The Last Tumblr Apocalypse

PSA: Stuff You Maybe Didn’t Realize You Can Back Up To AO3, And How To Tag it

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

olderthannetfic:

destinationtoast:

inu-fiction:

Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me:

Archive of Our Own, aka AO3. 

“What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??”

No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included – no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?” 

The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters?  The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks? 

All of those are fannish nonfiction! 

Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” – ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons – to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans. 

Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!):

First, the Very Broad:

– “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it.

– while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters).  The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them – something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.

– I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers. 

Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag. 

– You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right?

If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc. 

Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add:

– “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know)

– “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them.  In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it,helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally. 

Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 :)

Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions. 

The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting – such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc!

But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers. 

What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later. 

Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)

Thanks for this helpful guide! I haven’t used some of these tags so far for the fandom stats work I’ve cross-posted to AO3, but that’s because I didn’t know about them. Great ideas! :)

I keep meaning to mass archive my Toastystats work to AO3, but I am always stymied by image hosting when trying to overcome inertia and do so. It takes time to repost all the images to external hosting (like imgur). So thus far I’ve only done it for a few major analyses, and even in some of those cases, the images are hosted on Tumblr. But I should finally get around to it. At least I’ve exported my Toastystats side blog recently, so most of my stuff should be preserved if anything should happen. But maybe this holiday break I’ll finally make more progress.

I second all of this!

I’ve also found that AO3 is the best way for me to distribute my vids. I do have to host them elsewhere, but AO3 gives me a consistent URL and a way to have useful headers with fandom/ship/etc. even if I switch hosting a hundred times.

Tags:

#101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #the more you know #AO3 #PSA

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

i’m not actually awake enough to go Deep with this so i’ll attempt to keep it brief

so the barnes and noble thing where they fired all their full time employees recently. obviously, terrible thing, sympathies, fuck capitalism, etc, but like.

for me specifically, that’s like “welp, another timeline shot”. cos if i had not quit my job there due to snow and crazybrains, one of me in the multiverse was still working there and probably full time or managerial at that point, so like… that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

and like. the thing i’m trying to say is. that’s capitalism. you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same. you have to give your life to people you can’t trust.

and i’m so *bad* at not trusting. and that’s why i’m so bad at capitalism. actively not trusting takes a lot of spoons and fucks me the hell up. my default state is trust, and in a lot of timelines that’s killed me already, and it’s going to get me in a fair number of the rest.

and i hate that. i don’t know what to do with it, trying to be less trusting is… it’s different than trying to be less empathetic? it’s not “if i do that it will make me a Bad Person”. it’s that i *forget*. i don’t have a… a dimmer switch for trust. it’s all or nothing. and that just utterly does not work for capitalism and i *hate* it :-(

>>that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

[…]

you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same<<

Hmm. I’m having a hard time verbalising my thoughts here…like, there’s generally only so much that somebody can fuck you over financially if you’ve had some good years to prepare in. But I guess the ability (or lack of) to go “I should use these good years to prepare for the inevitable fucking-over attempt” is in fact the problem (or a large part of it, anyway)?

(It seems like costs of living vary a *lot* from one set of circumstances to another, and figures that seem unrealistically high to one person can seem unrealistically low to another. But in the circumstances that *I’m* familiar with, a full-time minimum-wage job is enough money to support two pretty-careful people or 1.5 moderately-careful people. So if one *doesn’t* have dependents (but does have roommates for the bulk discounts), for every year one can hold on to a full-time job, one can live for 6 – 12 months after getting laid off. Longer, if one manages to obtain a job that pays more than minimum wage.)

(I guess it’s a variant of the idea of fuck-you money, one that focuses on the possibility of *them* telling *you* to fuck off rather than the other way around. “Fuck-me money”?)

—

I was just talking to Mom earlier today about how I’m not sure I’m ever going to be *able* to trust that an income won’t just disappear one day, that even in the better possible scenarios for a decade from now where I’ve gotten some cushy job in an accounting firm or something, I’ll probably still be living on the 2028-dollars equivalent of $1k – $1.5k/month and agonising over every expenditure and squirrelling away every spare cent for the winter.

Which is the opposite of the psychological issues you usually hear about poor people developing (and which you have yourself, right?), where they feel like there’s no point in saving because *savings* always disappear no matter what you do. I think this is because those people tend to have spent an extended and/or formative time as living-paycheck-to-paycheck!poor, whereas I spent mine as living-primarily-off-of-dwindling-savings!poor. Different kinds of poverty lead to different adaptations.

