We are the Pride Knights, and this is our battle cry No enemy can shake us, as hard as they can try There’s a fire in our eyes that no hatred can kill A passion in our hearts that’s as strong as our will
To our fellow queers who fight their battles on their own We promise to fight with you, you are never alone To our fellow queers who have fallen with the pain We thank you for your courage, your fight is not in vain
We are defenders of the right to be proud of who you are To love who you love and to accept every scar We are your knights, protectors of our pride Together we stand, together we ride
Thank you everyone for the overwhelming support you have shown for this project and for joining the @prideknights. Our goal is to let everyone feel and know they are valid no matter who they are.
The website has been fully funded! Our next goal is to create armor so we can make empowering and inspirational Youtube videos! For anyone who wants to help: Be your local Pride Knight and support and empower others. You can get these designs on a variety of items in our store. The campaign ends on December 15.
Look, I don’t believe in God, but I will not disrespect the Good Gentlemen of the Hills. That’s just common sense.
Between this and the Icelanders with their elves I do not understand what is going on above the 50th parallel.
My general rule of thumb: you don’t have to believe in everything, but don’t fuck with it, just in case.
^^^ that part
This is truer than true. Especially the Irish part.
Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.
This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.
Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.
I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.
And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.
You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.
So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)
Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.
They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.
Atlantic islands. Faerie: we haz it.
The Southwest is like this in some ways. You don’t go traveling along the highways at night with an empty car seat. Because an empty car seat is an invitation. You stick your luggage, your laptop bag, whatever you got in that seat. Else something best left undiscussed and unnamed (because to discuss it by name is to go ‘AY WE’RE TALKING BOUT YA WE’RE HERE AND ALSO IGNORANT OF WHAT YOU’RE CAPABLE OF’ at the top of your damn lungs at them) will jump in to the car, after which you’re gonna have a bad time.
If you’re out in the woods, you keep constant, consistent count of your party and make sure you know everyone well enough that you can ID them by face alone, lest something imitating a person get at you. They like to insert themselves in the party and just observe before they strike. It’s a game to them. In general you don’t fuck with the weird, you ignore the lights in the sky (no, this isn’t a god damn night vale reference, yes I’m serious) and the woods, you lock up at night and you don’t answer the door for love or money. Whatever or whoever’s knocking ain’t your buddy.
^ So much good advice in this post right here
I live in the south and… you just… don’t go into the woods or fields at night.
Don’t go near big trees in the night
If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night
I have broken all these rules.
I’ve seen some shit.
If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.
One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.
You think it’s the neighbor kids.
It’s not the neighbor kids.
Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.
So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.
If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.
Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.
Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.
Shit’s wild and I sound fucking crazy but I swear to god it’s true.
Every time this post comes around, it’s my favorite to open up the notes and read the stories. Probably shouldn’t have since I’m sleeping alone tonight, but you know, it’s fine. 😂
Austrian girl here who has lived in Ireland for 5+ years. This shit is LEGIT. I’ve seen it with my own two Catholic eyes.
Sure, visit during the day. That’s alright as long as you’re respectful. But you couldn’t PAY ME ENOUGH to go there at night. These are also the last places where you wanna start littering.
I grew up in southwest Pennsylvania which is a weird mixture of American cultures and environments. I was in the heavily forested mountains (northern Appalachia) but had lots and lots of corn fields and cow pastures. Like the Smoky Mountains and fields of Kansas combined. And being so cut off from a lot of the world, we had our fair share of ghost stories.
We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you).
But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.
I was walking to a friend’s house one night. It was about 20 minutes down a dirt road with forest on one side and a cornfield on the other. I’ve walked past it many times and wasn’t really concerned. My main worry was coming across a skunk or porcupine. I didn’t have a flashlight because the moonlight was bright enough and I knew the walk really well. Then I saw the eyes. I immediately averted mine (because for some reason that’s how to not annoy it) but they kept wandering back. They were still there, watching. I heard rustling and saw the eyes come closer and I took off running. I got to my friends without a scratch, but I was terrified. I mentioned it to my friend and that’s when I found out it was A Thing. Her parents agreed and shared their stories. I brought it up more and almost everyone knew what I was talking about. It was a phenomenon a lot of folks around town experienced but never mentioned. To this day, I don’t linger around poorly light cornfields at night.
@thedevilinthealchemy and I are very old friends. I used to live in the same town as her, in Southern California. One night, a few years ago, we were celebrating the end of finals and the start of winter break, and we just hanging out in her car, killing ourselves with late night Taco Bell. Well, we decide we don’t want to go home just yet, so we start driving. We drive up a canyon, near her place. Now, we both had made this trip many, many times, in daylight and dark. A local tourist trap is in that canyon, and there’s a shortcut to a college campus that goes through that canyon. It was a normal winter night in SoCal.
Well, about halfway through I start to get scared. For no reason. Within the span of two heartbeats I grew so terrified that my palms were shaking and my mouth was dry and for some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off the wood to the driver’s side.
“Turn around.” I say, quickly.
“Dude, already on it.” Kama said, doing a quick three point turn. I look in the mirror as she’s pealing away and see the creature. It was vaguely humanoid, and hairless, with elongated limbs and pitch black eyes, on all four limbs, loping after us. Now, if you’re in the know, you might be thinking “hey that’s like the creatures from Until Dawn, I call bullshit on this.” Well, Until Dawn was four years away, and it wasn’t even in development yet, so shush.
I rip my eyes away from it and hold on tight as she drives. Then, at the same time, both of us get this instinct and we speak.
“Don’t look in the backseat.” Needless to say, neither of us did. She drove damn near 90 on a dark canyon until we saw the lights of her complex at the mouth of it.
