Ren Asteria

Death Parade Project Interest Check

Hello zine community! I am running an interest check to gauge the level of interest on a potential Death Parade fan project.

As of right now, my original idea was to have it be a Tarot deck project, but I’m not sure what the level of interest on that is in the Death Parade & zine communities. So I am willing to do a zine instead, but I would like your feedback.

If you are interested in a Death Parade project, please reblog this post and if you have a moment, fill out our interest survey: take survey

Thanks so much for your time and attention!

The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.

Some good news, I’ve been talking to two developers now and got them working together, we just had a meeting with the guys behind an existing large (millions of users) site similar to Tumblr, with a vibrant and open-minded community, and more importantly, it has open-minded owners who believe in free speech. They think we can get something done here to rescue the whole community.

I’m not allowed to reveal the site name yet. I can tell you it’s mainstream, open to everyone, open-minded and welcoming. (It’s not WordPress or any site owned by Facebook or Twitter. It’s not Pillowfort, that’s in closed beta. It’s not Ello, that’s mainly for artists. It’s not kinkspace or fetlife, those are too specialist. It’s not jux, that seems to be closed. It’s not Soup, that seems still in development and too small.)

One of the reasons for delaying the announcement for next few days is they don’t want a “land grab” where people take the names of current popular Tumblr users over there (cyber squatting). So they are looking at ways for existing Tumblr users to keep the same names on the new site.

More info over the days to come.

The plan is, broadly:

1. By December 9th, announcement of the new site and how to secure your username there

2. By December 10th, an online tool for bloggers to copy their existing content to the new site automatically, with the same tags and captions.

3. Bloggers will need to copy their content across between December 10th and December 17th if they want to use the automatic tool.

4. My understanding is that after December 17th there will be no public access to any “flagged” posts on Tumblr, but the original poster will still be able to see the flagged post (for a short time at least). Therefore, the original poster may still be able to manually download a post to their own PC or phone, after December 17th, and manually upload it to the other site. But if you have lots of posts that will take a long time, it will be better to use the automatic tool before December 17th.

Please understand that these dates are approximate and may change for technical or other reasons.

There may be a few rough edges or not so perfect looking site design on the transfer tool. Everyone is doing their best. The main goal here is to help as many people as possible preserve access to their content, in the short space of time Tumblr has allowed us, and preserve as much as possible of the Tumblr community spirit somewhere new.

The new site will cater for photo, GIF, text and html posts. It will not offer video and audio posts, due to cost reasons - maybe in future, but for now you will need to preserve video and audio content yourself in some other place.

If your Tumblr blog has a mixture of original content and reblogs, or all reblogs, all of that can be copied over to the new site. Reblogs will become “your” original content if nobody else posted them yet, otherwise they will be shown as reblogs. The devs are looking at ways to preserve attribution of reblogs back to the original Tumblr poster, if that person also moves to the new site.

Important: your Likes cannot be copied from Tumblr to the new site. You will have to go find the same posts again on the new site, and like them afresh.

(Similarly, existing reblog comments, asks, messages and other user interaction on Tumblr cannot be copied to the new site - that’s just too much to do, in the short time available.)

If you want to preserve any of your existing Liked posts on Tumblr, you will need to either: (1) download the post to your own PC, or: (2A) reblog it now to your own Tumblr blog, and then (2B) use the automatic tool, before December 17th, to move your whole Tumblr blog across to the new site.

If you have Liked a lot of posts here on Tumblr, the gridllr.com webapp should be able to help you do steps 1 and 2A quickly, I mean download or reblog.

(Someone complained to me today about the appearance of Gridllr on a phone. It’s best to use Gridllr on a PC, Mac or Tablet with a large screen.)

If you have liked a post here on Tumblr and the original poster decides to delete it, or even to delete their entire blog, some time before December 17th, then that post will be permanently lost. So if you want to be sure to preserve any of your Liked posts, you should best download or reblog as soon as possible. If it’s reblogged to your own blog it is safe from deletion, at least for next few days.

We now have a plan to save this Tumblr community!

Help is on the way!

More to come!

I want to personally thank all those volunteers who are involved in this project.

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If Article 13 is approved, European People might be basically banned from uploading any fan content. 

You won’t get new fanfics from people in Europe.

You won’t get new gifs from people in Europe.

You won’t get new fanart from people in Europe.

Because they’ll be automatically filtered and blocked!

We might leave Tumblr and other fandom pages.

And if we’re getting all our content blocked? 

You might lose some of your favourite followers/mutuals.

You might not get to read the rest of that fic you’re dying to read - simply because the writer lives in the wrong country.

So do whatever you can to help us stop this.

Reblog this.

Look

I know some people might not care about this. I know some people think this is to complicated. And I know some people think this won’t affect them. But here’s the thing, IT WILL definantly effect you no matter where you live. It will effect you tumblr user, you reddit users, and you watching youtube.

If this law gets passed then it’s gonna inspire the rest of the world. It was just like how in the USA.

The video is barley sixteen minutes and less if you skip ahead.

IT IS THE TRANSLATED AND SIMPLE VERSION OF ARTICLE 13’S IMPLICATIONS

Here’s a quick rundown.

