Pun wasn’t intended but I think we all need a laugh right now
I’ve been doing a lot of reading tonight. This purge situation is more grim than I thought it was. Not just on Tumblr, but all over the place.
I don’t make a lot of explicit art, but I know people who make a good living off of it and who might be looking for alternate places to post their art. Turns out there are surprisingly few options.
Tumblr, as we already know, is going to get rid of all adult content, including erotic artwork and other forms of “sensitive” imagery, which is basically anything they or The Ineffable Algorithm deem unsuitable for their new squeaky-clean policy.
DeviantART also forbids sexual content (sample seen below of their “sexual themes” policy).
Facebook has implemented a similar policy on 15 October that is now starting to take effect. Granted, it’s under the headline of “sexual solicitation”, and while you’re probably not posting artwork in exchange for sexual favors, there’s a clear line that states drawn content of explicit sexual activity is prohibited (see below).
And apparently that’s not all. There’s a whole lot of garbage going down that I didn’t know about (understadably, I’m not enganged in some of these platforms or websites) but there are articles popping up all over the place about how this is happening on many popular social media sites. Here are some of the better articles I’ve read:
There are still some sites that allow freedom of expression, however.
Archive of Our Own. What more can be said? It’s the shining beacon of free speech in an increasingly un-free internet age. Owned by fans, run by fans, supported by fans, untainted by the stench of advertisers who dictate what can and can’t be seen.
Dreamwidth continues to astonish me with its embracing of creative freedom and I wish I had come across it sooner. Read their About Us and Diversity Statement to get a taste of the kind of people they are. It sounds like a blog version of AO3, which is awesome, and, like AO3, they are solely supported by their userbase and are advertiser-free.
Pillowfort is set to be the next Tumblr (minus a lot of the negative things that haunted Tumblr), but they’re just getting started and need time and support to grow. A possible future concern is the fact that the .io domain prohibits use of its sites for sexual or pornographic purposes–but perhaps not sexually explicit art? According to Pillofort’s official tweet, they do allow mature content. The exact definition of the limitations/qualifications of such content remains to be seen.
Twitter has a pretty liberal policy on adult content. Some people are not comfortable posting there due to the inability to control who sees what. From what I’ve heard from fellow Tweeters and Tumblrites, there’s a fair chance of getting unwanted attention from haters, antis, garden-variety Nazis and racists, and good old-fashioned trolls. General concensus appears to be post at your own risk.
Instagram has a no-nudity policy which implies that explicit sexual content (and art) is also verboten. However, they don’t explain if there’s a difference between hand-drawn nudity and photographic nudity, so I assume it’s another case of post at your own risk?
Listen, guys.
This is more than just drawings of cartoon sex. This is about people’s livelihood, their happiness, their fandoms (and their fans), and their freedom of expression, the latter of which is rapidly vanishing from the internet as we know it.
The list of sites above are only the ones I’m familiar with. If anyone has experience on other media sites where explicit art is allowed (like Mastodon? I don’t know much about it), please reblog and help your artist friends find an alternative place to keep doing the thing they love.
Also, if I’ve missed or misinterpreted anything in the above, feel free to correct me. I tried to read everything thoroughly but I am human and very, very tired, so please be gentle.
I’m going to reblog this again because I want to add something I didn’t the first time.
I don’t like Dreamwidth. It really isn’t designed for posting art. They might let you. I mean, I know I put a drawing of two female tits there without a problem, but good Lord the sizing of the pics was off the charts and it’s been too long since I’ve had to code with HTML. While it might be ok to post art there, it really isn’t designed for it. If they ever decide to move in a direction for hosting art, I might take another look at it.
A little knowledge of HTML and CSS makes Dreamwidth easier to customize to your liking, and their image handling could be more fluid, not gonna lie. I’m making it a personal mission of mine to try and bridge the migration from Tumblr to Dreamwidth and make it as smooth as possible for new DW users. I’m currently working on building a journal skin that looks and behaves like Tumblr’s default blog layout, but it’s not quite ready yet.
In the meantime, I’ve got a quick fix for you that will keep your images from exploding out of your journal boundaries. Try this:
Go to your Custom CSS on your journal (Account Settings –> Journal Style –> Customize your theme –> Custom CSS) and insert this code in the Use Embedded CSS box:
.entry img { max-width: 100%; }
Click Save Changes and that’s all you have to do. Doesn’t matter how big your uploaded image is, it should look fine in your journal. Hopefully it won’t interact with any of your other styles. 👍
Reblogging for DW art info🖤
Also adding pillowfort is changing domains for less explitic restrictions, they will be the blogger versions of ao3 :) they allow all types of adult art (apart from pedophillia)
I did this last year and inexplicably turned out to be eligible for Medicaid in WV, which I STILL have. Absolute and total lifechanger that’s letting me go to school instead of having to work full time.
I’m coining generation Nobody Knows for people born in 1995-2000
generation Nobody Knows has the qualities of both Millennials and Gen Z. We are broke and miserable like Millenials and frothing at the mouth and out for blood like Gen Z.
He comes from a very poor family. His father was an alcoholic who beat him and his mother (he once poured hot tea over her and put her in hospital several times), his brother is a drug addict, he literally built an empire out of nothing.
He credits his mother as his biggest inspiration and often has her cooking in his shows.
