dzamie

[dzamie]

Last Call

Between the whole Matt Meltdown (Mattdown?) thing and the AI debacle, I think I'm done giving this site any more data. I'll check in now and again - mostly for anyone trying to contact me, but I won't post art or fic, won't make posts.

Find me on:

Cohost

FurAffinity

send me an ask or DM if you want my Discord - sorry, Guilmon Anon, I'm not answering this one publicly

I found this site looking for pony askblogs, and it's been a hell of a decade. I've made friends, I've seen friends leave, and it's time for me to join that trend.

[dzamie]

Last Call

Between the whole Matt Meltdown (Mattdown?) thing and the AI debacle, I think I'm done giving this site any more data. I'll check in now and again - mostly for anyone trying to contact me, but I won't post art or fic, won't make posts.

Find me on:

Cohost

FurAffinity

send me an ask or DM if you want my Discord - sorry, Guilmon Anon, I'm not answering this one publicly

I found this site looking for pony askblogs, and it's been a hell of a decade. I've made friends, I've seen friends leave, and it's time for me to join that trend.

[dzamie]

Last Call

Between the whole Matt Meltdown (Mattdown?) thing and the AI debacle, I think I'm done giving this site any more data. I'll check in now and again - mostly for anyone trying to contact me, but I won't post art or fic, won't make posts.

Find me on:

Cohost

FurAffinity

send me an ask or DM if you want my Discord - sorry, Guilmon Anon, I'm not answering this one publicly

I found this site looking for pony askblogs, and it's been a hell of a decade. I've made friends, I've seen friends leave, and it's time for me to join that trend.

[dzamie]

Guilmon Anon. It's no problem maybe I'll see you on cohost. 👍😊

(making one last exception for a loyal anon)

Glad to hear it! My cohost ask box is open and anon is on :)

#text #asks #rawrs #anonymous

[dzamie]

Last Call

Between the whole Matt Meltdown (Mattdown?) thing and the AI debacle, I think I'm done giving this site any more data. I'll check in now and again - mostly for anyone trying to contact me, but I won't post art or fic, won't make posts.

Find me on:

Cohost

FurAffinity

send me an ask or DM if you want my Discord - sorry, Guilmon Anon, I'm not answering this one publicly

I found this site looking for pony askblogs, and it's been a hell of a decade. I've made friends, I've seen friends leave, and it's time for me to join that trend.

#text #rawrs #tumblr #[tumblr]

[dzamie]

I can’t believe automattic had managed to go from being the token good corporation, the champions of the open internet etc, to totally destroying its reputation and go full into the dark side, opting strongly for enshittification and mistreating of its users… In under two weeks.

Even Elon Musk needed more time destroy Twitter.

#text #tumblr

[dzamie]

now THAT’S a meme……simply exquisite!

#text #image #old memes #tagged

[dzamie]

#image #text #tagged #math #calvin and hobbes

[dzamie]

the T in LGBT stands for "tartan"

Remembering when I went over to my female teacher's house in 5th grade and saw that she lived with another female teacher & went home going "wow, so teachers really do all live together!" & then my family had to explain to me what lesbians are

#text #tumblr

[dzamie]

I just read this reddit comment about yesterday's staff post and ... 100%

People in the notes of the post don't seem to understand how massive of a move this is. Sure, this is not the Tuileries palace storming, nor the execution of Louis XVI, but it very well could be Tumblr's storming of the Bastille.

See, what happened yesterday was a bunch of trans staffers very politely saying "our boss is full of crap, what he is doing is absolutely not ok", and also "the official line he had been posting narrative of everything being peachy with moderation is bullshit, we acknowledge the systemic problem, and we demand addressing it ASAP".

Now, this has probably been possible just because of the exceptional circumstances: Louis XVI (Matt) is on vacation on his summer palace, and the person who he had left in charge of the court has refused to order the army to quell the internal strife... so they have stormed the Bastille to ask for the abolition of the ancient regime. Mind you, that doesn't mean we are at a point where they are in the middle of a revolutionary coup to create the Paris Commune: that's not in the cards right now. This is more about the people rioting to demand the king powers to have checks and balances. this is about demanding a constitutional monarchy instead of the current absolute king.

