questionabledemon

[questionabledemon]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Adventure Zone (Podcast) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), Lup & Taako (The Adventure Zone), Magnus Burnsides & Merle Highchurch & Taako, The Director | Lucretia & Taako Characters: Taako (The Adventure Zone), Lup (The Adventure Zone), Kravitz (The Adventure Zone), The Director | Lucretia, Magnus Burnsides, Merle Highchurch Additional Tags: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Family Dynamics, Crying, Communication, Literal Sleeping Together, Sad with a Happy Ending Summary:

Taako can't forgive Lucretia.

Not yet.

And no one seems to be listening to his reasons except for Kravitz

[questionabledemon]

Where to find me: beth aka Ineffectualdemon

Dreamwidth: https://ineffectualdemon.dreamwidth.org

Twitter: https://twitter.com/babblebeth

Pillowfort.io: https://www.pillowfort.io/Ineffectualdemon

Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preciousbunnynoiz/profile

Thank you!

[questionabledemon]

heads up before you spend $$ on pillowfort, especially note the paypal thing. the io domain concern does not seem carefully enforced but is in the TOS so 🤷

[questionabledemon]

I FUCKING KNEW IT.

SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.

AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.

I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.

It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time - in the era before anyone had heard of google - if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.

GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.

And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on - it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space - but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.

Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history - a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.

(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)

And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…

Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.

And watch as the flames take everything.

Brush the ash from their hands.

Walk away.

Once upon a time - in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” - fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon - or as many years late - as you wanted to.

Because there was a tagging site - del.icio.us - that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.

They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it - many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.

It is like fandom suffered - collectively - a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.

We have never yet recovered.

Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.

I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.

I do not think Yahoo is “bad” - I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.

But they are, historically, bad for US.

And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.

…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.

[questionabledemon]

They already took my original blog and show no signs of giving it back despite it not violating the TOS at all

Also they have made it clear by deleting the chronic pain, depression, and anxiety tags that this is no longer a safe place for me to discuss my physical or mental health anymore

I’m tired and disabled and I don’t see any benefit of me hunkering down and forcing change that I honestly don’t believe is coming

There’s a reason no one uses Livejournal anymore

DON’T LEAVE TUMBLR

I know it’s tempting to leave and migrate to Twitter or Deviantart or whatever place to put your content due to the new policies, but DON’T. Let me explain why:

when your space is invaded, do you leave and let them take it? or do you stay because it’s YOUR space.

Leaving Tumblr won’t solve anything. As nonchalant as the staff is, if we leave, the new policy will stay in tact and NOTHING will be fixed.

We have to stay right here and tell the staff to go fuck themselves (Not literally, don’t harass the staff with threats or something) and do whatever we can to let them know their rules ain’t shit. Fix it.

it could take awhile. Weeks, a month, but we HAVE to kill this new policy.

Make petitions, videos, posts, but DO NOT LEAVE TUMBLR until they learn how to fix their shit.

[questionabledemon]

Tumblr is apparently doing some crazy nonsense again, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pillowfort.io is a new social media platform that aims to give users control of their content and how it’s seen and shared, as well as provide better communication tools to promote conversation and creativity. If this sounds good to you, you can donate $5 to our PayPal and you will receive a registration link the Friday after your donation. And if you decide the site isn’t for you, you can request a refund for up to three weeks after you sign up. (All money we receive through this process is going towards paying our hosting expenses and compensating our programmers.)

[questionabledemon]

Show, Don’t Tell: Yuri on Ice Masters the #1 Rule of Storytelling

Yuri on Ice is one of those masterpieces that I want to know inside and out, as as I’m watching it again I’m catching its artistry of Show Don’t Tell. Everyone knows the obvious lovey-dovey moments between our two leads… but it’s the smaller moments that speak volumes, and the writers go extra lengths to ensure this. In this post I’ll be discussing ep. 7 starting with the kiss, to what we see afterwards in ep. 8.

