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Reality’s Shitposting Corner

@realityisdulllonglivefiction

Let’s be revolutionary, my darlings. LGBTQIA+ friendly. Bisexual Demiromantic. RoyalAdvisor13 on fic sites, She/Her, 21

tumblr blackout proposal

tumblr mobile has steadily become near unusable these past few updates. not just from a user experience perspective (which is important enough in itself) but also from an accessibility perspective.

examples include the new way the image viewer works (if you can call it "working"), the tumblr live button replacing the profile button, and that newly created blogs will be forced to have their main dashboard tab be the 'for you' page.

the demands of the protest would be along the lines of:

  • reverse the recent image viewer update
  • scrap the new users 'for you' page default setting
  • let us turn off tumblr live indefinitely
  • increase efforts against spam / porn bots
  • make reporting abuse and hate speech as easy as reporting as reporting spam
  • let us go nuts show nuts again... for real this time
  • remove flashing ads, including not accepting blaze campaigns for posts with flashing in them
  • commit to improving usability and accessibility, and listening to users!
  • (suggestions welcome!)

to protest against these usability issues, and inspired by the recent reddit blackout, i propose a 48 hour blackout (where you don't use tumblr at all). preferably of both mobile and web (since web has problems too) but mobile is the focus here.

[edit: a 'blackout' is when you don't log in, or interact with the site at all, for [x] amount of time.]

I suggest from the 30th of June.

this marks the end of pride month (for the "queerest place on the internet") and the start of disability month (since accessibility is a massive issue here).

tumblr office is in San Francisco, USA, so the times and dates will be calculated using their time zone (PDT).

i can't afford to blaze this post so please spread it around as much as possible! protests only work if significant numbers show up!

edit: tumblr rejected the blaze campaigns for this post because they know it would hurt them. let's make this an indefinite blackout - it's the best way to get results.

The names Practice

Mal Practice

Nice to meet you Dr. Practice, could you please tell me what’s wrong with my son :)

He needs surgery on all of his bones

Very well, here is my credit card :)

I accept no payment I do this because I love it

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As someone who lives outside the UK, I find it so hilariously wild when "the monarchy brings in tourism" is used as a reason to keep this random family in power.

Tourists are not going to see or meet members of the royal family, it's not a Disney meet and greet situation.

Tourists visiting places of importance like Windsor and Buckingham Palace does not require an active monarchy to fuck over the working class.

If anything, I would be MORE compelled to visit England if the monarchy were abolished and the public were allowed to view the miriad of art the royal family have hidden away.

Visiting Versailles and being able to enter much better for tourism than if you could only look at it from outside because some nepo baby lives there.

So for anyone quaking in their boots about tourism post-abolition, worry not, tourists will come because seeing the monarchy was never the point in the 1st place.

bisexual attraction is inherently queer! yes, even if one of those modes of attraction "seems" inherently heterosexual. it's not! unless the individual chooses to label it as het, bisexual men being attracted to women is queer. bisexual women being attracted to men is queer. get used to it!

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

  • Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
  • Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
  • Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
  • Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
  • Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

  • Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.
  • The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
  • You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.
  • Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up
  • You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
  • You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.
  • Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

  • Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog
  • Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
  • If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
  • You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"
  • Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.
  • Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
  • We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
  • Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

  • Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
  • Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
  • Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
  • You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.
  • Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.
  • Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit
  • You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.
  • Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.
  • Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.
  • If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
  • Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

  • Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension
  • In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.
  • You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
  • Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
  • Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

Vegans of tumblr, listen up. Harvesting agave in the quantities required so you dont have to eat honey is killing mexican long-nosed bats. They feed off the nectar and pollinate the plants. They need the agave. You want to help the environment? Go back to honey. Your liver and thyroid will thank you, as well. Agave is 90% fructose, which can cause a host of issues. Bye.

So let me get this straight ,vegans should stop eating the food of the Mexcian long-nosed bats, because the bats need it, and instead vegans should instead eat honey, the food of bees, that their larvae need, even though the bee populations are facing ecological issues as it stands.  10/10 post, dude.

Did you forget the whole part where only excess is taken and all their needs are met and then some orrrr?

Like, did you read it orrrrr?

Anyway, BUY HONEY SAVE BEES

It is a 10/10 post. Because OP is right.

Bees do not suffer when beekeepers take their honey, because experienced beekeepers do not take all of their honey, in fact, they leave plenty of honey left for the bees to consume over the winter. If we do not collect their honey, 1 of two things will happen.

1. they will leave for a bigger home. Which at first seems fine until you remember that bees are dying very quickly out in the wild.

or

2. They will start using the areas that they reserve for their young as a place to make more honey. This is bad because if no more young are being produced, then the hive will start to die out because no new workers are coming into the world, and the average live only 150 days, so it would also mean the loss of more bees.

So yeah, eating honey isn’t inhumane at all. In fact, you’re helping the bees by eating what they produce and giving money to the bee keepers who are the ones making sure that the hive will keep being healthy.

LOUDER FOR THE VEGANS IN THE BACK: use honey, not agave! Bees need your support and other animals need agave! Using honey means more bees!!

