Some good news, I’ve been talking to two developers now and got them working together, we just had a meeting with the guys behind an existing large (millions of users) site similar to Tumblr, with a vibrant and open-minded community, and more importantly, it has open-minded owners who believe in free speech. They think we can get something done here to rescue the whole community.
I’m not allowed to reveal the site name yet. I can tell you it’s mainstream, open to everyone, open-minded and welcoming. (It’s not WordPress or any site owned by Facebook or Twitter. It’s not Pillowfort, that’s in closed beta. It’s not Ello, that’s mainly for artists. It’s not kinkspace or fetlife, those are too specialist. It’s not jux, that seems to be closed. It’s not Soup, that seems still in development and too small.)
One of the reasons for delaying the announcement for next few days is they don’t want a “land grab” where people take the names of current popular Tumblr users over there (cyber squatting). So they are looking at ways for existing Tumblr users to keep the same names on the new site.
More info over the days to come.
The plan is, broadly:
1. By December 9th, announcement of the new site and how to secure your username there
2. By December 10th, an online tool for bloggers to copy their existing content to the new site automatically, with the same tags and captions.
3. Bloggers will need to copy their content across between December 10th and December 17th if they want to use the automatic tool.
4. My understanding is that after December 17th there will be no public access to any “flagged” posts on Tumblr, but the original poster will still be able to see the flagged post (for a short time at least). Therefore, the original poster may still be able to manually download a post to their own PC or phone, after December 17th, and manually upload it to the other site. But if you have lots of posts that will take a long time, it will be better to use the automatic tool before December 17th.
Please understand that these dates are approximate and may change for technical or other reasons.
There may be a few rough edges or not so perfect looking site design on the transfer tool. Everyone is doing their best. The main goal here is to help as many people as possible preserve access to their content, in the short space of time Tumblr has allowed us, and preserve as much as possible of the Tumblr community spirit somewhere new.
The new site will cater for photo, GIF, text and html posts. It will not offer video and audio posts, due to cost reasons – maybe in future, but for now you will need to preserve video and audio content yourself in some other place.
If your Tumblr blog has a mixture of original content and reblogs, or all reblogs, all of that can be copied over to the new site. Reblogs will become “your” original content if nobody else posted them yet, otherwise they will be shown as reblogs. The devs are looking at ways to preserve attribution of reblogs back to the original Tumblr poster, if that person also moves to the new site.
Important: your Likes cannot be copied from Tumblr to the new site. You will have to go find the same posts again on the new site, and like them afresh.
(Similarly, existing reblog comments, asks, messages and other user interaction on Tumblr cannot be copied to the new site – that’s just too much to do, in the short time available.)
If you want to preserve any of your existing Liked posts on Tumblr, you will need to either: (1) download the post to your own PC, or: (2A) reblog it now to your own Tumblr blog, and then (2B) use the automatic tool, before December 17th, to move your whole Tumblr blog across to the new site.
If you have Liked a lot of posts here on Tumblr, the gridllr.com webapp should be able to help you do steps 1 and 2A quickly, I mean download or reblog.
(Someone complained to me today about the appearance of Gridllr on a phone. It’s best to use Gridllr on a PC, Mac or Tablet with a large screen.)
If you have liked a post here on Tumblr and the original poster decides to delete it, or even to delete their entire blog, some time before December 17th, then that post will be permanently lost. So if you want to be sure to preserve any of your Liked posts, you should best download or reblog as soon as possible. If it’s reblogged to your own blog it is safe from deletion, at least for next few days.
Obviously, you will lose access, after December 17th, to all past posts you have liked, if Tumblr has flagged them as NSFW. Again, the steps (1), or (2A) and (2B) covered above will be the only way to hold on to these posts.
Oh I so hope this works. It would be great to get this out so we can try to get as many people as possible all back in one place and not split up all over different platforms.
Please reblog
Here’s hoping
everyone who see’s this from Me PLEASE reblog this!
~Uncle R.
Guys, check this out.
We now have a plan to save this Tumblr community!
Help is on the way!
More to come!
I want to personally thank all those volunteers who are involved in this project.
