Ugh. PEOPLE
Like much of fandom, I've drifted away from LJ/DW in recent months and years, in favour of various combinations of Twitter, Tumblr, anonmemes and AO3.
I'm feeling especially grouchy about that today because I've ended up caught up in a duststorm of wank, and it's put me in a bad mood.
I will summarise. A gifset appeared on my dashboard, gifs taken from a video of a soldier coming out to his father. I noticed that a number of the images were missing, replaced with "This image has been removed for violating one or more of Tumblr’s Community Guidelines". (I would be interested to know if you see it the same way.) I took a screencap, reblogged it, and thought no more of it. A few pals reblogged/retweeted it, which I appreciated. Today I discovered a number of reblogs accusing me of photoshopping it and trying to - and I quote - "stir up shit". Which I haven't been accused of since I was 15 or so, which I think says a lot about the possible age of the people accusing me, now that I think of it.
Anyway, having spotted these accusations, I reblogged it again, including, this time, pictures taken on my iPhone of the screen including a handwritten notice to prove it. Ridiculous? Childish? Yes. It made me feel a bit less furious though.
The thing is -- this is a pretty small issue in some ways, but there has been a lot of argument recently about Tumblr being taken over by Yahoo, and how that might affect the adult/explicit material hosted there. (As well as the fandom presence, which includes as much NC-17 fic and art as you might expect, there are also many porn blogs, educational sex blogs, and so on.) I reblogged this because I found it worrying that something utterly SFW would be censored (especially as the bits that seem to be censored are the bits where the soldier is saying "I'm gay").
(The thing is, and this probably makes me a shitty person, but I've found myself hoping, wishing even, that a Tumblr exodus would mean everyone coming back to LJ/DW and that everything would be as lovely as it was in the good old days, which is never going to happen and those days weren't that good anyway, but I still find myself thinking it.)
Anyway! I actually do feel better having had a little rant about that. It's probably silly to be so wound up about it; there are wanky types everywhere, and fandom has always been full of people like that, and I really do feel like there are a lot of quite young people on Tumblr who have just started to learn about social justice and are very passionate but not enormously knowledgeable, and I know that I was exactly the same at that age (e.g. a boy at school might ask me what feminism was, and I would slap him in the face and call him chauvinist scum, and he was genuinely asking, and I had a book in my bag called "Feminism for Beginners" and I'd only read half of it). In any case, Tumblr isn't always a great place discussion and that it's very easy to be misconstrued there. So I'm not going to dwell on it.
Let's talk about something else. Recently I have been watching Avatar: the Last Airbender, which I had never seen until now, and it's so good! I am about to finish the final series and I will miss it very much. I love all the characters, and the weird animals and the awesome setting. It's GREAT.
I have also jumped on the Welcome to Night Vale bandwagon and I regret nothing. It's also GREAT. I have always had a thing for eldritch abominations and for incomprehensible horror and/or strangeness mixed with the very ordinary (see also my love of Murakami, for instance), so it's perfect. It's also lovely to have something I can obsess over and get excited about and enjoy immensely while also not taking my eyes off my knitting. Radio shows and podcasts are the best for that, haha.
Enough of this, anyway; how are YOU?
I'm feeling especially grouchy about that today because I've ended up caught up in a duststorm of wank, and it's put me in a bad mood.
I will summarise. A gifset appeared on my dashboard, gifs taken from a video of a soldier coming out to his father. I noticed that a number of the images were missing, replaced with "This image has been removed for violating one or more of Tumblr’s Community Guidelines". (I would be interested to know if you see it the same way.) I took a screencap, reblogged it, and thought no more of it. A few pals reblogged/retweeted it, which I appreciated. Today I discovered a number of reblogs accusing me of photoshopping it and trying to - and I quote - "stir up shit". Which I haven't been accused of since I was 15 or so, which I think says a lot about the possible age of the people accusing me, now that I think of it.
Anyway, having spotted these accusations, I reblogged it again, including, this time, pictures taken on my iPhone of the screen including a handwritten notice to prove it. Ridiculous? Childish? Yes. It made me feel a bit less furious though.
The thing is -- this is a pretty small issue in some ways, but there has been a lot of argument recently about Tumblr being taken over by Yahoo, and how that might affect the adult/explicit material hosted there. (As well as the fandom presence, which includes as much NC-17 fic and art as you might expect, there are also many porn blogs, educational sex blogs, and so on.) I reblogged this because I found it worrying that something utterly SFW would be censored (especially as the bits that seem to be censored are the bits where the soldier is saying "I'm gay").
(The thing is, and this probably makes me a shitty person, but I've found myself hoping, wishing even, that a Tumblr exodus would mean everyone coming back to LJ/DW and that everything would be as lovely as it was in the good old days, which is never going to happen and those days weren't that good anyway, but I still find myself thinking it.)
Anyway! I actually do feel better having had a little rant about that. It's probably silly to be so wound up about it; there are wanky types everywhere, and fandom has always been full of people like that, and I really do feel like there are a lot of quite young people on Tumblr who have just started to learn about social justice and are very passionate but not enormously knowledgeable, and I know that I was exactly the same at that age (e.g. a boy at school might ask me what feminism was, and I would slap him in the face and call him chauvinist scum, and he was genuinely asking, and I had a book in my bag called "Feminism for Beginners" and I'd only read half of it). In any case, Tumblr isn't always a great place discussion and that it's very easy to be misconstrued there. So I'm not going to dwell on it.
Let's talk about something else. Recently I have been watching Avatar: the Last Airbender, which I had never seen until now, and it's so good! I am about to finish the final series and I will miss it very much. I love all the characters, and the weird animals and the awesome setting. It's GREAT.
I have also jumped on the Welcome to Night Vale bandwagon and I regret nothing. It's also GREAT. I have always had a thing for eldritch abominations and for incomprehensible horror and/or strangeness mixed with the very ordinary (see also my love of Murakami, for instance), so it's perfect. It's also lovely to have something I can obsess over and get excited about and enjoy immensely while also not taking my eyes off my knitting. Radio shows and podcasts are the best for that, haha.
Enough of this, anyway; how are YOU?