Jesus christ, I am having a fucking riot this day. A riot.
Last night I decided that I was going to be deeply, egregiously petty, because my main blog (here) is still flagged, but the dozens of pornbots who follow me weekly are not! It’s so good to know that the fucking pornbots are having a better experience on this website than I am!
So, I decided to be petty, very petty indeed, and I went through all of my flagged posts - all the way back to 2013 - and I appealed all of them.
Those of you who have been following me for a while will know that my main blog was, until The Purge™, a place where I posted and reblogged mountains and mountains of explicit gay pornography. 99.9% of these flagged posts were, unsurprisingly, exactly that, so I sat there, for much of the night, scrolling through all of these flagged porn posts, appealing every single one of them, because fuck @staff, that’s why. It’s not fair for them to flag me for things that I posted when NSFW content was allowed, and I’m sick of trying to play nicely when they clearly have no intention of treating their longstanding users with any respect.
So I appealed all of these posts. Hundreds of them. All night. I dug up that one retrowave YT channel and got listening to the stuff on there that I hadn’t had a chance to hear yet, and I appealed all of these fucking posts, purely out of petty spite and frustration.
“Why would you send us all of these obviously explicit pornographic posts to review!?!”
“BECAUSE I HATE YOU”
Fast forward to today.
Today, when I started receiving emails detailing the results of my appeals. Many, many emails, coming into my inbox in flurries. Sometimes I’ll get one or two and then it’ll go quiet for a while, but sometimes I get 50 in one go! It’s great, I’m having a marvellous time. Unsurprisingly, most of these emails - and they’re still coming in, I’m still getting them! This has been my whole day so far! - are failed appeals, because I’ve just been appealing straight up, blatant gay porn, but some of them are actually getting restored for some reason! So that’s, I mean, okay then! I’ll take it!
But the funniest part of this, the best part, is that in amongst all of these emails telling me about my filthy gay porn appeals, sometimes I get an email telling me that my actual blog has been restored! And when I get one of those, I can reload my dash and see that I’ve got my icon back! And then I get another email, within seconds, telling me that adult content was detected on my Tumblr, and then my blog gets flagged again! Sometimes I will get several of these within a span of a few minutes and my main goes back and forth being unflagged and flagged again like someone’s having a fucking lightswitch rave with it, and I fucking love it! I love that this is happening, it’s fucking hilarious.
I’m in the middle of another flurry of emails and it’s happening right now. I am fucking roaring. I’ve been unflagged and flagged again several times while I’ve been writing this post. As much as Tumblr claims that appeals are reviewed by “a real live person”, this is the kind of absolute batshit nonsense that only a machine could be capable of; one post out of the hundreds I appealed gets restored, and then my blog gets restored too, but then immediately afterwards I get back another failed appeal and I instantly get flagged again. It’s incredible.
This fucking website. I’m going to miss it when it’s gone.
MY MAIN IS RESTORED! But for how long? Stay tuned to find out!
when the capitalists die out either thru global warming or revolution will we be able to start homegrown internet
been reading about dual power and how to grow my own tomatoes and i’m wondering how and if we’ll be able to start commie internet lol
like obviously the internet is this huge electric capitalist controlled hardware infrastructure thing so after all that shuts down is there a way to do it ourselves lol
i want to come home from a hard day on the communal allotment, kiss my Wife, crank up my generator, and start sharing meams!
GOOD NEWS: the homegrown commie internet is in the works! Across the world, people fighting against censorship and for a more democratic internet are building mesh networks (meshnets) of long-range wifi (LoRa)
Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!
As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc
What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing
You can read more about this kind of stuff here (or here if it’s cloudy in Barcelona)!
there’s also the work being done by the DCPT, left-behind Detroiters meshing together their neighborhoods to share overpriced high-speed connections among the community and producing these good good educational documents, especially this rad resource page. building meshnets to share a global uplink is very similar to building meshnets for the purpose of intracommunication and these resources are useful in both cases
I’ve had a couple people ask about how to join/organize something like this, which is great! The best list of active projects I know of is here, though you should also do a search online if you don’t see one in your area in case they missed it. For those without a nearby group, put a pin here and try contacting nearby pins as well - you can use the instructions on buildyourowninter.net as well as the DCPT’s resources as linked above to get set up!