Oho! Judge Nonny! Fair enough, I submit for your review the following essay…
I honestly view Quinn as an Imperial doing his best to retain a semblance of honor in a system built to screw him over. When the writers talk about Quinn, they talk about him as a character who is intensely loyal to the Empire as an ideal. Without getting too deep into lore, part of the history he was exposed to since birth was the idea of the Republic as being an evil, corrupt government who used their Jedi to go on a genocidal rampage against the Sith. And Republic very much DID issued orders to commit genocide against the Sith after they had been defeated. The propaganda machine has since skewed the attack and made Imperials believe they survived because of the strict Sith hierarchy, but more importantly, because of the Emperor. Lord Scourge himself sheds some light on the subject. The Emperor is viewed as a savior god, and the Jedi are used as boogeymen. They literally tell their kids “Behave or the jedi will get you.”
Slavery, Sith infighting, treating imperials as expendable, social castes… the propaganda machine would no doubt pose all of these necessary evils. “We need slaves because we’re outnumbered. Sith need the freedom to lead. Don’t question your betters…” Quinn is born and indoctrinated deep in this Empire and his loyalties reflect that. He was written as a character who does his duty even if it comes at great personal cost. Drukenwell could have very easily cost him his life for insubordination/mutiny, however he was willing to challenge Moff Broysc. He puts the Empire before his own wants and needs. Is it problematic? Yes. On so many levels!
And then to add on to this flaming garbage of a situation, Baras rescues him.
I don’t think people realize what a huge deal this is. He was looking at incarceration or possibly execution and Baras rescued him. Quinn being Quinn only focuses on his salvaged career but he owes the man EVERYTHING. A lot of players get upset because Quinn betrays you on the transponder station. This is due to the fact that we expect our companions to be loyal to us! (I know I’m guilty of this, but that’s a different essay.) But the point remains, he is indebted to Baras. Per the writers, Quinn’s sense of honor meant that he had to act against you, but his love/loyalty to you meant he was never going to seriously try to kill you. Essentially Quinn was committing suicide by Sith on the transponder. Convoluted and poorly written perhaps, but at least my Sith understood it was a situation of an Imperial being caught between two Sith.
Why do people hate Quinn? I think most of it has to do with that expectation we have of having our companions be 100% loyal to us. You don’t expect someone on your team to just say ‘Hey by the way you suck, Baras rocks. Come at me!’ Another part is a somewhat unfair perception that he has more say in the matter than he actually does. He’s an Imperial caught between two Siths, serving a government that has repeatedly screwed him over. Baras is a Dath serving on the Dark Council. Baras IS the Empire at this point. Quinn then follows the only thing that has gotten him through his life, his sense of honor. Misplaced honor in the case of Darth Baras, but that is what he has. It’s his flaw. He doesn’t expect to come out alive from this, in fact he expects you to punish his deceit with death. Some people don’t see that, they just see someone they trusted turned out to be a snake. One of my SWTOR buddies killed Quinn on Iokath, and I told him he pretty much reacted how Quinn expected.
Which brings me to a somewhat controversial third reason… Quinn is disliked because he is written as a submissive man. He is competent, intelligent, brave but all of that is drowned out by the fact that he is deferential to the Sith Warrior. He stood up to Moff Broysc, single handedly rescued Major Ovech, and protected Vowrawn ‘with no thought as to his own personal safety’. And yet, people still refer to him as opportunistic, cowardly, or at best fickle. Why? Because he defers to you and if he was a real man he wouldn’t grovel like that. If he was a real man, he’d stick it to the Sith and defect to the Republic. Nevermind that he literally spent years in an Imperial prison because he defied orders to stop looking for you. Nevermind that in all that time he stubbornly refused to move on and accept the Wrath was dead like the Empire wanted him to believe. No, he’s spineless because he is reverent to who you are as the Sith Warrior and real men don’t fawn over someone like that.
I can’t help but feel we’d be having different conversations if Quinn’s character was a woman.
Tl;dr Quinn is an nuanced and complicated character. His personality is a product of his upbringing but he is worthy of love and understanding: 1) He’s just not some people’s cup o’ tea. 2) He’s got great character traits, but is stuck in terrible social caste system that screws him over. 3) Some people just can’t respect a man who was written as a submissive regardless of redeeming qualities.
You are correct, if Quinn had been a women the reaction would be far different, the sheer visceral hatred from the fandom would be overwhelming. Having a female love interest companion betray a sith lord? This fandom would implode.
This fandom (and video game fandoms in general I’ve seen) wants both companions that are actual characters who have depth and motivation…but also who never ever go against the all powerful player.
And the just have not figured out that you can’t have both.
Thank you for articulating what I’ve seen in Quinn’s motivations fir a long, long time. I still can’t convince some of my friends that there are seriously obvious in-character reasons for this man to behave as he does. An Imperial caught between two Sith is SCREWED and they know it, not even love (in the case of romanced Quinn) can really breach that ingrained need to repay what’s essentially a life debt.
