This Is Very Interesting To Read About. Although In Europe Bigger Portions Are Becoming More Popular

This is very interesting to read about. Although in Europe bigger portions are becoming more popular we are generally used to the old tradition that not eating up your meal means something is wrong with it/that you did not enjoy it. Especially in more expensive places taking leftovers home is considered rude/greedy or simply not possible as you are supposed to enjoy your meal while you are there. Taking leftovers home is becoming more common but not the norm so this might be where the confusion comes from. 

Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home.  The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”

If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese.  Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.

An Open Letter to Tumblr about the Adult Content Ban and How it is Hurting Your Users:

Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more. 

You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again. 

We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue. 

 Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole.  There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough. 

You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:

Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind. 

We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.

 If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to. 

You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.

If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

@staff @support

Tumblr: Oh wow look a female human chest... think about the traumatised children...the world has seen no greater evil!

Users: WTF chill breast are naturally occuring on all...

Tumblr: Eeeevilll pedophiles look at female nipples!! BEGONE!

Users:

Guys, I decided to be brave and post this. I know I don’t have a very large reach, but I encourage others to share if they find this important. Just a warning: some may find these images difficult to view. I assure you, it’s even worse to experience.

After carefully reading over the new rules and regulations I discovered I’m in a unique situation to both test Tumblr’s new rules and law down some education at the same time. I’m exposing myself in the process, so please be kind.

These are female presenting breasts without nipples. As you will notice, they both look different. That’s because they are from two different forms of breast reconstruction. The left is a simple reconstruction with expander placed under the pectoral muscle immediately after mastectomy. It is slowly inflated during a series of appointments over several weeks or months. The right one initially looked like that as well until an infection required emergency surgical removal of the implant.

This is what I was left with after that surgery. It isn’t pretty, is it? I found a plastic surgeon to fix this, which is what I spent my summer doing.

The only way to reconstruct that breast was with a form of reconstruction that uses donor muscle, tissue, and skin from my back. This is called a lat flap reconstruction. You can see the beautiful artwork my surgeon did with a sharpie in preparation for my surgery. That should give you an idea of how extensive this surgery was. The surgery itself was 8 hours and recovery is ongoing months later.

And that gets us back to here:

I have a massive scar on my back and a Frankenstein breast, but it’s the closest thing I’ve had to normal in 8 years. I still have to go in every couple of weeks for fills in the new breast because they’re not quite even yet. Then I get to wait a couple of months for things to rest before my final surgery where we’ll replace the expander with actual implants.

So there you have it. Female presenting breasts, no nipples, and all posted in the name of education. What do you say, Tumblr? Is this good enough for your new rules?

Instagram: @relatabledoodles

Pixie and Brutus Halloween

Artist credit: @pet_foolery

Self explanatory sadness…