Everyone knows the kiss scene. Everyone loves the kiss scene. But what happens after? First of all let’s talk for a moment just what Yuri must be feeling here. I mean his face says it all: 

Think of what Victor is to Yuri. “A glistening god out of reach.��� “I’ve chased after him for years, trying to catch up to his genius.” Yuri idolizes Victor as a skater, Victor is the very person who inspired Yuri to do so well at skating at all… and now this “glistening god” just planted a kiss on his lips on national television. It’s more than a dream come true – it’s unreal. He can’t believe it. He’s in shock. After a moment like that Yuri is more than elated – he must be stupid happy; the surge of emotion so great the crowd and even the scoreboard just washes into a blur. And… what happens after the kiss? No kiss and cry. No waiting for the score. All we get is a recap from a much more composed Yuri, clearly having recovered from the emotional surge of the kiss to narrate. But he’s not narrating in real time – it’s a recap. Cut to Yuri in real time shortly after the kiss, and what do we see?

…I think he has awhile left before he comes back to earth. Just LOOK at that face. You can practically see the giant cupid arrow sticking out of his chest. Another note: Victor is also still blushing. You think Yuri’s the only one on a mountain right now? They’re both a blubbering mess. Not only that, but in this moment Victor just interrupted Yuri’s interview to say “Yuri’s already proven he’s the skater to beat this year. Now with the quad flip in his roster, I’m sure he’ll win the Rostelecom Cup and advance to the Grand Prix Final!” To the first-time viewer, both Yuri’s suddenly composed recap and Victor’s comment on the skating feels jarring – like the writers are sweeping our grand moment out from under us. THERE IT IS, they kissed – ! …aaaand back to the skating. When in fact, by avoiding explicit discussion altogether, the creators allow room to show the effect of that moment both on Yuri and Victor through their actions. Victor is bubbling with pride, barely able to contain himself even on national TV. Meanwhile Yuri just stands off in a lovestruck daze as he watches his idol gush over him to the world. In fact, when you take the enormity of the emotion into account here, it’s almost unfair to expect a rigid explanation or direct thought from either of them. As Victor himself said earlier in the show: “It’s an emotion, so why waste time trying to put it into words, you know?” To poke and prod our leads until they “tell us how they feel” would just cheapen the rawness of that moment. 

This is where I start reading in between the lines… but you have to in order to understand YOI’s brilliance. Check out the first real moment we get between Yuri and Victor since the kiss in ep. 7:

The shot starts with a close-up of Victor’s gloves tying Yuri’s skates. This is the first time we’ve seen this, and it goes without saying it’s a significant gesture. This is shown even more by the shot panning up from Yuri’s skates to his head. For a moment all we see is Victor selflessly serving Yuri with the upmost sincerity (What was that Yakov said at the beginning? “Victor doesn’t think of anyone but himself, he could never be somebody’s coach!” Victor’s action of tying the skates can also be likened to Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, the epitome of a selfless act) and when we get to see Yuri’s face, he is surprisingly calm about it. Wait – they have to be blushing a little bit, right?

Nope. Not at all. Whatever firehose of emotion these boys went through in ch. 7, it seems to have completely worn off. Again, to the viewer this can feel like we’re being cheated. “But WHERE is my cute moment?! HOW can they be so calm about this!?” 

First let’s talk about how much time has passed since the last episode. That was the end of the Cup of China. They had to go back to the hotel together. They had to get back on the plane together. Now whether that plane went back to Japan or straight to Russia is unclear, but I can speak from experience that airports and plane rides take a very long time. Then they had to get from the airport to the hotel – keep in mind they are in Victor’s country, and I’m sure he is thrilled to point out different culture tips and landmarks to Yuri. There is still no confirmation that Yuri and Victor are sharing a hotel room – this info is saved for ep. 10 – but we at least know from Victor’s interview and Yuri getting into the elevator that they are in the same hotel. In other words, there is a HUGE time gap between the emotionally charged kiss in ep 7. and this tying-of-the-ice-skates in ep. 8 – a time gap during which Victor and Yuri practically spent every second together. We get no explicit information as to what happened during that time, except that Victor and Yuri seem much more comfortable in the romantic element their relationship – particularly Yuri who before was a blushing, blubbery mess just at the sight of Victor. Who could forget this moment: 

Now from a storytelling perspective this part felt like fan service, mainly because it seemed sudden. Waitwaitwaitwait, this is moving way to fast! Why is Yuri acting all confident and seductive, where is this coming from!?

