My beloved yakuza themed discord, the Minnesota Fats Clan Kiwami, has just turned four years old. That’s incredible! I love running it and all the friends I’ve made through it and it brings me an indescribable amount of joy to see it still thriving
if you want in on the nonsense it’s a 16+ heavily LGBT server with everything from mahjong nights to a bot that fucks up images for you to long discussions on horse hostesses (horsetesses), here’s your chance
also if you follow my ryu ga gotoku online translation blog maddogofshimano.tumblr.com I do all my translating in fats clan first, so you can get early access
art tips that actually help. tracing pictures is fine. try not to shade with black. draw as much as you can all the time and make it shitty im so serious. dont buy expensive materials its not worth it. never post your art to tiktok. raise your commission prices. sparkle on be yourself
Imgur was created in 2009, and has remained one of the most popular image hosting sites on the internet for decades. Its 300 million active users access content on the platform over 60 billion times per month. Compared to other image hosting sites of the early 2000s, such as Photobucket, Imgur has a reputation for being a place to host niche, originally created works, including memes, personal artwork, image macros, fan art, and yes, highly specific porn and fetish content that caters to small yet passionate communities.
Until 2016, the only way to share images on Reddit was by passing them through Imgur first. If you didn’t already have an Imgur account when you were making a Reddit post, you mostly likely uploaded it without bothering to create one, so your image files were posted anonymously. But Imgur is now mass-deleting all images that can’t be linked to an existing account. This means that the vast majority of image posts on Reddit that predate 2016 will be completely broken after Imgur’s new terms of service are adopted. That’s not just posts with pornography or nude photographs that are getting removed, which would be a sizeable data loss itself, but nearly eleven years worth of digital history.
Many of these in-depth Reddit posts are absolutely reliant upon images. And every single one of them that came before 2016 can potentially be ruined following the Imgur purge. Even many posts that were made after 2016 will be destroyed as well, because many Reddit users who upload images to Imgur never create official accounts.
Whenever sexual content is driven from social media, there is little in the way of public mourning. If anything, there is a tepid acknowledgement of the harm that will befall sex workers, alongside outright celebration that at last these sites will be scrubbed of the most unseemly and dangerous sides of human nature, and at last rendered “safe.” But condemning future generations of queer and kinky people to ignorance and loneliness is not saving them. And exposing someone to sexual content too early in life is not the only form of sexual harm. Denying a person a chance at self-recognition can be equally traumatic, and violent.
Those of us who do decry the sanitization and Disney-Worldification of the internet are frequently likened to predators who wish to expose our bodies and proclivities to children. Our mere existence as adult sexual beings with adult bodies is deemed a threat. Paradoxically, we are also mocked for taking the removal of erotic art so seriously. Porn is somehow viewed in our culture as both frivolously pointless, and profoundly terrifying.
But in reality, sex is not dangerous. And sex is not frivolous. It’s a rapturous, inevitable, and an essential force in human life. Sex isn’t for everyone, but it is one of the most precious ways to experience inhabiting a body, and refusing to acknowledge the existence of sex makes it impossible to fully appreciate human history, identity, or any form of art.
Sex’s removal from public discourse and digital record keeping is a hateful, genocidal destruction of one of the most precious aspects of the human experience. We are right to mourn for it. And we are right to fear what comes next, after our bodies are rendered unviewable and our dreams unspeakable.
the first time i posted this essay link, tumblr removed it for being sexual content and then blurred my account. jesus fucking christ. read the piece, please. our ability to communicate and find one another online is rapidly eroding and this is no light matter
See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn’t seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.
But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I’d ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It’s just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.
I didn’t get any parsnips, not that year, because I’d weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my ‘ugh no that’s grass’ twitchy horticulture finger.
The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn’t weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I’ve grown lots of parsnips since. They’re kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don’t harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it’s worth it.
Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who’s gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.
seeing other trans people be happy and enjoy being trans is not a threat to you. to doubt their transness because they’re (perceived as to be) not as miserable as you is, however, a threat to them. - transmonstera
[IMAGE ID: “to measure the validity of other transsexuals by their misery is to hold the cissexual narrative higher than your own right to joy” in bold white text. the background is a number of yellow measuring tapes and rulers. the base of the measuring tapes has a sad face sticker on the side. the background is solid black. END]
the one trope that never fails to Get Me is normal butch x insane femme
butch whos kind of down to earth and rolls with the punches & femme whos utterly deranged and out to win her man (female). shes like hes the specialest girl ever and if you dont clap for him i’ll blow up this fucking building
like 90% of the responses to this post feature characters who are literally not butch but thats ok i too love projecting on fictional characters and lying to myself
nothing will make you think “i have got to get weirder” more than finally feeling comfortable enough around other people to admit to interests of yours that you think make you a freak and a weirdo only to realize with a combination of embarrassment and relief that you’re like a normie to them
“sicko feedback loop” is a warrior’s bond stronger and more meaningful than marriage
We have been seeing some claims that OTW has already hired a Diversity Consultant. We wish that were true! At this point all that’s been done is appoint a volunteer to research diversity consultants
Here is a timeline, as best we can construct, of this issue.
