deleted a bunch of chronic pain and chronic illness posts from blogs they’ve left (like mine)
This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects.
The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.
ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers.
Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)
This is a fucking problem, let’s not blow it off.
I know some people are too young (or simply weren’t involved in fandom back then) to remember what went down with livejournal and a couple of other sites “back in the day”, but it all started out as “it’s okay, we’re just removing the nasty porn”, and then “okay well, just make sure you put your porn behind a cut, no, wait jk you need to host it externally, a link is fine, maybe” and pretty much devolved swiftly into “actually sweety, LGBT content is inherently NSFW by default because it might make the kiddies gay if we expose them to it, so y’all need to leave now byyyeeee”.
Like…that happened. And it took nearly a decade for the fandom spaces to recover and stabilize and to get to the point where LGBT content creators could host their content without being told “you’re not welcome here” and I’m just sitting here, watching as youtube demonetizes LGBT content creators, and Facebook flags up LGBT ads as “inappropriate” and now tumblr is going through the queer and gay tags and just mass blanketing it as inappropriate, while actual pornbots and nazis wind up in my recommended feed.
Like I am uncomfortable y’all. I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like “the olden days” where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone.
And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.
So yea, the sky is not falling, but the ice under our feet sure is making worrying sounds.
bu-bu-but I need my spoonie spaces, it’s the only place left where I get support and advice and feel less alone in the world… ughh…….
It ain’t over till it’s over, and this bisexual spoonie will be here until the lights go out. They’re going to have to come to my house and pry my phone out my hands to get me to stop shitposting. And hey, by then there will likely be new spaces to branch out into and cling to each other. It won’t be the exact same mind you, but fandom spaces and online communities have always been migratory in nature. We moved from fanzines swapped around in coffee shops, to coffeeshop AUs online. We’ll survive whatever the next jump is.
It’s just bullshit that we’re being forced to prepare to make the leap at all. But that’s what happens with corporate run sites in the end. Sadly.
But we’re not quite at doomsday yet, and even after the changes roll out on the 17th, we’ll still have a ways to go before the site is entirely gone. Hell, even LJ is still running….
And in the meantime it’s not a bad idea to look around and get the handles/emails of the people you’d truly miss if they were gone the next day. I still have friends I think about and miss from LJ.
@thebibliosphere do you post elsewhere? I’d love to follow you on a different platform
The teen who was assaulted by a Queen’s University student three years ago, when she was 16 years old, said it’s “ridiculous” that the school would invite her assailant to guest lecture during a business class.
Macdonald, who was initially charged with sexual assault and forcible confinement, pleaded down to common assault. He was sentenced to 88 days of intermittent jail on weekends and two years of probation. After Macdonald’s sentencing made headlines last fall, Deloitte announced that he was no longer working for them, and his LinkedIn profile disappeared. Despite the university releasing a statement expressing dismay that Macdonald was a Queen’s student around the time he was sentenced, a faculty member at Queen’s invited Macdonald to speak to a business class in May.
“Logging companies keen to exploit Brazil’s rainforest have been accused by human rights organisations of using gunmen to wipe out the Awá, a tribe of just 355.”
Iron in the Sand 