…until you remember the time gap. And you realize Victor and Yuri had to work out those crazy emotions somehow. And whichever method they chose, it changed the tone of their relationship completely. Yuri’s move seems to invoke a shared memory between them, confirmed by the fact that Victor isn’t blushing but fighting down a grin at Yuri’s hot breath against his ear. There is no discovery here, no embarrassed newness. There’s a familiarity between them that wasn’t there before. Look back up at Yuri’s face while Victor ties his skates. He’s not fangirling like he would have earlier in the show – like he just did in ep. 7 – he almost expects that kind of devotion from Victor, and he treasures it. Oh, they’ve come down the mountain alright. They’ve come down and moved on, and now we are in a totally different valley. 

A lot of the criticism I saw for YOI was that the story wasn’t as clear about Yuri and Victor’s relationship as it should have been. And I felt the same way… until I started paying attention to tiny details like this. The nature of their relationship couldn’t be any clearer – the creators just chose to SKIP what was probably the most defining moment for these two and then SHOW it through their actions after the fact. We don’t need to see what happened when Yuri and Victor got a private moment after the Cup of China. What little we see of them in ep. 8 tells us everything we need to know, keeping the focus off the more private aspects of their relationship and on the beauty of the relationship itself. Even better, YOI continues this method of storytelling through Yuri’s skating routine. He is skating to Eros, after all – and not without blowing a kiss to the judges, an addition to his routine that was only shown in this episode. And I don’t even need to comment on the way Victor watches him:

With episode 8, the creators are telling us: “These two have come leaps and bounds.” This is made clear when, as Yuri comes off the ice, the focus of the narrative shifts to Yurio. For the first time, we watch Yuri and Victor at the kiss and cry from a distance, and from a different character’s POV. This passing of the baton is brilliantly done, and leaves a feeling of (temporary) completion of Yuri and Victor’s arcs. I mean just look at them: 

No conflict here, folks, nothing to see! Move along, move along! … and the story does, until Makkachin swallows a steam bun and we have a new problem to tackle. Just to drive home the genius of this kind of subtle storytelling, check out this two-second shot of Yuri and Victor after Yurio’s performance:

Victor isn’t even looking at the score. He’s looking at Yuri looking at the score. And he is hopelessly in love. We don’t need to see what happened between the kiss and the Rostelecom Cup – the writers show that development through tiny moments like this. And that is just one of the elements that makes this show a masterpiece. 

[questionabledemon]

Update 2: I’m babblebeth on twitter. I didn’t want to add that but so many people are on that I feel like I have to

I’m done

I’ll be backing up this tumblr and collecting everyone handles in the morning but then I’m deleting this blog because this isn’t a safe place for me to talk about my mental and physical illnesses anymore thanks to their deletion of the chronic pain, depression and anxiety tags.

and I don’t think it will be a safe place to be queer and genderfluid

I don’t think it will be a safe place for fandom either

So what’s the point?

If you’re a mutual and want my email address to stay in contact just hit me up in messages and I’ll gladly share it with you

Otherwise I’m ineffectualdemon on pillowfort.io and dreamwidth. I’m also preciousbunnynoiz on Ao3

I am on discord but I barely know how to use that so *shrug*

I’m probably going to keep the blog until at least the 17th but then I’m gone from this helllsite

Fucking well done tumblr

[questionabledemon]

Update: I’m also on mastodon.social as ineffectualdemon

So there’s that too and that might be better for art people idk

I’m done

I’ll be backing up this tumblr and collecting everyone handles in the morning but then I’m deleting this blog because this isn’t a safe place for me to talk about my mental and physical illnesses anymore thanks to their deletion of the chronic pain, depression and anxiety tags.

and I don’t think it will be a safe place to be queer and genderfluid

I don’t think it will be a safe place for fandom either

So what’s the point?

