#selling the data

[8pxl]

PSA: Tumblr/Wordpress is preparing to start selling our user data to Midjourney and OpenAI.

you have to MANUALLY opt out of it as well.

to opt out on desktop, click your blog ➡️ blog settings ➡️ scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle.

to opt out on mobile, click your blog ➡️ scroll then click visibility ➡️ toggle opt out option.

if you’ve already opted out of showing up in google searches, it’s preselected for you. if you don’t have the option available, update your app or close your browser/refresh a few times. important to note you also have to opt out for each blog you own separately, so if you’d like to prevent AI scraping your blog i’d really recommend taking the time to opt out. (source)

[forgottenbones]

Hardware Store CEO: We're Rebranding (For Some Reason)

[trek-tracks]

I bought some amazing Trekkie art today from Heather Castles (of @upcycled_vintage_art on Instagram, if you wish to acquire them)!

For my dear friend, this Spot and Data couple’s portrait:

And for my desk:

I love my Unicorn Dog dearly.

[staffs-secret-blog]

We're taking a leaf from Facebook's book and selling your info, please answer truthfully

[yukipri]

Some thoughts on Cara

So some of you may have heard about Cara, the new platform that a lot of artists are trying out. It's been around for a while, but there's been a recent huge surge of new users, myself among them. Thought I'd type up a lil thing on my initial thoughts.

First, what is Cara?

From their About Cara page:

Cara is a social media and portfolio platform for artists. With the widespread use of generative AI, we decided to build a place that filters out generative AI images so that people who want to find authentic creatives and artwork can do so easily. Many platforms currently accept AI art when it’s not ethical, while others have promised “no AI forever” policies without consideration for the scenario where adoption of such technologies may happen at the workplace in the coming years. The future of creative industries requires nuanced understanding and support to help artists and companies connect and work together. We want to bridge the gap and build a platform that we would enjoy using as creatives ourselves. Our stance on AI: ・We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation. ・In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily.

Should note that Cara is independently funded, and is made by a core group of artists and engineers and is even collaborating with the Glaze project. It's very much a platform by artists, for artists!

Should also mention that in being a platform for artists, it's more a gallery first, with social media functionalities on the side. The info below will hopefully explain how that works.

Next, my actual initial thoughts using it, and things that set it apart from other platforms I've used:

1) When you post, you can choose to check the portfolio option, or to NOT check it. This is fantastic because it means I can have just my art organized in my gallery, but I can still post random stuff like photos of my cats and it won't clutter things. You can also just ramble/text post and it won't affect the gallery view!

2) You can adjust your crop preview for your images. Such a simple thing, yet so darn nice.

3) When you check that "Add to portfolio," you get a bunch of additional optional fields: Title, Field/Medium, Project Type, Category Tags, and Software Used. It's nice that you can put all this info into organized fields that don't take up text space.

4) Speaking of text, 5000 character limit is niiiiice. If you want to talk, you can.

5) Two separate feeds, a "For You" algorithmic one, and "Following." The "Following" actually appears to be full chronological timeline of just folks you follow (like Tumblr). Amazing.

6) Now usually, "For You" being set to home/default kinda pisses me off because generally I like curating my own experience, but not here, for this handy reason: if you tap the gear symbol, you can ADJUST your algorithm feed!

So you can choose what you see still!!! AMAZING. And, again, you still have your Following timeline too.

7) To repeat the stuff at the top of this post, its creation and intent as a place by artists, for artists. Hopefully you can also see from the points above that it's been designed with artists in mind.

8) No GenAI images!!!! There's a pop up that says it's not allowed, and apparently there's some sort of detector thing too. Not sure how reliable the latter is, but so far, it's just been a breath of fresh air, being able to scroll and see human art art and art!

To be clear, Cara's not perfect and is currently pretty laggy, and you can get errors while posting (so far, I've had more success on desktop than the mobile app), but that's understandable, given the small team. They'll need time to scale. For me though, it's a fair tradeoff for a platform that actually cares about artists.

Currently it also doesn't allow NSFW, not sure if that'll change given app store rules.

