the friend group he was in. He liked keffals, he thought it was ok to say the R slur and he felt people should be allowed to support JK Rowling.
He left my discord and I contacted him trying to smooth things over. We talked for a long time and I settled on agree to dissagree the hopes to change his mind on some of these issues.
That didn't happen. Jayed kept starting fights about woke shit, even though he's a self proclaimed "leftist" and it slowly drove a wedge between us. He stopped talking to everyone in our friend group, unfollowed us all on socials.
Artists/streamer and friend Ixu had drawn a big group shot of all of us together. Weyland (who is in this friend group) was pretty angry about the whole ordeal so he asked Ixu for a version without jayed edited out. When he posted this jayed got super pissed about it.
Jayed tweeted about how unwelcoming my community was. Screen caped some DM's and changed the context. I was so angry, I had spent months continuing to offer my friend ship and trying to change his mind. One of the last fights we got into he said he was mad that "people" expected him to show support for Palestine and thats kind of the end of it.
This one hurt because it felt like a betrayal. Jayed you can get fucked dude.
Socksthewolf
This one is super recent and is basically why I decided to write this.
I can't remember how I met socks. They work in the games industry and they have a LOT of money/connections. He gives away a lot of stuff, Donates to people a lot. He very affectionate and Everyone loves him. I even accepted a bunch of charity/gifts from him and in return drew a bunch of gift art.
Socks success made a few mutuals of mine uncomfortable. He had a lot of money to put into stream so his channel grew insanely fast. I'm also told he made comments to some mutuals, comparing channel growth that made them feel bad. He ran multiple giveaways and got partner almost a year after starting stream.
There was some drama between socks and one of his mods. I tried my hardest not to get involved. Socks employs a lot of parasocial strategies in order to retain an audience so he flirts a lot and also has a persona of "I'm you dad" on stream. Idk if this counts as love bombing, but it feels similar.
I heard that one of his mods developed a crush on him and when rejected, he drank himself into the hospital. He almost died.
I spoke with this ex mod about it. He doesn't blame socks for what happened even tho he feels the rejection was harsh. I still feel that socks takes advantage of people with his gifts and parasocial friendship. This is a result of that going unchecked.
One of our mutuals found out about this and was really upset. They tweeted about it and tried to hold socks accountable. Nothing came of it.
I grew distant from socks when he started hanging out with Redmoon a lot. Because I felt close to them at the time I messaged him a about Redmoon and what happened between us. He never replied.
This story takes a dark turn when jayedskier, friend of socks, decided to make that tweet mentioned in his section. Socks also went in on someone jayed had mentioned.
This is about my good friend Weyland. Weyland had had someone very close to them pass away recently. Socks complied some tweets and chat screen caps, and made up a story of weyland threatening to kill themselves.
Some of the messages were about weylands dead friend. Socks knowingly changed the context and lied to make weyland look bad.
I honestly think this is the worst thing on this post. To use the death of someone and the personal anguish of someone and ammo for you bullshit story about them is fucking horrifying.
I replied to socks tweet about weyland, I told him what he was doing was wrong. He told me that he feels bad I'm surrounded by toxic people and that he hopes they get better.
After seeing the way socks treats his audience and the way he lied about another streamer, I genuinely believe hes some kind of abuser. Idk the vibe is REALLY off with this one. This feels worse then bullying, there's an ego about it. I've blocked socks on everything. Frankly they scare me.
Final notes
Anyway that's been my aweful experience with aweful twitch streamers. The whole thing has left me bitter and sad and I no longer want to interact with anyone. idk where to go from here.
Twitch TOS doesn't care what people say or do on other platforms. And with other streamers/mutuals so unwilling to get involved or show support I just feel alone.
I do feel compelled to speak up when I see or experience something I think isn't right. I think a lot of neurodivegant people, like myself, feel that way. But I think it's been terrible for my career. I hate the feeling that I'd be so much more successful if I'd shut my mouth and looked away. Maybe even be partner by now. I know a lot of this comes across as just "furry drama" but i think its reductive to label it as that. Content creators who engage in these kind of harmful behaviors need to be held accountable if we want to see any positive change. And im not saying that means "CANCEL" them. some (not all) of these content creators can still learn and grow and be better. Negative attitudes and dismissive statements of "its just drama" create a space for bullies to thrive
Finally, please PLEASE do NOT under any circumstances harass anyone involved in this post. This is not an attempt to rally the masses to lynch some people, im just telling my story so that next time you see someone come forward with claims about a content creator you like you'll see the situation differently.
If you made it this far, wow. Thank you. Dunno if I'll post the vids/screencap evidence. I don't know if I care enough.
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pangolin-404 · 2 months
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little (big) announcement
Well, looks like Tumblr has taken the turn to sell data to Midjourney.
According to my archive, I've been in here for 6 or so years. I've stuck with this site for a long time, and believe it or not I'd call this hellsite a net positive for my life. I never intended to leave, even when Tumblr was boiled down to its skeleton crew. I thought I'd go out with the whole site when the servers rotted away. I've heard rumors that the CEO was taking a gander at AI but I never thought it'd pull through since the Tumblr userbase is vocally anti-AI. And, lo and behold, they slipped it as an opt-out thing into the settings very casually.
I want to hold out hope that the resulting backlash will urge Tumblr's CEO (as I don't blame most of the staff for this) to back out, but the trust has been damaged greatly over the past few months.
I do not want my art or writing or anything to be used to feed AI. As for my art, I am hesitant to keep posting here. I don't know what I'm waiting for. But if that nebulous reckoning of the end times comes, I will log out. I think I'm too emotionally attached to delete my account.
I have a Bluesky account which I am thinking of wholly migrating to. That feels weird to say; I never thought I'd make a social media account anywhere else. I made a lot of friends on Tumblr (who I am connected to via Discord and not strictly here, thankfully), and will be hunting for people I follow on BSKY as well.
I know, inevitably, not everyone will migrate to BSKY. Some people will choose Cohost (I did make an account there, but so few people I know here go there, it's not my first choice) or Dreamwidth as their new platforms of choice. But for those who are moving to Bluesky, I hope to find them.
I really don't want to leave Tumblr. Its culture and UI is truly one of a kind and is the biggest reason I've stayed. I don't want to wholly abandon ship just yet; maybe I'm too sentimental and we're already past the point of no return. I'll still be here, even if for a little while.
I'll be making this my new pinned for the foreseeable future, so let's get all this out of the way. Here's where I lurk:
Tumblr (Main) (here!)
