so many posts on so many different forums are about to break
In case you hadn’t heard…
“We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content,” the page reads. “Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.” Imgur notes that it will “employ automated detection software” alongside human moderators to identify explicit content.
Squidge is free, and has a TOS that’s about the same as AO3’s.
from a glance, Squidge looks promising..
HOWEVER it is hosted by ONE person?? what happens when that person dies, or their personal circumstances change??
Squidge is not a trustworthy long-term alternative.
Squidge.org has recently registered as a nonprofit, like the OTW. (I’m on the board.) (This is very new and very tiny.) https://www.squidgeworld.org/ is the first/only AO3 clone on the internet right now.
And there are agreements in place - if something disastrous happens to the owner, the OTW takes it over. (The OTW may not be able to do much with the image side of things. But they’ll be able to keep it stable.)
Squidge has been around over 20 years. It’s as stable as fan-run sites get. And he’s aware that it needs more stability than “I’ll keep the servers up,” so he’s recently made changes that allow for long-term viability.
Also: Like the OTW, he owns the servers. He’s not beholden to Amazon or Google’s TOS for content permissions.
He has a tumblr! @squidgiepdx if this is still you
Yep! Squidge.org has been run by me for 29 years (!!!). But now we’re a nonprofit with a board and plans for Squidge to outlive me.
TV Executives: “if the strike goes in, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”
Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.
Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.
It’s just hilarious that they’re trying to pull this whole “but your favorite shows!” nonsense.
Oh, you mean the shows you cancel after the third season no matter how good they’re doing to avoid paying writers residuals? The shows that get produced and then never aired because you found a nice tax writeoff? The shows whose writing suffers because the writers’ room got six weeks to write before getting booted and making the showrunner adapt all their scripts? The shows you straight up pulled from your streaming service to scam their crews out of rewatch money?
I will happily sacrifice my shows for the writers that gave them to me, no questions needed, but if anyone tries to say that the blatantly terrible way streaming treats its writers is somehow beneficial to shows, remind them of Infinity Train and Batgirl. That’s the ideal they’re pushing towards if someone doesn’t say no, and we should be thankful that the writers are doing that for us.
Steven Universe: Eh, I don’t really feel like saying “girlfriend” or “wife”. Maybe they’re together. They have a special connection…
(gets violently shoved aside)
The Loud House/Craig of the Creek/The Owl House: Pfft, amateur. “My GIRLFRIEND Sam and I…” “I’m texting my GIRLFRIEND, mind your business.” “Luz’s new GF showed her…”
Can we not do this thing? Do you realize that Rebecca had to fight for what we got with Rupphire and literally risked her job? and Pearl and Rose. Like, there is no need to knock other shows down because of Lumity.
These kids today, I tell you what. In my day you had to bury your girlfriends under subtext and then end the series when the truth was revealed.
Risked her job, hell, it’s an open secret now that the Rupphire wedding (which, may I remind folks, was the first queer wedding in a kids’ cartoon, which is a BIG DEAL) is why everything about the rest of the series felt rushed. They had to scramble to tell the rest of the story because they took a gamble and the network retaliated by shortening their production time.
Rebecca Sugar and the crewniverse risked the entire show getting flat-out cancelled in order to show that wedding, only for people to say it “wasn’t progressive enough” and was “giving in to stereotypes” to put Ruby in a wedding dress. Never mind that Ruby kept getting dubbed over as a guy in localization, Sapphire was unmistakably feminine in every version, and putting Ruby in the dress was a flagrant way to say, “fuck you, you can’t pretend this is a straight couple; this is a queer couple and a queer wedding.”
Dana Terrace has said that The Owl House only exists with its intended queerness because of what Rebecca Sugar and her team accomplished with Steven Universe. Hell, there are multiple members of the Steven Universe team who went on to work on the other shows mentioned in the OP–Steven Sugar, for example, who is Rebecca Sugar’s brother and inspiration for SU in the first place (as well a background artist on the show), is currently an artist on The Owl House. There are people who got their start on Steven Universe who now only have the opportunity to tell more queer stories because of Steven Universe’s success.
I’m not even 30 years old yet and I’m still old enough to remember when being gay was fully illegal in the United States. Not gay marriage, but literally just BEING GAY. It wasn’t that long ago, and the fact that today in 2021 I can turn on the TV and watch gay cartoons intended for children? I never thought I’d see it. Fucking ever.
So let’s stop pitting queer creators and media against each other, shall we?
So often older shows that seem pitifully lackluster by today’s audience’s standards were hard-fought, BIG-ASS DEALS in their contemporary context. (And for the record, calling SU or something like Korra ‘older’ to me feels bizarre af, I’m 28, this is all new to me in some ways. This is all extraordinary and the opposite of lackluster.) What you’re seeing is an extraordinary amount of progress over the last mere ten years. Don’t knock it.
I like this channel that goes over all the behind the scenes stuff show creators had to go through to get the few bit of gay stuff allowed in and what the reaction was when various shows through history first came out. It’s mostly sitcoms but also some films. interesting to see public perception changing over time.
Moria. You fear to go into that dispensary. The Dwarves toked too weedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the dankness of Khazad-dûm… shadow and flame.
shame that a lot of tumblr didn’t learn their lesson about treating moderate progress as worse than regression from the russian op scandal.
if someone is writing about politics in a way that makes you angry about progress in the right direction because it didn’t go far enough? do not fucking trust that person.
why do they want you angry about progress? why aren’t they sharing ways to help us progress further, but instead just bemoaning how far we haven’t gotten? do not fucking trust people who want you emotionally raw and helping no one.
As someone who remembers the 90s I’m just kind of like, why did we think it was cool for the future to be touchscreens and smooth surfaces everywhere, this sucks actually. But I think I know. It’s like, I’ve always wanted to try floating in a sensory deprivation tank but if you locked me in there I’d have a panic attack.
Anyways this is why I buy myself pens that have a satisfying tactile feel, why I take the time to rub my fingers over my paper, flip the corner and listen to the thup thup thup
During my most touch-staved phases of the pandemic I obviously wanted sex, I wanted affection, human warmth, but what took me a long time to realize was that I was also starved for texture. Once I started deliberately seeking out things to touch, taking my gloves off and rubbing tree bark, squeezing grass in between my hands, I found it a lot less tempting to keep getting into volatile online relationships that ended badly (often due to my own emotional inconsistency).
How many of the people who relentlessly say “touch grass” have actually thought to take off their winter gloves and run their bare fingers through the cold underbrush?