As mentioned above, they're independently funded, which means the team is currently paying for Cara itself. They have a kofi set up for folks who want to chip in, but it's optional. Here's the link to the tweet from one of the founders:

And a reminder that no matter that the platform itself isn't selling our data to GenAI, it can still be scraped by third parties. Protect your work with Glaze and Nightshade!

Anyway, I'm still figuring stuff out and have only been on Cara a few days, but I feel hopeful, and I think they're off to a good start.

I hope this post has been informative!

Lastly, here's my own Cara if you want to come say hi! Not sure at all if I'll be active on there, but if you're an artist like me who is keeping an eye out for hopefully nice communities, check it out!

[muffinlance]

It's Sunday. I had plans. Clean the house, do some laundry, some life admin, the gym, find a body of water to enjoy what's presumably the last hot day of the year. Instead, I stumbled across 'Salvage' this morning and I have not done anything else but read it all day. I dont even go there, to quote the ancient Gods. I have not even seen a single episode of this show. But I cannot stop reading it. It's so so so so good. But I have no AO3 account so I can only leave Kudos there. So here's my comment: ARGHHDUWHAULA THIS IS SO GOOD I WANT TO CLAW MY FACE OFF!!!

But if Claw Face Off, how can Read More Fics?

(I have 19 Avatar fics posted, if you do get an account. Only 2 or 3 for those not logged in.)

[elbiotipo]

The most absurd thing about all this bullshit is that all my data is going towards selling me things I don't want or I can't buy. Tech companies have built the world's most sophisticated and complex surveillance system, effectively trapping billions of people into a panopticon and consuming wasteful amounts of resources, technology and human work and talent, all just to sell ads. It's incredibly absurd.

[githjanken]

i’m seeing a lot of fear today about Tumblr Shutting Down (Real) (Actually True) today and let peepaw seg tell you a story

i’ve been on this webbed site for fifteen years, believe it or not, since way back in the days of Tumblarity. now i was but a wee lad at the time, so i don’t remember the fine details, but rest assured, it doesn’t matter much for the story i’m about to tell you.

you see, i remember when tumblr was owned by tumblr. folk called its ceo (david karp) “daddy”, and were enthusiastic about his communications, even if on our own blogs, we’d bitch and moan about tumblr making changes to things we were used to. i remember the hubbub when tumblr removed tumblarity, and how this was surely going to be the end of tumblr.

all those fifteen (though it might be sixteen) years ago.

layouts changed, and we’d bitch and moan, and tumblr’d get sold, and we’d know for sure that This Was The End Of Tumblr, For Real This Time. this happened again and again and again, because this webbed site, you see, it makes no money, and companies, greedy things as they are, like money.

the porn ban, under the reign of YaHoo that was, was seen as another death knell. tumblr was going to die, for real, for sure, and i’m not proud to say that i was one of the ones who fell for it. peepaw seg needed to sow hir wild oats on other platforms.

now, i say this happened under yahoo, but it’s important to remember that this ban came in the wake of both the apple app store banning the tumblr app on account of real life csem being hosted on tumblr, and the new usamerican law SESTA-FOSTA being implemented, which made it so that companies such as tumblr would have to moderate the explicit content on them to make sure none of it breached sesta-fosta. tumblr, being a small fish in the grand scheme of thing, didn’t warrant that amount of financial effort on yahoo’s part, as the site was still not making any money, and it’s easier and cheaper to blanket ban than it is to moderate. all this to say, it’s important to vote, because if you don’t, your internet freedom will be curtailed.

and now we’re here, some sixteen years on, and i’ll say automattic has been not all good, but definitely not all bad for the site. they changed stuff we liked to our discontent (layouts), and added stuff we hated (live), but they also gave us stuff we like (polls) and an amount of open communication about tumblr’s inner workings not seen since the days of david “daddy” karp. and now they’re putting just a skeleton crew on the tumblr project.

and that’s going to be The End Of Tumblr For Sure For Real Actually This Time. Really. Promise. Abandon Ship.

and we come to the crux of this story.

