If you’re European, in a couple of weeks you will be denied any and all access to fandom contents on Tumblr and everywhere else on the internet. Here’s why.
On June, 20th the JURI of European Parliament approved of the articles 11 and 13 of the new Copyright Law. These articles are also known as the “Link Tax” and the “Censorship Machines” articles.
Articles 13 in particular forces every internet platform to filter all the contents we upload online, ending once and for all the fandom culture. Which means you won’t be able to upload any type of fandom works like fan arts, fan fictions, gif sets from your favourite films and series, edits, because it’s all copyrighted material. And you won’t also be able to share, enjoy or download other’s contents, because the use of links will be completely restricted.
But not everything’s lost yet. There’s another round of voting scheduled for the early days of July.
What you can do now to save our internet, is to share these informations with all of your family members and friends, and to ask to your MEP (the members of the European Parliament from your country) to vote NO at the next round, to vote against articles 11 and 13.
Here you can find more news and all the details to contact your MEP:
Recently, I traveled to Denver, Colorado with my wife and my wife’s parents. As a resident of a non-legalized state – and as someone who is too much of a pussy to regularly buy illegal drugs – the thing I was looking forward to most was the chance to buy fancy legal weed. What could possibly go wrong?
So the first thing I do upon arriving (and after successfully ditching the in-laws) is drag my wife to a nearby dispensary for a shopping spree. And oh my god, it was just like in my dreams. Tons of different options in neat little sample jars and a team of helpful stoners walking me through the various strains:
“Are you looking for a mellow body high? Or do you want something that gives you a bit more pep and energy? Or are you just hoping for something light to take the stress off?”
“Yes, yes and yes!” I reply eagerly, like a fat kid in a candy store, and request an eighth-ounce of about 7 different options. In hindsight, if I learned anything from this experience, it is that my math and science teachers never taught me basic information, like “what is an ounce?” or “how much weed can a person consume in a single weekend?” Sure, I can tell you when two speeding trains leaving separate stations will collide or recite Avogadro’s Number, but it turns out that none of that information is particularly relevant to getting high in a responsible and efficient manner.
And it was at this dispensary that I also learned that you can’t actually smoke in public places (including the hotel that my wife and I were staying at). As a result, before leaving, I begged my wife to buy some edibles that I could munch on until we found a place to properly get lit. After expressing shock as to the absurd volume of drugs that we were buying (unlike me, she is the product of private school and understands the Imperial measurement system) she relents, and we walk out of the store with what felt like a dump truck of weed plus a small package of seemingly-innocuous gingersnap cookies.
When we finally get back to the hotel room, I tear those bad boys open… only to find about a dozen tiny cookies roughly the size of a quarter. What the fuck, Denver? Seeing the skepticism (and hunger) in my eyes, my wife warns me that I should go easy and look at the back of the package first before trying one.
“Dose size: ½ cookie,” I read silently as I start taking micro-bites from the edges, like a giant chinchilla gnawing on a sunflower seed. But what kind of a savage only eats half a cookie? So a second later, I covertly pop the remainder into my mouth.
And then I quickly stuff another two cookies in my mouth for good measure the moment my wife turns her back. We may not have legal weed back home, but I routinely devour an entire package of Milanos in one sitting without breaking a sweat. Your move, tiny gingersnaps.
About 30 minutes later we are in the backseat of her parents’ rental car on the way to dinner. And that’s when things start to go tits-up. My stomach growls. Loudly and angrily. My wife looks at me with inquisitive eyes that seem to say “Diarrhea?” But I merely clutch my tummy and mumble something about altitude sickness.
“You didn’t eat a whole cookie, did you?” she asks, 10% in genuine concern and 90% in seething irritation.
“Of course not.” I respond, avoiding eye contact for the remainder of the car ride.
A few minutes later we are climbing out of her parents’ rental car and heading into some trendy farm-to-table restaurant. I don’t remember how I made it to my seat, and I don’t remember even looking at the menu, but I do remember the concerned look on the waiter’s face as he asked me if I was doing alright.
“Keep it together, man,” I say to myself. But my wife’s sudden groan suggests that I may have also said that to the waiter. Things are going downhill fast.
The waiter nods sympathetically, takes our orders, and then heads to the next table.
The moment he walks away, my wife is staring daggers at me. I start to worry that the jig is up.
“You are sweating… from your entire face,” she says with both pity and disgust. Not quite knowing what to do, I reach for my napkin and proceed to blot my cheeks, nose, neck, chin and forehead.
At this point, my wife’s mom looks over at me with some concern. “Are you alright?” she asks kindly.