The people in the notes don't seem to understand the exceptional situation that the post creates. We are at a point where Matt Mullenweg has been called out by his own employees. His company, in his absence, had allowed his employees to break with the unified PR narrative that usually is forced to follow whatever path the CEO points to.

Now Louis XVI is in a peculiar position. His Authority had not only been questioned by the Paris rabble (us), but now he also had a regiment of elite grenadiers (1er Régiment du Trans Guards) openly in revolt and siding with the people of Paris. They are not firing at the royal palace, but they are saying "you know what? The people in the streets are right. We are not firing at them, your majesty". So Matt's next move is crucial. As I see it, there are several possibilities:

- the king / Matt acknowledges he had been in the wrong (either honestly or just because he doesn't feel powerful enough to win a civil war), accepts to get his powers limited, and allows some partial reform to address people's demands. This is obviously the best option for my friends still working for Tumblr. That doesn't mean tumblr would become a queer communist paradise, but at least we would see things improving.

- the king refuses to engage: he moves the court to another city (names a new Tumblr CEO reporting to him) and move the army to Paris to repress the rebellion (fires the people behind the post, double down in the current moderation policies). Things keep being the same, but without the people who asked for improvements.

- the king gets fed up of having to deal with ungrateful rabble and decides to just make an example out of Paris and orders the army to reprise the St. Bartholomew night, but on Paris population this time. This would be Matt firing everyone involved and closing Tumblr two months from now.

Right now, I wouldn't know which of these three options is more probable. Matt has been very quiet since yesterday, and whatever he posts next would be a big signal of how he is going to react to this development of The Situation.

#text #tumblr #long post

[dzamie]

me irl

Las serpientes son pajitas grandes

#video #snakes #reptiles #text #tagged

[dzamie]

Taillow sleeping atop a napping Ninetales. Drawn for a friend's request on /vp/.

Also found on FurAffinity (image 1, image 2), and Cohost!

Bonus with a mischievous guest under the cut:

[dzamie]

hey uh

what the fuck is this

𓁲

#text #image #tagged

[dzamie]

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

#text #tumblr

[dzamie]

I was really bracing for a gun-totally-not-held-to-their-head-haha-please-remain-calm style "us lgbt+ staffers believe that our valued CEO's words have been taken out of context; we're great at moderation and everything he said is justified" and was increasingly shocked and impressed at, instead, "oh god oh fuck why doesn't that man know how to shut up god dammit look we know we fucked up but we SWEAR it's in a different way than you think and despite what our fool CEO said we ARE trying"

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

#text #tumblr #long post

[dzamie]

I'll give answering these a shot.

So, to start with a quick (well, "quick") background, the label "Zionist" is remarkably useless from a communication perspective. It can mean anything from:

wants there to be at least one country with no threat of discrimination for being Jewish

wants to ensure that Israeli citizens are safe from the surrounding countries who want to kill all the Jews and anyone standing too close

wants all Palestinian territory ceded to Israel and Palestinians wiped out

wants whatever's expedient to stop Israel getting bombed

wants all Jews to be in a little strip in the Middle East to bring about the end of the world - the "second coming," IIRC?

wants all Jews to be in a little strip in the Middle East to get them out of their country

wants all Jews to be in a little strip in the Middle East to make them easier to exterminate

wants to maintain a country to reliably flee to if/when their current country starts Holocaust 2: Here We Shoah-gain, without worrying about being turned away for being too many Jews

wants Netanyahu and his party to be able to do whatever they want

a Jew you don't like

and many more. I admittedly hadn't heard your definition of Christian Zionism, as some sort of New Crusade for a Christian Jerusalem, but I wouldn't doubt people believe it. So in online discussions, you often wind up with exchanges like "I believe [nobody should kill all the Israelis]." "What? You want [all Gazans slaughtered, and the West Bank Palestinians too]? You monster!"

