I’ve got several issues with the proposed Tumblr blackout, but chief among them is the fact that it lands on the first day of Disabled Pride Month and the fact that there are people calling for it to become indefinite when disabled folks already have limited access to their communities, and many of us are losing what little reliable access we have because of places like Reddit going dark.
Like… idk. Maybe I’m being uncharitable. But the prioritization of ensuring Pride is minimally interfered with while the first day of Disability Pride is just taken away is rubbing me the wrong way.
And just to be clear. I don’t think anyone is doing it intentionally. But I also think that’s the problem. No one thinks about disabled people except other disabled people. I wish they would.
I have a chronic illness and I didnt even know there was a Disabled Pride Month.
So welcome to your first Disability Pride. I know it’s technically tomorrow, but it’s never too early to find out you have a community and be welcomed by it :)
Who’s calling for it to become indefinite? That, I would be against. But in its current form it seems fine.
And as a disabled person, I didn’t know about this July disability month. It seems US American-centric tbh. Not that it’s totally useless, of course, it just doesn’t have the same significance. I think we have more to gain in a short, 1-2 day blackout than we have to lose. Because a demand of the blackout is to fix some of the accessibility issues caused by recent changes.
There were numerous iterations in the notes from some people calling for it to become indefinite.
And while Disability Pride Month was to originally commemorate ADA, it is celebrated globally, with many other countries aligning with the US celebration.
Many people just don’t know it exists because Disabled Rights and issues are universally overlooked or ignored.
That you don’t recognize it’s importance does not mean it is not monumentally important to many of us and has been since the 90s.
And the blackout will not achieve anything. Fuck, it’s barely achieved anything on Reddit except to displace already vulnerable communities with limited access to community.
If you want to protest Tumblr, leave negative reviews on the apps citing the issues. Withhold money. Not this… token whatever this is supposed to be.
I do small-time activism for disability rights. Small time, as in, I write a lot of angry emails to places telling them they’ve broken accessibility laws. You can, in fact, do multiple things. I’m constantly on Tumblr’s ass about their issues.
I take issue with you saying this is merely a token. We don’t know that a short blackout won’t achieve anything. It’s different from the Reddit blackout, which is meant to be a strike. This is meant to be more attention-grabbing. I think it can work.
As for your claim that disability pride month is a thing internationally… well, kind of. A July pride month for disability is ONLY a thing in the United States, Brighton, England (as of 2016) and only online in Germany (as of 2020). There have been disability pride weeks in Aotearoa in September, November, and December. That’s two, maybe three other countries.
I didn’t say you didn’t do anything?
What I am pointing out is that the blackout will not work because there have been several Tumblr blackouts in my time on this hellsite (9+ years at this point, Gods help me), and not a single one has ever achieved anything.
And I’m aware that other counties also have their own months, but July as Disability Pride Month is still a major online rallying point for many communities, and the fact that you had never heard of it is not just cause to dismiss it as not important.
Reading your other posts on this subject, you make it seem like the original post just had disability stuff tacked onto it. That’s not the case, it was about accessibility from the beginning. OP is disabled.
We have nothing to lose by not going on Tumblr for a single day. We don’t know this won’t affect anything. At the very least, it would spread awareness about the accessibility issues. We do know that Tumblr rejected requests to blaze the post. That means something.
I’m not saying disability pride month is totally without value, I’m just saying it’s completely normal for someone not to be aware of it. Even someone who cares about rights for disabled people.
And you did imply I do nothing by imploring me to try other methods of affecting change instead of this “token” as you called it.
I did read the original post.
I read it the day it was posted, and I did not agree with it because I vehemently do not like the idea of the first day of online Disability Pride Month being silenced when so much of our activism revolves around NOT being silenced.
The people that did the sit-ins and die-ins before us would frankly find it baffling that silence was being used as a form of disability activism when 30 years on, we are still struggling to be heard, and the temporarily abled are still talking over us.
