Oceans in the Sky

What started as a simple experiment to see what my current D&D character, Belphi, would be like if I’d made different class decisions has taken on a life of its own and become a character I now plan on playing in an upcoming campaign: Nefari Blackflame!

Hey, have I mentioned I have a lot of D&D characters going? This is Abi, the Goblin beastmaster ranger I played in a recent Ravnica one-shot. She used to be a member of the Gruul Clans but converted to the Selesnya Conclave, though she’s still having trouble adjusting to the mindset of “Don’t wantonly destroy everything”.

Hello all! Haven’t been posting much lately as I’ve been busy with a bunch of not-drawing related projects over the past while. There’s a lot of hubub going around about Tumblr’s decision to nuke NSFW content and, well, everyone else is sharing their opinions, might as well share mine! I’m going to preface the upcoming Purge is probably not going to affect me or this account directly as I keep things pretty SFW but it’s definitely going to adversely affect a bunch of my friends and other artists I follow, which fucking sucks. I also want to say that Tumblr does have every right to decide on the nature of the type of content it hosts, however just because it can do something doesn’t mean I think it should do something. Now, while Tumblr is certainly used for a lot of non-art related stuff stuff (Some people even use this as a forum for discussion...somehow. Still not clear on how you’re supposed to follow a conversation on this thing) the real sort of bread and butter of this place has always been the artists that use this place to share their work. Yes we have our share of dank memes and social commentary and whatnot but from my experience it’s the artists that really keep this place alive, which is why purging all NSFW content from the site is such a terrible idea.

While it’s not universally the case I can tell you that a decent chunk of internet artists either support their efforts by doing smutty stuff on the side or their main work is just straight-up smutty in and of itself. If Tumblr removes the capability to support artists’ titty-based side-hustle it’s going to become a whole lot less enticing a platform. This place is already losing out to other sites like Twitter or Instagram when it comes to hosting art and getting rid of dongs is not going to help that.

I feel like the site could take a lesson from the various video format wars that have happened over the years: Whether it was Betamax vs VHS or Blu-Ray vs HDDVD the one that came out on top wasn’t which one had the best video quality or price, it was which one the porn industry put their lot behind. Sex sells and if Tumblr drops NSFW content they’re going the way of the Dodo.

Now that’s not to say there isn’t NSFW stuff that should be looked into: I mean those porno spambots are definitely running amok. But just flat out banning all NSFW content just feels like a cop-out on the part of the Tumblr staff: They’re throwing the baby out with the proverbial bathwater.

There are a lot more things that could be discussed about this (The negative impact these sorts of policies tend to have on the LGBTQ userbase due to our society’s double standard regarding what content is “appropriate”, How this is going to apply to people who create works that feature nudity or other material that isn’t technically “worksafe” but isn’t really sexual or explicit, etc.) but I already threw a big wall of words at y’all. So I’ll just leave with a final message to the Tumblr staff:

Not dead! I’ve been plugging away, writing scripts for a big series of comics that I will hopefully do something with at some point and I came to the realization that, after all of the changes I’ve made to the overall story, “Oceans in the Sky” didn’t really work as a title anymore as it had nothing to do with the story as a whole. After some brainstorming, pondering and a few internet polls I have decided to dub the comic “Beyond the Gate”!