If you’re wanting to show your displeasure, don’t just tag staff or support. Take a page out of other consumer revolts and make sure your displeasure is known.
Don’t be an idiot. Do not threaten, harass or otherwise make this personal. Contact these companies, make your displeasure known, alert them that you are a customer and you will be leaving their brand across all boards unless they reverse their decision.
Be clear, be concise, be polite, but make your displeasure known.
Sam is sick, and what are his boyfriends to do but take care of him?
~~~~
“Achoo!”
Gabriel’s boyfriend was sick. It had started a couple days ago when Sam started sneezing. He’d insisted it was just allergies, but Gabriel hadn’t been so sure.
It has escalated from there.
Next came the runny nose and incessant coughing, then the aches and headaches. Finally, the bone deep weariness and then Sam was forced to admit that maybe, just maybe he was sick.
Gabriel stirred a healing spoonful of honey into the cup of green tea he was making for Sam. There was something about Sam when he was sick that just made Gabriel want to coddle and baby him.
He shuffled across the floor, the soles of his slippers hitting against the wood with a loud slap. Gabriel gently pushed open the door of their bedroom and put the steaming cup down on the bedside table.
“No more tea, Gabe,” Sam sniffled, wiping his nose with a tissue. The garbage can was almost overflowing with them.
“C’mon Sammich,” Gabriel coaxed, sitting down on the edge of their bed. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“Not if I throw up first,” Sam retorted, snuggling down further under the worn comforter that had belong to Gabriel’s mother. “I hate green tea.”
Gabriel chuckled at him. “It’ll soothe your throat and the honey will stop you from cough,”
“You keep saying that,” Sam grumped, glaring at his boyfriend, but with how sick he was, he only looked like a pouty child which Gabriel found adorable.
“Because it’s true,” Gabriel pointed out. “Now drink up”
Sam grumbled at him again, but picked up the cup anyway and took a sip. He replaced it on the table and let Gabriel cuddle and fuss over him.
“You’re going to catch my cold,” Sam warned him, as Gabriel kissed his forehead.
“No, I’m not, I have the immunes system of an elephant,” Gabriel teased, tucking Sam in tighter as he heard the front door open and close. A moment later, Crowley came through their bedroom door, bearing a brown paper back and taking off his black and red plaid scarf.
“How are you feeling, love?” he asked Sam, hanging his coat in the closet and handing Gabriel the bag.
“Like crap,” Sam replied. “And Gabriel is making me drink tea.”
“It’s good for you,” Crowley replied, sitting down on the other side of the bed. “I brought you some soup.”
Gabriel unwrapped the bag, taking out a hot cup of the Matzo ball soup he’d asked Crowley to pick up on his way home from work. Gabriel had sick time to spare, but Crowley didn’t, so it was decided that Gabriel would stay home to take care of Sam.
He pulled a plastic spoon out of the bag and handed both the cup and spoon to Sam. “Eat,”he commanded. “It’ll make you feel better.”
Sam stuck his tongue out at him, but he took the soup without another word. He began to eat it, and Gabriel turned to his other boyfried.
“How was work?”
Crowley shrugged as he got up and began to change out of his suit, and into something a little more comfortable, the very comfortable, very expensive red and black silk pajamas that Gabriel and Sam had gotten him for Christmas. “It was work,” he replied. “I would have much rather been home with you two.”
Gabriel got up and walked across the room to give Crowley a kiss. Sam made a disgruntled noise on the bed.
“That’s not fair,” he pouted. “I can’t kiss anyone.”
“You’re sick,” Gabriel pointed out. “When you’re better, we’ll make up for it, won’t we babe?”
Not many people understood the kind of relationship the three of them had, but Gabriel didn’t care. He loved both Sam and Crowley and they loved him in returned. That was all that mattered.
Crowley nodded and got into bed besides Sam. “We’ll keep you company,” he said, grabbing the remote.
Gabriel slid in on the other side of Sam. “Finish your soup and we’ll even let you pick the movie.”
Sam paused to kiss each of them chastely on the cheek. “Deal,”
Gabriel should have known better.
It took a week for both Crowley and Gabriel to come down with Sam’s cold. Gabriel woke up feeling like a truck hit him, and if Crowley’s cough was anything to go by, he wasn’t feeling much better than Gabriel was.
Both of them were terrible patients. Crowley was insistent on going to work, until Sam ordered him to bed and hid his iPad so he could rest. Gabriel gor halfway down the stairs before he’d realized Sam had also hidden his car keys. He called Garth to let him know he’d be late to the studio.
“Sam already called,” Garth explained with a chuckle. “Feel better.”
Grumbling, and cursing under his breath, Gabriel stomped back upstairs to give Sam a piece of his mind, to find his boyfriend in the kitchen making cinnamon pancakes with whipped cream and lots of sprinkles, his favorite. He couldn’t be mad at Sam after that.
He quietly slipped back into their bedroom, changed into his pajamas and cuddled up next to the dozing Crowley.
Tumblr wants to take away all adult content on the platform, abandoning a large majority of it’s userbase which uses the site for this exact matter. Please sign the above petition if you would like to keep tumblr the way it is. They need to be shown that they will lose a HUGE amount of their traffic if they’re too carry this through.
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.
I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +6k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search.
Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog*
*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted. Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat.
I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing:
1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month) 2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog) 3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it) 4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not) 5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)
**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted.
So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes.
P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything.
this is actually really useful if you have an art blog full of years of work that you otherwise no longer have access to the original files. A lot of the art I have in the early days of my art blog are in that boat. I did this process JUST for that reason and I was pretty astonished at just how many pieces of media it backs up! (literally all of it) Drawings I didn’t even realize were sitting in my archive due to having been posted to text posts or undercuts, or untagged for years! It’s worth it if just for that, even if tumblr isn’t shutting down or deleting your blog.
reference.
This is just for windows users, but just in case some of my followers can use it!
I Aim To Misbehave 