*nods* Yeah, basically. There’s the paycheck-to-paycheck versus dwindling-savings thing, there’s the fact that I just plain tend to be a little more interested in buying shinies than you do (as demonstrated on Flight Rising), and… like, the trust thing from my OP, it’s not just that it’s exhausting and takes spoons I need to work. It’s that… *tries to word*… It’s almost a cognitive dissonance thing. The whole way I’m wired around trust is either/or. Working for The Man while simultaneously distrusting The Man is a fundamental skill of late-capitalism millennial life, and it – it fritzes me out. It’s not something I can maintain for more than a few months. It’s – you know more about thought experiments than I do, there probably is one about this, but it’s like trying to actively believe two contradictory thoughts at once, “Black is black” and “Black is not black” or something (I don’t know, I’m not terribly coherent), *all the time*. If I… if I let myself notice that my employer is not trustworthy, that they’re a capitalist entity and therefore going to fuck me over as soon as it suits them to do so, I can’t… I go straight to “well fuck them first” and I quit. I can’t seem to do a headspace where they’re going to fuck me over but I can stay and work till then. :-(

#fuck everything #i dont know that this is surmountable #because i do know that i always fundamentally *want* to trust people and think the best of them #(in topics for a separate post its so infuriating that these characteristics are always mentioned as making me a Good Person) #(i did not choose them and if i could choose i would not have them) #(its just brain wiring like my ability to feel awe) #(fucking brains can i just have a robot body now and reprogram myself) #:P

Tags:

#now that I’m thinking about this here is another conversational thread I was in for which the last comment was not mine #(note: thread is from March-April 2018) #I actually *do* have a spare copy of this but it would be weird to have to go digging around in my tumblr-utils output just to #finish reading this thread #no other such threads come *immediately* to mind but there probably are some #if I come across any while formatting the WordPress archive and they haven’t rotted yet I will reblog those too #adventures in human capitalism #venting cw? #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #I’m going to tag these reblogs #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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asexualactivities:

asexualactivities:

[This post is a submission.]

So I’ve been (very slowly, I know) thinking over the post asking for recommendations to share. Yesterday it occurred to me how many trials and tribulations I had in learning to masturbate, and I wondered if maybe I could help people in my past selves’ situations skip over some of that shit.

But honestly, the main takeaway I got from the learning process (other than the outcome) was that the whole thing is a complete mess and it’s a goddamn miracle anyone ever manages to find a technique that works for them.

I used to resent Scarleteen for telling me “masturbation usually doesn’t work the first few times you try it; keep trying, it gets better with practice” and sending me off on a wild goose chase for a while in my late teens. But it turns out that, in a way, they weren’t wrong: while the genital-focused methods they recommended have never done much for me, the method that *is* right for me *also* didn’t work at first and got better with practice.

(Trouble was, I had so much learned helplessness built up around masturbation from previous wild goose chases that for a long while I hardly ever practised. You know how long it took me to reach a skill level where I could reliably achieve effects that were, not just “neat” or “better than nothing”, but actually *satisfying*? *Three years*! And almost all of that time was in making “you know, I *could* masturbate, *that* might help with the sexual frustration” an available thought (instead of reverting to my old habits of distraction and waiting it out); if I hadn’t had to deal with that, I suspect I could have reached a sufficient skill level in a month or three.)

I guess the best I have for actionable advice is to focus your practice on methods with a high prior probability of working (things that are a good fit with what you already know about your sexuality, things that have worked for a lot of other people, or ideally both), and on things that are at least *somewhat* enjoyable even when they don’t satisfy your libido. That second part helps with cultivating a lower-pressure mindset: it’s easier to get the motivation to practice if there’s something pleasant to it (rather than just a gamble at it becoming pleasant *eventually*), and that also makes it easier not to get frustrated and give up too soon. (Although, unfortunately, I still have no idea how to tell how soon is too soon to give up. Hell, for all I know, there’s some trick to making genital-based masturbation work for me that I just never worked out, or never practised that particular trick long enough.)

I wish I could tell you that it gets better, but I know there’s no guarantee that a given person will have *any* method that works for them. Maybe try to make your peace with that idea in addition to the above practising; no individual is capable of the full range of possible pleasures, we’re all missing some stuff. Don’t get me wrong, masturbation *is* a very useful tool to have, and it’s worth trying to obtain that tool, but stressing out about whether you’re ever going to find something won’t help anything and might very well make it more difficult (by loading practice with negative associations).

(this is all assuming you even *have* a libido; I’m not sure which parts are different if you don’t, but I’m guessing it’s probably easier for you to be lower-pressure about it)

I don’t know if it gets better for you; all I can say for sure is, it got better for me. Lately I kind of want to go back, give my twenty-year-old self a hug, tell her it’s gonna be okay, and hand her a guide to self-hypnosis.

Very good points.

