maplefiasco

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Thinking about how each protagonist in the Fallout TV show believes themselves to be the last true American because each of them is a different kind of American myth. Is being an American all about getting to be the lone gunslinger who exists in a world without rules or limitations? Is it about being controlled by a corporation in a hyper-consumptive society that only gives you the illusion of free choice? Is it about being in control of such overwhelmingly dominant military technology that you believe your power grants you the responsibility of being the world's moral authority? Let's do some drugs about it.

#fallout #good shit

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can we as a society stop fucking making biopics. please just make thinly veiled rpf movies like velvet goldmine instead

#I will continue to scream about velvet goldmine #until everyone’s brain chemistry is as forever altered by it as mine was

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Kevin Durant is a extremely high tier shitposter who just so happens to also be one of the greatest basketball players of all time

#LEGACY POINTS DEDUCTED

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Communities closed beta is here

Hello again! We’re back with an update on Communities, a big idea we had last year that we’ve been working on steadily since then. We’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re beginning a “closed beta” phase of this new feature, which means many of you will get to play with it soon!

We want to build this whole thing together, with as much input from all of you as possible. We’ve read and re-read the feedback from our previous post, and we’ve been surveying and interviewing people about this idea for a few months now. But it’s time to open this up even more for hands-on testing.

We’ve already begun reaching out to most of you who interacted with our previous post, as promised, with a survey asking whether you’d be interested in helping (check your email!). Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be using the results of that survey to narrow down who we’d like to help test Communities in these initial batches.

The process is looking a bit like this:

If you received a Communities survey email to your registered Tumblr email address, fill it out! If you’re interested in helping us in this beta test period, that’s your way of potentially getting early access. If you did not receive an email with the Communities survey, don’t fret! Communities will be rolling out to more people as we expand our testing. 

We’ll go through the results and choose a diverse range of community ideas to gather a wide array of feedback.

Selected testers will receive a second survey with more detailed questions about their proposed community. Very practical stuff, like the name, title, and description, whether it should be public or private, the About page contents, its own community guidelines, and more.

We will create the new Tumblr community on your behalf using the information supplied. We’re building the tools that will let people create and edit communities themselves, so eventually you’ll be able to change them without needing our help. But for now, we’re creating and editing them for you, as needed.

After we’ve created the community, you’ll be made its first admin. Everything from here on out is up to you – Tumblr staff won’t be in your community (unless you invite us, of course). You’ll be able to invite anyone on Tumblr to your community. However, your community will have a population cap to start, limiting how many people can be in it and invited, as a way of keeping this beta test somewhat contained and manageable for us. We’ll be able to raise that population cap for communities that are growing and if we want to test further in that direction.

And throughout, we’ll be asking for feedback, both in some special communities for everyone in the closed beta, and via more surveys and the Support tickets we receive.

This closed beta version of Communities is far from finished, and that’s part of the reason we want to start opening it up to more of you for feedback. There are a lot of rough edges and known issues, but we think it’s far enough along that it’s usable enough for testing. We need feedback in order to feel like we’re building the right thing.

The very first public community is called “Communities Feedback” for this reason! We want everyone helping us test out communities to tell us about it, so people in this closed beta will be in there by default. We want to use that space to be more public and real-time about new pieces we’re building, bugs we’re fixing, things we know are broken, and answers to common questions. There is an additional, private community for community admins, to help shape how administrating and moderating these spaces will work. And if you don’t want to use those spaces, you can always use the “Feedback” category in our Support form.

Stay tuned for more, and keep an eye on that Communities Feedback space if you’d like to see how things are changing over time.

#tumblr #omg omg it's happening #LiveJournal 2.0

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SCREAMPT

#this popped up this morning on my tiktok fyp #glad to see it already making the rounds here. #SHE'S NOT WRONG

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WE deserved a soft epilogue. WE

#HAPPY CATWIVERSARY

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For @catws-anniversary / April 2 - Bucky Barnes / Prompt - ghost story

#bucky barnes #buckybarnesedit #stucky #stuckyedit #mcu #mcuedit #my edit #I really thought I was gonna do something ghost-y and dreary and CONSISTENT with these colors #but it's already late and I'll die before I desaturate that red #please enjoy the most wildy out of context quoting of Practical Magic

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SOLUTION TO BEING MUCH TO SCARED TO TALK TO MUTUALS:

FUgkin..... hit em with ur paws......

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the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you

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People feel like they have to... Justify their ships now? When the hell did that start? Ask me why I ship something and it's like, the characters were in a room together one time. The fuck more do you expect from me?

#fandom #canon only has as much power as you choose to relinquish to it

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bucky

i’ll be having this as a print at fanime, akon, and ax!!

#mcu #mcu fanart #bucky barnes #bucky postin' for his birthday

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you have a piece missing

#bcs #mcwexler #damn that’s good shit

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Lenny + Midge + Parallels, Callbacks, & Foreshadowing (Seasons 1-5) 

+Bonus

#the marvelous mrs maisel #as previously implied I'm doing a rewatch #and just got to 3x5. #and jesus christ how I yearn #I'm sick with yearning #watching how he delights in watching her!

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It's 2024. I have been participating in fandom for 40 years. This is a ramble commemorating some history I've experienced along the way.

