#just sell the site already

[ganondoodle]

[creativebrainrot]

i privated or deleted all my art for reuploading at a later date with watermarks & anti ai scraping measures when the gw2 warp panic was happening, just as a precaution.

my logic was that even if the people with warp didnt choose to retaliate for the post i made some other little ai fuckhead might, err on the side of caution and all that.

guess that was a good idea in the long run lmao.

[constantvariations]

V9C4

Finally here after several hours of a dnd session zero, so this whiplash is going to be interesting

Post Ep: not as infuriating as the last episode but still missteps at pretty much every turn. At the very least we can say there’s been character “progression”

God Ruby’s voice is so damn bad I thought it was a literal child calling for a cat. Why does she sound more mature at 15 than 17?

Did we really need a close up of the cat piecing itself back together? We already know it can do wacky things with its ugly gradient body, so why the emphasis here? I doubt it’s foreshadowing for a permanent bisection

“Nothing we’ve tried has gotten us any further.” Ruby. Darling. Babe. You’ve tried walking to the tree. Nothing else. It’s not the cat’s fault you can’t think of something else besides Scooby Doo hijinks with the looping sections

What the hell is Yang now? She hasn’t been fun or quippy since Beacon but now (and that one spot in V8) she’s suddenly Joss Whedon with a dash of Hulk rage? And I can’t recall Weiss ever having these kinds of facial expressions. Judgmental commentary, sure, but this feels like she’s 3 seconds away from saying something into the camera like this is the Office

“Just because [the cat] doesn’t want to go back to the tree doesn’t mean we can’t lure them there.” That’s... a curious choice of words. Why “lure?” You lure someone into a trap or an ambush, not ask someone to be a guide. Why wouldn’t Blake use the obvious direction of “we can make a deal with the cat because they’re curious and want information we have.” You can’t really call someone a hero when their instinct is deception of a potential ally who’s already saved their asses for no real reason

Are they going to be losing the cat the whole damn episode? Is that going to be the running gag? I fucking hope not. Ruby’s voice is absolutely obnoxious this episode

She’s talking to the cat like he’s a literal toddler. And it’s acting like a toddler with an ipad. Someone put me down like Old Yeller please

Which of these idiots thought lampshading was a good idea? Like, congrats! You recognize the flaws in the story you wrote! How are you going to fix them 10 years too late? You can’t wink, wink, nudge your way out of shitty writing that you so desperately defended and clung to despite all the people giving actual constructive criticism

Why are all of them so tired of the questions? Surely, each of them have something they’d be ecstatic to talk about at length? Ruby with the progression of weapon development, Weiss with her plans to improve the SDC, Blake with other stories she’s read or how the White Fang came and fell, Yang with stories about Ruby when she was younger. There’s so many possibilities when you have a genuinely curious audience, yet they went the lazy route of “har, har, no one cares about anything” again

Was that bridge made of legos?

Okay, this is the second time the roles of acres have been mentioned. Exactly what does that mean? Do these roles serve a central purpose? The tree seems to be at the center of Wonderland, so are the acres serving the tree in some way? Is harmony throughout the different factions pivotal in keeping Wonderland in wonder instead of despair? What could this possibly mean for any themes or character arcs? It doesn’t seem like the areas thus far have resonated with any of the team, and they left behind Penny’s halo sword, the only thing that’s been even somewhat emotionally compelling, so I’m struggling to understand why Wonderland is set up like this

Love how literally nobody asks the obvious question of “are you okay?” All we get is Yang’s “Rubes?” (has she ever called Ruby that before? I can’t recall) and Blake’s logical deflection and Weiss whining yet again. You’d think for a season that cut away from the bloated cast to focus on the main characters they would, I don’t know, focus on the main character

This is the least Little has talked the entire season. Please keep the cat around more so this shithead will shut the fuck up. Also, Little deadass pointed to where the cat went and y’all don’t immediately follow? Are you trying to get lost?

