Category: Meta (blog-related)

Meta: OK, I’m officially done

This blog was originally published on Tumblr, after the Camille Noire figure post was deleted. If you don’t want to read a grump about Tumblr and how this blog came to be, skip this one. 

So… I was going to do a post similar to this, but in about a week or two, however Tumblr has now forced my hand. So this will be today’s blog, instead of a figure post! There was a figure post…

So it started off like this:

OK, they’ve revised the email they now send out to be more expansive and professional-looking. Let’s go to my timeline and get this sorted:

Oh. Oh. Despite the new email still referring to the “flag for review” button, it has now completely gone!! I even tried all the buttons at the bottom – no, not hidden under the “cog” options either.

The figure for this blog, as can be seen from the title is Clive Barker’s Camille Noire. This figure, whilst skimpily dressed, does NOT have any nudity. She is quite gory though! But… fake gore isn’t against the guidelines, and neither is fake nudity for that matter.

I was planning on winding down or stopping my Tumblr blog, partially due to time constraints and partially…. because of this idiocy! My content is specifically not against the new guidelines, but gets flagged with alarming regularity. If I can now no longer ask for review, then I’m entirely disinterested in still blogging here.

I am currently contemplating on doing loot-style posts, but these will likely be on My Figure Collection instead of here. These posts will have less pictures of each figure, feature multiple figures and happen on a less frequent basis. Photographing then editing images takes a lot of time – and too much free time for something that I don’t gain much from.

If I go back to blogging on a more regular basis, it won’t be on Tumblr. I will be cross-posting my Tumblr content to a personally-hosted blog, so that it can be preserved in case of a tightening of the Tumblr adult rules (meaning more posts vanishing off the face of the planet).

Thank you to those who have chosen to follow me, and have been reading and reblogging my content! If I start up a new blog somewhere else, I’ll add a “last blog” here to point to it.

Tumblr & the policy change

This wasn’t the first full text post I was planning on writing… but here we are.

Here’s the tl;dr version:

  • Tumblr’s policy change is not good
  • Tumblr’s bot is *rubbish*
  • I will see how this thing shakes out, but might be moving my blog in the new year

So, for those who are currently under a rock, Tumblr is banning pornographic content. This shouldn’t technically have anything to do with my blog, but it has and probably will continue to do so.

The policy in of itself shouldn’t affect my content, as I’m writing about things that should be classifiable as art in their definition – I’ve done some reading, and it looks like they’re targeting IRL nudity and things bumping uglies. However, the bot they’ve had on the loose has flagged a good portion of my posts.

The bot

Out of 488 blogs, I had 30 flagged – this is about 6%. 20 of those I’d consider safe for work (SFW) and 10 of those I’d consider not safe for work (NSFW). My definition may vary from yours – I’m going largely by more European standards, so bikini figures are fine unless they’re posed sexually. Most ‘lolwat?’ blog that got flagged was this one about gachapon. Yes, that naked rabbit is really harmful to the community! Or was it the origami?

Out of all the flagged blogs, all but one passed review. I have no idea why the last one didn’t pass review – the figure that failed to pass was Melona by MegaHouse. If you’re reading this prior to the 17th, and OK with NSFW, the blog is available here. Was it the absurd genitalia? The slime? No idea. Certainly wasn’t the nudity, as all the other cast-off figures passed review just fine. I have a support ticket filed with Tumblr so I can get to the bottom of why this post was not OK – if I don’t get a reply to it then I’m definitely out – I don’t want to risk randomly losing the odd blog due to poor policy enforcement. I don’t think people will confuse Melona with a real life human, as per their policy… This policy being: “Don’t upload images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples —this includes content that is so photorealistic that it could be mistaken for featuring real-life humans (nice try, though).“

So in future, I can expect roughly 1-2 blogs a month to get erroneously flagged, with my chance being upped for a NSFW blog.

All of this is very irritating, as I’ll need to pretty much do daily checks to ensure nothing new gets flagged – before I could write a week or two’s content in advance and just leave the queue system to do its thing – I tend to write blogs in blocks, so it isn’t constantly consuming my time.

The community

Big thanks to you guys reading this! And those who have chosen to follow me. I don’t know how much the community will shrink, but if the effect is significant, I may as well move to self-hosting, whereby the content can’t be taken away from me by the platform itself. One of the reasons I stayed here was because I discovered how the tag system works, and it really does help drive traffic to my blog – but if a large amount of the community drifts off, then I may end up blogging to no-one again (I’m kind of a niche within a niche…), and I’ll be concerned for the longevity of the platform. If there are future troubles, I’d like to move before Tumblr’s owners question the longevity or start doing less-desirable things to try and sustain it.

Tumblr itself

In researching why Tumblr may have come to this decision to change their policy, I did discover some things I didn’t like. Certain issues were more prevalent than I thought, and this way of dealing with it feels very heavy-handed. They’ve kinda gone 0-100 in dealing with a very real problem. Part of me wants to distance myself from Tumblr for this reason too.

The future

As well as a potential reduction in the audience, there is no assurance that plastic titties may come under fire eventually – they’ve banned a significant section of the adult content, they may go even further in future to make this a family-friendly site. I don’t really want to split into two blogs – I don’t do NSFW blogs that often, so it really isn’t worth setting up a separate blog for those. I’m more than happy to tag/mark them as NSFW, but Tumblr is taking this away from us too – sensitive mode is going, because everything is family-friendly now. Wat? They’re allowing incidental chest shots and non-IRL nudity, but no way of marking these things so that people who don’t want to see it can’t hide it? I… wat. All of my wat. So now you REALLY can’t look at Tumblr in a work/public situation as there’s no hope for hiding the 18+ content that is still allowed.

Currently I’m writing blogs daily or in small batches (less than 5/time), due to my uncertainty. If I do decide to move the blog, I will blog about it though, and update links on my profiles elsewhere. If anyone knows of a site where my blog would fit in, and is OK with cast-off figures, I’d appreciate the suggestions. Many of the suggestions I’ve seen are for adult-orientated sites (so the bulk of my content wouldn’t fit in) or one that isn’t launched yet (but does look promising).

Meta Blog: New backdrop

From this point forward, I will be experimenting with my backdrop, after deciding I’m no longer happy with my scratched-up bit of wood. Surely I can do better! 

Here was my first attempt, with some wrapping paper:

image

This is a cropped photo only – usually I’d do more processing, but this shot shows most of the issues – a couple of the test figures ended up taking on a blue hue, odd things would happen with the lighting, and the shadow of me, thanks to using the window as light. 

So I switched to a blue fabric backdrop that came with an el cheapo “portable photo studio” I bought ages ago: 

image

Yeah, I ended up with ironing board marks on it… oops. It was very creased though, as it was stored folded in its original packet, so not ironing it wasn’t an option. Pattern is kind of pretty though… 

The “blue” issue affected a couple of figures, but far less when it did. So I’ll probably try to get hold of a more neutral coloured piece of fabric at some point. Even though this one does match with my table mats :P. Don’t really want to go with black fabric, as this won’t look so good if I’m doing a dark-coloured figure. May prepare the black backdrop as an option, though. Could go with the white one, but I’d like something that isn’t overly plain. 

So starting today, be prepared to see new backdrops now and then :). And the occasional reappearance of the plain wood backdrop, as pre-prepared posts pop out 🙂