plaidadder:

aenariasbookshelf:

anaisnein:

xenoqueer:

The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.

Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.

good luck with your plan to sell ads targeting a user base that doesn’t exist any more, @staff.

@staff @support you may want to read this. No one seems to think this nsfw ban move is a good thing. Your credibility is circling the drain at this point.

This has all been done in such a tragically stupid fashion. And it makes it worse that they actually planned it for six months before initiating it. 

The Vox piece doesn’t even really portray the extent of the devastation. They’ve broken this website for ALL of their users.

(via totallynotagentphilcoulson)

nomadicism:

Sounds drastic. Especially for content creators who may still need Tumblr for commissions while they find an alternative.

If you can swing it, here’s why:

I suspect that the December 17th deadline is so that Verizon/Yahoo can clean house and make Tumblr appealing to investors. This is a Q4/Q1 fire sale kind of thing. It makes a certain amount of business sense to make this change. Human-lead content curation (e.g. separating the CP from the legit) is expensive and time-consuming. I doubt they have the money for it. They already sold off Flickr. As a long-time Flickr pro user, I’m not pleased by the change and increase in pro account price, but I get it.

Investors are looking for a user base. User base is a prime attraction for investment or buy-out for a social media platform or application (I speak from experience as a co-founder of Rhinobird.tv).

Every account that is cancelled will be one less account in Tumblr’s user base for their pitch. I assume that there are millions of accounts with some percentage simply being abandoned accounts that haven’t been used in years. So cancelling one’s account on the way out the door won’t really matter unless the number of cancelled accounts reaches several hundred thousand at least.

If you decide to leave and cancel, then I also recommend sending a polite message to Tumblr staff, or tweet to the account about why you are leaving.

Finally, using Twitter to voice your concerns and thoughts about this issue will increase its visibility. They ain’t gonna like that. Media outlets that cater to tech entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley types are going to be all over this.

I never ask for reblogs, but I will this one time.

(via missnomerz)

pocketss:

an absolutely devastating prank by rin

rabitx3:

pocketss:

i’m feeling good about dragon diversity tonight!! dragons can just look like whatever and it’s all good. there are barely any design limits which i think is pretty neat :)

dragon:

also a perfectly acceptable dragon:

it’s great! 

(oh shit they’re in love!!)

CUTE

(via pocketss)

pocketss:

twizzlerstriders:

interstellarvagabond:

pocketss:

Happy Halloween!!
Eat lots of candy and stuff!!!

I see this one like every year and I still dont know the characters involved but I love it, it’s not Halloween without the pumpkin dragons

I made them!! @pocketss

:O

amarielah:

machigaeru:

I started Hebrew, which is why I’ve been dead on this blog, but I don’t think I can ever properly convey to you guys the sheer cultural whiplash of spending years learning Japanese from Japanese teachers and then trying to learn Hebrew from an Israeli

• Japanese: you walk into class already apologizing for being alive
  Hebrew: you walk into class, the teacher insults you and you are expected to insult her back
  
• Japanese: conjugates every single verb based on degree of intended politeness, nevermind keigo and honorifics
  Hebrew: Someone asked my teacher how to say “excuse me” and she laughed for several seconds before saying we shouldn’t worry about remembering that since we’ll never need to say it
• Japanese: if you get one stroke wrong the entire kanji is incomprehensible
  Hebrew: cursive? script? fuck it do whatever you want, you don’t even have to write the vowels out unless you feel like it
  
• Japanese: the closest thing there is to ‘bastard’ is an excessively direct ‘you’ pronoun
  Hebrew: ‘bitch’ translates directly

Fun fact: Israel has possibly the lowest power-distance metric of any culture in the world, while Japan has one of the highest. I didn’t realize that the CTO of my company was the CTO until somebody else told me, because everybody called him by his first name and engaged in mutual shit-talking/playful insults with him.

In Japan, even calling your boss by the wrong honorific is liable to get you in trouble.

And apparently there’s some sciencey cooperative venture going on between Israel and Japan in an official diplomatic capacity. I want to be a fly on the wall when Japanese and Israeli scientists work together.

(via erikisafail)

orcishbard:

on the topic of rewriting racist d&d narratives

it takes work, yes!

it’s worth it. for both you and your players, but especially for new players who can see the game in different ways than you

examples I’ve written that you should feel free to use:

-orcs: rather than give in to the weird “tribal savages who fight all the time,” consider connecting orcs and their inate strength/constitution to the earth. in my most recent campaign setting, orcs are descended from a human champion who bested an earth primordial; the primordial, impressed with their strength, blessed them and their descendents with powerful tusks and a greater constitution.

-drow: instead of the entire drow narrative being “they’re dark skinned and bad because they betrayed the fair skinned elves and their gods,” consider playing up their connection to spiders. perhaps they worshiped a spider God who gave them the ability to blend into their darkened surroundings. if you’re married to their current aesthetic appearance, take care to present multiple drow societies that have different outlooks; not a homogenous race of black skinned slavers. consider pigmentless drow, who’ve lost all skin color because they never see the light of day. drow who use echolocation? distancing your drow from the bad connotations carried by the current zeitgeist is a useful endeavor

-include elves of color in your game

-drop the ‘tribal’ aesthetic and the connotations that goblins and other monstrous races have. it’s lazy (note, tribes and other similar social structures are still perfectly valid social structures; but if the only example of them in your game world is the violent, monstrous people who seek to destory “civilized communities” that sends a bad message about real life tribes and their validity

-focus less on race and more on societies; a society can be evil or good, but a race cannot

-consider that fantasy races have no reason to conform to any gendered structures (especially our current human binary). dwarvish societies who express their varied and fluid genders through beard braiding. elvish societies who reproduce asexually. don’t limit yourself to what you can relate to from a 21st century human perspective

it takes a bit of elbow grease to decolonize your d&d, and the process is never done, but in my own experience, it’s only ever lead to more innovative and engaging experiences!

(via jupiterroxx)

nunia:

retro-leigh:

THEY PUT RAMMSTEIN INTO A BONGO CAT MEME YALL

the one i want

(via creativerule34hentai)

lunackitsuen:

buz=^.^=

It took me way too long to process that this was not, in fact, a regular sized couch.

bookrat:

Deinonychus bust made with chicken feathers

(via thegreenwolf)