Stonemilker

Long-haired Eskel is best Eskel. 

CDPR should definitely have kept the long hair from his concept art imo.

So…. Your banning

FEMALE PRESENTING NIPPLES

But still advertising “massage wands”

This is the funniest thing ever

Deregulation strikes again.

First of all, if you search your blog for a tag and get zero results where you know there should be several, your posts with that tag probably haven’t been deleted; they’re just blocked from all tumblr searches including your own search function on your own blog.

So, with tumblr being super messed up and not letting us search our own blogs for certain tags anymore, here’s a quick reminder that you can use Google to search your blog instead. It’ll bypass tumblr’s restrictions.

It’s not perfect because it searches the body of posts as well as the tags, but it might help you find specific posts of yours and you can get pretty specific with the keywords to narrow down results.

To do this, just go to google and in the search box type:

site:[your tumblr URL] keyword keyword keyword

(without the brackets, using as many or as few keywords as you like). You can still use whatever Boolean search parameters you want in the keyword section - so like quotes and minus signs for specific results should still work.

You might get some wacky results in there, but until tumblr unfucks itself, this is a decent workaround to find old posts of yours (or of someone else’s).

Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me: Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.  “What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??” No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included - no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?”  The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters?  The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks?  All of those are fannish nonfiction! Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” - ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons - to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans.  Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!): First, the Very Broad: - “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it. - while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters).  The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them - something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.

- I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers. Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag. 

- You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right? If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc. 

Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add: - “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know) - “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them.  In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it, helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally. 

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.

In light of Tumblr’s most recent bullshit I thought it might be a good time to extend some more invitations for the server! We’re tight knit and cozy, and you can post n**w stuff without Tumblr breaking down your door in the middle of the night

As a former staff engineer from Tumblr leaked, “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway... Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.

Tumblr is a free blogging platform and makes its money through ad revenue - we are the product that Tumblr sells to advertisers. The executives at Tumblr and Verizon have made it very clear, time and time again for years now, that they don’t care about issues affecting their users - Nazis, CP, homophobia, and open harassment, among many others, have been allowed to exist entirely unchallenged on their platform. But as soon as their revenue is threatened by (a belief in) a lack of companies willing to advertise next to porn, they dedicate additional resources in a scramble to roll out what they have been internally referring to for some six months as “Project X”.

They don’t care about people, but they do care about profits. The only power we have in this situation is collectively, and the only way we can get them to listen is to threaten to take away the only thing they care about - their money. It really irritates me that some people in this situation don’t seem to realise that Tumblr is already under threat of shutting down because of this incredibly short-sighted grab for advertising dollars. This doesn’t just affect NSFW bloggers, this move will have massive ramifications felt across the entire platform.

Sure, Tumblr won’t vanish into the ether on December 17th. Rather, it will begin a slow death by degrees. As the ban comes into effect, Tumblr will be gradually starved of its content creators, of artists, of sex-positive activists, of a large portion of its LGBTQ+ community and huge swathes of fandoms and shippers, among countless others. And when activity dwindles, blogs will slowly be abandoned, accounts will be deleted, and people will migrate to other platforms.

Make no mistake, this is the death knell for Tumblr.

It is important to protest the adult content ban in solidarity, even if you don’t believe you will be directly affected. Personally, while I do reblog erotic visual art on occasion, I am predominantly a NSFW fanfic writer and Tumblr isn’t actually banning “written content such as erotica” (because, let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to run ads on text anyway!). So the ban won’t affect me, right? Wrong. The adult content ban will ensure that the number of active users on this site will shrink. Social media websites such as Tumblr are like an ecosystem; they rely on people creating and sharing content as well as people consuming to continue to grow and flourish. 

When the users actually creating content to share on this website are censored and pushed out, what will be left for anyone to fan about, to comment on, to discuss and debate? Even if you exist in an entirely SFW space here, you will feel the loss of the NSFW community. We are losing a piece of ourselves.

And even if you do feel sceptical that a protest like this could even work, or you believe that “ppl have litterally [sic] tried to do this exact kind of protest before and it failed”, try anyway. It’s only for one day. On Dec 18 you can log back on and bitch about how we were wrong and stupid, but at least have the guts to try.

If you really love Tumblr and you want it to survive, fight for it.