And as a fellow disabled queer, I am allowed to disagree with the reasoning of that post and to also complain about the ableism that is quite frankly rampant in the broader LGBT community.
The fact that so many other people jumped on it and started calling people “scabs” for not planning to take part again, during disability pride month, when we are losing our other community connections, was enough to make me side-eye the intent of some people involved.
As I also said in my original post: I did not think the general “blahness” of it all was intentional on the part of the OP. I simply thought it was poorly thought out and that some of the people who were calling for indefinite blackouts were not thinking about disabled people but were more than happy to use us as a cudgel when they would not do the same during LGBT Pride.
I also did not imply anywhere that you do not do your own activism by pointing out there are better methods of protesting than what is, yes, a token protest.
A blackout will not hurt Tumblr. It will not have the same news-grabbing results as Reddit. We know this from years and years of experience. The platforms are too different, both in scope and functionality.
Me giving viable ways for people to protest other than the blackout was not me saying that you personally do nothing. If you read it that way, I apologize. Clearly, my meaning was not clear.
As a long-time tumblr user and a queer disabled person who is very active in both queer and disabled spaces on tumblr and elsewhere:
This is the first I even heard of a blackout being proposed. A real blackout requires real actual organization and coordination and collaboration and it has to be planned really far in advance. I doubt most users of this site have even heard of this plan. And even if every single user on the site was aware of it and wanted to take part, it would make absolutely fuck all difference. @thebibliosphere is right: that is not how it works on this site, it’s been tried before and always failed, and it was never going to achieve anything other than people making themselves feel like they’d done something important which requires literally zero effort on their part (look at me, I um, I didn’t look at a web site for a whole day, and that makes me an activist) - and cutting disabled people off from their community at the start of their pride month.
If people want to just not use tumblr for a day fucking go for it. I do it all the time. But not enough people even know about this idea for it to catch the attention of anyone in charge, and even if they did, it wouldn’t change anything because tumblr doesn’t work that way.
This site has some serious accessibility issues that need addressing and that has been the case for some time. A lot of us are trying our best to do something about it. Wanting to do something about it is great! But this won’t work. It was never going to work.
And yes, doing it at the start of disability pride month (even if that only affected the US - which it doesn’t - that country represents a majority of the users on this site) kind of sucks. It’s the first day of a month when disabled people share information and support and pride and promote a community which is rarely listened to. I’m not in the US and there’s no disability pride month where I live but I enjoy all the disability pride stuff here on tumblr because tumblr is special for that.
Literally, imagine if there was some issue that affected the queer community specifically and a group of people got together and said “hey, I know what to do, we’ll boycott the web site where all the queer people congregate and support each other, and we’ll do it at the start of queer pride month, just when everyone was looking forward to celebrating!” You’d just be cutting off the members of that community right when they are planning to be most connected. This is no different, even if disability pride month isn’t as widespread. It is widespread here, on tumblr.
Wanting to do something is a good instinct. Trying to boycott your way into getting attention only works in very specific circumstances, and this is not one of them.
adults of tumblr how on earth do you decide on what mattress you want to order
Go to the store.
Go to the store and lie on it for five minutes.
I know online is cheaper, but go to the store. Online delivery has a send back guarantee, but do you really know yourself capable of and willing to dismantle your bedroom because it didn’t work out? No? GO TO THE STORE.
Go to the store and try it out and compare prices and nine out of ten times, they will match the online prices for you, because you’re THERE and they can’t afford to let you walk out empty handed.
Try it out, figure out the right hardness for you. Make sure you’re comfortable.
A good mattress will last you 20-30 years depending on how often you move and how well you commit to taking care of it: vacuum it regularly and flip as per instructions, usually once every six months.
A bad mattress costs about the same as a good mattress, up front, except for the fact it will fuck you up for years and you might end up with chronic pain because of it.
Go to the store. Try it out.
