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.
If you’re a fic writer and you do prompts and drabbles on tumblr and only put ‘full fics’ on AO3, please consider porting all your writing over to there. I promise, as long as you tag that stuff is just an idea, or unfinished and never will be finished, or just a drabble/ficlet/w’evr, people won’t be angry at you for it.
I really hate to think of all the beautiful little fics I’ve read on here just *poof* disappearing one day.
If you’re a visual artist, AO3 lets you put art and vids and things other than fic on there too. Essays and meta go on AO3.
We as fandom are now accustomed to looking to AO3 as a place to find our fannish fixes. So putting all your stuff over there is a good thing. People will be able to find it.
Thing is, if everyone does this, it’s gonna stress the resources of AO3. So if you’re able, please consider donating to them to cover the additional cost.
So I live in in New York City, where a lot of tech companies are–including tumblr, actually. I made a friend online 11 years ago who I actually see on occasion to this day. She doesn’t work for tumblr, but she is involved deeply in NYC tech.
She essentially has told me that tumblr is done and it’s just a matter of time. The tumblr offices are awful to work for and people who want decent jobs quickly migrate from there. It’s nigh impossible to make tumblr profitable or able to be advertised on so, essentially, it is a matter of time.
Honestly so I am fairly ready to move back to Dreamwidth or on to whatever the next blogging thing is because, quite frankly, it’s over soon.
I feel like we need to make a family fire escape plan. Where are we going when the house goes up in flames?
my 22nd birthday is one (1) month from today i don’t want anything off of a wishlist or anything but donations to my top surgery fund would be hella and signal boosts are also ❤
Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, are you?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular – but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place – when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
Hey everyone! Recently I’ve had to reduce my working hours for health reasons, which is helping very much so far, but unfortunately the difference in my income has been pretty noticeable, and for this reason I just though I’d take the opportunity to signal boost my storenvy shop!
Stickers are $1.50, 7×5 matte prints are $5.00, 8×6 glossy prints are $6.50, and mugs are $15.00!
Full size versions of all the prints above can be found in my Sherlock fanart tag (nsfw).
Prints are generally better quality and cheaper than on redbubble.
I will ship to anywhere in the world from the UK (postage starting from $1.50).
Please feel free to message me with any questions you might have.
I’ve turned off Anon. I need a break, and I want to catch up on the 20+ asks still in my drafts and chat box, PLUS I need time to fix my masterpost; I tried google caching but it seems it cached my page RIGHT after I fucked up on it… SOOOOOO Yeah, might be a week or so. I’m a little bit overwhelmed since I’m also supposed to be finishing my paid work as well.
THIS is why you don’t update things at work. I know what I did now: Internet Explorer is literally the shittiest browser ever but they won’t install anything different at work.
Anyway, won’t be nearly as long as before. Hoping by Monday to open it again, so hold onto your questions.
Thank you all for your understanding.
❤ A very tired Steph
PS this has NOTHING to do with the multitude of similar asks I got yesterday;
THIS IS BECAUSE I NEED TO FIX MY MASTERPOST AND IT’S OVERWHELMING ME. I’m so sorry. I love you all.
Best of luck! Take a rest when you can, you definitely deserve it!! *hugs*
I’m in a bit of a hole… after checking my bank account today (4/12) I noticed that fraudulent charges had been made and my account had been emptied. I have almost nothing to get me through to next payday (4/22).
I don’t need much, just enough to pay my credit card payment for the month to avoid any extra penalties there and a bit more so i can get groceries. In total I can probably get by with $200.
My paypal is char.sedor(at)gmail(dot)com. Literally any amount would be helpful! Five dollars can buy me lunch one day, and I’d be so so grateful for that.
If you do donate, feel free to message me and I’d be happy to try and make you a sherlock quote graphic like ones i’ve made before. I absolutely hate having to ask for help, but I’d be happy to give something little in return.
I appreciate any help whatsoever! Even boosting this post would be wonderful. Thank you, truly, sincerely.
Here it is, The Great Divide long-form. Rest in power, and in peace – Keisha Jenkins and Adam Kizer.
I had to employ some trickery/finagling to get this whole strip up in this format because Tumblr felt it was too long. It IS pretty damn long and I can already hear the “GET THIS OFF MY FEED” responses.
I can definitely compact it so this isn’t as overwhelming, the only downside is it will create additional clicks and keystrokes – as compared to how it is now as one long scroll.
WELP…that didn’t work! Currently I have two options – I can upload just 10 or the 11 pages. Or I can upload the last two as one file – which Tumblr is compressing (read: ruining). I’m going to see if there’s a work around – maybe if I decrease the size? Blah.
See this blog here? @shinyainlace She is a joy! A ray of sunshine and just the sweetest and she’s almost to her first hundred followers so go check her out and click her follow button. Show her some love!
whimsysmayhem 