Please reblog this version so others can get involved!
no matter how ‘mature’ u think u are when ur under 18….like u will have a fkn revelation in ur 20s about how naive and different you were………….even if ur like the most experienced teenager it doesnt matter……………its bizarre to me that Anyone in their early 20s could ever be attracted to someone younger than them…those few years r packed full of the most formative shit in establishing ur personality and identity and its fkn gross that anyone could see someone in that vulnerable process and think yeah this is my equal despite me being at a completely different stage of life than you. like what the fuck. its always guys who feel so inadequate so are seeking 2 be idolised by someone younger who doesnt have enough experience to know just how pathetic that person is
and especially cos when ur in highschool/just fresh out of there ur still in that ‘adults have authority over me’ childlike state of mind that has been drilled into you and u havent had a chance 2 dismantle that thru experiences such as uni or tafe or jobz (or just simply losing ur status as a highschool student) which allows u to feel like ur own person and an adult in society etccc
Here’s something I wanna say real quick, while I’m feeling salty: Amazon has totally contributed to the devaluation of literature. Those prices you see, the $13 they’re asking you to pay for a hardcover book? Those are deep, DEEP discounts that they’re able to implement because they don’t collect sales tax if they can get away with it, they don’t contribute money to the communities where they have a physical presence, they have shitty labor practices, Jeff Bezos has more money than god, etc.
They’re so omnipotent at this point that they’ve normalized the discounted prices for books as the standard. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had someone come up to me and tell me what the price on Amazon is, expecting me to match it. The number of times I’ve been told, “Oh, it’s cheaper on Amazon, I’ll just get it there.” Even at author events, where book sales DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTE to whether or not that bookstore will be able to get more authors in.
So when you go into a bookstore, and you’re asked to pay $27 for a hardcover, remember: THAT IS THE COVER PRICE. Set by the publishers. The bookstore is not upcharging you. They are asking you to pay the value of the book. Amazon’s low prices come with a cost. Please, just keep that in mind.
(I made a post with options for buying books online that aren’t Amazon. Check it out!)
This is a great post, and I just want to point out: publishers aren’t upcharging you either.
The cost of the book is the advance for the author, it’s the salaries for all the people who work on it (including editors, yes, but also designers and marketers and publicists and lawyers and accountants and everyone else who makes sure publishing works). It’s the cost of printing the books and the materials to print those books on and the warehouses to store those books in.
It’s keeping the literal lights on.
No one in the book business, from the author to the publisher to the bookseller, is making themselves rich off your money. This is the cost to survive. Amazon is running at a deficit because they can make up the cost with other things they do, and because once they run everyone else out of business, they’ll be the only game in town and can charge whatever they damn well please.
And please, please do not ask a bookstore (especially an indie bookstore) if they “price match.” It’s so insulting.
Amazon routinely sells books at or *below* wholesale cost. Meaning that when you ask a bookstore to ‘price match’ Amazon, you’re literally asking them to give you the book for free, or even take a financial loss on it.
‘So how can Amazon do it?’ you ask? The answer is Amazon does not care about losing money. It sells goods at a loss continuously. (Don’t believe me? Just search “Amazon quarterly losses” and you can find article after article about this) Why? Because its goal isn’t to sell the most things, it’s goal is to be the only place where you CAN buy things. They gouge prices on goods to a point where brick and mortar retailers absolutely cannot compete and they do it with the singular goal of eliminating competition.
Things have value. They represent many people’s time and labor. For books, specifically, they represent tremendous cultural worth that extends far beyond the value of the paper they’re printed on. We have to appreciate the value of goods and be willing to pay a fair price that will support and nurture industries.
It’s ok to be upset that you can’t afford $26 for a new hardcover, but make sure that that anger is directed, not at the people whose labor makes books possible, but at the people on top (like Jeff Bezos) who have devalued your own labor such that you can’t afford it.
Don’t forget: bookstores can’t sell groceries, they can’t sell electronics, they can’t sell homewares or clothing or pet supplies. They can’t sell all of the other things that Amazon uses to make up for its losses on the books it sells.
Rest assured that those book prices will go up - way, way up - when Amazon’s competition has been driven out of business.