Article 13 is still in its final stages of voting. The problem is not that people don’t want to protect copyright, it’s that the LANGUAGE of the LAW is TOO VAGUE and OPEN TO ABUSE. IT COULD PASS THIS YEAR.

This law WILL impact EVERYBODY. Media platforms like YouTube will not bother to have different policies for the EU and for everybody else, they’ll just apply strict EU laws to EVERYONE.

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL LOSE THEIR JOBS. You can yammer on all day about how people shouldn’t be building a career on an industry like YouTube or Instagram anyway, but the world changes, and there is actually not much different between YouTube content creators and traditional media like movies and TV. Youtubers, Instagram models, hell, even kids who use apps like TikTok are either directly or indirectly CREATING JOBS, and you CANNOT deny that. ALL OF THESE JOBS WILL BE PUT IN JEOPARDY IF ARTICLE 13 IS PUT INTO PLAY. THE ONLY CONTENT CREATORS THAT WILL BE ABLE TO THRIVE POST ARTICLE 13 IS BIG MEDIA COMPANIES.

THIS IS NOT FEARMONGERING. Is it scary, even anxiety-inducing that Article 13 could take away the only safe space that some people have—the Internet? YES. But we CANNOT close our eyes and scroll past all the article 13 posts because they make us anxious, or because they make us sad. YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Reblog/make posts. Spread awareness. Tell your friends. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, IF YOU LIVE IN THE EU, TALK TO YOUR REPS. IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO SAVE OUR INTERNET.

We’re currently going through a scare on Tumblr where your blog could get taken down at any time for any unclear reason, because they’re cracking down on child porn. That is good, but many people with perfectly appropriate blogs are having them taken down, too. The thing is, right now, you can still get your blog back without hassle if it is taken down by mistake. Imagine if your blog was taken down simply for making or reblogging a meme, gif of your favorite TV show, or simply producing art that isn’t 100% original, and Tumblr COULD NOT RESTORE IT BECAUSE THEY WOULD BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS BY ARTICLE 13. That could be our reality. Do NOT turn a blind eye to this.

tl;dr Article 13 will 100% change the internet as we know it for the worse, and you aren’t safe even outside of the EU. SPREAD THE WORD. EU RESIDENTS CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

I know you guys love to shit on MatPat here, but he made a wonderful and interesting video going into more detail.

https://youtu.be/GbXHrj8k7dg

So what has happened so far … the Commission has drafted up a long overdue copyright reform. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2016_280 It contains a lot of good, and some bad: mainly Article 11 and 13.

This was put forward as a whole to the European Parlament, where it was voted down on the 5th of July 2018

This meant, this will not go through the fast way, and will be subject to scrutiny and change. 

The Commission made some alterations https://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/2016_280 and put it forward again. If Parlament would have voted it down again, it probably would have meant back to the drawing board, but most people (including me) agree that Europe does need copyright reform, so on the second vote it passed the first step:

So what happens now? 

This will now go into what is called the Trilogue, where Commission, Parlament and representatives of all national governments will sit together to make alterations until everybody is happy implementing the regulation.

This means we can now influence this via our MEPs and our National Government!

In countries that are red your government is likely to support Article 13.

What to do now?

There are a lot of organisations that organise actions against article 13. Check out their websites and get in touch with your MEP or local government and let them know you are unhappy about this.

https://www.saveyourinternet.eu/ 

https://epicenter.works/

https://www.changecopyright.org/

https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/

… and many many more, just google to find one in your country.

Also, as @asthesea-breezehitsmylungs pointed out, a lot of people are not aware of this going on. So make them aware! Share the memes and point them to the petitions. And don’t just complain how shit this is, get in touch with your politicians!

So, it seems the worst happened today. EU parliament approved Censorship Law, which will require sites to monitor copyrighted material. In a worst case scenario, this means EU countries will be cut off from sites, which host copyrighted material, like Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram - and possibly, Patreon and Webtoons. I will keep my eyes open and if cutting happens, I’ll be using VPN/Tunnelbear as much as possible to see if I can avoid this. Everything is still a hassle and no one knows what happens.

In the very, very, very worst case scenario, Demon Sanctuary stops running in 2019, because I lose access to pages where I can host Demon Sanctuary. If that would happen, so that Tunnelbear can’t help either, I hope to make a mailing list where I can share the comic.

Thank you for your support! I’m sad things went this way in EU. I will keep each and everyone of you updated!

- Niu EDIT: Got more info:  The last voting / accepting regarding Article 13 will happen in January 2019 so until then we still have time to fight and demand internet to stay free! Here’s some little parts what I picked from online about Article 13: “Before existing copyright laws can be updated, however, the approved copyright law bill will now pass for approval to the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, and the leaders of the EU’s 28-member states.” “What’s clear is that if the Copyright Directive receives final approval by the European Parliament in January, it will have a huge, disruptive impact on the internet, both in the European Union and around the world.” “Today’s vote is not the end of the story, though: every amendment approved today will have to undergo another round of behind-closed-doors negotiations between EU politicos and EU member states, before going again through a vote in January 2019. The meme war is far from over.”