“Yeah, the food’s just a bit spicy,” I reply, far too quick to realize that we had literally just ordered and that there is nothing on the table except for a basket of dinner rolls.
My wife kicks me under the table to grab my attention. “Bathroom. Now.” she hisses. “Get it together.” I reluctantly get up from the table and head for the toilet. After splashing several handfuls of water on my face, I approach a urinal and start to pee.
Now, one of the more disconcerting effects of those tiny gingersnap monsters is the feeling that time has become untethered from reality. As I am peeing, I start to get the very unsettling feeling that I have been taking a piss for the better part of an hour and that my wife must be pacing around the restaurant worried about me.
But deep down I know that is absurd: I’ve been peeing all my life, sometimes multiple times a day. I’ve probably taken more than 50,000 leaks, and it usually only takes about a minute at most. So given that my typical pee is no more than 60 seconds – and given that it feels like I am about half way done – that means that I’ve probably only been standing here about 30 seconds, right?
But the guy at the urinal next to me doesn’t respond, and instead starts shuffling away from me mid-stream, like a startled penguin. I try, albeit unsuccessfully, to break eye-contact.
After finally finishing, I again splash some water on my face and return to my seat, making sure to apologize to the table “for being gone such a long time” just in case my math was off.
Next, I try briefly to engage in small talk with my wife’s father, but I am far too high to understand what either of us are saying. Not wanting to start laughing uncontrollably at the wrong moment – or, really, at any moment – I figure the safest idea is to nod my head periodically and drink a ton of water. Nothing cures mental fatigue like water, right? To my wife’s horror, I stand up, grab my water glass and thrust it out to the waiter, who unfortunately is on the opposite side of the restaurant. But he turns out to be really cool and, after making his way over to our table, tells me that he’ll do his best to keep me stocked with ice water for the rest of the meal. He also helpfully suggests that if the dinner rolls aren’t too spicy for me, I should probably eat one or two so that I’m not sitting there on an empty stomach.
Smart man.
However, after going through all of the bread on the table and three glasses of water, I start to get worried that I need actual food to offset the growing paranoia from those tiny gingersnap devils. “Do you think I should flag down the waiter again and ask what’s taking so long?” I suggest helpfully to my wife.
“What?! We literally just ordered three fucking minutes ago.”
And at that exchange, my wife loses her cool. “HOW MANY COOKIES DID YOU EAT?!” she demands.
“Whoa, easy there, Torquemada,” I respond, somewhat horrified at her outburst. “I had a few cookies, but keep it down. I don’t want your parents to know how fucked up I am right now.”
“REALLY?! THEY ARE SITTING TWO FEET AWAY FROM YOU. THEY KNOW.”
I look up and for the first time notice both of my in-laws just staring at me… for what literally felt like an eternity.
TL;DR: ate way too many edibles on a trip and wigged out during a dinner with my wife and her parents.
i’m so glad i was high when i read this, cuz this was so fucking entertaining lol
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
!!!!!!
Get this out there 👆👆👆👆👆👆
Share the fuck out of this! -Salty
I will be silent tomorrow
I came to tumblr originally to post and write about things I wasn’t comfortable putting out on Facebook. I haven’t posted or written much, but I have found and followed some amazing people doing amazing things, I have found and followed people doing amazingly brave things…I will be silent tomorrow while I look for other sources and venues for the kind of content I want to consume.
What’s truly remarkable isn’t that a bunch of cynical politicians thought they could ride their base voters’ anger into control of Congress by lying to them about what they could actually accomplish; it’s that their voters actually believed it. And then those voters got even angrier when it turned out that the president had the ability to veto bills passed by a Congress controlled by the other party. Who knew! So instead of looking for a presidential candidate who would treat them like adults, they elected Donald Trump, a man who would pander to their gullibility even more.
On the eve of his election to the House of
Representatives, Montana Republican Greg Gianforte
beat up Ben Jacobs, a reporter for the “Guardian" newspaper.
What prompted the
violence? Jacobs had asked Gianforte for his reaction to the Congressional Budget
Office’s report showing that the House Republican substitute for the Affordable Care Act
would result in 23 million Americans losing their health insurance.
Then, in the words of a
Fox News team who witnessed the brutal attack: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the
neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him. … Gianforte
then began punching the reporter. As Gianforte moved on top of Jacobs, he began
yelling something to the effect of, ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’ Jacobs
scrambled to his knees and said something about his glasses being broken…. To
be clear, at no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show
any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after
giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies.”
After the attack, Jacobs
was evaluated in an ambulance at the scene and taken to Bozeman Health
Deaconess Hospital. Several hours later he left the hospital wearing a sling
around his arm.