Tumblr (Art Blog)
Bluesky (Main)
Bluesky (Art Blog)
Cohost (Main) (most likely to collect dust)
Archive of Our Own (writing only)
Neocities (as a side project, I suppose)
It's been fun. May we all trip over our shoelaces on our way out the door. o7
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asura-zoro · 1 year
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ATTENTION: ART THIEF & SCAMMER [PART 2]
This is part two of the Lino/Hoelys-blog situation, I will provide a summary of the situation with this person and of the events that has happened in the original post. For the previous part, and for other posts about Lino (accounts from his victims and the original artists he has stolen from) please check out the #hoelys-blog tag via tumblr search bar, my blog, or in this post’s tags. I will be posting updates almost every day or every other day, depending on what I find or what people bring to me. So for the most recent information, check out my most recent reblogs (of this post). If you have information that you think is relevant please message me.
Before I begin, please do not message him, do not harass him! Lino is an art thief and scammer that alters art and sells it, it seems he has been doing this since November 2022. In his previous blogs, he would post stolen art and present it as his, and would even post commission posts with stolen and altered art. Lino also goes and messages people asking for them to commission him, often using emotional manipulation tactics to drive his scams. He will also try to get you to upgrade your commission and will also charge you more than once on different paypal accounts (because “the payment didn’t go through”). Oh, and Lino is not afraid to beg you for money- he has begged several people to buy him some shoes (expensive ones).
Do not talk to someone who does not have examples of their artwork on their page, or if the artwork that has been posted has drastic changes in art style, or if they message you asking if you want to commission them. It is most likely a scam, and I highly suggest you reverse image search to find the original source. Lino caters to multiple fandoms, not just One Piece, DBZ, and Naruto. I’m also pretty sure, despite me blocking every account of his that I’m aware of, that he is watching my posts about him.
Lino is like a cockroach... The sheer amount of times he has created new blogs, renamed blogs... is just astounding. Here is a list of all of his known blogs:
@Hoelys-blog ->@Reikantopeni ->@sparklyeagle1 -> @starstrucksandwichpainter [Gone]
@Kawaiibasementsublime [Still up]
@Pashnaengnami [Gone]
@lino1017 [Gone]
@iwilldrawanythingforyou [Still up]
@happyconnoisseurdestiny [Possible blog of Lino’s, new]
@dutifullysparklyheart [New]
He also has a twitter: https://twitter[.]com/dajs64027553 (remove the brackets when you use the URL) I do not use Twitter, so I am not sure how bad the situation is over there.
If Lino does scam you, please screenshot EVERYTHING, and be sure to report him on every platform you have talked to him on, and block him (he likes to harass people and online stalk his victims). On tumblr, we can report him for phishing (and artists can report him for stealing their work), you can also report him on paypal or other money sending app/sites (please get your money back). Please contact the original artists so that they can be made aware and can take action against Lino. You can send the artist(s) the posts that I make about this situation. For those who have been scammed and/or gotten their work stolen- if you need his full name and list of known email addresses, please contact me.
Before most of his accounts got deleted, Lino posted on pashnaengnami that “I am going to delete Tumblr :(” and changed his pfp and banner to cartoon open wounds lol. Then he made his new accounts and a few hours later most of his blogs were gone.
Oh, if you make a report on Lino and Staff has touched base with you, please let me know! We can make a report support group, and keep each other updated and verify information. 
 This is the end of my summary, anything below this will be updates!
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pangyham · 6 months
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sorry to anyone who has to see this HAHAHA i think it's a little fun to ramble to.. a void i guess. i'm typing this under the assumption no one's gonna read it, let alone find it, so, sure, i'll talk!
on pangytine, my current and only instagram account, i sometimes get these spontaneous urges to post a huge a long overdue thank-you paragraph to my followers on my story. gratitude for indulging my artistic endeavors when i still had tangypine. i just never did it because.. well it's kinda.. cheesy... i had no idea how to deliver it in a way that didn't seem dramatic or "humble" because cmon, i'm not that relevant. It felt a bit weird addressing it because it just made it seem like i was this huge influencer who suddenly disappeared (and yes i know i was technically considered a big artist on both ig and twitter but.. it's not like i was unique; i think.. the state of Fandom and the art community these past few years makes accumulating thousands of followers a little less unattainable, and i was one of those artists. and my work is not phenomenal- i did not leave an impact on the art community. but these nuances will just have to be generalized for now because i think you all know what i mean) and so i couldn't help but laugh and cringe and think, "i am not this relevant-" because i really wasn't. why make a big deal out of it?
but i can't help it being a little dramatic though, because i still get emails from my followers asking where i am, and i get comments and messages on pangytine ("i finally found you!"), and i even get messages from my shop's contact form! a shop that i've abandoned for months! and my heart swells. I don't want to dismiss that; i think i will always be a sensitive, emotional person and so stuff like this just makes me overwhelmed. it's sweet, and it will never fail to make me a little bit nostalgic and thankful. I will always have a soft spot for tangypine and my time spent in the anime + genshin communities… i dunno.. people are just so kind and i'm thankful i've encountered a lot of them
i've been a lot less.. chronically online (LOL) that the thought of having 200k followers is completely foreign to me. i forget that i had a huge following, that people actually looked at my stuff. I dont mean for this to come across as modesty though because i'm just being honest, truly. but this just makes the occasional "where are you? i miss your art" hit a little harder 🥲 i mean, i was able to somehow sell my art through tangypine. i was able to do commissions.. had so many say they loved my art- of course a part of me misses that. i don't think i yearn for it, and knowing that makes me a little sad.
i genuinely am thankful for every kind comment people have left me, and every kind message. I think i'm just ultimately thankful i had a kind following. people are so nice! and that's what i wanted to say, that's all ive always wanted to say before i deleted my accounts. here it is
aha and again i dont really expect anyone to see this (except maybe a few handful just because my very first post here has a whopping 4 notes, me included, and that genuinely shocked me HAHAHA). perhaps i just find closure in publishing these particular thoughts somewhere, and here they are sorry this is cringe to the people who read it. my friend once told me i'm notorious for overexplaining. This is will be the only time i get to say this, so gah whatever. i don't think i can bring myself to post this lengthy ramble on my more public account on instagram
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rockethorse · 1 year
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Day twenty-one: One community lot and four businesses ready to be run!
All the lots are CC-free... except one, which only uses two pieces of CC which have good odds for already being in your game.
WARNING!! This is a LONG post with a lot of pictures underneath, but I figured it was better than splitting the post up - just be warned!
These old lots are from a new BaCC-style challenge I started developing a while ago but decided to reboot from the ground up with a better approach. Some of the lots were cool, though, so I refined them into the gift you see today.