“There’s certainly a raw and visceral shock to seeing swastikas displayed in American streets,” Hart tells TIME. “But this is a topic I’d been working on for quite a while at that point, and while it wasn’t something I expected, it was a trend I’d been observing. I wasn’t terribly shocked but there’s still a visceral reaction when you see that kind of symbolism displayed in the 21st century.”
Hart, who came to the topic via research on the eugenics movement and the history of Nazi sympathy in Britain, says he realized early on that there was a lot more to the American side of that story than most textbooks acknowledged. Some of the big names might get mentioned briefly — the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, or the highly public German American Bund organization — but in general, he says, the American narrative of the years leading up to World War II has elided the role of those who supported the wrong side. And yet, American exchange students went to Germany and returned with glowing reviews, while none other than Charles Lindbergh denounced Jewish people for pushing the U.S. toward unnecessary war. In its various expressions, the pro-Nazi stance during those years was mostly focused not on creating an active military alliance with Germany or bringing the U.S. under Nazi control (something Hitler himself thought wouldn’t be possible) but rather on keeping the U.S. out of war in Europe.
So why was that past overlooked for so long?
In part, Hart theorizes, it’s because the American story of World War II is such a powerful national narrative. The United States, that narrative says, helped save the world. Rocked by Pearl Harbor, Americans stepped up to turn the tide for the Allies and thus solidified their nation’s place as a global superpower. That narrative doesn’t have much room for the relatively small, but significant, number of Americans who were rooting for the other side.
“It’s always been uncomfortable in this country to talk about isolationism, though the ideas are still out there,” he says, “It’s part of the American mythology. We want to remember ourselves as always having been on the right side in this war.”
It was also possible for those who had participated in Nazi-sympathetic groups to later cloak their beliefs in the Cold War’s anti-communist push — a dynamic that had in fact driven some of them to fascism in the first place, as it seemed “tougher on communism than democracy is,” as Hart puts it. (One survey he cites found that in 1938, more Americans thought that communism was worse than fascism than vice versa.) Such people could truthfully insist that they’d always been anti-communist without revealing that they’d been fascists, and their fellow Americans were still so worried about communism that they might not press the matter.
I’m finally getting around to putting together the pet insurance claim for Scully’s final few months, which means I only now added it up, and it turns out I spent over $2,000 on the poor little guy in a span of two months.
like don’t get me wrong, I’d do it again and I’m immeasurably grateful that I was able to afford it in the first place, but holy shit that’s a lot and the insurance company SURE AS HELL better pay a lot of it back considering how much I paid them over the years.
SURE WOULD BE GREAT IF THE AFTERSHOCKS WOULD STOP
also if I spill my tea because of an aftershock (instead of the usual reason, which is that I’m clumsy and not in a cute way), I’m gonna be pissed
My first “serious” writing–IE, had a continuity, was not abandoned as soon as it got hard, went through an actual editorial process where a red pen was applied to my precious pages–was for an ElfQuest fanzine called Dreamberry Jam. I wrote about a glider/sea elf cross named Gull, who basically hopped from one disaster to another, because I was a sixteen year old girl with the power of life or death in her pen I WAS UNSTOPPABLE and I was having so much fun. So much fun.
My high school LJ (which became my college LJ, which became my post-college LJ) was studded with Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic (not gonna lie: lots of porn there, much of it written for my girlfriend of the time, who had a thing for Buffy/Faith), with Veronica Mars fic (including my Shakespearean adaptation of season one), with Halloweentown fic (I am most of the fandom). I have participated in every single Yuletide. My agent knows I will turn down work in December so that I can remain a pitch-hitter for defaults.
What are my thoughts on fanfiction authors who start writing and publishing original stuff?
I’m in favor.
But you’re right: people do get some shit for their fannish pasts, and by “people” I mostly mean “women,” because “being a fanfic writer” is a “giggle giggle let’s show porn to the actors and see if they get mad” thing that girls do, while “putting myself in the story” is a manly masculine imagination thing that boys do. Almost every guy in my high school creative writing classes began with a self-insert Trek or Wars character, assuming they weren’t writing up their D&D or World of Darkness campaigns, but they never got the scorn from the teachers or other students that the girls got for admitting that maybe they gave their OCs the hair color they’d always wanted. It goes all the way back to elementary school. It was totally normal for the boys to be racing around BEING STAR WARS PEW PEW PEW, but weird for the girls to want in.