In 1984, I attended my first convention, and made a beeline for the one long row of covered tables in the Dealer's Room that was, according to the whispered lore of my friends, 'the one'. "um", I said, very suavely and coherently, except for how it was totally the opposite of those things, "I'm here for the... for the, uh. For-"

"Come around here," the man behind the table said with exhausted ennui, so I went around, and he lifted up the table skirt next to him and pointed to rows and rows of boxes underneath the line of tables. "It's all under here."

It was all under there. Along with about five older ladies with glasses, graying hair, cardigans. Flipping through slash zines and chatting in whispered voices like old friends (which of course they were). I noticed one of them had the good sense to be wearing kneepads. I was still too young and ablebodied to need kneepads when crawling on a carpeted floor, but I immediately found her preparedness skills to be both impressive and hot. "You're new," one of the ladies whispered to me--a bit warily, which made sense. "Are you sure you're in the right place?"

In the faint light (the kneepads lady had also come prepared with a flashlight, additional practicality hotness points for her) I grabbed a comb-bound book with a heavy line art piece on the cover, featuring a musclebound Captain Kirk getting righteously and enthusiastically plowed by a stern-yet-ebullient Spock. "This," I said, pointing helpfully at the cover, like I was trying to make myself understood in a language I had only the vaguest knowledge of. "I'm here for this."

Outside at the convention, most of the attendees were wearing large homemade circular pins that shrieked 'K/S is BS!!!'1. But underneath the table, we reveled in the forbidden.

***

In 1985, I fell very hard for Starsky & Hutch fandom. Which was simply referred to at the time as 'the other fandom', because there were only two. We were upstarts. Many fannish elders predicted that it was just a phase.

***

The 'circulating library' was a massive stack of barely-legible pages that smelled strongly of mimeograph ink. When you were on the list, you would write stories while you waited for your turn, and when the big box was mailed to you, you would read everything (new finds, old favorites), add your own sloppily-typed or hastily-mimeographed stories, and then mail the whole thing to the next person. For me, at the time, it was an extremely expensive indulgence--but my favorite one.

***

By 1990, slash fandom had grown enough that I no longer knew everyone in it, which was both thrilling and a bit daunting. A young woman at a convention waited for me after a panel I was part of (I think it was 'writing impactful smut' or something like that), and said she had a question she didn't want to ask in a group setting. I'd heard that before. I said that's fine, go ahead and ask; and she came out with: "Why do you have to be gay?"

I blinked. "Is... that a problem?"

She looked annoyed. "Yes, because your stories are on all the recommendation lists and in all the top zines, but if you're gay and I read something you wrote and I get hot from it that makes me gay, and I'm not gay."

"Wow." I grinned, I couldn't help it. It probably made me look very predatory-dyke-about-to-score-a-toaster. Whatever, it was enough to make her back away from me fast.

When I thought about it later that night, I wondered what it would be like not to be the only queer person in slash fandom.

***

By 1997, slash started appearing on the internet. Many fannish elders claimed it was the death knell of slash fandom, or dismissed it as 'just a phase'.

***

Anyway, I wrote all this for myself as a commemoration of sorts, but if you took the time to read it--thank you. Love you, fandom. I always will.

1 In those days, m/m fandom was known as 'slash', which grew from the fannish shorthand where 'K&S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock having adventures or tribulations or what have you, and 'K/S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock getting it on (Kirk divided by Spock or Spock into Kirk--it was mathy fannish humor and I was into it then and I still am now). Slash was decidedly unpopular in the fannish world in 1984, and there was a concerted effort to force slash authors, artists, and fans out of 'mainstream' fannish public life. Hence, under the table.

#fandom #fandom history

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"Frozen": a Faux-Blackout Poem

a February fill for Build-a-Bucky Bingo @buckybarnesevents, Prompt: Frozen/Cryo

And just the poem, in an easier to read format:

Frozen he dreams? alone a man pulled out of time his future stolen, poor soldier erased.

Thanks to the lovely peeps making this event (and many others) happen 🥰 I told myself to just make a small little thing. I don't know if I'm super happy with the execution of this, but I still like the idea of it.

My previous bingo fill: half agony, half hope (a Stucky Regency AU)

My bingo card so far:

#bucky barnes #mcu #OMG. #this is so perfect and the DETAILS #it’s too too lovely/terrible

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@forgotn1 you're on Dan Stevens story on insta lol

#dan stevens my beloved #batb #the muppets

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Someone at tumblr/automattic asked whether requests to opt out of "AI" data sharing would be honored retroactively (which seems important, seeing as tumblr has apparently compiled the user data they're going to send *before* giving any kind of opt-out option) and Automattic's head of "AI" Andrew Spittle responded:

We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.

And I do not trust midjourney or openai in the slightest--their business models, by their own admission, depend on scraping art they don't have permission to use--so I do not believe that they will honor any requests to remove data already received when requests are made to remove it. So yeah. take that as you will.

Edit

about 20 minutes after I posted this, @staff put out this:

They do not acknowledge that they are definitely actually in the process of selling your data to third parties, but they have a setting which (they claim) will prevent them from sharing information with third parties, including "AI" training businesses.

I've turned it on, but tumblr has burned so much trust that I really don't have faith that tumblr will actually change the package of information that will be provided to these third parties based on the setting: tumblr/automattic must know that "AI" art theft is tremendously unpopular with a huge portion of tumblr, and that having this setting (even with a "you must know about it to use it" opt out setting) will result in a bunch of users setting their unintuitive "don't share with third parties" setting to "on" which will diminish the value of the sale.

I don't think tumblr will honor this setting.

#tumblr #ai #deepest of sighs #the enshittification of the internet