Okay. Not gonna lie. The caterpillar’s design is dope as shit. The triple eyes in that gorgeous green. The pointy mouth that moves like a skeleton’s jaw. The two-toned wings. The antennae and little spikes. The collar and vest. That ~voice~ Fucking A+ The only thing I’m side-eyeing is the accessories. Hopefully I’m wrong - I’ll be the first to admit I’m not well versed in Indigenous cultures - but the coloring is very reminiscent of turquoise which was an incredibly significant mineral to Southwestern Native American tribes, most commonly associated with Navajo, and Caterpillar’s jewelry designs reflect this as well. My quick google search for this specific design mostly ends up being “hippie aesthetic” which does take inspiration from Indigenous aesthetics, so I can’t really say for certain which one crwby looked at for the design. Given the Medicine Man trope and the herbal smoking in the OP, I’m not holding out much hope

“Growgurt” sounds so damn gross please never say it again

They are really hammering this “who/what are you” thing directly into your eardrums aint they? I’m not entirely sure how this answer affects a recipe, but go off I guess Also, note how Caterpillar gets just the bit exasperated and Yang’s immediately in a fighting stance. The others are afraid, for some cocksmith of a reason - all homeboy did was grumble, what y’all scared of? Did y’all suddenly develop RSD? - but this bitch at half a foot is ready to throw down

Caterpillar is speaking philosophy 101 and these idiots are acting like he’s speaking ancient greek. I hope he poisons the lot of them

“This is how a king winds up a prince.” Does that imply that the prince was genuinely the king that played Alyx but he’s somehow reverted back to a toddler? That raises way too many questions I have no care to even ponder

This far in and we have no idea who or what Caterpillar was to Alyx. Not even a whispered expo-dump, which would be stupid easy given that most of them are tiny. Yet Blake, upon seeing the smoking, is like “we gotta dip” which so par for the course in every episode thus far. This better not be crwby’s attempt at an anti-drug message or I swear I’m gonna toss a fridge into space

Oh christ on toast the Beacon outfits don’t deserve this slander

“You could just be human or just a cat.” Once again, weird phrasing. Like, yeah, it’s clarified that it’s about trying to bring peace between humans and faunus, but why wouldn’t you phrase it in a way that sticks closer to that sentiment rather than acting like she has the Yamato and can carve out what she doesn’t like? What would it even mean to Blake to “just be a cat?” Would that mean living in Menagerie forever with no worries about humans? Would she turn into an actual cat? She just has fucking cat ears man, this is so overblown

Wow, these “I know who I am” speeches suck ass. They’re so vague and InSpIrAtIoNaL I’m wondering if this is supposed to be a mature cartoon or a reading of those posters they put up in school halls of cats in trees with the quote “hang in there!”

“I’m the granddaughter of a hero” bitch who? Who is this mysterious hero? If someone doesn’t know or watch the Remnant expo-dump series, they don’t know who you’re talking about Weiss! You can’t bring up something in the main story if the context is shoved in a spinoff! Also, “daughter of a villain.” Babe, your father was a clown at best and a business major at worst. Villain is not a title he deserves “I will not be defined by my name because I will be the one to define it.” Uhhhhh exactly where in this redefinition is compensation for the lives stolen by your family company? Have you thought of that, Miss Heiress? When your name has that big of an impact, I don’t think you get to be the sole decider. Also, you have siblings who might want a say in it too

Still pissed that the whole “Missing Summer” arc was shoved onto Ruby, who was what? 2? 3 years old when she left? Ruby talks to her gravestone, sure, but as for memories or stories, she hasn’t had a single one. This entire thing falls flat because there was 0 buildup

“You’re supposed to be helping others find their way, but you’ve lost your own.” WHAT WHAT WHAT THE FUCK. Jesus on a toaster strudel can you not villainize every single person who slightly questions uwu precious Ruby? He literally helped the other 3 cement themselves, why doesn’t that count? Sure, it was against their will and all, but these girls clearly need some goddamn help if they can’t answer a basic question like “what is a huntress?”

