KJ

To the great shock of exactly nobody who has been involved in online fandom for any period of time, Verizon is looking to sell of Tumblr. I mean, really, who could have seen this coming? Who? *insert eye-roll emoji here*

Perhaps slightly more surprising is the one potential buyer to express public interest: PornHub. This is... not the worst idea, actually, assuming that PornHub would act as responsible stewards for the whole site, not just the adult content. Put in robust tagging, blocking, and search options, and it could work out very well. I do wonder what having a porn distributer for an owner would mean for things like apps and work blacklists, however.

I do wonder, though, if Verizon would want to sell to PornHub. Surely such a sale would not fit with the company's image of itself. On the other hand, money is money, and I have a hard time imagining many other options. Oh, capitalism.

Though I remain skeptical as always of new social media platforms, I went ahead and asked for a beta invite, to hold my username if nothing else. I am, as usual, owlmoose, so feel free to add me, or whatever they call it over there.

Also if you know of active communities in my areas of interest, I am all ears!

This is my final crosspost to LiveJournal. I think you all know why. The LJ community was a wonderful space for me for a long time, but it hasn't been that for many years now, and I'm ready to face forward into this new chapter.

I'm not planning to delete anything, and I may still pop in to read occasionally, but functionally owlmoose should be considered an archival account.

If you post on DW and I'm not already following you there, please ping me so that I can add you. Same with Twitter and/or Tumblr, if that's your preference. Just leave a comment on this post and let me know.

Hugs to all, and see you on the other side.

Welp, here we are. Day 7. Here's hoping we make it the rest of the way.

• More proof that California is not remotely fucking around: Governor Jerry Brown's State of the State address. He's previously had some strong words on taking action against climate change, but he laid down the law on a bunch of other issues too: immigration, healthcare, etc. California has 10% of the nation's population and the world's sixth largest economy; that's a lot of weight to throw around, and I fully support doing it. I have friends who keep making noises about a "Calexit", but I think that's both mean-spirited and short sighted. We need to be leading the charge against Trumpism, not running in the other direction.


• Protest Works: Jamelle Bouie on the power of the 1/21/17 Women's March and why it proves we need to stay on the offensive.


• Fortunately, it looks like there are a lot more protests in the works: The Scientist March (no date set yet, but they seem to be moving quickly), the Tax March on April 15th, a National Pride March on June 11th (I might even try to get to DC for that one). I think a big protest every two months, with rapid response gatherings in response to specific things like the immigration rallies yesterday and the GOP gathering in Philadelphia today, sounds about right. I hope we can keep it up.


• As these protests, marches, and rallies come together, I hope that we can be mindful of the many legit criticisms of the Women's March around intersectionality. This is one example, on race issues, but there are many, many others. We can celebrate the good aspects of the march while still listening to the critiques, learning from them, and trying to do better next time.


• From 2016 but always relevant: Why Rep. John Lewis is not to be trifled with.


• One of my favorite pieces of resistance (much as I hate that it needs to be done) are the "rogue" Twitter accounts being created by government employees to get around the limits that the new administration has been placing on the spread of information. Unofficial accounts for the National Park Service and individual parks, NASA, the EPA, the USDA, and over a dozen others have started popping up. StollmeyerEU is maintaining an updated list here. Who knew that, when the revolution came, that the National Park Service would be leading the way? (Well, maybe this lady.)

And for today's bit of fun: remains of giant prehistoric otters have been found in China.

I joined yesterday, mostly to snap up my name and look around. Who else is there? How do you find people? Also I have invites, although I imagine that everyone who wants to be there has already joined by now. But if not, and you'd like one, let me know!

I gather it's based on Reddit structurally, which is an interesting idea for a community-based site, although I still think I like the DW-type platform better. Especially the ability to have an individual journal, instead of having to create a "community" for yourself (although I gather the personal journal aspect is coming?). Anyway, we'll see what happens. If it ends up being a viable replacement for Tumblr, I'm all for it.

So Game Informer is doing a month-long series on Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is available here for anyone who's interested and hasn't seen it already. It went up last week, and since then the details have been coming fast and furious: from the article, from the website, from developers answering questions and dropping hints on the BioWare forums, from fans speculating about these tidbits of information and coming up with theories based upon them.

And I totally understand the impulse to tear through every scrap of data you can find, especially when it's been so long without any new content, but it's not for me. I want to approach the game as a near-blank slate, a new experience. I want surprises. I want to discover the characters and get to know them as the game presents them, not have my impressions adulterated by advance fan reaction. I don't want to guess all the plot twists for myself in advance. I don't want to develop elaborate headcanons that will almost certainly be contradicted by the events of the game. Again, nothing wrong with that, if it's how you enjoy doing fandom. But any fun I get out of that kind participation is negated by the sense that I'm ruining the games for myself.

In a way, this is nothing new: I've been dodging spoilers on the Internet for about as long as I've been on the Internet, and it's impossible to avoid them entirely -- I was spoiled for a key Harry Potter character death by a headline on CNN! But nothing has prepared me for the experience of spoilers on Tumblr. At least in my other fandom venues, people have always used spoiler cuts or white-on-white spoiler text. Tumblr has no spoiler text option, and while cuts exist people don't tend to use them, especially not for images, and you can't put tags behind them at all. It's not built into the site function, but more importantly it's not part of the community's culture. In "the olden days" of journal reading, you usually got at least a few days between something being released and people posting lots of spoilery things about it. On Tumblr, it's often a matter of minutes before images and gifsets and reaction posts are everywhere.

So for the first time ever, I've installed blocking software (the xkit extension), and although it's helped, it only works as well as people are willing to tag. It's like an arms race, keeping up with the tags and terms that different people use, and I have to wonder how effective it will be. I've already asked three people to be more careful about tagging, and they were all receptive, but at some point I'm probably just going to have to unfollow people. It's either that, or quit Tumblr for a year and a half, and I really don't want to do that. The other day, I was half-joking with here_be_dragons about creating a "DA3-free-zone pledge" and only following people who agree to sign it, and although it was mostly a joke, I wonder if it would actually work.