To Be Clear, Unless Staff Trips Over The Trail Of Extension Cords Keeping The Servers Running, Tumblr

To be clear, unless staff trips over the trail of extension cords keeping the servers running, Tumblr likely isn't going anywhere any time soon.

What the info we've seen suggests is that updates are going to slow down, maintenance is maybe going to get a little shaky, and we're going to see more glitches as time goes on and the remaining staff gets further behind their workload.

Is this a good thing? No, absolutely not.

Should you be panicking, jumping overboard, running for the hills, etc? Also no.

So what does it mean?

Well, for myself and several other creatives you all saw tagged in that post, it means we're looking around trying to figure out what to do in the long run. We're not running for the lifeboats. We're just eyeing the iceberg in the distance and getting our shit together in the event that the worst comes to pass.

Speaking for myself, I intend to crawl through the walls of Tumblr until they pry me out of the air vents armed with a broom and oven mitts. I'm not going anywhere until the lights go out, and even then, I'll be chewing on the wires.

But that doesn't mean I'm not looking around for somewhere to land when the time comes.

Myself and several others are not panicking about this, but we are trying to be organized about it.

I'm just old enough to remember when fandom websites being nuked overnight was a very real thing. You'd go to bed one night and wake up the next day to find friends you'd known for years were just gone with no means of contacting them because the site you'd been using got wiped. Entire collections of fandom history were just destroyed in the blink of an eye.

We don't want that again. And the good news is, we have time. We have time to back up our shit, time to swap contact info with our friends, and time to find a new place to exist within our communities while also staying here because Tumblr ain't dead yet.

She's just slowly going to wind down over time.

Unless, of course, they trip over the cables. Then we're fucked.

By the way, how you structure how you eat can massively change your relationship with food and can help you if you struggle with managing how you intake food, or even with motivation to eat.

The general 'rules' we have around eating and how we structure eating often fail to take into account how each person is different and has different needs and preferences when eating, and even different availability to eat throughout the day.

Some people, like me, are graze eaters. We prefer to eat little but often. Smaller meals broken up over the course of the day, and snacks that make up what we need nutritionally throughout the day. This type of eating can help if you don't have the type of day structure to set aside time for specific meals, or can't eat bigger, set meals.

If you're someone who needs bulk and density to feel full, and fuller for longer, all those 'miracle soups' on TikTok aren't going to satisfy you. You'll feel hungry after an hour and find yourself mooching around the cupboards for something to fill the void. You're better off researching volume eating, and how you can eat the most food within your intake range.

If you're someone that fills up quickly without much of an appetite throughout the day, look into what foods hold the most nutritional and calorific bulk for the least amount of volume and work around that. For example, things like rolled oat peanut butter bites and dates and avocados. There are lots of snack bars and bowls you can make or buy that feel lighter in your stomach and don't take much 'effort' to eat, but will still help you meet your nutritional needs.

Trying to force ourselves to conform to set rules around eating is often what trip starts a declining relationship with food and how we eat. Likewise, trying to fit these rules in around our daily lives and schedules can add additional stress we just don't need.

Find out what works for you. Tailor how you eat to match your needs and preferences.

"Fanfiction is not a 1:1 reflection of reality."

"But Jaws—!"

I think most people would, if they knew my stance on shipping, put me into the pro shipping category.

But I feel uncomfortable being labeled this way because I very much have limits.

I don't think people should write fanfiction or draw explicit fanart of characters being played (or voiced) by underage actors (and ofc the same applies to explicit rpf of said actors).

I just think the risk of these young, valuable people coming across these fanworks featuring either them or their likeness is too high (and one also has to remember the natural curiosity to check out stuff featuring them).

I don't think I'm being unreasonable here, but what do you think?

I think that that's a reasonable stance and perspective, to have.

The common assumption about proshipping is that you absolutely have to support and endorse absolutely everything and if you don't you're backsliding into being an anti, or you're not fully a proshipper.

But here's the thing; that's not actually the core meaning or value of proshipping. Proshipping does not inherently negate or demand that you have absolutely no limits or that you can't inherently disagree with or be uncomfortable with certain things.

Everyone has certain limits and certain things they simply cannot support or agree with. And that's perfectly fine. Where proshipping comes into it is recognising that everyone has that right, and also the right to still create and engage with things that you personally don't.

Its absolutely fine not to want to identify as a proshipper if you feel that your stance and your limits might be misperceived by using the label. Proshipping does have its inherent meaning and core values, but everyone also uses the label differently and assigns different, personal interpretations and values to it.