I got a 46% discount and 18 interest free installment payment on mine, just cause I was physically there.
Figure out your budget. Go to the store. Ask to try it out. Make sure it feels good.
You deserve a good mattress and you deserve the money you spend to be worthwhile.
You’ve got this.
Also a lot of those trendy online-only delivery mattresses are not quality controlled, multiple people have discovered their mattress was stuffed with fiber glass only after it ripped and spewed sharp fibers over literally all of their belongings
Something my family says a lot: invest in a good mattress and a good pair of shoes. You’re always in one or the other.
I spent months trying to figure it out and going to the store was the only option. I really wanted to just order a mattress in a box but not a single one seemed worth the risk. My friend was actually a victim to the fiberglass mattresses. She had to throw out her whole closet. Not a single thing was salvageable.
Listen to the adults and just go to the store! It sucks and it’s time consuming but you get what you want that way.
hey netizens! iβm not sure how many people are aware, but youtubeβs been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that canβt be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate
BUT, if youβre a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!
when a carrd is like “usual dni criteria” what the fuck does that even mean. you’re just admitting that you don’t even know what moral standard youre claiming to uphold here. literally “I agree with whatever everyone else is saying”
tumblr puritans have never spoken to a kinky person and you can tell this because they talk about ~scary~ kinks like a child who thinks their teacher sleeps at school. they have a 1700s “actors cannot be trusted for they engage in obscene behavior” mindset. yes lil buddy people can in fact roleplay situations and then exit that roleplay and have different thoughts and actions 🤗 adding sex to performance does not actually cast a magic spell that turns you into a monster incapable of morality <3
Listen, you should never film strangers in public without their consent, but I swear there need to be fines or something for people who do that shit in some spaces. For example: I had to go to the ER last night, and some jerk filmed a woman who just came in and was clearly having an asthma attack. She immediately got to go back, and he was unhappy about that. Believe me, I get that it sucks having to wait when you’re in pain, but you don’t get to pick who deserves care when. The medical system in the US is a nightmare, and the ER could be the worst moment of someone’s life. No one deserves to be recorded because some jack ass believes someone doesn’t look like they need care.
This is fine to reblog. People who film strangers should be shamed if nothing else.
I know a lot of EFR instructors (Emergency first response, the people who teach CPR classes) who used to be ambivalent about this and now are firmly in the “fuck you fuck your phone category.
Maybe its demographics, EFR instructors do tend to be older and less online, but there’s been a shift from voyeur filming being seen as irritating and tasteless to actively harmful.
I met one lady who had an entire section of her lecture based on how to divide labor in emergency and one of those steps was crowd control. If you are taking charge of an emergency situation, you delegate tasks. Point at one person and tell them to call 911, Point at another person tell them to warn traffic, Point at another person tell them to get the first aid kit if you know where it is. You assign small tasks to individuals instead of asking a crowd that way the task actually happens, and you’re not sitting around 20 minutes later wondering why the ambulance is taking so long to show up and it turns out that everyone assumed someone else called.
Now there is another step. Pick a big dude and tell him to stop people from filming. Which is actually the tamest version of what she said, because this lady went on and on about how phones are fragile, light, small, pieces of computer equipment that can be easily punted into oblivion.
And yeah, she’s probably the most vocal proponent of property destruction in the face of voyeur filming I’ve heard lately but she’s far from the only person in emergency services who’s frustrated with the eternal quest for viral videos of strangers pain.
And to be clear there is a huge difference between the paramedic who doesn’t want you filming and the cop who doesn’t want you filming.
The paramedic who doesn’t want you filming is trying to protect someone who is hurt and vulnerable and maybe going through the worst day of their life. That is worthy of respect and if you film someone in medical distress you are a pustulent asshole of a human being.
A cop who doesn’t want you filming is probably trying to violate someone’s civil rights and you should absolutely record away.
Don’t just shame those people - if you can, sue them.
