#this wouldn't particularly help with anything it's just inherently funny to me

[rabbiteclair]

step 1: build a professional-looking, ad-free site that will perform formatting and validation on a wide variety of file types used for configuration and data transfer (.properties, YAML, .config, JSON, etc), and decrypt file contents if people will just paste in their handy dandy private key/shared secret/etc. Yes, there are already sites for this stuff, but they're fairly scattered and ad-infested.

step 2: perform whatever SEO skullduggery is needed to get your site to the top of the Google search rankings.

step 3: once your site has established itself, pass every single thing that gets pasted into it to a backend service. If you wanna be coy about it, continue doing the validation in Javascript and pretend that the backend calls are metrics. Listen, if you make the URL something like https://admin.yourhosthere.com/datadog-agent then 90% of devs are gonna go 'yeah that seems legit, it's just my good friend Datadog :)' and investigate no further.

step 4: parse every message for strings like 'username' and 'password'.

step 5: now that you have production credentials for about 40% of international corporations and governments, hold the planet hostage.

step 6: rule the world from a flying volcano lair staffed with jumpsuit-wearing henchmen.

(traditionally the henchmen would come before the world conquest, but like most things, supervillainy has gone through massive changes thanks the internet)

#listen i know what you're thinking #'there's no way big international companies would have people doing such insecure things' #this is how I know that you've never worked IT in a big international company that doesn't sell software to survive #i guarantee you that within a day or two of it taking off you'd have ITAR-controlled data #honestly if I did this I would make sure my server is outside the US just for that #you just did an export babey #this wouldn't particularly help with anything it's just inherently funny to me

[jonnywaistcoat]

Hi Jonny, if you don't mind I have a question about the TMA TTRPG! So I noticed that on the player's guide there's this guy, who my friends and I assumed is probably Jon. If it is him, is this a canon design, or more like some of the non-canon stuff that's in the merch?

So, I hope you don't mind if i use this ask to go a bit off on one. I'm not specifically dragging you (I'm actualy glad you asked, as I've thinking about posting on the topic), but all the discussion around the RPG art and how "official" or "canon" it might be is, to my mind, slightly silly.

First up, is it "official" art? I mean, yeah, its art for the officially licenced Magnus Archives RPG. This means Monte Cook Games have commissioned someone to do a beatiful illustration broadly based on some aspect, episode or character from the podcast and it goes in the book. But that's kinda all it means. "Official" is a legal distinction, not an artistic one. The fact that it's in an official product doesn't make it any less one artist's cool interpretation of a character that has only been vaguely described in audio.

Second, is it Jonathan Sims the Archivist? I mean, it's probably based on the idea of him, but it's certainly not set in stone. When we were first discussing art with MCG, we advised that character pictures be more vibes-based and not explicitly tied to specific people (ie. a portrait inspired by Tim wouldn't be captioned "This is Tim" and wouldn't be placed opposite a profile for Tim Stoker, archival assistant.) This was mainly because we wanted the artists to have plenty of freedom to interpret and not feel too tied down by the need to know everything about the podcast. But, to be frank, it was also because we know that there are a few fans out there that are kinda Not Chill about what they've personally decided these characters look like and can get a bit defensive over depictions that differ.

It strikes me as particularly strange to be having this discussion about art that's for a roleplying game book. Something that's explicitly and solely designed to give you the ability to play in your version of the Magnus universe. The idea that this is the thing where we'd for some reason try to immutably establish unchangable appearances for these characters would be pretty funny if some folks weren't taking it so seriously. Similarly ridiculous is the idea we could reasonably have said to MCG "We'd love for you to make a huge beautiful RPG book of our setting... Just make sure you don't depict any of the iconic characters or events from it!"

But... is it "canon"? Now, to my mind, this highlights a real weakness in a lot of fandom thinking around "canon", which is that it generally has no idea what to do with adaptations. All adaptation is interpretation, and relies on taking a work and letting new creatives (and sometimes the same ones) have a different take on it. Are the appearances of the Fellowship of the Ring in the LOTR movies "canon"? How much, if at all, does that matter? Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere was originaly a 90s BBC series made with a budget of 50 pence; is anyone who makes fanart of Mr Croup that doesn't look like the actor Hywel Bennet breaking canon? What about the novel that describes the character differently? Or the officially licenced Neverwhere comic where he looks like neither of them? Which is his "canon appearance"?