First up is Seven Sisters Fine Foods, a very large community lot primed to be an owned business based on the architecture of my home town of Adelaide. This is the lot that contains CC - the Maxis Lost & Found plumbob arch, and frillen’s Invisible Tiles, in order to create the arched walkway you seee in the preview photos above. Both files are included in the download.
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As an owned business, the intent is for your Sims to sell Seasons produce and fish they have grown and caught themselves, along with restockable grocery bins and some kitchen appliances. There is a staff area on the second floor of the greengrocer’s side, and space for packing stations there and next to the fishmonger’s if you play with them (not included).
There’s already a little garden area for Sims to grow produce, and you could easily add a pond on the opposite side if you want to employ Sims to fish. This lot is built with a rowhouse effect - so that if you know how to use the Lot Adjuster, you can have other lots appear “attached” on either side - but simply delete these extra walls/bushes if you don’t need them.
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The second lot is Rosé Bistro and KISS@TEN Cafe, inspired (obviously) by a TS3 rabbit hole that functions as a restaurant. I hate running restaurants so this is the only lot not primed to be run as a business, haha, but you probably could if you’re a masochist! The lot is primed to accommodate toddlers if you have mods that let you take them to community lots.
The first two floors are one restaurant, with a casual family dining area downstairs and then a fancier dining area suitable for celebrations and functions on the second floor. Of course, Sims will sit wherever they please.
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The top floor is KISS@10, a little coffeeshop (and... magazine seller) based on Japanese cafes. If you did want to run this as a restaurant, then this would be a good place to sell takeaway or deco food. Sims should not trek up here to sit and order food as none of the chairs/tables/counters work together.
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You can see below this lot is built for the side street to either back onto another road or lot, but you can simply close it off with a fence behind the stairs as necessary.
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The third lot is the Dewitt Yuself Hardware Store, based on the kind of place we would call Bunning’s here and I guess... Home Depot? In the states? One of those big comforting home reno & garden centres dads love. This was an interesting exploration of the kind of business a Sim could run without CC, and your shop stock ends up being a mixture of fixtures, Build Mode objects, and some garden supplies. There are two checkouts, and an employee area upstairs.
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And lastly, you get two more business presented as one, because they’re designed to look like two halves of the same building; Tiny Smiles Daycare Centre and The Stretched Canvas, an art/art supplies store.
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The daycare centre sells toddler supplies as well as tickets, even though by default most of the clients will probably be adults. You could probably try and run it as an actual school/daycare if you use the appropriate mods.
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As usual, there is an employee area upstairs.
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The art store sells supplies on the ground floor and has an empty gallery on the second floor as well as a maker’s space. You could either sell tickets and charge people to view the art and take art lessons, or you could sell the art itself; either sculptures and paintings your Sims have made, or regular decorations from the catalogue. I won’t tell anyone.
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It’s a bit boring, if I’m honest, but I included it for convenience to attach to the daycare - if you’d like to turn this into a different business or community lot, just use the Clean Installer to install it without any furniture. There is a pretty convenient employee area/living quarters in the back.
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Thank you for scrolling this far! All lots have been cleaned with the Lot Cleaner as well as tidied from any Sim references in SimPE.
Download All Businesses/Community Lots @ SFS
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magmacavern · 11 months
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Hero and Partner Week, Day 7: Free Day!
Last up for the free day today is a little drawing of my own team! After I made all this art of Neo and Skitty (now named Penelope) for this week, I decided that I should actually try to come up with unique designs for them. Now all of my previous illustrations of them are officially outdated. Oops.
I'd gotten attached to the depictions of them in my previous Hero and Partner Week drawings, so I didn't want to change them too much, but I still wanted them to be recognizable as original chararcters and not just general depictions of an eevee and a skitty. I'm pleased with Neo's redesign, but I would like to make Penelope a little more unique in the future. If you're interested, you can read more about them and their alternate universe under the cut!
This will be my last submission for Hero and Partner Week. I had a blast drawing and writing for this event over the past month, and I really enjoyed seeing what everyone else created as well. Thanks so much for hosting this amazing event! I'm already looking forward to participating again next year and seeing how much I've improved as an artist by then!
(Also, apologies if this posts twice. It disappeared from my queue sometime after I scheduled it, and I'm not sure if it's still going to post. I decided to just rewrite it in advance, and if the other version turns up, I'll delete it.)
@heropartnerweek
Neo
Neo is an odd-colored Eevee who woke up in the Tiny Woods one morning unable to remember who she was or how she got there. She occasionally dreams of a strange Pokemon atop a frozen mountain, and after learning about the legend of Nintales, she comes to the conclusion that she must be the human in the story who angered the deity and abandoned her partner Pokemon, Gardevoir. She feels obligated to help save the world because she's (allegedly) the one who brought about its destruction long ago, but secretly she feels she's not capable of it and is hoping for a way out. Neo can most easily be described as cowardly. She lacks courage and prefers to run and hide rather than fight and stand up for herself. She doesn't wish to hurt others and cares deeply for many Pokemon she knows, but when push comes to shove, her strong sense of self preservation takes control and she always puts herself first, even at the detriment of other Pokemon. She also lacks confidence, and this causes others to be distrusting of her and lack belief in her abilities. Neo tends to make promises she can't keep because she either doesn't think it through all the way or just wants to help and please others, which makes her seem more unreliable to those she lets down. Her hastiness also hurts her ability to think for herself. Neo can problem solve well when she is forced to slow down and reason out the situation, but when she rushes herself, she doesn't consider all the possibilities and can come to the wrong conclusion. Neo came to trust Penelope quickly because Penelope was there for her when she didn't have anyone else to turn to, but she also sometimes regrets forming a team with her and wonders if it was the right choice because of her struggle to show bravery and do the right thing like Penelope does.
Penelope
Penelope is a young Skitty who was raised in Littlegrove, a town on the sea northwest of Pokemon Square. Her parents, a Meganium and a Delcatty, tend to a pecha berry orchard and a small garden of other berry and herb plants, and her mother is a skilled weaver who makes scarves and other textiles using the plants grown in town. Penelope and her younger sibling Orion were often tasked with travelling to Pokemon Square to sell Delcatty's scarves to the Kecleon brothers and the many rescue teams that visit town, but since a mystery dungeon formed within the Tiny Woods, Penelope has been making the trip alone. When she learns that she and her partner must be the ones to save the world, she immediately rises to the task because the lives of her family are on the line and she's determined to save them, even at the cost of her own life. Penelope is courageous and quick-thinking with a strong sense of integrity. She's highly motivated by her commitment to and love for her family, especially her younger sibling Orion, and she'll never make a promise that she thinks she can't keep. Her strict moral code often makes it difficult for her to be understanding of those who act selfishly, and it also makes her prone to overworking herself or throwing herself into danger if she thinks it will help someone she loves. She is highly confident in her beliefs and her decision-making abilities, which allows her to act quickly on instinct. However, this also makes her stubborn and unlikely to follow in other Pokemon's footsteps or take their advice without good reason, and because she's still young, her beliefs and decisions aren't always backed up by experience or knowledge, leading her to make some poor choices. Her personality is often at odds with Neo's cowardice and self-interest, so they have a rocky start to their relationship.
