but I'm hearing there's a NSFW-friendly ko-fi alternative built on atproto that's actively in the works, and being vetted by lawyers right now. as torrent-princess (OP) says, you should be able to swap out payment processors while keeping your account intact. this matters since even if stripe removes support, you'll still have a shop and all of your links intact. (ATproto is an infrastructure that bsky is built on, but is far bigger than bsky with far more opportunities.)

additionally, the Free Speech Coalition is working on a credit union specifically for adult work (including kink art) - here's the link so you can add your interest & support. Since this will be built by sex workers, there'll be far less risk of being debanked for spurious and puritanical reasons.

on a domain TLD level, there's an initiative here for a .furry domain built from the ground up by seasoned furries; it's unclear whether they'll support NSFW, but it's yet another promising turn of events for a group that's been similarly affected by censorship.

Elvira's 'cave' room (1990s)

"I call this room "the cave." Pretty creative, bub? It's the one room in my house where I can bang out and really be me. It's dark, creepy and the waterfall outside the window gives it that damp, musty feeling I crave. And talk about impressing your friends... just break out the ol' shackles and it's a party!" - Elvira

You exist in a perpetual state of just about to get to Disney World.

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and what strikes me is that, content and characterisation aside, a lot of these stories and books have structures that are alien to me. i'm used to stories having certain features which classifies them as stories, and some of these classics have been amusingly deviant from my expectations.

the best way i can think of to describe them is to compare the structure of a story to that of a suburban house. bear with me here, see if the analogy sticks-

currently reading sherlock holmes stories. delightful houses. solid. they may be a bit plain but all the rooms are present and functional and easy to navigate. loving these houses.

just finished edgar allen poe stories. sooome of these are houses as i know them, with the usual rooms. some of these houses are tents. some of them are elaborately house-like on the outside but consist only of a single beautifully decorated corridor from the front door straight to the back. some of these houses appear gorgeous from the front and then you open the door to realise nobody's actually built the rest of the house

moby dick was an effort. i struggled. this is by all accounts a house you could live in but it, for some reason, also has fifty closets. there's a bed and bath sure but just, at least 80% of this house is closets. frankly especially bewildering for someone who was always told about the single stunning living room of this house.

phantom of the opera was delightful. beautiful gothic mansion on the outside, as promised, with an interior to match... but the wallpaper consists of brightly coloured polka-dots.

Yeah, it's tough, especially in a serialized medium where every single page is getting immediate and very loud responses. You can start second-guessing everything you do, wondering if you should drop unpopular characters or play up the ones that are getting a better reaction.

But don't. Cut that shit out. Because the audience is great and necessary but they're not the one that has to make the work. You MUST follow your OWN instinct and your OWN preferences because YOU are the most important person in the audience. YOU are the one that has to stay engaged with the work for it to advance. If you ignore yourself in favour of your reader, you're just going to faceplant.

I know there are writers and artists out there who are super plugged in to popular tastes and can follow them while still staying engaged - often because they have the same taste themselves. But if that ain't you, you just have to follow your own predilections and hope that a likeminded audience will come. This is definitely hard mode, but it also makes you valuable to that particular audience. Because you'll be less common. They'll find you and hang on 'cause no one else is selling what you got.

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UK legislation: Online Safety Act 2023

Brazil legislation: Digital Statute For Children And Adolescents

Apple App Store Age Verification

These are not tumblr specific policies. Tumblr is implementing age verification in response to legislative moves that were made months ago.

Tumblr is a failing social media site that has escaped death multiple times already; they do not have the social cachet to defy state regulatory agencies. We know they won't say no to Apple, either--the porn ban on tumblr was in response to Apple's crackdown on explicit content.

If you did not know this was happening, you were behind the curve. That is fine. You're caught up now. The next step is to link up with people in your country who are working to preserve privacy, to roll back these laws where they exist, and to prevent their passage where they do not. In the US the organization you want is Stop KOSA--in the EU you can start with Fight Chat Control.

but that i believe the internet is the one place that sincere cringe should exist.

now, maybe it's not the internet specifically. maybe it's in lowbrow art more generalized. it's always existed in some form.

but the important thing bein' that there remains at least one place where you can play in the mud freely and there is mud to be thrown around.

throw lil' mudballs at each other, you know. get familiar with the concept of dirtyin' up yourself and being the fool and finding whimsy and maybe, just maybe, finding a little bit of holiness in the filth as much as it is a hot mess and will never be respected.

what measure is sincerity if you can't find power in it when it's at its most naked and filthy in its bed?

is it sincerity if you can only feel it when it's properly cleaned up and simpered to and "respected" a very specific way by others and Bigly Numbers or a very specific slice of moralistic counterculture to feel all superiorily snobby-like over somebody else's cringe?

