Author: artherra

i-homeostasis:

i-homeostasis:

dude seeing these Mega high quality images of the surface of mars that we now have has me fucked up. Like. Mars is a place. mars is a real actual place where one could hypothetically stand. It is a physical place in the universe. ITS JUST OUT THERE LOOKING LIKE UH IDK A REGULAR OLD DESERT WITH LOTS OF ROCKS BUT ITS A WHOLE OTHER PLANET? 

LIKE THIS JUST LOOKS LIKE IT COULD BE A PERSON’S BACKYARD. LIKE YEA A LITTLE DUSTY MAYBE THERE WAS A SANDSTORM BUT THAT’S COOL I’M JUST GONNA WALK DOWN TO THE STORE P S Y C H YOU’RE ON MARS BICH!

A History of Fandom Purges

fierceawakening:

greywash:

elder-lemon:

cameoamalthea:

tsuki-chibi:

whitmerule:

liz-squids:

pearlmaser:

elfwreck:

olderthannetfic:

unclutterme:

olderthannetfic:

I’m curious how many related deletions we can come up with.

  • 2002 – FFN bans porn
  • 2002 – FFN bans RPF
  • 2004 – FFN bans script format
  • 2005 – FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
  • 2007 – Strikethrough, Boldthrough
  • 2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
  • 2010 – FFN forums deleted
  • 2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
  • 2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
  • 2014 – Quizilla shuts down
  • 2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.

… they deleted Fandom Wank???

Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.

  • 2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
  • 2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
  • 2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost

I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.

I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.

Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.

Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down. 

Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.

Yahoo owns Tumblr.

1356: 50% of monks.

People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.

AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.

2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost

Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005

Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.

A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.

^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.

these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view

You missed some:

Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).

If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.

This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.

Never forget this. There are certain kinds of content people don’t want you to make, and everyone expects that to be “graphic rape” or some thing that is at least arguably Not Great

but more often than not it ends up just “gay.”

Censors. Are. Lazy.

No matter what you don’t like or what you’d rather not see, never forget that censors are lazy.

That’s rule #1, guys. RULE ONE.

sundanceritz:

Anyway the last point I have to make here is that even if tumblr breaks under the algorithm (almost certain if they don’t back out of using it) and/or everybody leaves… I don’t have anywhere else to go or post things

people like to joke about it being bad, but I legitimately really like Tumblr. it actually feels like a blogging platform in a world where facebook and twitter are active political weapons that manipulate us elections. i don’t feel like i’m baring myself to content i don’t want to see here, or having to engage with a popularity-focused culture. the content isn’t sorted to influence you or trick you. it’s a bunch of people being themselves on their own terms. it’s oldnet.

yes, i do use other websites, but i’m not interested in posting personal things to any of them. this was a place i had control over and i’ll stay with it until i can’t. and when that happens there’ll be nothing left.

1×02 Re-watch

arlowritessam:

wendibird:

arlowritessam:

I noticed something that I thought was really interesting
when I re-watched 1×02 Wendigo for gif-ing purposes. There’s this moment where
the Monster of the Week is coming down the tunnels, ready to eat everyone. A
family, including the heavily injured Tommy, is terrified and both boys are scared
and Manfully Hiding It. What do they do?

They split up:

HALEY: We’ll never outrun it.

DEAN looks back at the others and makes eye contact with
Sam: You thinking what I’m thinking?

SAM: Yeah, I think so.

DEAN: All right, listen to me. Stay with Sam. He’s gonna get
you out of here.

HALEY: What are you gonna do?

DEAN winks and starts walking and yelling: Chow time, you
freaky bastard! Yeah, that’s right, bring it on, baby, I taste good.

SAM waits until DEAN is a safe distance away: All right,
come on! Hurry!

The family follows SAM down the tunnel.

These are the same boys who break down if there’s so much as
a door between them in season 13. And yes, they’ve gone through a shit ton of
stuff between the second episode and the nearly-three-hundredth. But at the beginning,
the ‘saving people’ part was more important than the ‘family business’ part-
although they both are way too self-sacrificial in the later seasons (and it
manifests in different ways for each), much of that martyrism is focused on the
idea of family. Dean feels the need to control and therefore protect his family,
Sam feels the need to cherish and therefore earn his family. To fulfill these values,
both will do almost anything to themselves.

But right here, Dean comes up with the idea- splitting up
and luring the monster away from the injured family. Sam is in sync. Both are
panicked, but both can see that this is the safest and quickest option- so Sam
lets Dean go. And then, when the wendigo is about to kill the civilians, Sam
throws himself in front of them- giving Dean the time to kill the monster. Both Dean’s attempt at luring the wendigo away and Sam’s attempt at shielding the civilians involve a degree of self-sacrifice- but it is to save people, and even if it means putting the other brother in danger, they immediately agree that it is the best option. They
are in sync, they trust each other, and more importantly: they value the lives
of the civilians more than they value their ideal of family safety- which
honestly, makes them a better family unit than they are in mid and even later
seasons.

What changes this?

Well, there’s a ton of factors, but I think a big one is
that John sold his soul for Dean. Dean hated this because of guilt and
complicated grief associated with such a sacrifice. Dean learned that family
was more important than ideological scruples, such as dealing with demons or
regarding an individual’s own autonomy. So when Sam was dead, he inflicted the
same terrible fate that had been forced onto him onto Sam- who then felt he
needed to make the sacrifice worthwhile by earning the privilege of life via
honoring family.

But in the beginning? Before the cycle of Death-Sacrifice, they
were brothers- brothers, and not Winchester Brothers. Just two boys who trusted
each other and valued each other and worked together to help other people. They
didn’t love each other less in the beginning, but they had a healthier dynamic built on mutuality.

I fully agree with everything mentioned here! I’d also like to add that another good example of this sort of thing in Season 1 was in the 15th episode “The Benders”. Yes, the whole time Dean was doing whatever it took to find Sam, maybe even more so than he had been at the start when it was just another case, but there was a specific moment that always gets to me, especially considering events in later seasons. When the family has Dean tied-up and they tell him to choose which of their two prisoners they’ll hunt, the lady cop or the guy (or they’ll kill them both,) when pressed Dean chooses Sam. Yes, he’s worried about his brother, but he also knows what he’s capable of. And he knows that despite all her police training, Sam will still have a better chance against them than the cop would. So he chooses Sam because he TRUSTS him, and because saving people is still important to him. It’s still their priority. (Now the family went and changed the rules, so it ended up being a moot point, and Sam still kicked ass, as did the cop, but I still appreciate what Dean’s choice meant.) Because I have a feeling that if that situation had instead happened in later seasons, he might have chosen differently. He would have felt bad about it, but I think it still would have happened.

I love this addition! You’re right- I’m pretty sure that something like this wouldn’t happen in latter seasons because when it comes down to a potential threat against Sam’s life or TRUSTING Sam’s skills and autonomy, he almost always picks the former.