Arra-Tech

A few weeks ago, a small but higher-than-normal number of accounts were mistakenly suspended. The suspensions were quickly reversed, but our response wasn't good enough, and we want to say more.

We're sorry it took us this long to address this. Trust and safety issues are difficult to discuss publicly, and we can’t share details about specific individuals or how our systems work without exposing Tumblr to bad actors. But caution led us to say too little, too late.

We’ve heard from members of the trans community on Tumblr that they were disproportionately impacted, and that deserves a direct response. According to 3rd party researchers, Tumblr’s userbase has the highest proportion of LGBTQIA+ folks on social media, so it makes sense that when something goes wrong, those communities might feel that disproportionate impact.

One thing we want to emphasize is that we do not moderate people's identities. We moderate behavior. We know that identity shows up across a Tumblr profile in many ways, from followed topics to the flags people put in their bios, and more. However, these signals play no role in how our moderation systems make decisions. We monitor those systems for evidence of bias and take corrective action when we find it.

We understand that the communications sent to affected users, and our broader silence to the community, didn't meet the standard people expect from us. That feedback is fair, and we apologize. We've updated the messaging sent to people impacted by these incidents. We are also overhauling our process with a goal of responding to mistaken suspension appeals within 24 hours, and have instituted an ongoing internal review of how suspensions and appeals are handled.

Going forward, we're committed to finding a better balance: being more transparent with our community about issues that matter, even when we can't share everything.

Tumblr belongs to everyone. We take that seriously, and we intend to earn back your trust. We are not afraid to have tough discussions with you or make updates based on your feedback, though on occasion, it might take some time.

To the people whose accounts were affected, and to the members of our trans community who felt targeted: we are truly sorry.

We, the users, know that staff and tumblr's owners are raging bigots. We have seen one of said owners follow a trans woman across several sites just to harass, intimidate, and threaten her.

We are aware that tumblr has settled out of court when they were sued over this previously.

Mabel from the intro song, wearing a sweater that lights up as long as she plugs it in. It also has a switch. This indicates thats she's using simple LED lights and circuit board, tho it wouldn't be surprising if she's using an arduino kit too.

The boom box sweater from s2x01 Scary-oke is the most impressive. Not only does it light up when touched, it also plays a sound! It reminds me of those greeting cards that play a song when you push into it. However, Mabel's is way more complicated coz of the LED lights + mini speaker. This also has batteries. It's an improvement to the sweater that needed to be plugged in.

The lightbulb swearer in s2x02 Into The Bunker is a variation of the BoomBox sweater. It also lights up when pressed and runs on batteries.

And ofc, how could we forget the impressive Sock Opera from s2x04. It's a whole complicated puppet production with mussic, lights, special effects.

.....

I imagine that aside from knitting and art supplies, Mabel also brought a whole ass electronics kit (with arduino boards and many LED lights) from California to play with.

Knitting different sweaters everyday was arleady impressive enough (knitting also involves quite a lot of math and 3d visualization); adding electronics features and making them interactive is just a whole upper level of ability. I won't even be surprised if she's etching the circuit boards in the bathtub (coz i dont think she'd be content if the final product was on a breadboard). It's easy imagine Mabel soldering the components on the dining tabe and doing some programming to get the LEDs and amplifiers/speakers to light up and sound in any way she wanted, all the while Dipper is busy with perusing the journals or practicing some advance math..

Most futurefics put her in Arts and Design careers but heck, Mabel will actually do pretty damn well in STEM if she wants to. She has already got the technical and applied experience from making her electronic sweaters.

Needed a clean graphic for a project, and figured while I was vectoring I would put sex and magic back in.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.