The curse of modern fandom is that it has allowed fans to get even closer to artists, but they won't view the artists as people.

Human limits, human mistakes, human feelings, human needs, are never ascribed to artists, and when other fans rightfully point out, "hey, humans are making this, maybe don't harass them or demand they cater to your personal tastes," it gets shut down under, "uh, people who make popular mainstream things are automatically Public Figures who are also probably rich, so eat the rich and destroy artists over every perceived minor fault. <3"

Even though there's, y'know, a really big strike currently going on because those artists are very much not rich or influential or in control of the bullshit.

The more friends I make in the various facets of the entertainment industry, and the more widely my own art gets shared, the more I realize that a lot of y'all genuinely don't see artists as human beings if they meet some arbitrary standard of Being Known Online.

There is no amount of online fame that makes someone subhuman and a valid target for blatant disrespect and harassment.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not actually own and control a piece of art just because you like it a lot. The artists are not subject to your personal whims and tastes. They owe you nothing.

CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it's part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions

if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators

THEY ARE TRYING!!!!! SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE DISNEY ANIMATORS' UNION RECOGNIZED

this petition is from IATSE (union), btw! it actually has credibility, unlike most change.org/etc petitions! please sign it!!

image
"Coulter Thomas got a shoeshine from Shadow Morton at the Dore Alley Fair"ALT
"Shadow Morton, a female-to-male gay man active in Female to Male International and oart of that organization's speakers bureau. Active in the leather community, Morton is former co-chair of the Parade Committee and is one of the founders of International Ms. Leather"ALT

"Coulter Thomas got a shoeshine from Shadow Morton at the Dore Alley Fair" (photo source: Bay Area Reporter, August 1987)

"Shadow Morton, a female-to-male gay man active in Female to Male International and oart of that organization's speakers bureau. Active in the leather community, Morton is former co-chair of the Parade Committee and is one of the founders of International Ms. Leather" (bio source: Bay Area Reporter, April 1995)

neonnautilus:

So what is the threshold in declaring whether this experiment is a mistake or not? Do we need to send feedback in daily? Stop using the site altogether? What will actually be counted vs written off as people not liking change?

cyle:

when we A/B test something, it means that one group of people has the new thing, and one group of people has the old thing. this youtube video is a very quick way of explaining that process, i suggest watching it first here.

in this case, with the new navigation layout, our hypothesis is that the new layout will be more easily understood by more people, meaning we’ll see more engagement with the navigation items themselves. like literally, more clicks to the things we now have labels for, when before they were just an icon. and the fact they’re in a place that’s become more standard across the internet: a left-aligned sidebar.

ideally, that will lead to better retention of new users, and even an “aha” moment for people who have been on tumblr for a long time but never really looked at those different destinations. i’ve been on tumblr since 2009 and even i’ve found myself clicking on the inbox and activity more than ever, with the new change.

for us to see the change as a “mistake”, we’d need to see statistical evidence to contradict that hypothesis, which we’re already tracking automatically for everyone in the test. we’d also need to get an overwhelming amount of feedback to contradict any positive gains we do see. sending in negative feedback daily won’t do that.

so if you want the whole thing to go away: we need to see a negative behavior change in potentially millions of peoples’ behavior. that has happened before! we’ve rolled changes back that caused that negative reaction. that’s the whole point of these experiments.

and if you want to send us feedback about how the experience is negatively affecting you: please, please do!!! despite the statistical evidence, we want to know if there are accessibility concerns we missed, usability concerns, design considerations, etc etc, because that’s why we’re running this as an experiment and not just launching it to everyone. that feedback is really important to us, as long as it’s constructive.

On how a video game about fucking a bear interrupted furry discourse

People don’t realize the absolute comedy that just went through Furry social media.

See, feral smut (i.e. smut of four-legged characters who otherwise satisfy the Harkness test) has always been a contentious subject in the furry fandom, due to how easily it leads to unwarranted real-life accusations of zoophilia. It’s an annoying bit of discourse that has been rearing its head every other year since the modern fandom began four decades ago.

Which, you know, pretty rich, coming from the fandom where a pretty large percentage readily admit to having had some form of sexual awakening over the TLK and MLP:FiM franchises.

And anyway, that discourse was exactly what was going on last week. People getting harassed on Twitter, as an extension of the whole “groomer” moral panic. A lot of fandom relative newcomers parroting arguments right out of the Burned Furs movement (a late 1990s/early 2000s movement dedicated to “purifying” the furry fandom from “perversion” and “degeneracy”).

And then, just as the discourse was at its most heated, Baldur’s Gate 3 entered the chat.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about the game that will let you fuck a bear. Yes, a bear, as in Ursus arctos. A Druid shapeshifted into a bear, to be fair (again: the Harkness test), but a bear nonetheless.

And mainstream media erupted with reports that the game’s sales skyrocketed based on that scene alone.

And the discourse suddenly screeched to a hilariously embarrassed halt.

10/10 comedic timing, no notes.

This just cannot be left hidden in the tags.

Exit the discourse, pursued by a bearALT
weaselle:
“capitalismkillz:
“I love this meme because I think humans 10,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago would also like it
”
the heat of the fire draws air straight up from the center over the fire. This draws the air in from the sides in a circle...

I love this meme because I think humans 10,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago would also like it

the heat of the fire draws air straight up from the center over the fire. This draws the air in from the sides in a circle around the fire creating an air current, which means air is being blown toward the fire from all sides. When you sit on one side of the fire, it blocks some of the air moving toward the fire from that side. Now there is more air being blown toward the fire from the side opposite you. This pushes the smoke your direction. When you move to the other side, it just makes the same thing happen over there. The smoke actually literally does follow you around no matter where you sit. Because physics.

zarokia:

So, this will likely get ignored and I'm scared of actually sending asks off anon, but here goes, since the feedback on the navigation ui desktop has been so overwhelmingly negative already, with complaints about it being too crowded, too claustrophobic, and essentially just like twitter, which pretty much no one here likes, will you be listening, ending the test and letting the dashboard stay as it was, or will you be forcing an overwhelmingly unpopular change on us anyway?

cyle:

the new design is an experiment. it’s not out to everyone. we do these experiments so that you can provide us with feedback, and so we can see if updates like this cause actual behavior changes. please do send in your feedback to Support.

personally, i found the change really jarring at first as well. it took me a few days to get over that, as someone who’s been using this site almost every day since 2009. however, i’ve been using the site with this new layout for a couple of months now, and i cannot believe it ever looked different. now i don’t want to go back to the old layout, tbh. but that’s just me.

i do hope the people having such a negative knee-jerk reaction give it a few days and see how they feel about it then. when we changed the reblog UI design back in 2015, it was like the sky was falling for the first week or so, and then everybody forgot the dashboard ever looked any other way. now we look back at that blockquote-reblog time like it was a joke. i hope we can say the same about this.