(parenthetical asides)

High Potential

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

In 2017, American film researchers recovered “Something Good – Negro Kiss,” a short film depicting a playful kiss between a Black couple which had not seen the light of day for more than a century. A long-forgotten artifact from the earliest years of American film, the sweet, humanizing vignette, produced by the Selig Polyscope Company, makes a startling contrast to the overwhelmingly racist and blackface-ridden contempory portrayals of African Americans. Four years later in 2021, archivists in Norway, halfway across the world, identified a sister short in their collections—an extended alternate cut which reveals more of Chicago stage performers Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle’s vaudeville-like routine, a theatrical, hot-and-cold romantic dynamic between two lovers which parodies the popular and controversial short “The Kiss” (1896). Both films, which had previously been lost, were known from entries in old motion picture catalogs but had been assumed to be era-typical, anti-Black “race films” until their rediscovery in the 21st century. Together with its more famous sibling, which has since been inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, this alternate version of “Something Good” represents the first-known instance of Black intimacy ever captured on-screen.

Despite the fancy survey, changes to the UI and TOS reveal we’re getting the service in the future whether we want it or not. Obviously, Post+ is a terrible idea that is trying to bank revenue on user content. Unlike patreon or onlyfans, tumblr’s primary focus is on FAN content. The legality of this is NOT in the users favor and as the new tumblr TOS states, said users will be entirely liable for whatever legal matters arise.

SO WHAT ARE WE DOING?

Besides filling out the survey, it’s time to show tumblr we mean business and show our displeasure by hitting them where it hurts.

Ad revenue.

We’re proposing a 24 hour log off as phase one of this protest.

WHEN IS THE PROTEST?

August 6th 2021

12 am Eastern Time (US)

4am UTC

5am BST/London

6am Central Europe Time

7am Moscow Standard Time

9:30 Indian Standard Time

12 noon Hong Kong Time/Australian Western

1:00 pm Japan Standard Time

1:30 pm Australian Cental time

2:00 pm Australian Eastern Time

August 5th 2021

11pm Central Time (US)

10pm Mountain Time (US)

9pm Pacific Time (US)

THE END TIME IS 24 HOURS FROM START TIME!!!

So no posting, no queues, no likes, and no reblogs!

WHAT IF I CAN’T/WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?

Like this post and share it AS MANY TIMES AS POSSIBLE. Use the hashtags #tumblrlogoff2021 or #postplusprotest on ANY and ALL social media.

WILL THIS WORK?

Maybe, maybe not. It’s an attempt at doing SOMETHING.

BECAUSE I’M A TIRED IDIOT, USE THIS TO DOUBLE CHECK YOUR TIME ZONE!!!!

In short, here are some of the things a musicologist would have to do in order to get to the point where you can start looking for someone who plays an ancient Mesopotamian lyre (yes, the sammûm is a type of lyre):

—

Katherine Addision (aka. Sarah Monette) on “Of Better Worlds and Worlds Gone Wrong (via adribbleofink)

oh, I like this - thank you for sharing.

“And that, I think, is where hope comes in. If we understand “escapism” as the Escape of the Prisoner rather than the Flight of the Deserter, then surely what motivates it, more than anything else, is hope. The hope that the prison is not eternal. The hope of communicating with other prisoners. The hope that if you keep chipping away at the bars long enough, one of them will fall out. And I refuse utterly to classify that hope as weak or foolish.”

(via broadlybrazen)

I especially like the Ursula LeGuin quote: ‘it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can’

100 year old Aldabra tortoise with a few weeks old Aldabra baby posing for a new family photo, and its own baby photo from 100 years ago.

First, language found on the blog in dallasjustice.org led us to a secondary site which we believe was used to stage, or preview, the site for clients- as is often the case with agency made projects.

This website was located at: http://dallasjustice.aodev4.com/

And has been archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210726165513/http://dallasjustice.aodev4.com/

The root domain, aodev4, shares an ip address with another url, "luceosolutions.com"

This website has been archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210726153236/https://luceosolutions.com/

The Luceo website is interesting for a number of reasons. First, its "www" subdomain redirects to a recruitment website, and wayback archive links indicate this domain functioned correctly in this way until early 2021. However, with the website configured as it is, we can now see the server root for a company staging server.

A google search for "aodev4.com" reveals a number of right wing campaigns and sources using these links, and the list of websites on the luceo server include noted Dallas astroturf campaign "Keep Dallas Safe."

It is in at least two of these projects that we discover something interesting in the wordpress theme files:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210726164531/https://display-ad.aodev4.com/wp-content/themes/base-theme/style.css

https://web.archive.org/web/20210726161604/https://keepdallassafe.aodev4.com/wp-content/themes/base-theme-child/style.css?ver=0.4.1

Both of these sites are built on the wordpress theme "Understrap", but have had their source files modified in order to attribute development to "AO Dev Team" at the url "http://online.arenacomm.com".

This url redirects us to "Arenawins.com", the website for Arena, a company which supplies the GOP and various right wing campaigns with agency services.

It is our belief that DallasJustice.org was developed by Arena for a client, in order to allow them to attribute statements and ideas to Dallas activists for the sake of driving a wedge between the left and the communities we inhabit.

Mike Rothschild Retweeted:

Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club (@EFJBGC) Tweeted: An investigation by local Antifascists has uncovered that the "organization" @DallasJusticeN1 is an astroturfing scheme by GOP marketing company @arena_wins who also has ties to the failed @KeepDallasSafe scheme. Full write up and receipts: https://dfwbrigade.tumblr.com/post/657806859231707136/an-investigation-into-the-origins-of [this tumblr post]

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network is heartbroken and outraged by today’s court decision striking down a regulation that would have banned the use of the graduated electronic decelerator (GED), a skin shock device used on people with disabilities. These devices, which the United Nations has recognized as torture, involve causing severe pain in an attempt to control behavior and are only used at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC), an institution in Massachusetts.

The disability community has fought for decades against the use of skin shocks on our people. Last year, after receiving extensive input from experts and community members, the FDA finalized regulations that banned the manufacture, distribution, and use of skin shock devices. The regulation was finalized four years after it had been introduced and six years after an expert panel had recommended the ban, with strong bipartisan support. Over 300,000 people had signed a petition urging the FDA to act.

Instead of following the new regulations, the JRC immediately filed a lawsuit against the FDA so that they could continue torturing people with disabilities. This lawsuit was only the most recent of a long string of aggressive lawsuits fighting attempts to curb their abuses of human rights. Although the trial court had initially upheld the FDA’s regulations, today the DC Circuit overturned that decision because the FDA’s regulation specifically bans the use of the GED for one purpose (behavior modification). The DC Circuit Court ruled that the FDA has the authority to ban a device completely, but does not have the authority to ban only one possible use of a device. The next step is clear: the FDA must completely ban the GED and similar devices. ASAN calls on the FDA to immediately pursue a new, complete ban. We will continue to advocate fiercely until this torture is finally ended.