which is that this has happened before, and it will happen again, because tumblr is surprisingly immune to making any money.

what we’re likely to see in the coming time is no new features (that’s reserved for projects that make money), and an increase in ads, until one day, and this might be in a few months, and maybe in a few years, there’ll be an announcement that tumblr’s been sold to one direction to a new company.

and we’ll start the whole rigmarole again. and this company might be good for tumblr’s userbase, or it might go against everything the tumblr community holds dear. no way of knowing which way it’ll go.

until one day, some parent company will have had enough, and will pull the plug.

but for now… well, i’m gonna sit here on my porch (blog), and we’ll see what happens. i'm not worried, tumblr’s survived worse things.

[zelebirbo]

Tumblr & Going Forward

With the confirmation of AI deals and allegations of user data already being sold before they could consent to it, I no longer feel comfortable posting artwork on tumblr. This is a decision more on principle than practicality.

I will be leaving everything I've posted here up, unless I decide to delete entirely. Doing so would also be based on principle, as all signs points to there being no point otherwise. Deleted blogs sold to OpenAi. Jesus christ.

As of now, I'm strictly on Discord, but I don't feel comfortable sharing my private discord publicly. I have a business discord, but that is, as it says on the tin, for business. If you're interested in hiring me or having me as a professional contact, feel free to send an ask or IM. Wherever I decide to share my art next, I will post an announcement here.

Until then, I advise everyone to opt out. And maybe research if this counts as a security violation that could be brought to court. I dunno.

EDIT: This is getting a bizarre amount of attention, and starting to get replies suggesting Glaze as a solution. I elaborated on why exactly I no longer feel comfortable posting art here in the replies of this post:

TL;DR - I don't care about the tech. I care about the deceitful way this deal was handled, and how it's the latest in an escalating pattern of deceit and abuse towards tumblr's userbase.

[chicago-geniza]

I'm watching Xena DVDs on a Toshiba TV from 2006. Never put a "smart" device in my house

[icewindandboringhorror]

indeed my exact process once every 8 months or so

[tubapun]

Hello All!! As you might have seen, I have spent this last week compiling all the monsters listed in the Scooby-Doo Encyclopedia (which covers every series from Where Are You through 13 Ghosts) into a spreadsheet, categorizing them by type, realness, and series. This is an ongoing project, but I wanted to be able to share what I have so far in terms of data!! Let's begin with a breakdown of Monster Types!!

This first pie chart details the breakdown by pure monster type, meaning monsters that are only one sort of monster. This may seem arbitrary, but as you can see, a whopping 25.98% of all monsters across the series included are some sort of combination monster. That's the largest category overall, but the largest specific category is Ghosts, with 19.61% of the 204 listed monsters being just a pure ghost. Some are sheets and some are just glowing translucent dudes, but either way they're haunting the gang intensely.

The only sort of monster that never appears outside of a combination is the Pirate. I almost excluded that category for this reason, but enough pirates existed in combination (always with ghostliness) that i didn't feel right dropping them.

This chart is much like the first one, but counts the combination monsters in with each type they contain. Because of this overlap, the percentages technically add up to 138.92%. but that's fine, cause they're still taken out of the 204 monsters. Now we can see that 37.44% of these monsters are some sort of Ghost, with Magic Users and non-anthro Animals being the next largest categories. For those counting, that's 76 instances of a Ghost type monster, most of which are combined with some other monster type!! Speaking of which...

These two charts detail the combinations, with the first one being about the sort of combos we get and how often they occur, and the second being about the instances of each type in the totality of the "multiple" category (total of 53 monsters for those of you who want the numbers from the percentages).

Notably, 69% of combination monsters are Ghosts. Nice.

Some monster types never get combined, however, with Skeletons, Robots, Cavemen, Greek Myths, Mummies, European Legends, Dragons, and Evil Humans always occurring as just themselves with no extra modifiers. But now you get to imagine a Dragon Skeleton Mummy, or any such combination and boom. Scooby-Doo Monster OC. You're welcome.

