For others, this thing can ruin their lives and their means of supporting themselves. So I’m not going to make it about me too much.
Most of my stuff is gay so its probably going to be flagged a lot. I’ll request reviews when I notice it and will probably keep posting my work here, at least for a while. But my guess is that I’m eventually going to get tired of fighting with Tumblr. I encourage you to find me on Instagram (@mostlyharmlessdesigns) or Twitter (@harmlesscrochet) if you want to keep seeing my stuff consistently. I’m also Mostly Harmless Designs on Facebook. Note that my Twitter has ended up being mostly talking about movies with my friends and talking about D&D. If you’re here for yarn, go to Instagram
Tumblr was the first place my work really took off and it means a lot to me that I’ve been able to reach so many of you, particularly with my lgbt plushies. Rest assured, I will be continuing to make them and hopefully expanding what I do even more.
I hope you’ll be willing to come along for the ride with me, even off Tumblr.
You don’t need to own the blog to back it up with this, so if your favorite resource or fan rec blog has been dormant and you think they might get hit (like recipe blogs and sfw queer resource blogs did…), well…
deleted a bunch of chronic pain and chronic illness posts from blogs they’ve left (like mine)
This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects.
The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.
ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers.
Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)
This is a fucking problem, let’s not blow it off.
I know some people are too young (or simply weren’t involved in fandom back then) to remember what went down with livejournal and a couple of other sites “back in the day”, but it all started out as “it’s okay, we’re just removing the nasty porn”, and then “okay well, just make sure you put your porn behind a cut, no, wait jk you need to host it externally, a link is fine, maybe” and pretty much devolved swiftly into “actually sweety, LGBT content is inherently NSFW by default because it might make the kiddies gay if we expose them to it, so y’all need to leave now byyyeeee”.
Like…that happened. And it took nearly a decade for the fandom spaces to recover and stabilize and to get to the point where LGBT content creators could host their content without being told “you’re not welcome here” and I’m just sitting here, watching as youtube demonetizes LGBT content creators, and Facebook flags up LGBT ads as “inappropriate” and now tumblr is going through the queer and gay tags and just mass blanketing it as inappropriate, while actual pornbots and nazis wind up in my recommended feed.
Like I am uncomfortable y’all. I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like “the olden days” where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone.
And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.
So yea, the sky is not falling, but the ice under our feet sure is making worrying sounds.
They just flagged the post I wrote about leaving Tumblr, this is absolutely ridiculous.
So here it is again, without the image:
It’s not an easy choice, after a decade, but I have no intention of being on a site that implements bans that are sexist (”female presenting nipples”? Really?!) and honestly, plain stupid. Where you see “porn”, I see expression, vulnerability, emotion, art. And don’t even get me started on how broken your algorithm is. To you guys, who have supported me and shared my art here: Thank you♥ If something changes, I’ll be back. You can always find me on IG, FBandTwitter. If you want to keep up with important art related announcements (book launches etc), there’s always my newsletter.
Everybody’s talking about Tumblr’s probable eventual demise! So I thought I’d just remind you all that I can be found on a couple of different platforms:
I’m also on Dreamwidth in a more private/personal way as chocolatepot. My DW entries are mainly friends-locked, out of habit but also because I talk about my job and/or job search from time to time. Dreamwidth has a bad rep as a dead zone, but that’s a) kind of a self-perpetuating perception, since if people didn’t think “nothing goes on there” they’d take more time to read and comment, and b) not even that true, I read my friends-list every morning and there’s always new stuff. I’m going to quote from the recent post from the admin there:
With the new update to Tumblr’s community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we’d like to take a moment to reassure all y’all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it’s legal under US law, it’s okay to post here. We’re 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we’re here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways.
Tumblr’s definition of “adult content” seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It’s definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr’s, I won’t lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it’ll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that’s small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.
For those asking whether we have a mobile app: we don’t at the moment! There are many (soooooo many) prerequisites that we have to do first, which we’ve been working on but haven’t yet finished, because we’re dealing with a lot of systems and architecture decisions that were made nearly 20 years ago by now. (A mobile app would also be subject to the same censorship pressure Tumblr faced – it’s looking pretty good that Apple taking the Tumblr app out of the App Store was the proximate cause of Tumblr’s content guidelines change, and Apple is notoriously strict on apps for sites that allow user-generated content – so even once we have one, it’s even odds on how long it’ll be able to stay available for certain platforms.) We’ve been trying to improve the website’s experience on small screens in the meantime, and that’s an ongoing project that we’ll do our best to devote some more attention to over the next few months.
Feel free to use the comments to this post to recommend communities to join and to make new friends, whether you’re here for the first time as a Tumblr refugee or have been here since the start (and any range in between). To the newcomers: we’re happy to have you join us. Welcome aboard!
Fandom is a very different place on text-based and journal/community-based sites, but still fun! There’s a multifandom friending meme going on, too, to help you find people to follow there.
Sometimes you find a new home, a new path, new friends, new interests and it’s okay to leave your old life behind and start new somewhere else. You are allowed to grow. You are allowed to transition from 2018 to 2019 with a different view on the world. You are allowed to say goodbye, save some memories and start fresh somewhere else.
I would like to thank the over 60+ major and independent publishers as well as each independent author and artist that has granted the TarotProse blog permission to utilize their decks within this blog. I am eternally grateful, humbled and overjoyed that I can continue on this journey of self discovery, expression, writing and divination as this blog was intended for. Thank you to all the publishers who actively went to my blog, have provided words of encouragement, sent beautiful letters, emails and commended me on my due diligence of being respectful and patient concerning the permissions and usage of their decks. Also thank you for those publishers who have sent me tea. I have a really huge supply now. lol I really appreciate it. 😀
Thank you to the Divination and Tarot communities of social media. We have made such monumental change within our community concerning permissions and usage and I would like to applaud all of you.
Thank you to everyone who reads, follows and subscribes to this blog. There is almost three hundred of you! I hope I can continue to be of worth for your time and your reading pleasure. Thank you for pushing me, for your kindness, love and generosity. Thank you for your understanding and allowing this blog to continue to be a safe space for the ups and downs of my life. You are appreciated and adored beyond measure.
Spitfire Alice A Gra 
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