So, with that preamble, let's get into the meat of it:

The likely reason for bringing up Christian Zionists is because, well, it's a label that we simply never see. Despite, as the other person said, the entire global Jewish population being outnumbered by Christian self-described Zionists in the US alone, basically all accusations of zionism on tumblr are directed at Jews. We saw people saying "Happy Chanukah to all the non-zionist Jews!" but not "Merry Christmas but only to Christians who aren't zionists!" It's a frustration directed not specifically at you, but more at a general sort of collective of leftist goyish tumblr, which you happen to fit: people only think about zionism when Jews are involved, which is bigoted and also annoying.

This ties in nicely with your third point, actually:

I didn't want people to confuse my support of the Jewish community with support for the Israeli government.

Your followers would presumably have no issue if a post about protesters shutting down an anti-abortion event didn't include a caveat that you support pro-choice but not Israel. Hopefully, no callout posts will be made if you reblog a "happy easter" post without adding "but I don't condone the slaughter of Palestinians." Yet you worry that reblogging "I support the Jewish community" will have backlash from other users if you don't condemn Israel on it. Again, the topic of I/P only comes up when Jews are mentioned.

That also means that someone - possibly you, possibly your followers - believes that supporting Jews implies supporting Israel, that the default state for anyone who isn't bigoted against Jews is to cheer on the Israeli govt. And you did say that this is a new thing, that you reblogged it last year with no issue, which means that there's a growing trend of people who see "I support the Jewish community" and their first thought is "hmm, they must be evil."

This is... relatively easy to remedy, at least on a local-corner-of-tumblr level: stop bringing up Israel when Israel isn't mentioned. Over time, two things will likely happen: 1) your followers will see "Jews -> pro-Israel" less, and therefore themselves make the association less, and God willing it'll spread until the only people calling random Jews zionists are the people who would accuse us of being (((elite globalist lizard bankers))); and 2) you'll get the occasional ask demanding why you didn't denounce Israel in a "Jews are human actually" post, at which point you can try to explain that it's kinda bigoted to assume Jews and the Israeli govt think in lockstep (if you're up for it, of course - I admit the temptation to just block is pretty strong).

I’ve been seeing a lot of anti-Nazi ones, which is great, but I felt like we needed one to show our support for the Jewish community.  

#text #image #tumblr #long post #politics

[dzamie]

Honestly watching western goyische leftists veer sharply into blatant, violent antisemitism ostensibly due to Palestine inspires a very specific type of rage in me that can only be triggered by ideologically-driven hypocrisy.

It's like watching the anti-abortion people also opposed comprehensive sex education and birth control while lamenting at how many abortions are currently happening. Every single person with more than one functioning brain cell knows that the only way to reduce abortions (not stop them, because that's literally impossible) is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies - something for which there are mountains of evidence demonstrating that comprehensive sex education and birth control can accomplish. But they don't want those things, because they allow childbearing capable people reproductive autonomy and freedom. So they DARVO and move goalposts and in general try to pretend it's about protecting babies when it's literally just about controlling women, girls, and people they're misgendering as such. Because if they truly cared, if they were genuine in their beliefs, they would support whatever method was most effective at reducing unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions.

The antisemitic "pro-Palestine" leftists do the exact same thing by ramping up antisemitism in the diaspora, despite the fact that the main driving force behind Zionism is a desire for Jewish safety. If you make the entire world unsafe for Jews except Israel, and you also want to dissolve Israel, where does that leave Jews? And I get that a lot of people just straight up do not care, genuinely want us dead, but here's the thing: people who are backed into a corner are going to fight for their lives. That is what Israel has done for the last 75 years. They have nowhere else to go, and the more antisemitic you make the diaspora, the more Jews will congregate there out of necessity.

If you don't address the root cause in a humane way, you are never going to make headway and you're literally just spraying water on a grease fire.

#text #politics