There are so many questions about those last 20 seconds that I don’t even know what to do with them. Let’s just sum it up with “what the fuck”

[hyruviandoctor]

My first impression thoughts on The Post that's going around is that it doesn't really matter and probably most users won't be significantly affected, like, at all. It's like a live service video game being put into a sort of maintenance mode - everything will be more or less the same as it is now, possibly some updates that are either smaller or more focused, but the site will still be the same for the average user. Obviously we won't know anything for sure until something happens, but I do gotta admit the tendency for Tumblr users especially to preach doom and gloom at the slightest whiff of any amount of change is exhausting. It's probably gonna be fine y'all, don't worry

[solradguy]

I dont get how people switch fandoms n stuff so so fast- I haven't left the creepypasta or like- fnaf fandoms since like 2015-2016- and I doubt I'll be leaving this one either- how do people not latch onto things 2 the point it consumes apart of them n fundamentally changes them as a person 2 some degree 😔😔 ~pumpkin anon

Yeah it's always interesting to me too when people are in like a different fandom every other month, idk how they do it haha For me, when I get bored of a series it's usually because I ran out of new stuff to go over. Like I was REALLY into Berserk for a while but then I caught up on the manga (around the infamous boat arc......), then the 2016 anime came out and it sucked and I just got bored and moved on... It didn't have much of a creative community (outside of Japan) either so there weren't fan works to tide me over between official updates, unlike with GG.

Maybe some people go through that cycle really fast?

[hockstuff]

i just want french open tickets is that so much for a girl to ask

[witchyvixie]

Made an accent for my friend's sona dragon which is the first I've made in a long time and now I'm starting to think how fun it'd be if I gave each of my dragons a unique accent and omg my wallet is crying

[bbyquokka]

am i the only one that can find comebacks to be a little bit stressful n overwhelming?

[shitpostdevil]

Nothing better than getting cat meme stickers on a whim and going through them just to laugh at almost every single one and keep at least half for my partner and I.

[elyanics]

Hello hello again! I will be enabling reblogs for now, but I'm still not sure if having someone with AI-scraping enabled reblog my posts will scrape my art via them. So, while I doubt it'll do much, I'm politely asking if you haven't turned that "feature" off, please do not interact with my account. Thank you!

[liketaylorswift]

how did i almost get scammed and then almost felt bad for the scammer

[foone]

Your posts are in an AI model

and then Tumblr decided to sell them to AI models.

Now, don't get me wrong, tumblr selling out the users to AI companies is bad, yes, they shouldn't do that. It sucks.

but don't lets get this confused: your posts were already in there. Tumblr selling them is about tumblr making some money and about the AI models having more exhaustive post collections. It's not about your posts being in an AI model, vs not being in one. That battle has already been lost.

Can you find your post on google? Then it's almost certainly in an AI model already. Think about it: These AI sites showed up before all the sites were making deals to sell their users' content, right? How do you think they built them in the first place?

They scraped the posts. Just like google and bing and such do when they build their search indexes.

It's a fundamental part of how the open web works: you want your posts on tumblr to be visible to users, right? You want them to be readable?* Like, look how much stuff broke when twitter changed their whole read-while-not-logged-in policy, ruining a bunch of thread links/NSFW links. And if it's visible, it's scrapable. That's what the AI models were built on.

I've done website scraping before (not for AI models, of course. I was doing search engines and website archival), this is just how it works. You hire a few relatively smart CS graduates and tell them "build me a scraper that'll give us a bunch of tumblr posts" and they go off for a month or two and come back with a database of a few billion posts, and you stuff that into your AI model. That's how they got all the deviantart and flickr and twitter and pinterest and so on posts. They didn't pay for them: they just took them.

They only ever pay for this shit because either:

they fucked up in such a way that the site might be able to sue them for taking rather than paying

They can buy them cheaper than they can finish taking them. Maybe they'd need to pay the CS grads for an extra month? well, that might be more expensive than just throwing the site a couple hundred thousand bucks.

ANYWAY: my point is, don't treat this "oh no tumblr is selling our posts to AI" like it's a big thing that might happen and it would be bad to happen. Yes, it's bad, tumblr shouldn't do this, this'll let AI models get continual updates of content for far easier than just scraping them would be, tumblr betrayed user trust, and so on...

but realistically, this is not a black and white matter of "if only tumblr didn't do this, then we'd be safe from AI models!"

Nope. We already lost that battle. I'm sorry, and it does suck, but that's just how it is. The avalanche has already started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote. * I'm assuming here that you don't run a private blog that's set to only followers or something. You'd be safer then, of course, but you're not really my target audience for this rant

[spoopy-sloth]

I am. Starting to regret signing up for an art table at my alma mater.