This concludes the data I currently have analyzed/available. I hope to have more soon, either a dive into which sort of monster is most often real or a dive into type percentages per Series (most of the real ones seems to be the ones from the Scrappy series, so I bet that will overlap the two categories). If you have any requests on data or even just want to see the actual main sheet these charts are pulling data from, please let me know, this has become a passion project in a very real sense.

Edit on 9/8: Here is the Breakdown of Monster Definitions with bonus stats on common Motives and Realness

Edit on 9/7: Fixed the first two charts to reflect an update in the data. I had initially placed Greek onster in the general European section, which caused their percentages to be flipped.

Another Edit on 9/7: Somehow missed that a character named "Ghost of" was in fact a ghost/magic user and not just a ghost. this has been fixed and the charts updated (thankfully the % of combos that are ghosts is still 69. nice)

Edit 9/8: I missed a monster somehow. This has been fixed in the charts and percents and numbers listed.

[asexualbookbird]

25 in 2025

Sigh. I've been bullied. I guess. I did a big swing and a miss on last years list, but I have a Plan this time. A Theme. A Goal. This will be mostly comprised of my Illumicrate books so I can decide if it is in fact worth it to keep my subscription going until the Alecto edition gets announced. If I don't actually enjoy the majority of the books in these boxes then what's the point, yknow?

So here's this years color key:

Green - Carry over from last year (not carrying over every missed book, which probably means I should just get rid of them huh)

Purple - Illumicrate books

Blue - I own these in physical form, but they're not from Illumicrate

Labyrinth's Heart by MA Carrick

The Faithless by CL Clark

The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu

The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

City of Bones by Martha Wells

Witch King by Martha Wells

After the Forest by Kell Woods

Voyage of the Damned by Frances White

Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen

The Phoenix Keeper by SA Maclean

A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft

Until We Shatter by Kate Dylan

Mistress of Lies by KM Enright

Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T Kingfisher

The Bone Shard War by Andrea Stewart

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker Chan

All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault by James Alan Gardner

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

In the Ravenous Dark by AM Strickland

A Conjuring of Light by VE Schwab

PHEW. Okay. A fw things to note. A Dark and Drowning Tide is an Illumicrate book, but I didn't pay for it. A friend gave it to me after I skipped that month because she wasn't interested. I always look up book spoilers and skip if I'm not interested and if I'm uninterested in any of the stuff I'll skip even if the book seems neat. That month the box was full of fandoms I didn't care about, so my friends said "here, take my copy" and I said "yay! Free book!"

Cutting in during the month of April to say Until We Shatter was also probably given to me by a friend because it's NOT in my order history and I don't have the stuff in that box but it IS on my shelf?? Wild. Where'd it come from.

The Last Hour Between Worlds I think was also an Illumicrate book? They do fanart for it so I assume it was at some point. I did not get it. This is not the IC edition. I was not thrilled about The Tethered Mage so I was going to get this out of the library. Then my mom bought it for me for the holidays. So yay! Free book!

I think I would also like to keep track of books I purchase this year. I'd like to cut down on buying books that I won't love. So I'd like to utilise my library more. Win win, I think! And that seems easier than a full out ban since yeah sometimes I do enjoy little treats! Books purchased for other people do not count, obviously.

There are also some books I'd like to reread this year, mainly The Bone Maker because I've been saying that since I read it the first time. And honestly, I've been chasing the same vibes and haven't been able to match it (Godkiller got close!).

As usual, I reserve the right to pretend this post doesn't exist, but I think I've set myself up for success here :)

I don't know who hasn't done this by now @logarithmicpanda ? Have you?? Consider yourself tagged >:3c

oh right I was bullied tagged by @bigcats-birds-and-books

[tf2heritageposts]

thanks tumblr you bag of cocks

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I hate that every drive thru begins with a recording of a white person asking me about mobile orders. No, I'm not using the app, let me talk to a human PLEASE.

[yakityyaku]

remember when ww2 ended and Japanese generals were on trial for committing atrocities against Koreans like sewing their limbs onto the opposite sides to "see what would happen" and the US government decided they wouldn't punish them for their crimes if they'd share all data collected from the torture with them?

yeah