Mattlindel - Babayaga

his first pride :) reblog if u support him

When somebody says that “a man likes to feel like a man,” all I hear is “A man likes to feel superior to you and it’s your job to make him believe it.” 

buying peaches is so stressful because you have to consume them so quickly…it’s like the moment the cashier types in that number the alpha peach turns to its brothers in the bags and says “alright listen up boys, it’s time to remember your training. i want to see immense bruising by sundown. i want to see you near inedible by sunrise. remember it is better to die a free man than to be eaten.” you gotta wolf down all of your peaches at the check out counter while the trader joe’s employees eagerly look at the Peach Consumption Countdown Clock and cheer you on. these peaches have sensors on them that can tell when they come into contact with human hands so they can begin their self-destruct sequence like you’re in a spy movie and the peach just relayed a message to you about the whereabouts of jimmy hoffa’s decayed remains

:/

rights received

“Please, let him be soft. I know you made him with gunmetal bones and wolf’s teeth. I know you made him to be a warrior a soldier a hero. But even gunmetal can warp and even wolf’s teeth can dull and I do not want to see him break the way old and worn and overused things do. I do not want to see him go up in flames the way all heroes end up martyrs. I know that you will tell me that the world needs him. The world needs his heart and his faith and his courage and his strength and his bones and his teeth and his blood and his voice and his– The world needs anything he will give them. Damn the world, and damn you too. Damn anyone that ever asked anything of him, damn anyone that ever took anything from him, damn anyone that ever prayed to his name. You know that he will give them everything until there is nothing left of him but the imprint of dust where his feet once trod. You know that he will bear the world like Atlas until his shoulders collapse and his knees buckle and he is crushed by all he used to carry. Dear God, you have already made an Atlas. You have already made an Achilles and an Icarus and a Hercules. You have already made so many heroes, and you can make another again. You can have your pick of heroes. So please, I beg you– he is all that I have, and you have so many heroes and the world has so many more. Let him be soft, and let him be mine.”

— Please, let him be happy ( j.p. )

it’s ninety-nine degrees outside, four fuck-thousand percent humidity, and my husband was like, “i’m gonna go for a bike ride.” and i was like “why. no. why. don’t put us on the news like that. local fool collapses on unnecessary journey. don’t do it.” so he says he doesn’t want to “hide in the house” because the sun is shining. bruh. honeybruh. “the sun is shining” does not cover it. its hot outside. its motherfucking hot as fuck outside. our outdoor plants have been crying into their hands all week. whole cars are melting into the sewer. our fucking patio umbrella developed sentience to ask me for lemonade this morning

This is a young adult novel, someone write it.

Literally no trope emotionally fucks me up faster than “Character outlives their lover by many years and at the end of their life their lover comes to escort them from the world” like I only have to think about it hypothetically to start crying.

on monday’s staff announcement

[disclaimer: i no longer work at tumblr. the views expressed here are mine and don’t represent oath or tumblr.]

i love tumblr. i love seeing the endless creativity from this community and the sense of belonging that i and others like me find here every single day. i’ve been a tumblr user since high school, and i feel like i grew up on this website based on how much it helped me learn and develop my understanding of the world, society, and myself. it’s part of the reason i moved across the country to new york to work there in 2016.

as someone who loves this place so much and contributed to its development over the last 2 years, monday’s announcement by leadership to remove adult content from the site was deeply disappointing to me. it’s also part of why i left the company in september.

first, i want to establish that explicit content involving children, as well as the people who share and consume it, have absolutely no place on tumblr, anywhere else on the internet, or anywhere else in general. apple’s policies on the app store and other content are absolutely puritanical in many other senses, but i believe in this specific context their actions were fully justifiable. 

as a platform that prides itself on freedom of expression (this is one of tumblr’s core mission statement values), the move to censor such a large swath of legal and consensual adult content from it is a direct contradiction. the ability to share, explore and connect across the full spectrum of human expression is a core part of what made tumblr into the unique and nuanced website that it is today. it’s also something that david karp fought strongly to preserve.

this change will, without a doubt, also remove a critical platform from countless sex workers who already increasingly struggle to find a safe and secure way to make a living, connect with others, and simply be seen as human beings online. in the wake of SESTA/FOSTA and the subsequent closure of sites like backpage, tumblr has become a place that many sex workers rely on, and removing their presence on tumblr will likely have a highly negative impact on their livelihoods and wellbeing.

removing adult content from tumblr will also remove a safe space that so many LGBT users (including myself) call home. our community is fundamentally based on interactions that span the SFW/NSFW spectrum as an extension of self-discovery and identity (also core tumblr mission statement values), and in many cases for resources that LGBT folks don’t receive IRL, such as LGBT-specific augmentations of sexual health education. tumblr was many of these things for me. growing up in a small town without access to many LGBT peers my age, tumblr was a place i could go to find my community when it sometimes felt like i didn’t have one in the real world. it was a support network when i needed it, and the place where i met some of my best friends that i still remain in touch with today. removing adult content will remove this sense of community and will remove what so many rely on as a safe space for self-discovery and exploration.

to be clear, i understand the reality that it’s difficult to monetize on a network that contains such a mixed range of content, and how cutthroat this can be in the social media space. i still fully believe, though, that there are better, more balanced solutions to this problem that respect the needs of the community while also providing a stable source of revenue to build and grow the platform with.

additional hiring investment in human moderators to aid existing policy enforcement, for example, would be a great start. while they’re very promising, i believe the software tools and algorithms the industry uses to enforce policies like these instead of humans just aren’t ready yet. i’ve seen it in the countless false positives that have already been flagged here under this change, and i’ve seen it in the waves of spambots that wash over this and other similar sites on a regular basis. to be clear, others in this space also grapple with the same issues just as much – tools like machine learning are still new and rapidly developing. however, their relatively higher usage of human moderators as counterbalance is apparent in the relative lack of these problems that end up reaching users. a renewed investment in human moderation, along with anti-spam experts and the other human beings needed to fix these issues, in addition to addressing the growing epidemic of harassment seen across this and other networks, would be a more sensible alternative to relying so heavily on software to enforce such a far-reaching policy.

i love tumblr, and i love my staff family that i had the privilege to work with and get to know over the last 2 years. the people i worked with at tumblr continue to be some of the most passionate and empathetic human beings i know. the things i’ve written here aren’t intended to be an attack on them; i’m writing this because i love tumblr so much, and because i truly care about what happens to it in the future. tumblr played a fundamental part in shaping who i am today, as an LGBT individual, and as a citizen of the internet and the world. it’s important to me that those today who are finding themselves in the same place i was so many years ago when i found this community are able to make a home here the same way that i made mine.

-hunter

p.s. – in the wake of this announcement, please consider donating to the EFF, who work to defend privacy and free expression across the internet, and also to SWOP, who work to defend the rights of, and end stigma and violence against, sex workers. both of these causes will help those who find themselves displaced by this change.