There's no obligation to use labels in fandom spaces at all, and there's also no obligation to have an 'all or nothing' stance. I know people who are, by definition, antis, but they're also heavily anti-harassment. They don't think that, morally, I should be writing incest porn, but they also recognise that even if I do, it doesn't necessarily mean I support it in real life either.

Being concerned about how fiction might impact real people is a very considerate, respectful concern to have. Its also why fandom spaces need to remain self-moderated in terms of properly using tags, filters, ect. Another common misconception people have about proshipping and anti-censorship is the assumption that we want to be able to just throw pornography and fiction around anywhere and everywhere, but actually, we still very much believe that everything has its place, and that there are proper, respectful ways and places to host content.

There's a lot of rambling I could do about the symbiosis of respect and moderation between a person/their guardians and fandom content creators, but that would be digressing slightly.

(And the point that a lot of fanfiction about teenagers and minors is written by teenagers and minors.)

The general gist is;

Your opinion is not unreasonable. Nor do I think any less of you for it. Nor would any proshipper, really. That's your concern, your limit, and that should be respected. In the same way that you would need to respect that that content does, and will always, exist, and the people who do write it with the proper measures taken are no less deserving of at the very minimum, your acceptance of the fact that they have a right to.

Proshipping is not:

Having no limits at all.

Thinking that you MUST create absolutely any and all content.

Thinking that you MUST support absolutely any and all content.

Thinking that nobody ever can be uncomfortable with or disinterested in what you create or what is being created.

Proshipping is:

Understanding fiction is not a 1:1 reflection of a person's real interests beliefs, values or their moral standings.

Understanding that fiction is not reality. It does not create victims.

That within the bounds of law, people have a right to create content, even if its content you personally do not support or agree with.

Understanding you do not have the right to dictate what someone can or cannot create, and that you do not have the right to be cruel or harmful to them because of what they create.

"Understanding that fiction is not reality. It does not create victims."

I don't know if I can agree with that, there definitely have been instances where shipping has created victims, real people shipping to be exact.

Both Harry Styles & Lois Tomlinson from One Direction and Camila Cabello & Lauren Jauregui from Fifth Harmony have publicly spoken about how fans shipping them put a major strain on their respective friendships and how they would like fans to stop.

Ofc most ships will never reach the amount of popularity needed to actually become a real life problem, but it is possible.

Fiction does not create real victims in that if I write about someone being raped, nobody is actually getting raped. Nobody is a victim of what happens within my fanfiction.

Just like the very legal defence of how thoughts are not actual crimes. I can think about overthrowing the government. But it only becomes an actual crime if I prepare to, or try to.

Likewise, I can write about all the murder I want. It doesn't make me an actual murderer.

Fiction does not create real victims.

Fanfiction itself is not to blame for how actual, real people, interact with and expose content to other real people. It wasn't people writing fanfiction who made those celebrities uncomfortable. It was the actions of the people who bombarded them with inappropriate content and interactions.

Mark Fischbach and Sean McLoughlin are a prime example of this. They knew people shipped them. They knew people wrote explicit fanfiction and drew explicit fanart. They didn't care. It was a separate part of their fandom they did not involve themselves in.

It only began to cause, as you say, real life problems when certain people began to harass their real life partners over it, began to tag them in or send them explicit content, and began to try forcing Mark and Sean to actually fanservice them.

Mark and Sean didn't ask people to stop shipping them. They asked people to stop forcing the ship on them in real life. They asked people not to harass their partners, not to send them explicit pornography, and not to force them to change how they behave in order to make it easier to construe it as romantic or sexual.

What people do with content will always be more inherently harmful than the actual content itself.

That is, again, why respect is such a huge part of proshipping and the RPF community. Why there are certain rules we follow and processes we follow in order to not be those people. The heavy emphasis on why things like tagging are so important is not only for our sakes, but for the sakes of the people we are using creatively. The only way they can avoid certain content is if we religiously give them the tools and meet the criteria they need us to in order to be able to.

The curse of modern fandom is that it has allowed fans to get even closer to artists, but they won't view the artists as people.

Human limits, human mistakes, human feelings, human needs, are never ascribed to artists, and when other fans rightfully point out, "hey, humans are making this, maybe don't harass them or demand they cater to your personal tastes," it gets shut down under, "uh, people who make popular mainstream things are automatically Public Figures who are also probably rich, so eat the rich and destroy artists over every perceived minor fault. <3"

Even though there's, y'know, a really big strike currently going on because those artists are very much not rich or influential or in control of the bullshit.