I don't want to know

When Adora first left the Horde she told Catra she was leaving because the Horde was evil, did monstrous things to innocent people, and had been lying to them the whole time. And Catra responded, “what, you didn’t know?”.

And there’s so much to unpack there, but what really killed me was when I thought about why that was. Why was Catra so cynical when Adora bought the propaganda?

It’s because of how they were raised. Shadowweaver raised both of them abusively, but they got different flavors of abuse. Adora was the Golden Child and Catra was the Scapegoat. They were both abused, but Catra caught the brunt of the most violent abuse. She knew the Horde hurt innocent people because she was one of them.

And that puts a whole new twist on how angry Catra was when Adora wanted to leave. When Adora said “what the Horde is doing is wrong and we should leave because of it”, Catra’s response wasn’t really “you’re just learning the Horde hurts innocent people now?” it was, “it wasn’t enough to make you leave when they hurt me?”.

That’s why she’s so angry. From her perspective, Adora was willing to leave the Horde because of what they did to these random people they’d never met before. But she’d never offered to do the same for her.

“I am going to kick the shit out of 2018, in the most positive, most glorious way possible”

Mission: Accomplished

You completed a world tour in 9 countries, honing your craft as a comedian and developing self confidence and stage presence that greatly improved your videos too.

You met the iconic Bryan Dechart who has now become a very close friend.

You met your long term face Ryan Reynolds (were you nervous? Now you know how we feel when we meet you! 😂) and are going to be releasing an interview with Jason Momoa soon.

You didn’t just get to go, but you got to *present* at the Game Awards, which I’m sure is many people’s dream!

You were invited onto your home country’s main talk shows and got to change people’s perceptions of what YouTubers are and what they do.

You raised $1.1 million dollars for charity (and growing!) which is nuts and insane!

You collabed with so many cool people including Rhett and Link, the Grumps And Kati Morton, with the latter you continued your mental health advocacy for which you are so known.

You started your own clothing line with your best friend. Dreams can come true.

You took PMA, originally something for your own personal guidance, and made it into the behemoth of a movement that it is now, and has changed so many lives.

Me @me a few seconds later after using common sense:

I’m 25 and what I can make out of my life is: 45 hours on skyrim without making anybody die. i have, like, a lot of followers on the only social platform it doesn’t fucking matter on. i guess one time rihanna, unknowingly, reposted a repost of my work on her twitter, uncredited, so that was pretty interesting.

sometimes, because of what i write and who i am, i get messages that read: i think i’m going to end it. i don’t need you to help me, i just need to tell somebody. and i’m not a therapist. but i’m a good talker. better at listening. and every once in a while, i get the chance to talk people down from things. sometimes i get thanked for it. more often i talk until i hear nothing. i lie awake wondering: oh god. did they do it. was i not enough for them. lord, are you listening? can you help me? can you protect them?

i don’t do a lot. i don’t know math. i can’t knit. i am allergic to basically all things. the world at 25 feels really, really fucking bleak. look at what other people are doing with their time on earth. look at what children are capable of. god, who am i? i am crumbling to dust.

but then i remember: i have two ears and one big heart. and i can listen. and i can read. and i can be there when someone needs me. no, i don’t know math, but i know how to help when someone’s been crying. i can’t knit but i know how to hold someone’s hand when they’re too scared to admit they’re panicking. i am still allergic to everything but it’s just made me appreciate that our bodies are not cars to crash. we aren’t broken, we’re rebuilding, we’re in the process of magic; we create even in the face of all that destroys, we have been destroyed and still we tilt our heads back and look up and keep going and say, fuck no, not today, death can wait; i don’t have a bucket list because who can live that long but i still want to know what it feels like to skinny-dip and no! i didn’t think i’d make it to 25 and i’ve wasted god, so much of this divine and precious life

but today someone from four years ago finally messaged me. hey. thank you for being there all that time ago. thank you for listening. i’m alive, i’m well, and i’m finally, thank god, healing

and that’s the answer, my beloved, my angels, my dragons - no prose or poetry or lyrics about it. we weren’t put here to rot, to stagnate, to unfulfill. we weren’t put here to answer the prayers of our parents or the gifted-child prophecies or read from the book of poor-kid-doesn’t-understand-anything. our lives aren’t made from milestones, aren’t made from birth-marriage-mansion goals, we don’t survive by the starter gun. we were put here, each of us, because we have one heart big enough to fit love. to look into the yawn of space and say, that makes me curious. to put cold toes in the unknown ocean and say she is my home. to look wolves in the eye and say oh, you’re me, and you’re mine. we love, don’t we, so big and wild that our smallness feels like erupting.

i looked into myself and i said: what have i done at 25?

Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more. 

You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again. 

We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue. 

 Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole.  There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough. 

You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:

Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind. 

We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.

 If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to. 

You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.

If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

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