Canon is an inherently messy concept, and while it is useful for a creative team trying to keep continuity and consistency within a creative work, for thinking about anything beyond that it tends to be more hinderance than help.

Anyway, all this is to say that the above picture and all the others in the RPG are exactly as canon as every other picture you've ever seen of the Archivist.

#sorry for the huge answer #been thinking about it a lot recently #and wanted to get my thoughts down

[trashprinceward]

EVERYONE LISTEN UP, THIS IS IMPORTANT!

I'm going to talk about the history of Tumblr, the current state of Tumblr, and why you should get out.

And you can call me a hypocrite, sure. But as an artist who depended a lot on commissions and art sales, I only came back to Tumblr because this is where the audience and active fandoms are. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't be here.

So, you've probably heard people calling tumblr "the queerest place on the internet". Probably more ironically that sincerely, lately. But the reason for this is that, at one point, it was true. Tumblr was synonymous with gay shit, all over the internet. That was this site's reputation. To the point that what the right wingers call "woke" these days, used to be called "tumblr shit". Tumblr was the BIGGEST resource for LGBT+ communities, information, advice and connection. That was here, on this site. Ask boxes thrived with friendship and fun games, artists got regular commissions and their work was shared. And, as much of a cliche as it may be to say this, Tumblr was a 'safe space'.

Then everything changed in 2018. I don't know how many of you were here for that, but that's when all this started. That's when we had porn bots. They'd start reblogging random posts, adding pictures of straight up porn. Naked people, straight up fucking. No tags, no warnings. Just uncensored porn and those stupid "click here to fuck me" captions. They were everywhere, constantly. And staff did nothing about it. No moderation, no kind of adding verification or new accounts. They just let the problem fester. Why should they care? Until they were threatened with being kicked off the app store, at least. Then they moved to do something about it.

So, instead of pulling together a human moderation team, or temporarily limiting new accounts, or doing any kind of intuitive policing of these spam bots, they just decided to make a blanket ban of all NSFW content, the enforcing of which would be carried out by AI bots. This, as you can probably guess, was a monumental failure. Anything that remotely looked like naked flesh was tagged as mature (a particularly infamous example features a picture of sand dunes being tagged as mature). And perhaps most tellingly of this failure, it didn't get rid of porn bots.

What it did get rid of though, was artists. Myself included. I was a mature artist. I had a NSFT sideblog. I sold commissions, I made money. It wasn't exactly career level, but I made enough that commissions helped me to eat when all my money went on bills. Then that was gone. Even SFW art wasn't entirely safe, because if the bot decided that your art had too much "skin" in it, you were flagged. (And at the time, I drew a lot of Jojo art, so I was screwed on that front.) So I had to leave. To find a new site where I could post my art, and try to continue selling commissions. The problem with this? Only a handful of people followed me offsite. I had roughly 300 followers on here. About 5 came with me to twitter. And then about 2 came with me to pillowfort. I had lost everything. Artists all over lost their following, lost their support, lost their income. All because people couldn't be bothered to boycott their funny fandom website.

But that wasn't all. Because now staff saw they had an opportunity. This bot they had created, was going around flagging anything mature, sometimes outright deleting posts or banning blogs that were too 'NSFT'. So... What group is often inherently seen as NSFT or sexualised? Yep, you guessed it. The queer community. And so that's what they did. They struck it all down. The biggest LGBT community on the internet, and they used the "porn ban" excuse to start flagging and deleting blogs. Never touched the nazi blogs, or the white supremacists, or that one blog that would doxx gay people in homophobic countries. Nope, they were left alone. But the most prominent, notable and well known queer blogs were gone. And again, the majority of the userbase was ok with this. They stayed.