If you’re a mutual and want my email address to stay in contact just hit me up in messages and I’ll gladly share it with you

Otherwise I’m ineffectualdemon on pillowfort.io and dreamwidth. I’m also preciousbunnynoiz on Ao3

I am on discord but I barely know how to use that so *shrug*

I’m probably going to keep the blog until at least the 17th but then I’m gone from this helllsite

Fucking well done tumblr

[questionabledemon]

I’m done

I’ll be backing up this tumblr and collecting everyone handles in the morning but then I’m deleting this blog because this isn’t a safe place for me to talk about my mental and physical illnesses anymore thanks to their deletion of the chronic pain, depression and anxiety tags.

and I don’t think it will be a safe place to be queer and genderfluid

I don’t think it will be a safe place for fandom either

So what’s the point?

If you’re a mutual and want my email address to stay in contact just hit me up in messages and I’ll gladly share it with you

Otherwise I’m ineffectualdemon on pillowfort.io and dreamwidth. I’m also preciousbunnynoiz on Ao3

I am on discord but I barely know how to use that so *shrug*

I’m probably going to keep the blog until at least the 17th but then I’m gone from this helllsite

Fucking well done tumblr

[questionabledemon]

My OG blog wasn’t a nsfw either. But I still lost it. There a deleted tags that don’t have anything to do with porn in anyway so there is more going on then meets the eye

Back up your blog just in case

if you run a NSFW blog or post NSFW content, here’s how to export your blog 

[questionabledemon]

Also “I should be safe” isn’t enough because I should have been safe and my blog was still taken down and is still down two weeks later

Back your blogs up

About this…

If you’re someone affected by the platform’s definition of what they’re going to be banning, I strongly suggest you back up your Tumblr blog. RIGHT NOW. Info on how to do that is here.

I can’t think why my own Tumblr would be affected, but I’ll be backing things up too… because in situations like this one might expect the algorithm to get a little out of hand and make mistakes that one might or might not be able to recover from. (See this article.)

For safety’s sake – because I’d very much dislike losing the content I’ve shared with other people here – I’l be embodying my Tumblr content in a new Wordpress blog over the coming days. I’ll share the address here when it’s ready, for those who might be interested.

But in the meantime, seriously: friends and cousins, back yourselves up.

[questionabledemon]

A better, more positive Tumblr

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio CEO

[questionabledemon]

if you run a NSFW blog or post NSFW content, here’s how to export your blog 

[questionabledemon]

What I’m more upset about is blogs that weren’t nsfw at all or didn’t have adult pictures (like mine. And I had adult fics but I only shared links to that on ao3 rather then posting that content on my blog) are just gone and are still gone two weeks later with radio silence about that from Tumblr

Add in the fact the take down of the tags Chronic Pain, depression, anxiety and other related tags with no explanation even now and I just think more stuff is going on and it’s alarming as hell

Before you panic too much, fandom:

text is not included, so your fanfic and RP is OK

nudity is allowed, including political protests, breastfeeding and illustration – it just can not include sex acts

your nsfw flagged blog will not be deleted immediately, and that filter will still exist

However, this will likely still be policed automatically, and if your stuff gets tagged you’ll have to appeal to get it back out.

And of course, this hurts sex workers, erotic artists, and probably survivors.

Since these rules will be policed automatically, I’m also guessing it won’t keep out the spammers the way they expect.

So.

This is dumb, and probably done by folks who don’t know the history of this stuff.  It won’t kill Tumblr but it is not going to be fun for a bit.

[questionabledemon]

I used the tumblr handle of the one that got deactivated rather than this one but for anyone who didn’t know I was ineffectualdemon on here and that’s what I am on other sites

A directory of social media handles so people can find you on other sites. Once you fill out the form (none of the questions are required so in theory you can just hit “submit” without answering anything, but you can also just View Here) you will be able to access, but not edit, a spreadsheet of everyone’s handles across their social media. 

As the disclaimer banner says, EVERYTHING you enter into this form is made public so you know, be careful. If you don’t want two of your handles linked…don’t put ‘em both in there. 

I can’t think of a genuine reason this would be a bad idea but it’s a lot of data about people and their personal names that’s easily scrapeable so you know, if you can argue that this is a really bad idea for X reason, I’m willing to listen and delete as necessary. 

[questionabledemon]

Attention:

I am ineffectualdemon on both dreamwidth and pillowfort.io

Feel free to add me both places. I plan to us pillowfort mostly once it’s back up but I’ll see which I feel I like more

Let me know what your handles might be if you want

Fuck tumblr