If you're not supportive of punching nazis in the face or civil rights, then don't follow. Also, will talk about all kinds of fandom stuff. So, yeah, fair bit of squeeing in between the political posts. You have been warned.
• Ask me anything What The Hoot?
To be clear, unless staff trips over the trail of extension cords keeping the servers running, Tumblr likely isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
What the info we’ve seen suggests is that updates are going to slow down, maintenance is maybe going to get a little shaky, and we’re going to see more glitches as time goes on and the remaining staff gets further behind their workload.
Is this a good thing? No, absolutely not.
Should you be panicking, jumping overboard, running for the hills, etc? Also no.
So what does it mean?
Well, for myself and several other creatives you all saw tagged in that post, it means we’re looking around trying to figure out what to do in the long run. We’re not running for the lifeboats. We’re just eyeing the iceberg in the distance and getting our shit together in the event that the worst comes to pass.
Speaking for myself, I intend to crawl through the walls of Tumblr until they pry me out of the air vents armed with a broom and oven mitts. I’m not going anywhere until the lights go out, and even then, I’ll be chewing on the wires.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking around for somewhere to land when the time comes.
Myself and several others are not panicking about this, but we are trying to be organized about it.
I’m just old enough to remember when fandom websites being nuked overnight was a very real thing. You’d go to bed one night and wake up the next day to find friends you’d known for years were just gone with no means of contacting them because the site you’d been using got wiped. Entire collections of fandom history were just destroyed in the blink of an eye.
We don’t want that again. And the good news is, we have time. We have time to back up our shit, time to swap contact info with our friends, and time to find a new place to exist within our communities while also staying here because Tumblr ain’t dead yet.
She’s just slowly going to wind down over time.
Unless, of course, they trip over the cables. Then we’re fucked.
Hey, Versobooks have made the above ebooks free to download
These resources challenge zionist ideology and offer a clear history of the occupation, Israel’s military industrial complex, and the BDS movement. (X)
Download here because some of you can use some reading tbh
in this house we have endless respect for cosplayers from the days before VCRs.
You couldn’t just rewatch the episode to look at all the details of the costume. You got lucky with press photos showing up in magazines or you just watched the episode/movie while sketching furiously
thinking about that one woman who made a Star Wars flight suit in 1977 entirely from trading cards and sketching details in the theater. or stories I’ve heard about old school Trek cosplayers getting the bizarre seam placements right by photocopying magazines onto overhead transparencies and projecting them onto butcher paper.
I’m a semi old school cosplayer (started in 2001) so some of the old school techniques are still things I learned on (I’ve sketched from stuttering VHS tapes on pause and used the overhead transparency trick)… what we have access to now for costume recreation blows what they had out of the water just in terms of reference material, let alone specialty costume supplies like thermoplastics and cosplay wigs.
Ok I wasn’t planning to share anything about this because I was waiting for any official comms, but I’m seeing people from outside of Automattic sharing this screenshot in a WordPress-related public discord server, so I guess the cat is out of the bag:
TLDR: most of the current staff is being moved to other automattic divisions and Tumblr will be run by an skeleton crew
hi everyone!
if you’ve never paid attention to one of my posts, start now.
or you can look at the reblog before from @dualumina
i work in technology, specifically surrounding supporting enterprise software.
this is bad.
this is death knell bad.
this is “end of life” for a product bad.
tumblr has basically said: this website is not a revenue vehicle, and thus, it may perish naturally. we won’t pull support from it. we won’t force people to move off of projects surrounding it. but we will do the bare minimum moving forward to maintain it’s existence and one day, when no one else wants to take responsibility for the decaying infrastructure and literally endless backlog of defects and code rewrites, the website will sunset.
you should start building a different online community today if you want one. there are options. or, hell, if you’re savvy enough, you could start your own and open source it.
but you should start building a different, queer, inclusive online community yesterday if you want one.
i do ask that if you aren’t allergic to peanut butter but aren’t a fan, just make a best guess choice cuz the last time i did a see results button it made the other options impossible to tell apart
I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?
Supernatural
Doctor Who (Steven Moffat specifically)
Sherlock (Steven Moffat specifically)
Actually Steven Moffat is basically just this sentiment given human form.
A version of this happened with The Magicians, tbh. Though instead of expectation: men, reality: women it was expectation: smug nihilists, reality: mentally ill queer folks.
Arguably Game of Thrones.
If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.
In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.
They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.
And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.
It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.
Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.
And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.
OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.
The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.
Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”
I think it would be harder for us to find examples of when this DIDNT happen than when it did. It happens all the time.
Doesn’t stop it from boggling the mind
(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)
Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.
Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.
(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)
The full pieces for each of the Star Ocean 2R characters, plus the new girl - Reel, the fish collector! I haven’t seen these versions without a background before, so I’m just posting them here for posterity. :)