I left this site for 5 years. And I tried to make it work elsewhere, I really did. I went to twitter. But over there nobody retweets work, nobody comments on your art. I only had like 2 regular supporters. I haven't gained followers in YEARS. Literally the only reason I still post to twitter is because Airdorf retweets FAITH fanarts. I tried going to pillowfort, which is honestly like a BETTER version of Tumblr. But, it was empty. Nobody was there. I even offered to give out free invite links to pillowfort so other people could join up too! Nobody ever responded to me. So I gave up. After 5 years with almost no interaction, almost no commission sales. No friends, nobody to talk to, nothing to do, nowhere to go... I came back here. And interaction is so much better (even though it's still a struggle to get people to actually talk to me). But I hate being here because I know what this site is like.

Also I know how complacent people are. The things they did back then, they're still doing now. Flagging trans women as mature, straight up banning them for no reason, spreading around campaigns of hate. Its STILL happening. And you're all still here sitting "oh this is awful, this website is transphobic" and then go back to reblogging memes. I saw a poll recently that asked what people would do if tumblr closed down or kicked them out, and the majority answer was just "give up social media completely" and it's like, really? There are plenty of alternatives out there. Artists and creators, and LGBT activists and whoever have been BEGGING you to join us, but you just wont. People would rather sit in this sinking ship till it goes down than make the leap and follow us into the lifeboats.

And I'm saying this again now because there have been talks about tumblr making a deal with midjourney. Because they want to feed all our art, our selfies, our hard work into the AI slop machine. So history is repeating itself again, and once more artists will be begging you to please come with us. Please get off this site. Please come to a place that isn't actively trying to get rid of us.

Me... I'll be staying here as long as I'm able because this is the only place I have any kind of audience. But if you can, if you care about friends, if you care about artists, if you care about queer people. PLEASE come with us. If the worst comes to it, then I'll be leaving for pillowfort. Please, PLEASE come with me. I have invitations, I can send you one so you can join. Send me a message and ask me. Just please, don't die with this place.

#tumblr #artists on tumblr #transphobia

[amalgamezz]

Honestly like... I'm aromantic, and drawing a line between those things (romantic and platonic attraction/love/whatever) is very important to me, because I'm extremely romance repulsed and I do not want anything to do with romance ever at all. So the divide between them is extremely important to me, and I know I've often had a lot of internal push-back or instinctive panic at the idea that there isn't a difference or a meaningful difference bc I've spent my whole life trying to get as far away from romance as possible while the world refused to let me escape it. 'Love is love' sure but those *are* different relationships to me, and I do not want ANYTHING to do with one of them, so that's why I personally want a very strong line in my own life between them. That's not to say some feelings or actions are *inherently* one or another, I think that kind of distinction is completely bogus, but there are a lot of reasons why people might want to be very clear about which one they are personally experiencing or expressing or seeking, and it's not just an alloro thing.

I hear you! I'm quite also a romance repulsed aromantic myself. Though funny enough, trying to draw a line between what is romance and whatnot is not particularly helpful in my case. For example, while I personally do associate most mouth-to-mouth kisses to romance acts and handholding completely being platonic acts, I have such instances where my repulsion acts up when I see a couple handholding and yet goes dormant when the very same couple is kissing. This has occurred so many times and on many different "romantic/platonic" things that it puzzled so much that I had to go back to the drawing board and reexamine my cases. Aaaaand it turns out what I'm generally repulsed of is performative displays of affections. So whether I label an act as platonic or romantic, I wouldn't still be able to tell if I'm gonna be repulsed by it until I see and clock whether it is PDA or *PDA*. Very helpful, thank you, brain.

That aside, actually, the main reason that prompted my previous post is that I've seen multiple times in which my alloro friends *agonized* (literally, I'm even not being dramatic) over whether their feelings for their new favorite person are platonic or romantic, to the point that they consider to stop hanging out or seeing each other as friends. Perhaps I'm too aro for this, but it makes me ??????? most of the time. That being said, as someone who used to id as lithromantic, I can partly understand why the distinction between romantic vs. platonic can be important and why people wishfully cling onto their romantic feelings, but at times I feel like they are too *obsessed* with drawing a fine line between labels that they themselves ruin many precious romantic/platonic relationships they have and tbh it makes me so sad to witness.

#ask #anon