“Just keep trying!” is something my advice is often guilty of, as well.  I wish there was a clear distinction between “You just haven’t gotten the hang of it, but you will with a slight modification” and “That just ain’t gonna work, try something completely different”.  Maybe the advice should be more like “Try lots of different things lots of different ways, lots of different times!”

The line “no individual is capable of the full range of possible pleasures, we’re all missing some stuff“ is something important to keep in mind.  I know what works for me and I know some of what works for other people.  When I try what works for other people, it’s a mixed bag.  Sometimes it works for me, but other things work better.  Sometimes it doesn’t work at all and I don’t understand how anyone can do it that way because wow that’s just uncomfortable and I’m going to stop now.  And sometimes it will be so close and maybe it would be great if I can just work out the one missing piece but nope that didn’t work after all but will it ever work and should I keep trying or not.  Maybe the advice needs to suggest all of those things as options.  But that can never catch all of the things that might work, and maybe none of the things suggested will, but something else might.

And so often, “Try something else” assumes that you’re in the right town to begin with, and you just need to find the right street.  But as you found, maybe the ticket to success isn’t in Genitalville, but it’s in the next town over or maybe even on a different continent entirely.  The standard guidebooks fall apart in that kind of scenario.

So, to readers out there:  Do you have any suggestions for telling the difference between “You haven’t gotten the hang of it” and “That ain’t gonna work”?  And how would you recommend finding what works, if what works isn’t remotely close to what everyone suggests?  Ask | Submit

Tags:

#I realised last night that I never reblogged the moderator’s response to my submitted OP back in March #and therefore it isn’t in any of my copious backups #since I often go read it when re-reading my blog #and I’m a bit surprised asexualactivities hasn’t *already* been purged #I figured I’d better fix that ASAP #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #asexuality #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lenyberry:

dingonato:

My post of just two hands touching also got flagged as explicit which pretty much confirms this flagging is being done by the Vulcan High Council. Let me post pictures of hands touching, T’Pau.

hand photos confirmed NSFV (Not Safe For Vulcans)

Tags:

#Star Trek #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

brin-bellway:

captainneverever:

Now that you’ve downloaded your blog and are waiting for the next step, what next?

Help out the Internet Archive (aka Wayback Machine) scrape tumblr for all the blogs!

Check out tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr to see the progress so far.

The ArchiveTeamWarrior needs an internet connection and some space on your device. They want to save as much as they can.

(Clarification: the Internet Archive is not *running* this project–ArchiveTeam is a separate entity–but they *will* be hosting the results.)

(hat-tip @sophia-epistemia)

Tags:

#morning reblog #signal boost #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse

Tumblr tracker Dashboard

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{Title link: http://tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr/ }}

nightpool:

Hey everybody, the ArchiveTeam tumblr project is up and running!

If you have resources, please install Archiveteam’s warrior program to contribute to the project! It’s very easy to set up on and install on any computer, there are step by step instructions at http://tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr/

We’re already up to 11TB and 187 million blogs archived, but we’re going to need a lot more help to get all the NSFW content before the 17th!

main project discussion takes place irc at #tumbledown on efnet, and you can add blogs to be saved using this google form: https://goo.gl/RtXZEq

Where did you get the 187-million figure from? It makes sense that the ~65k figure on the tracker would just be the sex blogs, since all of the blogs I’ve seen go by on it have been sex blogs, but I didn’t see any information regarding non-sex blogs.

I have unlimited Internet, cheap electricity, and a cool climate, so I’m in a pretty good position for (small-scale) volunteer computing. I’ve been running a warrior for a couple days now. I’ve been leaving my laptop on overnight because if I’m interpreting the instructions right, you only get to pause a task for a few hours before it’s considered abandoned and re-assigned, and I didn’t want to lose work. (especially since my current task has been 22 hours and counting; some of these blogs are pretty big)

I think I’ll continue helping out with their other projects once this one is finished: archiving is (as anyone reading this blog has probably noticed) a pet cause of mine. Since it mostly just needs bandwidth and doesn’t take much CPU, I can even run it and World Community Grid at the same time without problems (anti-disease efforts are my other pet cause).

Tags:

#reply via reblog #signal boost #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

captainneverever:

Now that you’ve downloaded your blog and are waiting for the next step, what next?

Help out the Internet Archive (aka Wayback Machine) scrape tumblr for all the blogs!

Check out tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr to see the progress so far.

The ArchiveTeamWarrior needs an internet connection and some space on your device. They want to save as much as they can.

(Clarification: the Internet Archive is not *running* this project–ArchiveTeam is a separate entity–but they *will* be hosting the results.)

(hat-tip @sophia-epistemia)

#signal boost #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse