from my sources adjacent to tumblr–from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector–im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i’m hearing there are about 25 people left.
This is important, people. Please don’t scroll past this one.
While I don’t think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:
Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW
Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW
Follow your moots at their places NOW
I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.
It’s a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.
The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.
I’ll be the one guy to say “hey Mastodon/fediverse is also an option!” for the casual and quick microblogging aspect.
I am on blorbo.social, and I can give invites if yall ask 🤗 seriously, just message me here or email me. you can also sign up yourselves and wait in the queue. I like blorbo cuz the TOS is good for my art, and the mods are very good at shutting down racism/transphobia/harassment in my experience.
The cool thing about fedi is that any of the connected sites can talk to each other. So if I’m on blorbo.social, and you’re on mastodon.art, and we have a silly friend on aethy, we can still see each other’s posts and comment! And they’re all mostly independently owned by people just like you n’ me, so we can actually talk to the admins when there are issues we want to change, and donate for the relatively smaller server costs 😺
BSky has a very restrictive TOS and moderation for my taste - they can and will delete users for art (including noncon and guro), as well as marking accounts as “spam” if they are posting requests for mutual aid (as I have seen with Palestinian users).
Not to mention that the same trolls on twitter are on bsky too lol cuz bsky doesnt have rules against million follower accounts spewing racism/transphobia/etc. (also it’s another one of those venture capital socmeds that has no monetization plan so I fear it will inevitably start sucking the souls out of the users with forced LLM scraping and web3 crap)
Like bsky is the same as twitter to me - big audience, I have an account that mirrors my fedi losts, but I never log in to look at things cuz there’s too much nonspecific crap going on. I don’t fault people for using it cuz some people like performing for big audiences. I personally just prefer yapping to the one guy (shane) i have trapped in my basement.
do you ever not write for so long that you’re almost afraid to? like what if I’m dumb now
You just gotta unclog the pipe. Are you dumb now? No. The water was sitting stagnant because you were busy doing other things (100% fine btw). If any ‘dumb’ got in the water then it will quickly leave once you let the water start flowing again. Go get all the stupid out into a doc that doesn’t matter. Even several of them. It might take a good while, especially if you’re returning to writing after years or after a period of intense burnout, or both (waves). But you’re just rusty, and letting that stop you will only ensure you stay stuck! Go forth and write some nonsense!
this applies to art as well btw
Zie is getting old, you guys
So it’s a week until I turn 40 (April 19). Can’t say I feel like I have the life experience to back up the number, but time passes even when we don’t have the energy to engage with the world around us, so…
Nobody’s obligated to give a damn.
But if you want to do something for me, that costs you nothing but a bit of time? I’d be thrilled for any interest shown in my dumb OCs. You don’t need to be creative, I’m not asking for art or anything that high effort. Send me an ask about them, read and leave a comment on my fic, anything like that.
It just makes me happy to see people care about the silly little people I made up in my head and/or the stuff I made up about their misadventures.
(The guy I’ve been mostly focused on this past year or so is Ferret but I still care about my other OCs even if I’m not actively creating much with them.)
Look, I have a BA in English with a focus on English Literature. My Literature classes were by far my favorite English classes in uni (barring the one piece of assigned reading I carry hatred in my heart for to this day; fuck you, Jazz). Discussing symbolism and themes and analyzing texts and relating them to the time when they were written is a great time. Really.
So I don’t begrudge anyone trying to figure out what the author is trying to say with this or that line, or what influences might have resulted in it being written. It’s an interesting topic to explore. But. I think drawing our conclusions too firmly is dangerous.
I have a piece of art in my FA gallery that was drawn to illustrate a stupid joke between myself and a colleague on staff. That’s literally the extent of my artistic intentions. We made a joke and I drew it. At one point I was told in no uncertain terms by someone who somehow failed to notice the artist’s name and my name matched, that the artist had obviously drawn it for titillation. Self-titillation, at that. Which. Um. No. Emphatically no.
The suggestion is, due to the exact subject matter, one that comes laced with an undertone of accusation and judgement that I do not appreciate one bit. They backpedaled pretty fast once I pointed out that they were in fact talking to the artist in question, but if they were so certain, how could that retraction really be more than lip service to save face?
So I understand the frustration of people feeling like attempts at analysis of art/writing are treated too dismissively. I also understand why people would get frustrated with such attempts, particularly when they ascribe motives and intentions to the creator.
