Random Thoughts

I started on Tumblr soon after it was created with a vanilla blog. Since then, hardly a day has gone by that Tumblr wasn’t a part of my life. I have made excellent friends on Tumblr over the years. In fact, MOST of my friends came from relationships I made via Tumblr. The precious, bubbly cupcake that is in my bed? Tumblr. So you can imagine how painful Tumblr’s announcement has been for me.

I love seeing the marginalized communities that are shunned elsewhere on Planet Earth have a safe place to exist and be themselves. It always made me smile when I see a Tumblr blogger ease out of their shells, steadfastly into the world.

Well, that shit is no more.

As some of you may have noticed I started a community effort to rescue these communities. I want everyone involved because it will be our garden, our club, our safe space to be ourselves.

And the new site (name to be withheld until we have something to show) is not just for kinksters, I want vanillas too; artists, witches, horror writers, brewmeisters, budtenders, book sluts, fandoms of all types, beat poets, wilderness photographers, Burners, vampire hunters, Dungeons and Dragons players, and rocket scientists. Hell, I want people who just want to blog about cats and cabins in the woods.

What we won’t tolerate are bullies, minors, Nazis (and their fucked up allies), abusers or trolls. They can fuck right off to a cesspool of their choice.

I am putting up the cash to get this started PLUS I am making this a community effort, that is why I am being so transparent about the process with our Discord planning group. Yes, it is chaos. We have taken on an INSANE project to get done in less than 2 weeks. Well, 9 days now.

This isn’t my first rodeo. I am actively trying to keep my anonymity as long as I can, but I know it will soon be spugged out in due order soon. You will then see what I have done in the past and learn about a very vanilla project that has been near and dear to my heart. You have probably heard of it and maybe even participated!

The beta site will not be perfect. It will be good but not perfect. Hell, we have been suffering with “far from perfect” with Tumblr now for years. It is my hope that our community can put up with our rough edges for a little while.

Where we are tonight is pretty good. We have selected a host, got our software loaded, installed the Linux packages required and are now getting those packages to play nice with one another. We had it working for a bit until a small issue with the registration page required some elbow work.

I am working on the branding and marketing with a bunch of really smart pervs in our Discord group. I am really proud of all of our volunteers and want to thank them all. 

If you want to volunteer or simply eat popcorn and watch the porn riots, please use this invite link: https://discord.gg/jVempgb

Remember, Discord is just the site we are using for planning, not the actual site we are moving to.

Many of you have asked about the Library For Kinksters, it will be archived and placed on the now site.

We plan to allow you to import your Tumblr blog over to our new site but Tumblr may have other ideas. Other services have been using Tumblr’s API for exporting and now Tumblr now seems to be shutting down that API functionality.

That is all for now. Keep your heads held high and remember you are ALL FUCKING AMAZING PEOPLE!

- Dominant Life

P.S. Please reblog the shit out of this. Santa may drop a slutty elf off at your house for Christmas!

http://gsmediallc.com/

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

In The Arms of a Dominant

In the arms of a Dominant a submissive is both captured and freed. The simultaneous sense of serenity, security and captivity permits a submissive to relax, breathe, be themselves, and fall into their Dominant. The submissive fills their Dominant with their entire being like water fills the seas, flowing to every dark corner and crevice, surrounding and enveloping every hard rocky coastline and soft grassy cove. The Dominant’s passion, honor, and integrity meld seamlessly with the submissive’s love, trust and devotion.

In the arms of a Dominant, time, distance and the pressures of life slip away and there is only the unending desire to close the space between and merge as one. Together a Dominant and submissive become a single interdependent being with no beginnings and no endings between them. No longer suffering the bondage of self they come to exist for one another in a bond as seemingly inseparable as life and death.

In the arms of a Dominant life as it has been known dies a little each day replaced by new life breathed in from one to the other. The changes are subtle, perhaps even unrecognized, but they are transformative and permanent. Once enveloped in the arms of a Dominant the colors of life seem more rich and vibrant, all else seeming dull and lifeless by comparison. This is both the risk and reward of falling into the arms of a Dominant; a submissive will be forever transported to a place from where there is no turning back. But why would anyone want to?

Originally posted on April 4, 2013

Caption © For The Love of a Submissive, 2013