When I was in high school, I read Robert Frost’s Out, Out—, and it really fucked me up. I remember going home and, in tears, demanding to know why anyone would create a story so horrible and so unjust, and swearing that all stories should be kind and gentle and good and leave us feeling joy and not sorrow.
Also, I was a high school student.
The following screencap began to circulate on Twitter last night:
I’ve had my Patreon for a month—time to break down how that’s going! (Spoiler alert: it’s going pretty well!)
Do you know how, sometimes, you’ll be trying to get on to the highway, and the on-ramp will suddenly jink at the last moment, forcing you to decelerate at the exact moment you want to be going faster?
Well, that’s me and February.
It’s the last day of 2018, precisely a year since I started writing these semi-regular “Infernal Dispatches.” You know what that means: a recap of 2018, and a look ahead to 2019!
Friends, let me tell you—having your own website is great.
Sort of.
I mean, it costs real money; and there’s no microblogging framework to easily disseminate your updates, necessitating you plug yourself on social media; and your website is still, ultimately, at the mercy of things outside your control, like the WordPress mainframe updating its text editor to the awful Gutenberg interface.
Creating my own website is a solution to circumventing Tumblr’s deplatforming of my NSFW content, but it isn’t a perfect solution.
A lot has been written about the economic and legal pressures on businesses like Tumblr and Facebook, who are banning NSFW content and instituting harsher Community Policy guidelines both to be in compliance with FOSTA-SESTA and to advance their own monetization schemes. It’s probably going to get worse.
On the other hand, it is always getting worse. Fandom purges are a routine part of the internet biosphere: websites grow large and popular on the backs of NSFW creators, then gentrify-out the “undesirable” elements when management believes them no longer necessary, or when laws or vocal opponents make maintaining NSFW content too difficult, too controversial, or too uneconomical to continue.
In this regard, everything old is new again. Thanks to FOSTA-SESTA, I suspect we’ll see a growing balkanization of NSFW online communities, as individuals host their content on personal websites, and/or lurch to new community sites.
Because don’t get me wrong: other companies will step into the breach and say that this time, they can provide you with the free and NSFW-friendly community for your art and writing.
And they will. For a time.
I suspect we’ll see RSS feeds come back into vogue, alongside small-scale chat rooms and forums and link pages. These were all things that were seemingly made obsolete by sites like Tumblr—by the centralization of internet communities into a few sites that promised easy, free, even democratic, platforms for individuals—and which are now threatened by what seems to be a growing seachange in how our society treats “pornography” and “sex work.”
But how different this moment is from previous purges, and whether the creation of smaller, individualized sites is a long-term solution, depends on how effectively interested parties are able to use FOSTA-SESTA as a cudgel against the First Amendment. Frankly, there’s always the possibility that hosting providers will eventually ban NSFW content en masse, regardless of what their Terms of Service are. We live in strange, interesting times.
In other “everything old is new” news, I’ve uploaded and formatted five more stories! I have yet to publish them, though, as I want to confirm that I have permission to re-host the stories with the original artwork that inspired them. You can always follow me on twitter for updates!
Friends: if you are reading this, then my Tumblr is already dead.
For at least the past week, there has been a growing ban wave of NSFW content on Tumblr. The Tumblr app was removed from the Apple Store on November 17th-18th, seemingly because child pornography was accessible through the app. Tumblr’s response has been to begin aggressively banning porn bots and child pornography blogs (finally!), but it also appears that many “acceptable” NSFW blogs, and even some SFW ones, have been caught up in the ban.
I guess I would know; I’m apparently one of them.
My blog was terminated on November 23rd, the day after Thanksgiving. One moment I was chatting with friends; the next, I was asked to sign back in and presented with the infamous termination screen:
Fortunately, I lost very little of my writing. Every story I have written this year was backed up on my computer, the benefits of creating manuscripts in Scrivener instead of typing them directly into Tumblr. Some of my older stories have been (temporarily) lost, but I’m working to recover them and port them over to this site. Most precious and fragile, though, were my semi-regular “Infernal Dispatches” writing updates, which chronicled my growth and struggles as a writer over the past year. Fortunately, all of those updates are now re-hosted here and back-dated to the day I originally posted them on Tumblr! I was very lucky: the Tumblr terminations had spooked me enough that I actually founded this website the day before my Tumblr was terminated, and I spent much of Thanksgiving evening transferring over the posts that I felt would be most difficult to recover in the event my blog disappeared.
