#this was queued incorrectly and never got posted

[welcometothekengan]

The Rolon Donaire fight ended kind of generically. I get that he’s supposed to be a full rounded fighter who employs simple fighting styles and but also has unique twists to keep his opponents on his toes, but that’s not really expressed well in the fight. Call me a baby with no reading comprehension (panel reading comprehension?) but I wish the manga was less subtle about his supposed genius.

So far Jurota vs Masaki Hayami was the only fight where I really understood that Purgatory was really all that formidable (Monkhbat, Lu Tian, and Fei Wangfang don’t count since they’re “worms”)

[willidleaway]

it’s been a while, hent it

So I haven’t been posting due to a confluence in the past half-year or so [*] of

dealing with health problems in the family

travelling for my current job

searching for a new job

and not having Doctor Who on the air [**]

but I doubt anyone actually noticed because, in case you’re unaware, this whole website is sinking, and I am just a deckchair being rearranged by people who really want to be sure the website doesn’t show too much of its underside on its way to the bottom of the godforsaken Sea of Opinions.

So yes, I’m going to use my first post in a while to rant about the site yet again. (And then I’ll probably vanish for a few weeks more yet because I’ll be busy travelling abroad.)

But, I hear nobody cry out impulsively, the site is out of Verizon’s hands! WordPress’s parent company owns it now and actually maybe won’t screw the whole thing up! Maybe not, and to be clear I think that—for better or worse—WordPress and WordPress.com have been an enormous force in web publishing for the common netizen [***]. I have no doubt that Automattic’s heart is in the right place, and in the same way that Flickr seems to now be improving overall after Verizon sold it to SmugMug—at least in the short term—I can only hope that this acquisition by a weblog business results in Tumblr being more focussed on, you know, weblogging. [****]

The disastrous fiasco that is the adult content ban, though, remains in place, which is highly disappointing for all the same reasons I viscerally reacted against it when it was first implemented. And while personally I’ve found the false negatives from my own tumblelog quite amusing—and yes, posts on this tumblelog are being flagged as adult content [*****]—

—I shudder to think what the impact has been on other communities built around entirely healthy aspects of human sexuality that now have to go elsewhere, and have to stay elsewhere despite the change in ownership because apparently the Automattic CEO thinks that Tumblr is ‘just fun’.

I was frankly quite puzzled by the WSJ article’s suggestion that the Automattic CEO saw maintaining the content policy as justified by the complementarity of WordPress.com and Tumblr. Again, take the case of SmugMug and Flickr, two services now under the same roof. SmugMug is about building a polished photography showcase; Flickr is about communities of photographers. Similarly, from my perspective: WordPress.com is similarly about nice, polished weblogs and websites; Tumblr is about communities of microbloggers. And that means it’s actually maybe a little weird that WordPress.com has no adult content ban (check their TOS—they don’t review the content they host) and Tumblr does. I happen to think they’ve got this the wrong way round.

Incidentally, I looked at Flickr’s policy around content moderation, and I see some things that wouldn’t be so bad for Tumblr to imitate. The thing that sticks out most is the graduated safety level—content isn’t just safe or unsafe, and there is a middle ground.

A good rule of thumb is, bare breasts and bottoms are "moderate." Full frontal nudity is "restricted."

And yes, pornographic videos are entirely prohibited, but note that the ‘restricted’ safety level isn’t just for nudity that belongs in a museum (which happens to be only a light paraphrase of the most that SmugMug seem willing to tolerate, based on their terms of service). The broad description explicitly states:

Restricted - full-frontal nudity and sexual acts; photos only–videos cannot contain restricted content and are deleted if reported

—and this seems far more reasonable than a blanket restriction on both photos and videos. Plus, unlike Tumblr, they’re not sending robots after you to close down your entire account:

An account safety level is changed only by Flickr staff when any images reviewed are incorrectly categorized

so there’s that, at least.

Could Automattic change its mind somewhere down the line? Maybe, and this acquisition is an interesting change for the site's future in general—I really thought Tumblr was just going to die a slow, agonising death under Verizon’s auspices, any semblance of personality utterly sucked out and crushed over time by Oath’s profit-centred advertising machine. But if the new boss sees Tumblr as ‘just fun’, I don’t hold out much hope that he’s going to be materially much different from the old boss.

So I just wanted to get all that off my chest for a bit. It's one of the many situations I'm in right now where I dearly hope I'm wrong, but at the same time it'd simply be unwise to be mentally prepared for the worst.

Again, I am travelling, and I generally just don't have access to my workstation, but I'll probably have another rant to spew before the year's out. It probably won't about this website, at least not directly ...

Footnotes:

[*: In fact, my ill-advised Star Wars AU list only went up back in May because it was queued up and in the mentioned confluence of things, I just forgot that I’d left it in the queue and in an unfinished state. So I haven’t actually written anything for this tumblelog in almost a year, since Series 11 ended.]

[**: I know, I never posted anything about the New Year’s special, and that’s partly because the main antagonist frankly freaked me out so much that I was a bit traumatised, but I also just didn’t know what to think about it. From what I remember of it, it felt decent enough (especially compared to various Christmas specials of the past), but seemed to be trying a bit too hard in parts, and given that it is literally the one episode of Doctor Who we are getting for the entirety of the calendar year 2019, it deserved to be a bit less clunky and a bit more brilliant. Oh well.]

[***: I am never ever giving up on that term.]

[****: Also a term I’m never giving up on. Also, I'm trying to resist judging either Tumblr or Automattic based solely on the fact that the one new feature added to this website in the subsequent months is apparently ... group chats.]

[*****: OK, credit where it’s due: if Tumblr really are having humans review content appeals, the humans are making very quick work of it more often than not, because I’ve had posts restored mere moments after I’ve submitted an appeal. But this is a moot point for people who conceivably are meant to be excluded by the new guidelines.]