Gianforte was charged with
misdemeanor assault.
Donald Trump’s reaction? In Sicily for the G-7 summit, he praised Greg
Gianforte’s election as a “great win in Montana.”
For years, conservatives warned that liberals were “defining
deviancy downward” by tolerating bad social behavior.
Donald Trump is actively defining
deviancy downward in American politics. He’s making America meaner.
Last year, Trump said of a protester at one of
his campaign rallies: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
In a different era, when decency was the norm, House
members would not seat a thug like Gianforte in the chamber. In the age of
Trump, it’s okay to beat up a reporter.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative former
talk-show host in Wisconsin, says “every time something like Montana happens,
Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They
normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”
Gianforte’s attack on Jacobs
was shameful enough. Almost as shameful was Gianforte’s press release about
what occurred, written immediately afterward by his campaign spokesman, Shane Scanlon:
“Ben Jacobs entered the
office without permission, aggressively shoved a recorder in Greg’s face, and
began asking badgering questions. Jacobs was asked to leave. After asking
Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined. Greg then attempted to grab the
phone that was pushed in his face. Jacobs grabbed Greg’s wrist, and spun away
from Greg, pushing them both to the ground. It’s unfortunate that this
aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our
campaign volunteer BBQ.“
It was all a blatant lie, as
confirmed by the Fox News crew that watched the whole thing. But under Trump, blatant lying is
the new normal.
And a “liberal journalist” is the enemy.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that “by
casting the press as the enemy of the American people, Donald Trump has
contributed to a climate of discourse consistent with assaulting a reporter for
asking an inconvenient question.”
It used to be that candidates and elected officials had a duty to answer reporters’ questions. We assumed that answering questions from the press was part of the job. We thought democracy depended on it.
But we’re now in the era of Donald Trump, who calls the press the “enemy of the American people.”
It was never the case in the United States that candidates or elected officials beat up reporters who posed questions they didn’t like. That was the kind of thing that occurred in dictatorships.
But “Trump has declared open season on journalists,
and politicians and members of his Cabinet have joined the hunt.” says Lucy Dalglish,
the dean of Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
More generally and menacingly, Trump has licensed the dark
side of the American psyche. His hatefulness and vindictiveness have normalized a new meanness.
Since Trump came on the scene, hate crimes
have soared. America has become even more polarized. Average Americans say and do things to people they disagree with that in a different time would have been unthinkable.
“I’d submit that the president has unearthed
some demons,” says Rep. Mark Sanford, a Republican Representative from South
Carolina. “I’ve talked to a number of
people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say
whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.”
This is not only dangerous for our democracy. It’s
also dangerous for our society. “There is a total weirdness out there,” says
Sanford. “People feel like, if the president of the United States can say
anything to anybody at any time, then I guess I can too. And that is a very
dangerous phenomenon.”
A president indirectly sets the norms of our
society. Trump is setting them at a new low.
…and it’s up to us, who don’t want to be dragged down and live in the muck, to resist and defend at every opportunity.
On a political cartoon site, one otherwise liberal cartoonist made the mistake of expressing doubt about the Russian connection to Donald Trump, to which a poster (handle “Radish”) provided the following amazing response:
I don’t know – it’s hard for me to see any U.S. ties to Russia…except for the Flynn thing and the Manafort thing and the Tillerson thing and the Sessions thing and the Kushner thing and the Carter Page thing and the Roger Stone thing and the Felix Sater thing and the Boris Ephsteyn thing and the Rosneft thing and the Gazprom thing and the Sergey Gorkov banker thing and the Azerbajain thing and the “I love Putin” thing and the Donald Trump, Jr. thing and the Sergey Kislyak thing and the Russian Affiliated Interests thing and the Russian Business Interests thing and the Emoluments Clause thing and the Alex Schnaider thing and the hack of the DNC thing and the Guccifer 2.0 thing and the Mike Pence “I don’t know anything” thing and the Russians mysteriously dying thing and Trump’s public request to Russia to hack Hillary’s email thing and the Trump house sale for $100 million at the bottom of the housing bust to the Russian fertilizer king thing and the Russian fertilizer king’s plane showing up in Concord, NC during Trump rally campaign thing and the Nunes sudden flight to the White House in the night thing and the Nunes personal investments in the Russian winery thing and the Cyprus bank thing and Trump not releasing his tax returns thing and the Republican Party’s rejection of an amendment to require Trump to show his taxes thing and the election hacking thing and the GOP platform change to the Ukraine thing and the Steele Dossier thing and the Leninist Bannon thing and the Sally Yates can’t testify thing and the intelligence community’s investigative reports thing and Trump’s reassurance that the Russian connection is all “fake news” thing and Spicer’s Russian Dressing “nothing’s wrong” thing so there’s probably nothing there since the swamp has been drained, these people would never lie probably why Nunes cancels the investigation meetings all of this must be normal just a bunch of separate dots with no connection.
