Weekend Links, February 25, 2024

Once again, the weekly roundup of my corner of Tumblr:

My posts

I have been amorphously unwell (migraines, dizziness, aches) this week, which is super great. I am, in fact, daunted by the complexities and unknowns.

 

See "Personal tag of the week" at the bottom for updates on the Tumblr happenings. (Dreamwidth note: We're in that old-fashioned Journalfen otf_wank mode here.)

 

Reblogs of interest

Thousands of Israelis protest in Tel Aviv, demanding a hostage release/ceasefire deal and new elections.

 

I never know how to segue from a serious news item.

 

Theseus liveblogs the labyrinth, and it’s heartbreaking.

 

Before hbomberguy was going after plagiarism, he was playing Donkey Kong for trans rights. 

 

“to touch is to interact, and when you put your hand on your dog the universe does not know that you are separate”

 

The universe knows you are separate from this cat’s Absolute Terror Field

 

Cats named Pigeon

 

The most dramatic cat

 

Figure out what starts your engine and ride the waves of your brain

 

This is not van fundamentalism 

 

Lawful good werebears

 

The Godmother is not committed to the kindness 

 

Escape room employees reveal the worst, or best, things they’ve seen on the job.

 

“So I explained to him the story of ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ and he began to get MAD”

 

It seems that y’all do not understand that the Better Call Saul ads are just how we live in the US, and that I pass five Alexander Shunnarah billboards just to get a quesadilla. 

 

1) Don’t take your native animals for granted. 2) This jay is the bluebird of happiness, apparently.

 

Wisdom from a Tumblr longtimer

 

Benign chain posts: the Money Garf

 

Video

Every now and then I fall apaaaaaart 

 

Click through for a massive gothic rock playlist on YouTube

 

It’s a great dance contest entry--but then they tell you it’s also randomly-paired improv 

 

Capybara capybara (capybara)

The sacred texts

You have not seen a sacred internet text until you have seen the Lolrus (2006)



Personal tag of the week

“the happenings” is my tag for all internet platform bullshit. This week, it’s Tumblr, as CEO Matt Mullenweg lost his shit and started harassing a trans user (including on another platform). This is a factual explanation early in the week of what happened and how it started: 

 

predstrogen (the first blog) was allegedly deleted for “sexually explicit material” despite any posts that may have been labelled as such being marked with a community label and her blog recently being manually approved as NOT containing adult content. she also talks in this post, as well as here, about how she has had a support ticket open for several months for harassment she was receiving that has not been dealt with

 

the CEO of tumblr made a post wherin he publicly aired information regarding her deletion and threatened legal action against her , showing examples of the alleged death threats where no actual threats were made and telling people in the replies to just leave if they were unhappy with the moderation of the site

 

Specifically, he was upset by the expressed wish that he perish in a car covered in hammers that would explode multiple times, a serious threat that could surely come to fruition in reality. If you can't tell that I'm being sarcastic, congratulations, you're CEO material.

 

It spiraled from there, but suffice it to say, it ended with trans employees posting on the Staff account (reblog here with commentaries):

 

The reality of predstrogen’s suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

 

While the full post is sincerely emotional and brave, the real chess move is this part:

 

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

 

Matt Mullenweg now either has to nod and go, “Yeah, yeah... I’m a great guy committed to freedom...” Or he can, I don’t know, shut the site down in a fit of defiant pique? All I’m going to say about this is that the day all this first went down, I started archiving any posts I’d put significant effort into last year, and I’ll be crossposting them on Dreamwidth and Patreon. I don’t want to lose Tumblr’s culture and unique platform--I mean, I think the Weekend Links posts themselves make a case for the fact that there is nothing else like Tumblr on the internet. And shutting down is not even necessarily the most likely outcome--but I’m not gonna be caught unprepared, either. 

 

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