(I know this is gender essentialist, I know, and I’m so sorry about that, but I’m talking about my elementary school experience, where girls would literally be pulled out of aggressive pretend play, and my high school experience, where the boys were encouraged to file off the serial numbers and the girls were told to write what they knew. The lens of the past is dusty and cold.)
Most of the shit I see slung at former fanfic writers (or professional authors who still write fanfic) is thrown at women who write YA, because, well, fanfic is juvenile and YA is juvenile (unless you’re a man writing YA romance and then it’s world-changing and revelationary). They are hence easy targets. You’re right: it’s sexist. It’s unfair. It will, hopefully, decrease and even go away. It will not happen fast enough for people to stop leaving bruises on my friends.
But here is the thing about fanfic: fanfic never dies. From kids playing on the playground to elementary schoolers writing their first stories to adults on the internet, fanfic is the human urge to interface with the stories that make us. A lot of very successful, very powerful works are saved from being fanfic solely by the fact that their source material is no longer under copyright. As the number of those works increases, as the scholarship on and around fanfic increases, the stigma is going to decrease. I genuinely believe that. I look at fandom now and compare it to fandom ten years ago, and I see so much more acceptance of fanfic on both the fannish and professional levels.
Crappy internet abuse aside, fanfic is restorative and powerful and important, and if it’s a thing you enjoy, you should absolutely embrace it with all the joy you can. The abuse may be here for a while yet. I will not lie about that.
im very grateful for the lessons in photography i was taught in stop motion class because just now they made it possible to photograph the stars with my phone in spite of the camera usually not detecting the light of stars because theyre so dim,,,, enjoy these shiny motherfuckers
ok so if everythings normal, your phone camera should have a manual mode (sometimes called pro mode). in it, change the settings of the shutter lag to 20 seconds, then put the phone down on some stable, plane surface and press the photo button (usually when using your camera, the volume buttons can be used as photo button) and let the phone still for the whole 20 seconds.
(basically the problem with most cameras is that they dont have a very good light sensitivity in the dark, however that doesnt mean they cant detect it at all. the longer the shutter is open, the more light your camera takes in and the more burnt/light your pic will be, so in (literally) dark situations, make the shutter lag longer to get all that light you need! also i said 20 seconds but really you can make it shorter or longer depending on what kinda stuff you want for your stars)
Yes this!
Additionally, adjust your ISO to the highest number (mimics the film used for very low light and low speed images)
And set your shutter speed to the longest time possible (on my phone it’s 10 seconds).
Leave your focus settings on Auto, and if your phone camera has a timer option, turn that on (five seconds is generally enough).
Plan your shot first, then find a place to set your phone down so you can get the image you want. The less light pollution, the better; you’ll pick up FAR more stars in your picture.
Once you know what you want to shoot, tap your screen to “focus” it, then hit the button to take the picture, set your phone down, and back away from the “tripod”. Don’t touch your phone for a good 15 seconds, just to be sure.
You will not be disappointed in the results, let me assure you.
some context for yahoo’s excellent product management that not a lot of people know about:
remember yahoo instant messenger? i’m guessing basically everyone stopped using that after like the early 2000s. but until about two years ago, almostall of the world’s oil trading was conducted through yahoo instant messenger. every day hundreds of millions of barrels, billions of dollars in equity, was traded by a bunch of dudes through yahoo instant messenger. traders and brokers loved that they could be speaking with tons of people at once, and their compliance officers loved that there was a transcript of conversations and deals left behind for auditing and regulatory purposes.
but yahoo decided, perhaps reasonably on the surface, that they did not want to support this service anymore. they wanted to migrate the messaging platform onto something a bit more integrated and 21st century. except their new service was not compatible with any kind of conversation-recording capability, so traders would not be allowed to use it anymore for compliance purposes.
chaos. billion dollar companies all around the world were scrambling. how would they conduct their business? i know this sounds silly, but traders talk to hundreds of people a day, brokers are showing them markets all day long. phones are inefficient and not all are set to record. they explained to yahoo what the compliance issue was. they offered to pay – these companies can afford any kind of subscription necessary. they assured yahoo that a massive pillar of the world’s economy, as fucking insane as it sounds, is actually conducted through their service. just let us use it. (here’s a reuters article about it, and here’s a financial times article on it)
yahoo didn’t change its plans.
now everyone uses something else to trade the world’s oil.
I'm a defeatist but I don't have to be 