One early spring day, Penelope was travelling through Tiny Woods with a new stock of her mother's pecha scarves when she came across an odd-looking eevee named Neo who said she had lost her memory. While she was distracted by the stranger, Gengar of Team Meanies snuck up on Penelope and attacked her. Because of her Normalize ability, Penelope was unable to fight back and Gengar stole most of the scarves she was carrying. Neo fled in the commotion, and Penelope chased after her, assuming she was working with Gengar to steal the scarves.
Penelope found Neo at the entrance to the Tiny Woods's mystery dungeon, which appeared as a deep chasm in the forest floor. She confronted her while Neo couldn't escape, but Neo claimed she didn't know anything about Gengar or his plans to attack Penelope. As they were arguing, they were approached by a Butterfree who needed help because her child, Caterpie, was lost in the dungeon. Penelope agreed to help and forced Neo to come with her because she didn't yet believe that Neo and Gengar weren't working together.
After finding Caterpie and reuniting him with his mother, Penelope took Neo to Pokemon Square where they decided to stay the night at Kangaskhan's inn because Neo didn't have anywhere else to go and Penelope didn't know how to fix the problem of the stolen scarves. While in Pokemon Square, she asked Neo to form a real rescue team with her in order to help earn back the lost money.
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crispywisp · 11 months
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Anon submission:
this is moreso petty tumblr drama esp so you can have a lighthearted ask! i’m in a very niche fandom and recently had some merch i drew skyrocket in attention/sales more than i expected; however, at the same time, a grown ass adult who constantly posts in the tags w… let’s just say 🤨 takes (joking about omegaverse a Lot, woobifying eugenicist/fascist characters, shipping old mentor x young ambiguous age mentee “"age gap”“ stuff, bruh) was constantly trying to be friendly on all social media talking to me… and then blocked me on all social media when i chose to silently not respond, thought that’d be the peaceful end of that.
NAH, when attention on my merch wips were growing, they unblocked and tried refollowing me, and after an entire night constantly softblocking and pinning a post like “hey i don’t want people into [aforementioned sus stuff] to follow me” that was ignored, i straight up dm’d them the post like “hey i’m gonna be blunt directly letting you know now, please respect this boundary” and they “apologized” But said some bs like “i don’t know where you got the impression i’m into omegaverse but still, have a good one” (note they explicitly avoided addressing my distaste w “"age gap”“)… long story short, ”“coincidentally”“ after reblocking me, they’re drawing hilariously bad art for the EXACT same type of merch i’m selling rn, apparently blocking anyone who’s reblogged my artwork, and deleted posts saying word for word "age gap” phrases from their blog. despite a lot of horny/sus posts still strewn across their entire blog; what a way to be so weird taking boundaries so personally and acting out inappropriately, esp in a niche space where Everyone Can See LMAO
this guy’s wild oh my god, im sorry you had to go through that lmao
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fdotaku · 7 months
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An Analysis of Pixiv's Recent Censorship of Femdom Artists
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Do you have femdom artists you love? Pixiv is the #1 online platform that Japanese artists use to share their art, sort of like Japan's version of DeviantArt. Even among Western 2D femdom artists, Pixiv's popularity has rapidly increased in the last few years.
This article is my attempt to shed light on Pixiv's policy enforcement changes this year that have targeted a number of artists, which sadly include femdom ones.
If you're a fan of 2D femdom, especially the heavy BDSM variety, it's natural to want to know if some of your favorite artists have been forced to delete or alter their creative works, and why. It's hard to find that info anywhere else, due in large part to the fact that Japanese artists don't always defend themselves as vocally as they have a right to.
Also, just to be clear, I'll say this up-front: the only parts of Pixiv that have been affected are the 3 monetizable parts, Pixiv Fanbox (a Patreon-like site), Booth (an itch.io-like site), and "requests" (i.e. paid commissions). The main Pixiv site where artists can create profiles and share their works for free has been unaffected, and is likely to stay unaffected.
Sorry, this will ultimately be a very lengthy post; if you just want to learn what's up with Pixiv, skip down to the section "Changes at Pixiv in Late 2022" for recent events, or the section after that "2D Artists Later Targeted" for a list of some of the affected artists.
To start, I want to explain the role of international credit card companies in all of this. This controversy ultimately begins and ends with them.
The Specter of the International Credit Card Companies
Two American companies, VISA and MasterCard, have an international near-duopoly when it comes to processing credit card payments. In other words, when a site like Pixiv wants to accept customers' money, one of the most convenient and popular ways to do that is to let them pay with credit cards, but in order to do so, Pixiv needs to make a deal with a bank which in turn has a deal with a payment processing company, and their only real choice is the VISA-Mastercard duopoly if they want to reach a large number of customers, especially internationally.
So what does this duopoly mean? It means that VISA and Mastercard are also responsible for making sure they don't accidentally fund terrorists or other kinds of criminals… Or to put it in terms they understand, they need to make sure they don't accidentally facilitate the payments of someone in a way that results in political fallout. It's not like these 2 companies are omniscient and can prevent anyone from ever processing a payment for a crime, and small controversies will pop up frequently. But if they fail to properly police their partners, especially if they were previously "warned" by an outside entity but failed to take action, and a small controversy becomes a massive controversy, it's not impossible that they could have that status taken from them. Their duopoly only exists through the tacit approval of the United States government, which expects them to do a competent job. For now, there are no serious threats to their duopoly. But in my personal opinion, if they allow 1 or 2 more massive controversies on the level of what happened with Pornhub, they could lose it. These 2 companies could be said to be "responsible" for an unfathomable amount of financial transactions, so they probably don't feel that they can slack off in their relentless efforts to minimize controversy.
