Abstinence-only-until-marriage
programs are statistically ineffective.
Studies show they reinforce gender
stereotypes, undermine public health
programs, violate adolescent human
rights by withholding accurate medical
information, and they don’t actually
delay sexual activity. SourceSource 2
adhd student: i love learning and i actually hunger for knowledge, but the way the school system currently operates doesn’t work well for people with brains like mine. i am capable of maintaining acceptable and even good grades, but it takes about 3x the time and effort of the average student. all my life i have been receiving messages, overt and subtle, that i am deficient, lazy, and/or weird for my inability to perform well in that environment, and my self-worth has been utterly decimated as a result.
Madagascar, Tsingy. These knife-like limestone formations stretch over 70 meters into the air. Known as The Forest Of Knives, these razor-sharp limestone points can slice through equipment and flesh easily, which makes traversing them extremely difficult and dangerous, some climbers have been known to get through over 15 pairs of boots! It is estimated that the Tsingy has the largest underground cave system in the world and many animals live among the endless maze of disorienting corridors, humid caves, and unforgiving razors at the ground level.
(Image one credit: Pierre-Yves Babelon)
WHOA!!!
Yeah it’s pretty sweet and for anyone who is about to ask, it’s a Sifaka lemur!
Tsingy is formed by mildly acidic rainwater dissolving into the softer strata of limestone from above, and carved it out from underneath, eroding the solid rock both vertically and horizontally, and wearing it away on every surface to a sponge-like, porous honeycomb of limestone cells.
So many of you are probably thinking “Wow I’d love to go and climb around it” and yeah I don’t blame you, it looks amazing. The Tsingy are located in the ANKARA geographic park.
However it’s also incredibly dangerous, due to the fact that those spires are literally razor-sharp. Seriously, most of the park is completely unexplored because it’s so dangerous and you will burn through shoes like anything. It’s not something to just have a walk around, it’s genuinely a feat.
The sky isn’t falling, Tumblr isn’t deleting all the dirty fan art on purpose, and fandom isn’t going to leave Tumblr tomorrow.
However…
Once a site starts using bots to delete content willy-nilly, it has a serious problem and is not a safe home for fandom. In this case, the aim was to get rid of child pornography. (Actual child pornography.) The problem was already so out of control that they hit a bunch of innocent blogs by accident.
If this happened once, it’s going to happen again. It’s going to keep happening until Tumblr’s limited staff is so overstretched that they stop even a vague pretense of caring about false positives and accidental deletions of other content.
I’ve already seen several posts going around telling people to “calm down” and assuring us that Tumblr isn’t out to get us. Tumblr is not out to get us, but they’re not out to help fandom either, and you should definitely not calm down.
Make your other accounts now.
Have somewhere to go when Tumblr finishes imploding.
Two bits of advice:
-back up your stuff. make copies of your important text posts. save your media elsewhere. tumblr has a built in backup tool. use that.
-let your friends know where else to find you. fannish exodus works best when we end up the same places. (may I suggest dreamwidth?)
Last I heard dreamwidth was not a great option because it’s servers are in Russia. Many of us think of the internet as something that lives “in the cloud, up there somewhere” but much of it’s infrastructure is hosted in rooms full of servers around the world. The server’s physical locations are subject to the laws of those areas/countries.
That’s Livejournal, dude, notDreamwidth.
Dreamwidth is a similar-looking site that started off as a code fork of LJ. It is run by a tiny team in the US and is explicitly fandom-friendly. They’ve already been attacked by having people tattle to paypal and get their paypal suspended. They had to find a (more expensive for them) credit card processor that wouldn’t hold them hostage, demanding they change their content policies.
From the ‘open expression’ part of their about us page:
“We believe in sustainability, not profiteering. We want to grow our business slowly and steadily, in a way that can support the community instead of exploiting it. We don’t own you or your content – we hope that you’ll empower us to be your hands and trust us to build a community that can last.
We will remain third-party-advertising-free. We believe it’s possible to run a sustainable hosted service without resorting to third-party advertising or third-party sponsorship – and we’re committed to showing you what we’re taking in, what we’re spending, and where the money’s going.”
The problem with Dreamwidth is that it looks old-fashioned and doesn’t have all of the features fandom likes: The image hosting is minimal, and there’s no reblogging.
What it’s great for is text discussion with threaded comments (for which we use reblogs here, but for which reblogs frankly suck).
The people and policies behind the site are all great.
As someone who’s moved with fandom from BBBoards and Yahoo groups to Livejournal to Dreamwidth and AO3 and Tumblr and most recently to Pillowfort – it seems to be par of the course for sites that are NOT fandom-made to sooner or later become unfriendly or less usable to fandom.
Dreamwidth may be quiet, but it’s made by fen, and I will keep supporting it with my money and looking in now and then to see old friends. I will keep supporting AO3 that was born out of that same needs for the fandom to own the servers. I would suggest people not forget fanlore.org – it’s your fandom lore wiki, and you can create an user page for yourself to direct anyone how to find you in case one of your main non-fandom-maintained fannish-community sites goes boom (a lot of us did when LJ purges and Delicious blowout and other stuff like that happened, here’s mine with my fannish contact info – https://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Calime ).
We will no doubt be ousted from many a wide world web pasture in the future like we were in the past, but fandom network is resilient and stays around. Also, please, don’t forget your history and keep supporting the sites and organisations that fandom has made for the fandom, like AO3 and OTW, or the ones that like-minded people have created to be fandom-friendly, like Dreamwidth.
Dreamwidth is the best option for conversation/text/meta. It’s fan run/designed and while as above sharing images and the like is extremely limited and you can’t reblog, it’s very fandom friendly, and it’s easier to control your blog and who sees what.
(If you don’t like not being able to reblog, you can bookmark posts at least to your “memories” or send them to other people and show them that way, so that’s a thing?)
The irony of my original post up there!
Consider the sky officially falling. Go make a DW. It’s free. When Pillowfort is back up, go look at that. But make a Dreamwidth now!
ForLoveFromFear 