June 2020
OTW first talked about hiring an external contractor in their June 2020 statement on racism, and said they would start researching options “in the coming months”
In July 2021, a year later, they announced that they had created two new “officer” roles, including one to start researching diversity consultants. (OTW uses the terms “officers” & “staff”, but those are currently unpaid volunteer roles)
In April 2022, almost a year after THAT, they appointed one of two Diversity Consultant Research Officers & said they would be starting work. (I guess technically that’s still “coming months” from 2020? lol)
In January 2023, when asked about the timeline for working with a diversity consultant, OTW said they hoped to “conclude the project” in 5 years. Also they had not yet appointed a second officer.
Which brings us to the most recent OTW Board meeting in March 2023, almost another year after the officer had been appointed, when we received the first update on what they had been working on.
OTW was asked about the five year timeline, & this time we were told that they hoped the project would be concluded OR have “made great progress” in five years, again moving the goalposts.
Currently
Looking at this timeline, this could make it eight years before we see anything substantial (3 til now +5 more) in significantly addressing this issue. This is unacceptable. We know they have the funds to hire consultants.
This is why we’re demanding that OTW make good on their commitment and hire someone in the next 3-6 months. It’s not an unreasonable ask given that the officer has already had more than a year to work on this and we are 3 years out since we were told this was a priority.
You’ve completely misunderstood what the ask is, here.
We’re not asking for AO3 to have moderators.
We are asking them to hire the diversity consultant they said they were going to hire three years ago. A diversity consultant would have nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the site. Their job would be to look at the way the organization is run, the institutional culture, the policies and procedures, and help AO3 adapt them so that they are less hostile to people of color. Things like, “is the way we recruit volunteers equitable, or is it biased, and how could we fix that?” “is the institutional culture such that people of color are likely to feel isolated and unsupported (and thus be more likely to quit or burn out than white fans) and how do we make it better?” “does our internal procedure for handling abuse complaints work fairly in all cases, or is it biased against reports about racism, and how do we fix that?” “Is there a racial or cultural issue at stake that we’re not seeing as we discuss this other issue?”
A diversity consultant wouldn’t be looking at individual works on the site to see if they were racist; a diversity consultant would be operating at a much higher level than that.
Also, I’m not sure why you think hiring moderators–or a diversity consultant, for that matter–would require AO3 to lose its nonprofit status. Most nonprofits have paid staff! A nonprofit can’t have an owner who is taking profits from it, but that is NOT the same thing as paying your employees.
As for moderating … AO3 already has a team of volunteers that do that. (I believe it’s called the Abuse team?) I haven’t seen any requests for the scale or style of moderating that you get in for-profit social media behemoths. What I have seen is people asking them to look at their existing Abuse policies and see if there is something they can be changed so that their response to certain types of harassment will be to actually do something about it rather than say “it doesn’t violate our ToS.”
Note that this campaign is not telling AO3 what changes we think they should make to their ToS and policies and procedures. This campaign is saying “hey, remember how you admitted there was a problem three years ago and promised to do something? the problem is still here. What progress have you made in untangling the issues and figuring out how to make the problem less bad?”
Exalted is a really cool game, and of the Exalt types, Liminals are almost definitely my favorite. However, official rules don’t exist for them yet. To solve this problem, I spent a little over a year making a homebrew ruleset for playing them. It’s not finished yet, but everything at the link–character creation guidelines, rules for play, and Charms–is relatively finalized and completely playable. However, I do plan to keep adding content onto this until I see it as being complete.
If you read these rules or play using them and enjoy it, please let me know what you think! Feedback and criticism on this would be very valuable to me.
i went to a tiny counterserve diner once and accidentally poured sugar instead of salt all over my hashbrowns and was eating them sadly anyways. the waitress took them away and started making me another one and I tried to protest, but she just snorted and said “we’re not catholic here”. now every time i’m doing something painful out of obligation i think about how that is not repenting, this body is not a catholic establishment, there is no nobility in suffering.