Thus, VISA and Mastercard have always been especially harsh on pornography. The vast majority of the commercial porn industry, especially before the web rose in popularity, revolved around real-life actors. So when these companies came up with policies about what kind of "content" was acceptable to sell, they implicitly formulated them with respect to real-life situations. Keep in mind that depictions of sex and violence are outright illegal in many parts of the world, and even safe and consensual BDSM is a crime in most places if the police are prejudiced enough to try to prosecute it. Why wouldn't they want to avoid financial liability for real-life porn that involves depiction of physical abuse, when they obviously have no way to judge whether it's a faked effect (like ketchup instead of blood) or a real act, and BDSM porn is known to depict real acts? And why wouldn't they object to real-life porn that has bestiality or child porn, when that obviously constitutes abuse? In any case, VISA and Mastercard's policies were mostly based in reason and respect for international law. After all, there is still a worldwide market for these materials, and it needs to be taken seriously. In particular, those who trade in depictions of children and animals who are unable to consent, sometimes even the brutal murder of animals, financially support or at least morally support the horrific creation of such material, the existence of which continues to traumatize many victims.
That said, porn isn't just 3D, it's also 2D, and not everyone can recognize the difference between fiction and reality. Perhaps thanks to some well-known classic literature with elements of fetishism such as Venus in Furs, I don't believe there has ever been a criminal prosecution in a Western country for purely written depictions of sexual and physical abuse that equates them with financially supporting the acts they depict. Text-based femdom is subject to the same common sense which tells us that a movie which depicts a brutal murder isn't equivalent to condoning murders. Overall, the written word is treated differently--as connected to the realm of ideas which are by themselves not crimes--than visual material. But the same can't be said for fictional visual material. Because "porn" can sometimes be defined as a reference to depictions that's independent of how those depictions are created, there's a kind of legal theory that treats scratches on a piece of paper as equivalent to photographs of horrific real-life crimes. And there have been scattered cases around the world where people were prosecuted for possession of kinky drawn porn, or even just non-pornographic manga with fan service, under laws intended to clamp down on a criminal industry.
Japan's creative industry has fiercely protected its 2D artists from arbitrary censorship for decades, and even strongly objected to occasional attempts of outside bodies such as UN organizations to pressure Japan to legally enforce censorship of "explicit" content in their domestic manga industry, such as perceived sexualization, groping, or anything that Western sensibilities object to. The Japanese 2D porn scene has its roots in the doujin scene, where people drew their fantasies without holding back (other than adding mosaics/bars over exposed genitals in accordance with Japanese law) and printed them to be sold at twice-a-year conventions. Around the turn of the millennium, that industry took to the web, and not only could people sell and buy physical erotic doujin magazines, they could sell and buy digital-only doujin works on sites like DLsite, and they expanded beyond manga into voice works, CG sets, video games, and so on. While Japan's corporate erotic industries are regulated by various entities, such as EOCS for eroge which requires games be submitted to them for advance approval, DLsite doesn't face quite the same level of restrictions, as works are speedily reviewed by DLsite staff. The popular Japanese artist site Pixiv barely ever regulates its users' erotic art, except to force them to re-upload it with mosaics. That's in contrast with the English-speaking internet, which lacked a central online marketplace for 2D porn until the VN industry pushed Steam to open its doors to erotic games, and even then they ban many games for their content; even when you compare artist sites, DeviantArt censors far more content than Pixiv, as it doesn't allow depictions of male erections, sexual contact or explicit sex acts, or characters who could be interpreted somehow as underage, and has its own volunteer army of Christians and porn haters who try to report as many fetish artists as possible. Well, anyone who's familiar with Japanese otaku culture probably understands that for better or worse, their attitude toward sex is different from that of many Western countries.
The Duopoly's Oppressive Influence on Artists
Patreon was created in 2013. At first, it was relatively censorship-free. I remember that Fenoxo, creator of Corruptions of Champions, was a top-ranked creator; that game included significant amounts of furry, latex, bestiality, futanari, mind control, rape, and of course, corruption fetish content. In truth, porn had never actually been officially allowed on Patreon. But for a while, the company clearly just wasn't sure where to draw the line when it came to how to define sexual content or not, so they left it alone.
However, all that changed in November 2017, when they outright banned a wide range of kinks. The major ones that everyone noticed were rape, incest, bestiality, and underage characters. Guro was also banned. And they interpreted these terms broadly. Some creators fled to SubscribeStar, but SubscribeStar doesn't accept as many types of payment methods as Patreon. Many creators, such as Fenoxo, stayed on by adjusting the content they produced. Half a year later, as a new ban wave swept the platform, Patreon staff confirmed that it was under pressure from payment processors to 'review content'. And then in 2019, Patreon had a major crackdown on hypnosis and mind control kink, because they defined it as a type of rape.
Now, let's look at the Japanese side. Japan was slow to understand Patreon's appeal. Due to Japan's cultural differences, there was some initial resistance to both the crowdfunding and subscription models; many people had a kind of right-wing mindset where they said that creators should just create a product and sell it rather than "beg for money". But that changed in April 2018, when DLsite launched a sister site called Ci-en, pronounced "shien" which means "support/aid". It was a smart move, because many creators already had DLsite accounts to sell their works, so it wasn't hard to expand that to Ci-en and let them set up plans to receive money from fans or just blog about whatever they wanted. A lot of ambitious femdom projects started up around this time, with the S na Kanojo-based game Escalation! among them. With Ci-en's explosion in popularity, two Japanese rivals emerged in a matter of weeks: Fantia and Pixiv's Fanbox.
Fanbox stood out for one clear reason: it's the only site that adopted the Patreon model. Ci-en has both free and paid plans, but treats each month-tier as a kind of purchase, where you unlock all posts at that tier for that month permanently. Fantia has more variety of payments options, but is also more focused around per-month purchases, and lacks a free tier. Fanbox, in contrast, creates a "box" which creators add to periodically, which is completely accessible once you pay for it, for as long as you pay for it, for the tier that you pay for; in other words, it's Japanese Patreon. And as you might expect, it's proven more popular than its rivals.
Just like Patreon, Fanbox also spent a few years relatively censorship-free, its "honeymoon" of sorts. But recently, the international credit card companies have come for Pixiv.
Changes at Pixiv in Late 2022
In mid-November 2022, Pixiv suddenly announced that they would be making changes in December to their Terms of Use to "clarify" what kind of content is not acceptable. They were open about the fact that international credit card companies had pressured them to take action. In fact, they didn't yet reveal what the specific changes would be… this was effectively an announcement about an announcement.
For anyone who had any doubt: Japanese people are far from ignorant about how their views on sex differ from Western countries. In fact, many Japanese people, especially those who appreciate otaku culture or adult content, are aware of and strongly oppose "political correctness" (ポリコレ/porikore) in Western countries. (Most of their impression of it comes from Western cinema, games, and comics, where they feel that these stories are distorted for the worse by the writers' need to adjust story elements, and in particular limit women's cuteness or sexiness.) Japanese people also understand that there's a faction in the West that wants to censor otaku culture. Furthermore, there's an overwhelming consensus among Japanese people that drawings cannot hurt anyone, and should not be criminalized.
