Well...this is Kan's blog

Chapter 22: Dalliance Word Count: 94,931 (total) Fandom: Final Fantasy 7 (post Advent Children) Pairing: Cloud Strife/Rufus Shinra Rating: Explicit

“Shit!!”

“What?” Reno asks dumbly just as Cloud’s legs finally regain some mobility.

He stumbles forward, falling to his knees to crawl into the gap under the desk where the basket should be. It’s a completely superfluous act, but his brain feels like sizzled meat and he can’t seem to get enough oxygen into his lungs.

“It’s–”

He clambers around, presses a cheek to the floor just so he can double check under the bed. Nothing there but the sword Rufus gave him what seems like eons ago.

“Fuck!”

“Oh, this doesn’t sound good,” Elena blurts out from somewhere up above.

Cloud stands, searching furiously in every corner, every nook, every cranny. He throws his little closet door open, knowing it won’t be there but looking anyway.

“It’s gone, holy shit, it’s gone,” he finally utters aloud as he tries to keep himself from fainting.

“What do you mean, gone?” Reno barks at him, but Cloud already has his phone in hand as he sails out the door and down the hallway, leaving the two Turks befuddled in his bedroom.

As he tosses his old office and even peeks into the other bedrooms, Reno and Elena catch up to him, their candor less desperate but increasingly uneasy. The basket wouldn’t have been moved–the kids don’t bother with his space and he’s been keeping the door locked lately anyway in case Tifa passes through to clean up or poke around for something if she takes a call on his behalf while he’s out. Even so, the minute hope that it was simply misplaced has him frantically scouring until, with a heavy feeling in his chest, he has to meet the two Turks back out in the hallway where they wait with arms crossed. It’s clear they’ve already recognized the gravity of the situation despite allowing him his spiral from denial to acceptance.

“It’s gone…” Cloud remarks a final time, his gaze distant and cast down at the floor between them.

“Yeah, you said that already,” Reno quips unhelpfully. Cloud is too anxious to care.

Without answering, he pushes past the both of them and rushes downstairs, completely oblivious to Lucy’s concerned reaction from behind the bar as he visually combs every inch of the bar and dining area. Suspicion has his senses sharpened, his blood pumping fast and hard. Suddenly, he’s out on the front stoop, scanning the intersections and alleyways, the neighboring buildings, the few people walking the street. He turns back to face the front of 7th Heaven, half expecting to see a shadowy figure perched on the roof or disappearing behind the back. It’s not until Reno and Elena appear in the doorway that he’s able to take a deep breath and pull himself together.

I've seen multiple people I follow, or their mutuals affected by shadow bans lately (makes me wonder if it's @staff's attempts to fight bots going totally haywire). As someone who survived a 2-month-long shadow ban on my main this winter, I thought I'd make a post.

First step of being shadow banned: calm down and take a breath. A shadow ban is just a stupid glitch in tumblr's anti-spam system. You're not losing your blog. You're gonna need a whole lot of patience, and deal with inconveniences, but it's fixable.

Read the incredibly useful post All About Shadowban by @that-damn-girl. It outlines the symptoms quite well. The only thing I'd point out is "your original posts won’t be visible to your followers either" - afaik that doesn't happen. Everything you post and reblog will still be visible to your followers, and also they can interact with your posts - like them, reblog them, reply to them.

Just like the post says, contact support. I recommend using a different email than what your banned blog is registered to; not because your ticket won't go through (mine actually did, as I found out when they finally replied), but because you might not receive an email confirmation for your ticket (it's somehow tied to the anti-spam thing, I think), and you're going to worry and try to send more tickets, like I did.

Now wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. They are SLOW. I've seen some miraculous 1-day unbans in the #shadow ban tag, but most people, like me, wait around a month for support to reply. Those are the same guys going through thousands of bot reports every day in addition to user tickets.

If you're going to wait, might as well keep blogging. Now if this is your sideblog that's shadow banned, consider yourself lucky. Make a new temporary sideblog, use it to post your original stuff so it goes into tags (mind that it might take a few days for a new blog to start showing up in tags). Reblog everything to your shadow banned blog so you still have all content in one place and your followers see it. If it's your main that's banned, you can still do that, but there's the extra pain of not being able to reply to posts or send non-anon Asks, since that is only done from main. Might need to register a separate account for that.

Some more fun facts under readmore.

"A pigheaded..."

"Pathetic..."

"Daddy-hating child."

"And underneath that brattish exterior..."

"Loneliness."

Rufus: "I don't deny it. Why should I? It's brought me all this."

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3