The real losers are the artists and authors that I have befriended on Tumblr. I tried my hardest to be a friendly, positive, enabling influence on the site, reblogging art and stories with supportive comments or glowing reviews. That curation, that support—a few paragraphs about why I adored a certain author’s work, or a gif of Jordan Peele nervously sweating in the face of some excellent art—is simply gone.
What’s most infuriating about this process is the complete absence of an explanation or even response from Tumblr’s support staff. I did as the termination screen asked: I used their website portal to fill out a short request for more information concerning my ban. I received no response, not even an automated reply that the support request had been received. When I resubmitted my request using a different email, I received an immediate confirmation, followed by a demand that “for my own security” I re-submit the request using the email tied to the terminated account. When I did, I once again received no automated confirmation that my request had been received.
My hunch, as dour as it might sound, is that Tumblr has adopted a policy of blacklisting the email addresses associated with terminated accounts, preventing requests for more information or review from ever being escalated to the support staff. I don’t know if this is a temporary measure implemented to handle the increased volume of requests, or a new “zero tolerance” policy for ostensibly egregious infractions.
But I don’t even know what rule I broke! I have absolutely never shared or supported child pornography in any form, and my Tumblr was appropriately flagged NSFW. I’m flummoxed at what rule my blog transgressed that isn’t violated by all of NSFW Tumblr.
And I think that is the scary part. Given that the Tumblr app is still not back in the App Store, over a week since it was removed, I suspect that this problem is not going away. Apple is exerting pressure on Tumblr to gets its house in order; that Tumblr is banning “good” NSFW content alongside “bad” NSFW content is not as serious a business concern as the profits and visibility that are being lost every day the Tumblr app is not available. Tumblr will either reach an accord with Apple that allows NSFW content to exist in some form on the site, or it will continue to ban NSFW content until Apple is satisfied.
In the meantime, bans like mine actually benefit Tumblr. NSFW content that threatens Tumblr’s relationship with Apple is a liability, and bans like this help push that “problematic content” off the site, hopefully never to return. Even if my blog is subsequently restored, Tumblr has sent a very clear, albeit implicit, message that NSFW content isn’t wanted on its site and needs to find a new home.
In my case, that new home is here.
Welcome back to Devi Lacroix Writes. I appreciate you following me here, and I look forward to sharing many more NSFW stories in the coming days.
My friends, it has been almost three months since I posted an update. While I’ve been very quiet on this blog, I want you to know that I have been writing: according to my notes, I’ve written at least 10,000 words and completed two stories over the past ten weeks. I plan to post them here are soon as @jilldoesprompts has finished the accompanying art!
But that’s not really what I want to post about today.
I’ve only reblogged a few things this month, and it has been even longer since I posted something of my own creation. But I have spent the month writing!
It has been almost five weeks since I posted my last Infernal Dispatch. I have been absolutely slammed at Real Work. It’s a good job that pays the bills and generally affords me respect, but it can be stressful and time-demanding; in the past two weeks, I’ve worked five twelve hour days.
It’s not always this bad, and I’m in a pretty good space mentally. But I’ve been too tired to seriously write after work, and my weekends have been hit-or-miss. However, I have written several thousand words this month! That makes me really happy, and I’m looking forward to writing more in the coming days. The month isn’t over yet!
I’ve written over 1,100 words this weekend. Better yet, I’m looking forward to tomorrow and the chance to write even more.
Looking forward to the next writing session, being excited by one’s own productivity, brainstorming and then giving voice to the brainstorm—this is how I felt in March. It’s nice to have that back.
I am beginning to sit down and write again, which is a very good feeling! Unfortunately, I’ve restarted @sapphomet‘s story multiple times in the past few days; in terms of word count, I’m actually getting negative yardage on my writing goals!
However, I’m not that concerned about output right now. Returning to WIPs after a hiatus gives me some perspective; it lets me gauge whether or not I’m actually content with my content. Do I like how the characters have been portrayed? Are the situations they are in acceptable? Are their reactions understandable?
I’m going to be honest with you fine lewdites:
I’ve not written a lick of fiction in April.
I’m not saying this to brag. There’s been a huge confluence of personal and professional reasons that my productivity has tanked.
That aside, one big reason I haven’t written is that I creatively burned myself out finishing my last 10k story. I can feel my creative juices beginning to recharge, but it’ll probably be a few more days before I’m back in the saddle. I apologize to my outstanding commissioners, who are patiently waiting for their stories.
In the meantime, I’ve written a few long posts over at tf-talk.net, about transformation erotica generally. Some of y’all might like to join in the fun.