And so the Japanese public's response to this announcement was, as expected, one of displeasure. There was a lot of discussion in Twitter about how tyrannical international credit card companies are, and it wasn't the first time such discussions had taken place, as plenty of other Japanese businesses have had disagreements with the international credit card companies in the past over the sale of erotic art. The magazine Bunshun, which is well-known for its investigative journalism, reported on how the credit card companies had been on a hair trigger ever since the Pornhub controversy in late 2020, and that because they recently discovered Fanbox had been used as a front by some Chinese vendors to covertly sell child porn and necrophilia porn hidden within lengthy videos, they were watching to make sure Pixiv came down hard on illegal content and were prepared to even ban Pixiv's entire parent company if Pixiv's actions didn't satisfy them. It wasn't only Mastercard, which is known to be a bit more strict than VISA, but also VISA and JCB (Japan Credit Bureau, an international credit card company based in Japan) who were likely to do so.
Finally, in early December, Pixiv unveiled the changes they would make to their Terms of Use. First, they distinguished between 禁止商品, content that would result in an immediate ban (which includes child porn), and 要修正商品, content that would just result in being designated as private/unmonetized until altered and re-approved by Pixiv (which includes all non-photorealistic drawings). This kind of difference in treatment is obvious, but Pixiv laying it out clearly also probably helped reassure some artists that they wouldn't be treated as criminals by Pixiv just because a "problematic" drawing was detected on their Fanbox, as well as reassure credit card companies that truly evil content would receive more than a slap on the wrist in response. Second, they add separate pages with clarifying examples of what kinds of situations are considered problematic. The key point is that their 要修正商品 page cites "sexual exploitation or sexual abuse of a minor (*1), incest, bestiality, rape (or any other non-consensual sexual behavior), non-consensual mutilation of a person or body part, [and] any other content deemed inappropriate by pixiv". Furthermore, it's clarified that this content is judged by the holistic situation presented by the image, title, tags, caption, and description; therefore, text-based context may matter as much as the art itself.
Up until this point, Pixiv had been vague about what content wasn't allowed on Fanbox and other services which utilized credit cards; they effectively just said you couldn't post "illegal" content. They were probably reluctant to tell Japanese users "look at all the fetishes that Western credit card companies consider 'illegal' to draw!" and just hoped it wouldn't result in a problem. However, as Bunsun reported, they had seen frequent cases over the years where these credit companies refused to settle payments for specific content on their platforms, and now, the credit card companies had taken the initiative to more or less band together and force Pixiv to spell out what they considered problematic in their Terms of Use.
In any case, to those of us who already were aware of what fetishes credit card companies hate most, the list didn't contain any real surprises. The real question was… to what extent would these new rules be enforced? Were they just lip service to the credit card companies who'd held them to the fire, or would they really make sure Pixiv banned every piece of incest fan art they could find on Fanbox?
Many creators held their breath around this time, and prepared to be banned when the changes took effect in mid-December. negisho, a femdom artist who both draws and digitally renders situations with muscular boys who're tied up and beaten by sexy older women, was particularly certain that he'd be censored, since he had the triple-whammy of somewhat photorealistic 3D renders, underage characters, and violence. As it turns out, his Fanbox wasn't censored. But some of his Booth works were, and out of fear, he moved to Fantia anyway. Another femdom artist, makin, creates only 2D art, but a lot of them feature loli characters and incest, so he made them all private in preparation for expected censorship… but when it didn't come, he just un-privated them in mid-January, and they're still up. So for the most part, what people feared didn't happen. However, it's true that a number of artists who produce 3D renders were targeted in a wave of suspensions that unfolded in late December. Still, overall, the impression most people had is that Pixiv's rule changes weren't being enforced strictly, and if they were enforced, it was mostly accounts who produced 3D renders that were targeted, not traditional 2D artists. There was a collective sigh of relief. And I'm sure Pixiv was happy, too, that the controversy had died down.
2D Artists Later Targeted
Unfortunately, the story didn't end there. After an apparent pause of a few months, a number of 2D femdom artists on Pixiv have had their Fanboxes targeted in a new wave of censorship.
To be clear, this is what happens: an artist is suddenly told that their Fanbox has been suspended for problematic content or have a number of their posts set to "private", which won't be visible to the public until they manually correct the problematic posts. In the case of Fanbox suspensions, they're not always told exactly which posts are problematic, so they have to somewhat guess what's problematic and make a large number of changes before applying for re-approval by Pixiv staff. They may also be told they need to remove external links such as ones to Google Drive.
Here are a list of some of affected artists, and what they revealed about the circumstances behind their account's censorship.
Miginohito Mitsuru: In March 2023, several posts set private. Reason suspected by artist: depictions of young male/female characters. Result: moved to Ci-en. (Note: The image used in this blog post is taken from their work.)
Luster Don (commissions both art and adult videos): In April 2023, he reported that he noticed some of his older posts with apparently NG (banned) keywords in their tags had been made private by Pixiv. Result: he reworded the text to not have those NG words, and re-submitted them. In fact, he had already taken the step of moving his photographic content off Fanbox onto other platforms, to preempt the possibility of a mixed fight being judged as 禁止商品 and having his entire Pixiv account banned as a result.
Kia-shi: In May 2023, their Fanbox was suspended. No specific reason/art cited by Pixiv. Reason suspected by artist: oneshota and/or oyoufuku akachan (a male character trapped inside tight clothes worn by a larger female character and pressed against her body). Result: deleted all art with those 2 fetishes, registered for Fantia, and posted that art on Fantia; continually operates both Fantia and Fanbox accounts but posts less art on Fanbox.
Robo Mikan: In May 2023, their Fanbox was suspended. Stated reason: there was a problem with the top page. Result: he changed all the images and tags displayed on the top page, and it was unsuspended. He suspects that loli content was the source of the problem (since he's a lolidom artist) but is unclear about what exactly caused it, so he created a Fantia account too and continues to operate both it and Fanbox.
Uramacoto (femsub focus artist, but lots of yuri femdom): In May 2023, their Fanbox was suspended. Stated reason: problems with their cover image, portfolio, plan cover images, and perhaps other unstated reasons; they'd also previously had a few posts flagged due to the need to revise the text or tags. Result: they changed everything that was designated problematic, but in an effort to avoid further suspensions, they researched what other people advised they do on Twitter/5ch, and in the end, they took the drastic step of censoring all adult terminology in text-based elements of their pasts and future posts (with the ● symbol, such as ア●ルト instead of アダルト): namely titles, tags, captions, and descriptions--they even took the effort to censor terms like bondage, S-onna, netorare, and seme. Note: they didn't censor the actual Japanese text within the images, just the post metadata.