I don’t know where I was going with this beyond “sometimes intent does need to be considered, and that includes stepping back and thinking about the implications and one’s audience before blurting out that X motif is a definite sign of the creator harboring Y aberrant desires.”
It’s happened over 10 times and at no point have they thought to stop letting him roam so this doesn’t happen. The cat is lucky that it’s something so benign as a haircut as there’s a lot worse that can happen to outdoor cats.
Also I love how this is just a thing that commonly happens to outdoor cats in the UK. I like to think it’s people protesting outdoor cats lmao
Don’t want your cat shaved? Keep it indoors.
Look. I know all about outdoor cat culture. Sweden has a similar problem. But you’re wrong on basically every count:
- Foxes can and will kill cats, and do still exist in the UK. Large birds of prey may also injure or kill small cats. So yes, cats do have natural predators, even in the UK.
- Unnatural predators that outdoor cats may encounter, outside of the above (non-exhaustive list): Cars. Humans. Dogs. They may also enter sheds or garages and get trapped by mistake.
- Believe me, you do not have a large enough back yard for a cat to stay in it. I used to live out in the countryside. One of our cats was (most likely) put down by a neighbor after eating rat poison or a poisoned rat/mouse. By “neighbor” I mean “lived at least a mile or two down the road.” My grandmother lost two cats to the big road that was several yards’ distance from her house. Once our stable cat followed me all the way to the train station a mile away and I had to call my mom to come get her because I was worried about her being so close to the tracks. Cats, and particularly unfixed cats, fucking roam.
- “Only during the day” might seem to work, at first. Until it doesn’t. If the cat decides it doesn’t feel like coming in at night, you’re shit out of luck. Happened to my grandma.
Aside from that, a few more reasons not to let your cat roam unsupervised:
- One of the main threats to the Scottish wildcat, aside from habitat loss, is interbreeding with domestic housecats. Because UK cat owners are letting their unfixed cats roam. If you’re anywhere near their range, you are actively contributing to the extinction of a species if you let your cat out. That’s fucked up.
- Roaming domestic cats have caused or contributed to the extinction of multiple species of small animals. They don’t take into account whether that bird or rodent or butterfly is endangered, if they decide they want to hunt it they will hunt it.
- Disease is spread between outdoor cats when they scrap over territory. Even if your cat manages to avoid other predators it’s virtually guaranteed to run into other cats. Even without communicable diseases like FIV or FeLV, cat bites are really fucking dirty, and a bad bite can land you with, at best, a nasty vet bill. I helped a tenant of my parents’ drain an abscess on one of her cats’s tail, likely caused by a cat bite, every night for at least a week, maybe more, some 16 years ago or so. It was nasty, and the poor thing screamed its head off so it can’t have been pleasant. My (indoor) cat who loved fucking everyone hated this tenant after that. Every time she came inside, the cat would be screaming in pain, so obviously she was bad news, my cat probably figured.
- As I kind of alluded to above, even without malicious intent (and there are people with malicious intent, as well), roaming cats get poisoned. Cats do not have instincts telling them “this is poisonous,” not the way people sometimes think. They can and will eat things that are deathly toxic to them. Hell, lilies are obscenely toxic to cats and people grow them in their gardens. Cat walks through a stand of lilies, gets pollen on it, and grooms itself, and may ingest enough to go into renal failure from that alone, if you’re unlucky. Or it chews on some plant that contains toxins. A mouse or rat or vole dies from or is weakened by rat poison and a hungry outdoor cat decides it looks like a good snack.
Look, there’s a lot of material out there about why you shouldn’t let your cat roam. It’s not hard to find the information. There’s also a ton of information out there about leash training your cat and indoor enrichment. All the excuses for why you (gen) want to let your cat outside, unsupervised, are just that. Excuses.
What’s happened before is in the past. You’re not a bad person for having had outdoor cats before. You’re not even a bad person for currently having one, not even if you for whatever reason aren’t in a position to make the switch to keeping it indoors.
But if you can read about the dangers outdoor cats are exposed to, and the negative ecological impact they pose, and you still want to let your next cat roam free? Yeah, then I’m judging you a little.
Master blog for the artist/writer/cartoonist/crazy cat lady better known as quoting_mungo. Contains ponies, furries, random pet photos, some art tutorial things, and other silly stuff. Warning! I do curse, quite a bit. If you've got a problem with that, let's part ways now, before I offend you.