Other animal products that are absolutely fine to use because they produce it in excess:

- Wool. Sheep need to be sheared or their wool will get excessively large, matted and gross. Its legit just a haircut. Calm down and use wool instead of whatever fake acrylic microplastic shit they have in stores now. Wool is super warm, insulating, and guess what! It grows back! Its a renewable resource and all the sheep want in return is some good pasture and protection from predators.

- Eggs. I’m not talking about storebought eggs. Go to your local farmer’s market. Find someone around with chickens/ducks. These birds produce eggs literally every day and will not stop unless they are molting, brooding, or kept in the dark for most of the day. Like I am not joking when I say you can very easily find someone with poultry and they will beg you to take some eggs. Theres so many. Please. Take some duck eggs. I dont want them. I had 8 laying ducks last year. Thats 8 eggs every day. Thats 2 dozen eggs every THREE DAYS. Thats SO MANY EGGS PLEASE TAKE SOME EGGS

Reducing animal cruelty does not mean abolish the use of animal products. Go eat honey. Go use wool. Go find a friend with birds and eat eggs, or get your own. Just because it comes from an animal does not make it cruel.

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

When Tina Turner left her first husband - who was also her boss, captor, and brutal tormentor - she snuck out of their Dallas hotel room with a single thought in her mind: "The way out is through the door." From there she fled across the midnight freeway, semi-trucks careening past her, with 36 cents and a Mobil gas card in her pocket. As soon as she decided to walk out that door, she owned nothing else. When she filed for divorce, she made an unusual request. She didn't want anything: not the song rights, not the cars, not the houses, not the money. All she wanted was the stage name he gave her - Tina - and her married name - Turner. This was the name by which the world had come to know her, and keeping it was her only chance to salvage her career. Things could have gone a lot of ways from there. She could have labored in obscurity for decades, maybe making records on small labels to be prized by vinyl connoisseurs in Portland. She could have stayed in Vegas, where she first went to get her chops back up, and worked as a nostalgia act. And, of course, given what she had been through, she might have … not made it. What happened instead is that Tina Turner became the biggest global rock star of the 80s. I'm old enough to barely remember this, but if you aren't, it was like this: The Rolling Stones would headline a stadium one day, and the next day it would be Tina Turner. A middle-aged Black woman - she became a rock star at 42! - sitting atop the 1980s like it was her throne. She managed this because of whatever rare stuff she was made of (this is a woman whose label gave her two weeks to record her solo debut, Private Dancer, which went five times platinum); because she decided to speak publicly about her abusive marriage and forge her own identity, and in doing so give hope and courage to countless women; and also because - in a perhaps unlikely twist for a girl from Nutbush, Tennessee - she had her practice of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, to which she credited her survival. She remained devout until the end. Tina's second marriage - to her, her only marriage - was to Edwin Bach, a Swiss music executive 16 years her junior. Of him, she said, "Erwin, who is a force of nature in his own right, has never been the least bit intimidated by my career, my talents, or my fame." In 2016, after a barrage of health problems, Tina's kidneys began to fail. A Swiss citizen by then, she had started preparing for assisted suicide when her husband stepped in. According to Tina, he said, "He didn't want another woman, or another life." He gave her one of his kidneys, buying her the remainder of her time on this earth and perhaps closing a cycle which took her from a man who inflicted injury upon her to a man willing to inflict injury upon himself to save her from harm. Born into a share-cropping family as Anna Mae Bullock in 1939, she died Tina Turner in a palatial Swiss estate: the queen of rock 'n roll; a storm of a performer with a wildcat-fierce voice; a dancer of visceral, spine-tingling potency and ability; a beauty for the ages; a survivor of terrible abuse and an advocate for others in similar situations; an author and actress; a devout Buddhist; a wife and mother; a human being of rare talent and perseverance who, through her transcendent brilliance, became a legend.

Credit: Will Stenberg

Marlene Dietrich is detained at a train station in Paris in 1933 for violating the ban on women wearing trousers.

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As with all german actors in the 30's, you always gotta check the World War II section of their Wikipedia page. Well im happy to report that Marlene Dietrich was in open opposition to the Nazi regime, and in 1937 donated her entire salary for a film (over 9 million dollars in todays money) to helping Jewish refugees :)

Y’all remember this photo of Marlene Dietrich being lifted up to kiss a soldier?

That’s my great Grampa kissing her. Needless to say my family’s huge fans of her. I did a research project on this photo for class, and did y’all know she was pretty famously in an open marriage? She also immigrated to the US, becoming an American citizen in 1939 and sold more war bonds than any other celebrity while touring before troops for almost two years, from January 1942 till September 1943. Independent, confident, fierce queen

Just so we're all on the same page with the writer's strike.

If during the strike, it's announced about AI generated shows. We are not watching them. Not even out of curiosity. Let them fail every AI generated show they try make.

The human voice can not be replaced by AI. Don't let them try.

me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

Hey OP? What the FUCK does this mean?

decay exists as an extant form of life

That’s a terrifying answer, have a nice day