[ms-demeanor]

any thoughts on the new post that staff went scorched earth on which is now making the rounds abt tumblr live? it basically screenshots all the tos and claims if you've ever opened the app (or in some rbs, unsnoozed live) tumblr has gotten your data. on the one hand i feel like this is fearmongering, but on the other its true that MOST sites have your data as is so its pretty standard. you seem pretty knowledgeable abt data gathering so i was wondering abt your take

This is going to be pretty unkind but watching tumblr users interact with staff and live is a great primer on how conspiracy theories happen.

Nobody on this fucking website knows how to read a ToS, nobody on this website knows how anything fucking works (sorry, this is not a dig at you but how would tumblr "get" your data from you clicking or unclicking live; the only data that tumblr has on you is the data that you have put on tumblr what data do people think that clicking the "new" button is scooping up that is anything beyond interactions or posts or IP addresses which are the things that tumblr already has information about like you do not introduce new information into the tumblr ecosystem by clicking a button you haven't installed anything you haven't changed permissions on your browser if everyone is so goddamned scared about live stealing their data i strongly recommend they stop using anything but public internet through an anonymizer and making sure location data is shut off on all of their devices and anyone who is flipping their shit about the type of data that live is collecting but who is using chrome on any device needs to chill the fuck out about live and flip the fuck out about google)

this is like that post about twitter's content policy that circulated the other day or that post about deviantart's content policy that circulated ten fucking years ago nobody knows how to read legal documents and nobody knows how to read technical documentation and this comes together into unholy matrimony on the no reading comprehension at all moral panic website

live never violated the GDPR it was just rolled out in the US first but the entire userbase decided that because it hadn't been rolled out simultaneously in the EU and the US that it was SO UNSPEAKABLY PRIVACY VIOLATEY THAT THE EU HAD BANNED IT FOR ITS CRIMES with, like, nothing whatsoever backing that up because, again, even at its most intrusive Live collects about as much data as Twitter or Yelp, both of which are *capable* of meeting GDPR standards with that level of data collection (even if musk sometimes makes decisions that violate GDPR).

Live is significantly less intrusive than any facebook product, than Amazon, and than any Google product. If you use youtube logged in, don't worry about live, the horse is out of the barn and tumblr is the least of your worries *regardless* of live. If you regularly use Google as a search engine please god learn how to evaluate and compare risks across platforms because Live is like a coughing baby compared to about a dozen things that most highly online people interact with every single day.

If you don't want to use live don't use live. Clicking the button doesn't magically transfer your secret FBI file to tumblr and even agreeing to the ToS doesn't share anything that tumblr doesn't already have if you don't continue to interact - if you don't interact with live after agreeing to the ToS it's not collecting any data except your non-interaction.

For everyone who is losing it over Live just turn off your goddamned location on your fucking cellphone and turn off your location on your goddamned computers and that's it, you're good, you're fine, relax. If your response to "turn off your location" is "but I need it for _____" then don't worry about Live, whatever "_____" is was already collecting and selling your data.

Do you use an activity tracker? Congrats, you have much, much bigger privacy issues to worry about than tumblr live.

Okay but also I yelled about that post and the very many ways in which it was incorrect in January.

And I happened to take an archive of the page at that time because I'm a paranoid motherfucker.

And if you want my guess as to why staff went "scorched earth" on that post it's probably because if you scroll down to the bottom of the page on the archive, OP calls on everyone looking at the post to send a kind fuck you to the CEO then tagged his tumblr.

If you look at the other posts that went scorched earth in relation to tumblr staff they were also posts that very pointedly directed a lot of ire at a single staff member.

I don't think that any individual tumblr staff members are above criticism and I don't think that staff as a whole is above criticism but part of learning to read a ToS is understanding that someone can be shitty and vague and use TERF talking points and skirt the line and be technically okay under the ToS while someone can have a legitimate gripe about another user being horrible and manage to violate the ToS by accidentally spinning up a harassment campaign or suicide baiting someone.

