#because among other htings

[levia-san]

With (credible) rumors about tumblr soon selling its data to midjourney for AI training, it truly is a peculiar situation for everyone on this website.

Personally, it's a choice between yeeting all my art off the platform à la twitter or keep it, but with some asterisks attached for the future.

For one deleting it all won't actually delete the post (and thus art) itself, due to how tumblr works. Even now glazing everything in post is useless, because edits don't carry over in existing reblogs.

So deleting the blog is mostly off the table.

But what now?

It's a bit hard to say for me. As I do have some attachment to this hellsite. That's why even when I was mostly on twitter, I kept being somewhat active here

But as time goes one, the good will I had keeps getting stretched and now this is the final straw for me.

Obviously, going forward, every picture on this blog will be glazed, nightshaded when the webversion is out. Sadly, I think this also means the update frequency will decrease a lot, as glazing will add a not insignificant amount of time to the posting process.

I'll also start using tumblr less, either migrating to other websites like bluesky etc. or just become less active on social media as a whole. I'll still be in the qijiu week discord though, so you can find me and my scattered art there too.

Otherwise, when I remember, I post occasional stuff on ko-fi as well.(even have a sorted gallery of sorts, so it's a nice place to have things sorted)

I'll link all those places below.

Anyway I thank everyone who has read so far and the support I got on tumblr. bluesky (x) non BL bluesky (x) QiJiu Week Server (x) ko-fi (x)

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Hoping the sign police will be over now, Harry said he's ok with it. It doesn't make him less gay, but that was not a closeting move. Hopefully the fantasy boyfriend fans stay when he's lost his hair in 5 years. But maybe he's ok with that too, so good for him anyway.

Good for him is a great response to all this anon.

So much of the sign policing was based on the idea that people knew what Harry was thinking and feeling. I would hope that it's possible that this will challenge that a little bit, but I'm not particularly optimistic.

Harry hasn't said that he's OK with the signs, but he has said that he's singing about women's pussys. And as I've said before, I think an argument that says a man can talk about women's bodies to a wide audience, but women can't talk about their bodies, is hard to make unless you want to uphold existing power dynamics between women and men.

As for it being a closeting move - I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. I don't think what he said in the audience right now was a closeting move. I don't even think writing the song was exactly a closeting move - I think it's useful to be more specific than that. This song was made to service the fantasy boyfriend audience. Harry knew what he was doing when he was writing and presenting the song. There may be other meanings, other things going on, but the surface level is intentional. I think to call it closeting is rather limiting, because it's aiming (and succeeded at) doing so much more than that.

[whatthefuckistevvs]

idk if owl actually makes the ow team (not blizz, ow team) money cause like. they have to pay all the players and the castors, they have to pay for all the resources like electricity and workers who make the streams happen, among so many other things. and then there's the activition/blizz ceos who want a few billions of the revenue in their pockets too. like what im getting at is that owl probably funds itself but it probably doesn't do much to fund the team who're actually working on the game

i dont know shit about how economics work or how OWL would get them money so i cant say if its a waste of money or not- i do know last year owl was MASSIVELY popular, i never got into it because... idk. i never get into that sorta hting

i mean, its ok. i just wish they had also paid attention to the actual game and not just the event of the game :/

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

I’m sorry as an American I cannot fathom refusing to vote for Biden. HOW. Think of the Supreme Court! If Trump is re-elected we can kiss Roe v Wade goodbye and god only knows what else. Biden isn’t ideal but how can one throw a vote away on a third party when we have a deranged monster as the only other viable option 😭😭

So this debate is going to get very tedious over the next six months and there is absolutely no way I would be prepared to engage with it regularly even without Coronavirus.  But I know I’m going to see a lot of posts across my dash that treat concerns about sexual violence, the murder of half a million Iraqis, and the incarceration , as somehow special pleading.  These posts won’t make any effort to persuade - instead they will castigate, guilt trip or order people what to do.  Such posts are anti-democratic in form and in content and also wildly ineffective and I figure now is the time to make my position clear.

Ordering, castigating and guilt tripping is an anti-democratic way of responding to someone not voting how you want them to vote. Treating a particular way of voting as illegitimate - as you do with your talk of other people ‘throwing their vote away’ is anti-democratic. Democracy is about accepting that people have different views and changing their mind.  Not about stamping your foot and thinking that everyone should do what you say.

That’s the form - but the content of what you say is also profoundly anti-democratic for two reasons.  First, is it is predicated on erasing how undemocratic American elections are.  You don’t know where the OP lives - a lot of Americans live in places where them deciding to vote for Biden won’t make any difference to how Trump lives. I have never understood why Americans are so invested in denying the fundamentally undemocratic nature of their voting system, but it’ll never get through my inbox without comment.

Secondly, there’s an attitude to voting, which seems strongest among American liberals, but you do see elsewhere, which basically thinks its appropriate to blame people for how they voted (but not oddly whether they voted, because this system often pretends non voters don’t exist - another hting I don’t understand).  As if the problem is the public has let down the politicians and not the other way round.  The contempt for the public in this world view seems anti-thetical to the public. Politicians should have to earn people’s vote and not voting for people you hate is part of the process. Surely it’s better to blame the Democratic Party for putting forward a rapist than voters for whom ‘not a rapist’ is a bottom line. 

On top of all of those principled objections - I also just think that these sorts of posts are wildly ineffective if their purpose is changing people’s mind (which I don’t think they are - I think they’re just an expression of a desire to be able to control other people - but often there’s at least some pretense that that’s the purpose). Changing people’s minds requires engaging with their concerns, and not telling them that blue is green  (which is why the refusal to add ‘if you add in a swing state’ to these posts really does my head in.  People in New York, California, Alaska and Mississippi, who refuse to vote for imperialist rapists know how the system works.  If you want to persuade people in Pennsylvania that there are good reasons to suck it up then speak to the situation that they’re actually in). It requires making a positive case that speaks to people’s concerns - rather than expecting ‘because I say so’ to be reason enough. Respect people and respect the importance of democracy as a process - and if you’re not prepared to do that, then my inbox is not the place for your American election thoughts.