The general context is I work in (non-compsci) engineering at a company that uses Microsoft products and is pro-AI. I demurred my manager's request that I get Copilot premium up until he asked my feelings on AI tools. I replied "tends to be negative" since I had bad experiences with it as a customer of companies that use it, among other concerns that it would jeapordize the quality of my work (admittedly I'm under-educated in security/privacy issues and only spoke to my personal experiences). He still said he wants his team to get comfortable using it to stay competitive in the industry and that I should find at least one way to use AI to work more efficiently (ugh).

Thanks!

(**Amendment to the anon ask about evading AI at work diplomatically: doing so while hating AI with a passion for non-work-performance-metrics reasons, as those emotions are rarely helpful as an underling trying to persuade your boss that you have sensible reasons for not wanting to use the AI agent he is very optimistic about)

excellent questions!

i'm glad you're asking them, and first of all, thank you for pushing back while being thoughtful about it. you're not alone; as you might have guessed -- personally in a similar boat since so many corporations in general has jumped on the bandwagon.

the good news is that it is a temporary bandwagon; bubble, trend, fad, whatever one wants to label it. even google's CEO (who has every reason to keep the hype going) is more chilly on it this year, and more experts & realistic voices are loudly signaling that it's going to be a particularly nasty bubble.

the bad news is there is an inherent power structure to who's pushing it.

(C-suite & upper management especially), so when you say evading; depending on your financial situation (and if you have any dependents), there may be some worth in playing along with the absolute bare minimum. (and, frankly, lying / obfuscating usage, plain and simple. there is no irredeemable dishonor in lying for genuine survival. so much of corporate is knowing how to bullshit with a perfect poker face.)

( > this is a sidebar that's really specific to how certian corporations operate and promote/fire people, your mileage may vary - but if you can keep any mention of AI requirements out of your performance reviews/ yearly "goals/metrics" through whatever bullshitting you need to do, that's helpful to core long term stability. so far i've managed to keep it out of mine so they can attempt to lean hard with ~suggesting~ improvements, but for at least one year, quietly not using AI won't affect performance reviews as long as i simply Am Better than most everyone with raw performance. if they start acting like it's mandatory, ask for it in writing (unsaid to them: for a legal paper trail because that's a whole different legal beast). make them work for it; these are fundamentally lazy managers who want to cut corners, not hold onto ethics. also? save every policy change email on this topic to a personal email account for more paper trail there too. )

that said --

in terms of pushing back in other ways, there's a few potential strategies:

if you're in the marketing side of things, and selling to Gen Z or particularly anti-ai demographics, you may want to cite a few reputable articles about how backlash against companies too aggressive with AI has hurt their profits. your boss' comments about "staying competitive" feels like it might be sensitive to this especially. additionally, there's international legislation in the works as far as AI transparency in marketing goes (mexico, new york & california) - so not just consumer risk, but legal/process risk too. having to replace AI content assets is gonna be expensive for a lot of orgs ~

is your workplace "product" heavily reliant on safety and trust? (medicine, food, baby products, safety gear - think products that involve lawsuits should something fail, or somebody die). if so, this might be an angle to quietly pursue; talk around your legal or product integrity department if there's one, and see if there's hesitation and hard evidence/profit risks that they're concerned about; try to get at least three citable bits of evidence if your manager presses again. lawsuits and recalls are not cheap (hint: in the millions of dollars minimum!)

security wise, AI can be shockingly risky. there's at least several high-profile people that have deleted important digital work equipment via their workplace AI (source: Claude deleting an entire companie's production database. / A meta security researcher deleting their entire inbox via openclaw. ) AI is also notoriously inaccurate with its summaries, so i can also see it giving incorrect numbers in analysis and audits being a type of security risk.

some people, you're not ever going to convince (sounds like your manager might be one of them) - a dear friend of mine had the excellent metaphor that they're gambling everything on this with the hopes that they'll make bank (not knowing they're the sucker for getting in so late) - and so they're extra hard to talk back from the ledge.

but you would be surprised at how far simple pushback can go.