Trump and his top aides have a plan to keep Republicans in Congress in line: A band of conservative internet trolls stoked by Breitbart News.
In the 2016 election, Breitbart’s ability to stoke the far right and morph it into a vulgar, hate-spewing internet mob in order to browbeat Republicans into supporting Trump became a powerful political weapon.
And that’s poised to continue with Bannon by Trump’s side in the White House.
“We met with probably, on the low boundary, 30 members of Congress,” Rick Wilson, an anti-Trump Republican consultant, told Mic in an interview.
“And over and over and over again they said things like, ‘Well, I hate Trump, he’s an asshole, he’s a dang liberal, but if I say anything, Breitbart’s going to send his people after me and they’re going to threaten my staff and threaten me and I’ll have nothing but Sean Hannity kicking the shit out of me.’” Read more
If these Republicans in Congress can’t stand up to Trump, if they can’t handle a bunch of shitty Internet trolls, then they aren’t worthy of their office.
They took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Their oath of office doesn’t include a clause that says, “unless a bunch of deplorables yell at you on the Internet.”
Respect your fucking office and your goddamn responsibility to the country, you fucking cowards.
I copied this off a Facebook feed…pretty much covers my feelings on the subject, too
It doesn’t matter whether Trump can win in the election. I doubt he can. What he’s doing is giving people permission to say shit they’ve wanted to say for years but have been too cowardly to say when they thought it was just them. Now they think they can just roll back on a century of social progress and get clapped on the back for it.
You think I’m not paying attention to which of you passive aggressively post links (without commentary, like you’re fooling anybody) to the horseshit and lies the NRA spouts? That “Comical Conservative” shit fountain? Well, actually, you’re right, because most of the time, I unfollowed you a long time ago. I’m not open-minded about bigotry.
Most of you have a child’s understanding of the world. You know nothing of Islam, and I don’t give a shit if you fought overseas or not. That doesn’t mean you understand anything. It means you went to someone else’s country to kill some of them. That hardly makes you an expert on their culture, anymore than your grandaddy was an expert on Filipino culture because he went in with MacArthur. Sorry, but it’s true.
And those of you who sit in your little rural homogeneous towns where your idea of “ethnic unrest” is when the Lutherans and the Episcopalians play shirts vs skins basketball against each other down at the rec center… who the fuck told you anybody wanted or needed to hear your opinions about people you know nothing about in places you couldn’t point to on a map?
Look, I don’t care what you believe or say, most of the time. I don’t care if you love Jesus and hate Mexicans. Whatever. That’s your own thing. I’m not inviting you to my parties, but you do you. I’m sure you think I’m a libtard or whatever. Different strokes for different folks, and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo.
Except now, right now, your ignorant small minded backwoods bullshit is about to cause real problems in the world. You’re making this country - which belongs to me and my Muslim friends and my Hispanic friends and my queer friends just as much as it belongs to you - look like Germany in 1937. And that’s not okay with me.
You don’t have to like anybody. But you do have to live and let live. That’s how America works. We don’t keep people out because of their religion or their heritage or the color of their skin. We take in the hungry, the tired, the poor. You remember that? When people are running away from horror, we don’t slam the door in their face. We bring em in and give them a job and teach them to bitch about the Yankees lineup this year. That’s what we did for your ancestors and mine.
And if some of them - some tiny fraction of them - are assholes, so what? Since when do we cower in fear? Is that what we are - a nation of Chicken Littles, terrified that the sky is falling?
That might be your America. I hope not. But it sure as shit isn’t mine. My America is the place where people come because they want to be free. My America throws her arms out to welcome the scatterlings and refugees, the wretched refuse, because we know they are what makes this country great.
I’m not afraid of refugees. I’m not afraid of Muslims. I’m not even afraid of ISIS or Daesh or whatever the fuck you want to call them. I’m afraid of you, and what you’ll do to this country - my goddamn country - in your childish fear. But you yourselves don’t intimidate me.
So I will continue to welcome Muslims into my country, and I will not tolerate any mistreatment of them by fools. I will not be shamed by simpletons. I will help them when I can and I will protect them when I can.
Not because I share their faith in Allah, but because - unlike you - I share their faith in America, what she stands for and what she can be if we keep our wits about us and don’t give in to cowardice.