Shitty people like nazis and terfs thrive on being edge cases. They are very good at finding a boundary and standing juuuuuuuuust on this side of it and going "la la la I'm not violating the ToS, you can't stop me!" and that blows and it leads to a lot of people encountering a lot of shitty stuff on a lot of websites but personally I'm pretty glad that there's a lot of gray area because when you cut out gray area that's when you see things like It's Going Down getting banned as extremist content alongside white supremacists. Please continue to report nazis and terfs, and when possible go deep into their pages to report because a pattern of behavior is more likely to get recognized as hate speech than a single post that gets reported a hundred times. Please block as many people who it's harmful for you to interact with as possible because it's clear that staff is not going to do the kind of work protecting users that users would like staff to do.

However I just can't get angry on behalf of a blogger who got nuked for saying "Hey everyone who hates this feature that we all hate please go tell the CEO to fuck himself at this URL specifically" - that is an extremely clear violation of the ToS because it is absolutely targeted harassment.

So now tumblr-the-userbase is going off on its merry conspiracy way skipping through fields and lacking reading comprehension and saying "users are getting banned for reporting the crimes of tumblr live and its gdpr violations" and ignoring the fact that the post was nuked because the last line was saying "hey everyone, let's all individually tell the CEO to fuck off in messages sent directly to him that are certainly not going to include any threats, exaggerations, gore, etc. etc. etc."

If I were to make a post that had 50k notes and the last line was "and while you're at it, please send tumblr-user-ms-demeanor a personalized message telling them why they're a terrible person so they know what we think of them" it would absolutely be reasonable to say that was harassing that user. And that post did it with the CEO. Who is not above criticism (and I have my criticisms! I don't think he really gets tumblr and that's a problem!), but jesus fucking christ don't tag the goddamned CEO or any other staff member in a call to action asking users to send them messages saying "fuck off" this is literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen a tumblr conspiracy theory coalesce around.

Anyway thank you for giving me a place to vent i've been getting more and more pissed about this for three days. Everyone feel free to kindly tell tumblr user ms demeanor to fuck off.

[kamuro-junrenka]

Man i wish i could preorder gaiden i want to play as daigo so bad but its not even a money issue (which it kinda is) like. sega on steam deadass doesnt let people from my country preorder anything now because of the insane inflation but like bro come on at least give us the preorder bonus anyway if theres literally no other legal way for us to get it

[inkskinned]

i don't mean to sound ungrateful, but as a content creator on this site, there's a part of me that's like. they absolutely just stole my work.

i'm not, like, unaware that tumblr has been shuffling downhill for years now. sometimes i play with the idea of switching platforms, turning myself into the shark. i often get tens of thousands of notes - i could be "doing numbers" on a platform that actually pays me to do so. i could have statistics that i could use to sell myself, i could rebrand and make content pay-to-play and make brand deals. i could have the other life, i mean.

but i don't want to. i like the quiet nature of tumblr. i like that it still feels like i'm writing poetry, not like i'm fulfilling ad spots. i like the community, and that i can sometimes still take someone by surprise and write something that really speaks to them. i like the tags and reading things like oh of course it's fucking inkskinned i love you inkskinned you gay mess. my girlfriend recently told me that people tag things "inkskinned" because they assume it is similar to tagging "creative writing". that's wild. i made this word up when i was 19, and have always assumed people tag me in things so i read it (and i often do). i have nothing but love and gratitude for you all, for this tiny scoop of family.

and i haven't made any money off it. i had opportunities, and i turned them down. i could have sold this thing like a thousand times. i thought about moving my work elsewhere - over and over and over i thought about it. i weighed each option specifically. but my tumblr felt like ... it's for you guys, only. if you're still here and reading this, you deserve to do it for free.

tumblr has now, most likely, skimmed my work (and yours) in order to make money. i will never see a single cent for that violation. something about landlords, i guess - my work pays their rent.

i just lost my job on valentine's day, and am working on scrambling for solutions. i am writing this to a blog that they will probably scrape with AI. and like, what number to do you think it was? do you think it was only a couple hundred thousand? no way it was close to a million, right? my time, effort, energy - it belongs to someone else now. how many silver pieces for them to completely sell out their user base.

and it's kind of like - funny? when it isn't very-sad. because i personally don't know what to do, ya know? i might as well move to a different platform, where my efforts are ai-scraped but could eventually pay me. where i know my privacy is the cost - but it could result in actual money. anyway. i need to figure out how i'm paying for meds. i need to email like six people about COBRA benefits.

my work is powering someone else's AI. it will be a beautiful fabricated poem, made from words i've already said.