Murasaki Gankyuu Suisou (SM-kei circle with a lot of heavy femdom works): In May 2023, or possibly early June 2023, their Fanbox was suspended. They fixed it in mid-June. No reason provided for why, though MGS does have a lot of violent content; if they had to censor any of it, they would've said so, so perhaps they just reworded some text or thickened some mosaics.
Philia (Korean femdom artist): In September 2023, his Fanbox was suspended. Stated reason: insufficient mosaics, external links to Google Drive. The NTR-themed CG set "Perfect Girlfriend" was also not allowed by them for some reason. Result: He did what Fanbox told him to do, and his Fanbox was restored. "Perfect Girlfriend" was apparently canceled.
My best guess is that around May 19, Pixiv automatically scanned the text-based metadata of the posts of all Fanbox creators for certain keywords associated with the content that they'd explicitly banned the previous December. And for accounts with a significant number of flagged posts, they suspended the accounts and told them they needed to fix this, and once they did so, restored their accounts. It's possible that merely changing the text would've been enough to satisfy Pixiv, but some creators like Kia-shi were more cautious now that they were under a microscope, and chose to delete the offending posts altogether. (In general, they're cautious because Pixiv has warned that repeat offenders may be outright banned.) That said, there are other cases of censorship too, but it's rare to see creators want to discuss it in detail, in part because of the shame/stigma of being told your fetishes are problematic, so in the end, the sample size I've examined is too small and I can't be confident about any of my conclusions.
Conclusions
It doesn't seem that many femdom artists have been affected by Fanbox's censorship… at least, for now. And in most cases, they've been able to make trivial fixes that let them stay on the platform. This is good news. But ultimately, the future is unknown, and the tension between Pixiv and credit card companies will probably remain for a while.
So, who are the villains in this story? Well, the criminals who misused Fanbox as cover to peddle illicit materials, obviously. Aside from them… I don't know. I don't resent any of the fundamental forces that sustain this dynamic which represses freedom of expression in erotic art. In particular, the credit card companies just want to protect themselves legally, and they have every right to be upset when the sites they partner with end up exploited by criminals. At the same time, some of these criminals are very clever, and I don't blame a site like Pixiv for not being able to detect all hidden content within videos sold on Fanbox, any more than I blame YouTube for every copyright notice that's filed against its videos. (Note: It's not like I believe Pixiv couldn't have done any better. But hindsight is always 20/20, and they're clearly putting in a real effort now.)
Villains aside, if I had to pick who else I dislike most, it's the people who embrace the censorship that results from this complex legal dynamic and falsely moralize it. For example, the current Patreon moderation team doesn't just ban certain fetishes, it outright morally condemns them in the warnings it sends to creators: "Per our guidelines, we have zero tolerance for the glorification of sexual violence, and this includes depictions of sexualized minors, non-consensual sex, incest, and bestiality." They actually implicitly accuse these artists, whose fantasies hurt no one, of encouraging violence. Fortunately, most organizations don't feel the same way. Steam famously has a single official policy toward its erotic games: they only ban what's "illegal" (read: they also follow guidelines similar to the credit card companies') or "trolling". Although they've received some flak because their moderation team treats all high school characters (no matter how curvy, no matter what school year, no matter whether they're stated to be 18 or not) as children, they've at least been largely consistent and refused to moralize their judgments; they even apologized for their premature ban of Chaos;Head Noah which led to fan outcry. Meanwhile, Japanese companies not only don't moralize this issue, they resist censorship as best they can. Even Pixiv, which was placed under a lot of pressure last December, has only censored a handful of 2D accounts that essentially verbally self-confessed to the content that credit card companies object to; there are countless femdom creators on Fanbox who I didn't mention, because they haven't encountered any censorship.
What's kind of ironic, actually, is that this past summer, Rium (Msize) started a Fanbox… less than a year after the changes in its Terms of Use caused Fanbox to lose face compared to Ci-en and Fantia. I hope it works out well for him.
Update on January 22, 2024
On January 17, 2024, Pixiv Fanbox enacted a new ban (well, force-hidden) wave, and this one covered a broader set of terms found in tags and titles.
There's been a lot of talk about it on Japanese Twitter. Tweets like this one list examples of all the terms that have been newly declared unacceptable. In short, the terms are all associated with any of 3 categories: non-con, underage, and incest. Previously, the main banned terms had been the ones associated with underage character depictions, and only a small subset of terms had been banned. Now, a broader set of terms has been used, and they expanded into two other categories. So for example, if a Fanbox fetish artist draws erotic art and uses the word "forced" (犯され) in the image's title, it was be force-hidden in the recent wave. And any erotic work tagged with family terms like "older sister" is unacceptable, which would even included, for example, an image of an "older sister" having sex with a complete stranger (just the two of them).
It's worth noting, though, that Fanbox's censorship wave does not instantly ban anyone, it just hides their works by default and forces them to make some kind of "change" before it can be un-hidden. This means that simply removing the offending title/tags, or renaming that with a censor such as レ〇プ instead of レイプ (rape), appears to be enough for their works to be restored. Same as what happened in last May's censorship wave.
Anyway, while a lot of creators are disturbed by what has happened, most of them appear to be sticking with Fanbox. I think the main draw of Fanbox for a lot of creators is that foreign patrons can't access Fantia or SubscribeStar with their credit cards, Patreon censors even harder, and Ci-en's subscription model and features are more limited and awkward.
Side Talk
This post took a while. I had to change my focus and rewrite a large part of it, and yet I still find myself wondering if I rambled on too much about details most people don't care about. I tried to minimize links to Japanese sources, though it's worth noting that if you know Japanese and are interested, the Bunshun article is worth reading. In any case, MGS is the only circle I'm truly excited to see more works from these days, so I hope that they can avoid censorship when they try to publish Femme Fatale on DLsite. They seem to be approaching the point where they can put out a trial version...
Lately, I've been trying to play some of the Western erotic game community's femdom games. It's been interesting. Too many of them are slow-paced VNs, with characters I don't find very likable. I always wish more English language devs would create fun character dynamics like the kind in Crazy GameMaster: The 7 Crystals. I also wish they would just finish their games. Too many of these devs stop developing their main game when they're close to done with it, in order to develop their next game in advance with the hope that they won't lose patrons once they finish their main game. I don't like to play unfinished games, but I rarely have a choice here.
I hope my next post won't take nearly a full year to put out. I have many ideas for posts that excite me more than this post, but I prioritized this post because I felt like the subject matter was more time-sensitive.