When he left his first restaurant he pulled a successful Jerry Maguire
- the entire kitchen staff went with him. That tells you what he’s like to work with.
He was one of the first to give a restaurant to a female chef.
He went to prison (Gordon Behind Bars) and taught inmates to bake and they opened a bakery (Bad Boys Bakery) that is still running. He hired one of them when he got out.
He did documentaries about the cruelty of shark hunting and cocaine. (when he discovered cocaine was used by his staff he didn’t fire anyone but made sure they are offered treatment)
His kids are a treasure.
He is always ALWAYS kind to servers.
When one of his partners (Marcus Wareing) wanted to leave they got into a fight and settled it in court, they no longer speak to each other but this is what Marcus said about him after the fight:
I feel bad that the first association to him for a lot of people is this shouty TV chef when he’s truly a wonderful person.
never forget that the reason he’s “shouty and angry” on his tv show is that he’s yelling at people who ignore the rules of courtesy and food safety and basically feed their customers poison, something which would enrage any good person
The worst part of Pride each year is riding the subway late at night and seeing the gay guys, mostly the ones riding by themselves, slowly take off their rainbow stickers and beads and what-not in preparation for their walk alone in their neighborhood, doing their best to prevent the off-chance of being jumped. I saw one guy with a flag in his bag turn it upside down so it wouldn’t poke out.
So yeah, fuck that heterosexual pride day nonsense.
This is the saddest god damn thing I’ve read in awhile, mostly because I literally remember peeling my stickers off on my way home too for this reason
Two years ago in Budapest the organizers didn’t let anyone leave the place until we dropped all the rainbow flags into the trash cans and popped out the balloons, because people were waiting outside the cordons to get and beat us. Sadly the situation was so bad that even without the flags, we couldn’t leave for a good two hours after the event anyway. There were hundreds of people just waiting to be able to get home safely, but we simply couldn’t walk out of the place because of those assholes. In the end, the police made us leave in smaller groups via subway. They closed down the stations closest to ours, so we could avoid running into the people waiting us outside. This was in Budapest, in Europe, 2014. I hate this world we live in.
And this is why #heterosexualpride makes me so angry.
I know this kid who was leaving Pride, trying so badly to rub off the rainbow paint on his cheek because his dad was abusive and didn’t know he was gay or at pride. I was on the bus with him and he was close to tears, he cheek red, and I had my make up bag and there was a packet of wet wipes, so I went up and sat next to him and helped him rub it off. We’ve been best friends ever since.
Heterosexual pride my ass
This is so fucking important. There are way too many human beings that are so ashamed of who they are because people just can’t accept diversity and it’s so sad. you can’t be fucking butt hurt when people celebrate minorities and people that have been suppressed, rather than groups that are wildly accepted and loved. Don’t try and take away from someone’s fucking happiness. Check. Your. Fucking. Privilege.
Veterans Ask Native Elders For Forgiveness At Standing Rock.
I never thought I would see this day when a white man apologizes for the tyranny and oppression of Native American population. This is so powerful. This is the nation that I want - responsible, compassionate and that learns from its mistakes.
hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code …
The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function.
You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity.
They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a
publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in
fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are
vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much
servers/hosting costs.)
In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy.
I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason
it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text
based rather than video.
AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.
Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.
It sees about 6 million people a day.
About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running
searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per
search. The demands involved are astronomical.
JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.
It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?
Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.
Care to guess its budget?
Double that of AO3.
AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
It’s
absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
Everybody pause your discussions about white men in androgynous clothing for a second and look at Ranveer Singh, a brown bollywood actor absolutely SMASHING it in these outfits for Vogue India
Hes wearing a whole dress with BANGLES if yall cant tell
Things he did?That
Just look
Amazing
I saw a man so beautiful I cried.
Reblogging so @pynki and @weasleyismyking540 can see this rather handsome man. (The last one makes me want to ask Where’s Shaft?)
Reblogging this becoz I love Ranveer and it’s incredible finding an Indian actor on my tumblr dash. Also, for those who might not know, he is a firehouse of talent, an incredible dancer and has the most quirky dressing sense in the industry.
There are a lot of times I feel like just…flipping the vegan script.
It’s not ‘polyester’ it’s plastic
It’s not ‘vegan leather’ it’s plastic
Its not ‘faux fur’ it’s plastic
Plastic is a pollutant and causes far more damage to the environment both now and in the future than leather or wool.
Please stop telling me that the Plastic Lyfe is the only life, it is not. My leather shoes will last a decade where pleather is lucky to last 12 months. Leather (and wool) decompose and are renewable. Plastic is neither of those.
THANK YOUUUUUUU~
A single wash cycle of plastic-based fiber (polyester, poly fleece, faux fur) may release 700,000 pieces of microplastic into our waters. Nasty stuff.
aw dangit
Wool is the most environmentally friendly fabric despite being an animal product.
“The Pan-African flag is red, black and green. So when you see Okoye, T’challa, and Nakia in their coherent looks, you see the colours of the Pan-African Flag”
The Pan African flag represents Pan-Africanist ideologies. Red is the color of the blood which men must shed for their redemption and liberty; black is the color of the noble and distinguished race to which we belong; green is the color of the luxuriant vegetation of our Motherland.