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shinesurge · 2 years
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I don't want to be all "hello random stranger, I think your art is cool please give me advice", but I saw your webtoons post and I'd like to ask where/how you'd recommend putting webcomics on the web? For me and also for my friend who does have a comic on webtoon.
Hi! you're good, I don't mind talking about this at all haha
Before Webtoon got to be a thing the usual procedure for making a comic was to start out posting pages on your social media for a while so you could test the waters before making the jump to a dedicated site. That way you could build up a little bit of a reader base on an existing platform who would be interested enough to make the extra click, maybe start generating some revenue to pay for the real site, but also you got the chance to see if you even want to make comics without dumping too much time and effort into a site. I posted Kidd Commander pages on deviantart (now deleted) and its tumblr blog for about six months before I decided to change over, but to be honest if it's just a hobby or it suits you you can keep doing that forever if you want.
Personally, I think if your comic is important to you (and ESPECIALLY if you're getting income from it) I would strongly suggest making a home for it that you own. Make your own website and funnel people to it from social media. I know that's a tall order for a lot of reasons, but if you really can't do it, Drunk Duck is fairly reliable option that even lets you customize your vanity links and such. It's also not a terrible idea to MIRROR your comic on other sites as long as you have at least one independent place, although the quality of your reader base varies wildly between locations. There's your answer from Me Personally, but I wanna talk about why I'm so adamant about this so people reading this can make more informed decisions maybe.
Hosting and making your own website is always the safest thing you can do for a project. I don't know how well-known this is outside of the webcomics community but an issue we have come up every few years is that The Current Aggregate Site, like tapas or webtoon or even patreon, gets big enough that they decide to throw queer/marginalized voices under the bus for the sake of advertising. The biggest one I recall was Tapastic leaving a lot of queer creators in the lurch because their (then new) rules about smut pinged queer content too, as these rules tend to. If you'd built up your comic's following and community on this website it could all just disappear, you lost your archive and your comic's following and had to start over. Patreon has been tightening its policy on 'indecent media' for years too. Even tumblr, arguably the best social site for hosting a comic rn, is unstable because the site is so glitchy and unstable. I had a friend have to painstakingly rearrange their archive because a tumblr update jumbled all the pages overnight, and that's small compared to getting your blog randomly deleted. Webtoon already DEEPLY disrespects comics as a medium and has no love for small creators, given they make most of their ad money from Scandalous Content I don't know what their Moment will look like but I assure you it'll happen like it does everywhere. There's that saying about how if a service is free then you're the product; if you establish your webcomic in a place you don't own they can take that product away at any time. Along those lines, you're also tied to their ship if it ever goes down.
Webcomics has always been a medium for voices that are unwelcome in the mainstream, and that means we need to be careful about who we throw our lot in with because all these companies WILL sell us out when they get the chance. We cannot rely on them to take care of us. It's incredibly difficult to build a following, and building it in a place that could disappear as rules change over time pivots neatly into a hostage situation. Getting people to visit an independent site is definitely more difficult! But I've always been able to rest much easier whenever these periodic upheavals happen because my community has a place to reconvene and my archive is safe no matter what I post. The quality OF that community is also much higher since everybody is actively choosing to be there, I'm not just borrowing people who happen to be on an unrelated site anyway, and honestly not having to tailor my comic's story around a company's guidelines fucking rules lmao
Webcomics is a bizarre landscape these days and I'm certainly no authority on what every individual should do. Maybe your friend is just posting for fun and webtoon works for them! There's nothing wrong with using tumblr indefinitely if you're comfortable with that! Everyone's different. But if you're serious and want to have the most control over your work, try to own it all the way down. I hope some of this was helpful! Best of luck with your comics!
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boag · 1 year
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How exactly do you know paz de la huerta?
This is a pretty long story but I’m gonna do my best to answer ur question.
So when I was 16, I made a post on instagram in support of Paz. I knew a bit about what was going on with her, mostly about her allegations against Harvey Weinstein and how she was working on her sobriety at the time. As a fan who saw that she was struggling, I wanted to write a bit about her to get the word out and help her get the support she needed. At that time, she had a public instagram account and was selling her art and taking donations so that she could pay for lawyer fees and try to start her career back up. So I directed my followers to her account so they could help if they were compelled to. I was never expecting her to get into contact with me about that post. Her account was deleted and she couldn’t be found anywhere online. I thought about her sometimes and hoped she was doing alright, but i did not know her personally at all. On Christmas 2021, almost 2 years after I made the post, I got a message from someone claiming to be friends with Paz. She said that Paz had seen my post from back then and thought it was very sweet, and that she wanted to invite me to her Telegram group chat. I didn’t know what to think but I figured like “I might as well join, worst case scenario is it’s not her and I leave the chat.”
Once I was in the group chat, I introduced myself and Paz immediately began talking to me. Right from the jump I was like “wait I think this is actually her…” bc I had followed Paz on all her social media since I was 14 and I knew how to spot her typing style and way of speaking. I kept talking to her and the other ppl in the chat and the longer I interacted, the more sure I was that it was really her. She ended up sending a lot of recent pics of herself in that chat, pics that didn’t exist anywhere on the internet. By the time I had been in the gc for about a week, I was certain it was real. After some time passed, me and Paz and everyone else had gotten pretty close. I had learned so much more about what actually had gone down throughout Paz’s life, stuff no one in the general public knew about if they weren’t in contact with her personally. Her story goes so much deeper than Weinstein or drugs. There are people in this world who literally would rather she end up dead than make her way back into the public eye bc of what they’ve done to her and what she knows about them… rich and powerful people who have hurt her in unimaginable ways. Eventually, she shared her private instagram account’s username with me. It was top secret at the time. She didn’t want it shared with anyone. I followed her and she followed me back. It was full of pics and videos and captions that kinda filled in the blanks about what had gone on since she had “disappeared.”
Over time, the telegram group chat died out, instagram became the platform where I keep in contact with her, and slowly but surely, things have gotten better and safer for her. I never stop learning more about her and what she has overcome, and I’m so lucky to call her my friend (although she calls us her “babies” or her “angels”… she wants to create a chosen family environment for everyone who needs that sort of love.) She spends most of her time dealing with lawyers, writing her book, creating all kinds of art, reuniting with old friends and making new friends, and just living her life the way she wants to live it, instead of living it in fear and in hiding. She’s not completely ready to go public, but she is doing interviews and creative projects and letting more fans follow her. She has so much in the works right now, and a lot that she’s already put out in the world recently. I am so proud of her and so glad I answered that dm back in 2021.
Lmk if u have any more questions and I’ll try not to write a full on novel about it LOL ❤️
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