I haven’t gone back in there since, and that canyon got shut down about a year ago due to a landslide and it hasn’t opened back up. I’m a history major, and research always has been my first love, so I go digging. I visit the local history society, talk about my tale. Turns out the whole valley used to belong to a people called the Tativam. One day, after the Spanish arrived, they vanished. Without a trace. We have a graveyard of theirs that we know of. One of my professors was trying to stop the houses that were being built on it. Spoiler alert: he didn’t, and the houses are hella haunted, and nobody wants to live there.
Personally I do think the creature is a wendigo. That chain of mountains is park of unbroken chain that leads right up the Serra Nevadas and Donner Pass.
I’m from Northern California myself, state capitol, and while we don’t have much by way of critters (sure, we’ve got Bigfoot up in the redwoods, but those guys are mostly harmless).
Most of what we’ve got is due to the Gold Rush, and not just the hauntings (though there are plenty of those, a great many of them are theatre ghosts, most of whom are harmless, though some are very particular). What we’ve got by way of Things were brought along on the trail from the Old Country to the East Coast and then along thousands of miles of wagon trail.
We’ve got our fair share of phantom hitchhikers and women in white, but mostly what we’ve got are the Things That Survived The Flood. There was a flood in the early 1860s, one that caused the state capitol to actually be relocated for a while, and when it was over and the floodwaters receded, there was enough sediment left behind that what had been the second floor of buildings was now the ground floor.
There are a handful of places in Old Town that you Do Not Go after dark (despite being safe during the day). When I worked in Old Town, giving comedic history tours, we started from and returned to a restaurant that had a club downstairs (in what had been the ground floor before The Flood) and there was a storeroom down there that got locked at sunset and no one questioned it, but the door to that storeroom was pretty much right next to the portable shed we changed clothes in, and I know, more than once, I heard knocking and scratching and one of my very last tours I got a facefull of wet-plant rot smell (not quite mildew, but not stinky like rotting meat gets) so bad I couldn’t breathe. It’s one of the reasons I stopped doing the tours, really, because I was starting to get the feeling I was being singled out, and I didn’t want to find out what by.
When I was like 17, I lived in the woods on the northwest coast of canada.
One day, I decided to go for a walk in a part of the woods I had never been to before.
Because sometimes I see weird things out there, I made sure to bring my grandma’s dog with me, just running free and off-leash.
These are wild woods, too, not parkland, so the only clear areas are deer trails. I stuck along to those because, you know, I don’t want to get lost, and about an hour in I hear this strange whistling.
Just a short call- One long, sharp whistle followed quickly by a short, piping one.
Now, I’m in a good mood and I figure it must be some new kind of bird, so I whistle back: long call, short call.
It whistles again.
I’m amused, so I whistle again. Long call, short call, and then just to be fun, I throw in a little trill at the end.
It whistles back.
It whistles back the exact same pattern.
Now, normally that would freak me out, but I was in a REALLY good mood. A really weirdly good mood. So, I whistled again.
And when it whistled back to me, I giggled.
I… Don’t giggle. Not alone in the woods over basically nothing.
The whistle came again, and there was a rustle in the distance. Seeing a shady outcrop, I ran to hide, feeling like I was playing hide-and-seek with someone. It whistled, I whistled back.
Another rustle. Closer.
I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen the dog in a while. I looked around, and saw him a few feet away, staring point-blank and totally still into the forest.
The whistle came again, closer this time, and suddenly my weirdly bubbly feeling was gone. Instant fear. I got the dog’s attention and we absolutely booked it out of there, all the way back to the eight-foot-high gate that marked the start of the wild land.
I locked it behind me, and we never went back.
I never really had any idea what was whistling with me in the forest. Maybe some kind of mimic bird that had escaped home, or a squatter hiding out there sewhere messing with this kid and their dog.
I only just remembered that when I was a kid, we learned about the Tsonoqua woman.
The Tsonoqua woman is supposed to be an old woman who lives in the woods. She carries a basket on her back and has long, tangled hair. When children wander away from camp, it is said that she snatches them up in her basket and steals them away forever.
But because she has bad sight, she uses her keen ears to hunt, and calls out with a birdlike whistle.
I have lived in southern California for a lifetime. There are things here that even I don’t understand. Things I can’t describe. If you ever take any advice from my blog, please, please, remember this.
Coyotes don’t hunt in packs.
ok first, that^^ gave me chills. second, i heavily fuck with all this shit but specifically the irish/icelandic folklore, makes me wanna deadass move there. a faerie could punch me in the face and steal my first born child and replace it w a changeling and id be like “thx boo”, putting myself forever in its debt, probably
This is what i wanna see on here ^^
Friends: I got a ouija board
Me: They don’t do anything, you know that right.
Friend: So wanna play?
Me: Hell no, I’ve seen this movie and I die 20min in. See ya.
In response to the NSFW ban being enacted by Tumblr Staff, on December 17th 2018 I propose that we all log off of our Tumblr accounts for 24 hours.
The lack of respect and communication between staff and users is stark. Users have been begging staff to delete the porn bot outbreak, which has plagued the website for well over a year. The porn bots oftentimes send people asks and messages, trying to get them to go to a website full of viruses. They also spam advertisements on others posts.
Users have also begged that Tumblr ban neo-nazis, child porn, and pedophiles, all which run rampant on the site. The site/app got so bad that it was taken off the app store.
However, instead of answering the users, Tumblr has instead taken the liberty to ban all NSFW content, regardless of age. But users have already run into issues of their SFW content being marked as sensitive and being flagged as NSFW, not allowing them to share their work.
Not only does this discriminate again content creators, but it also discriminates against sex workers. Disgustingly, the ban will be enacted on December 17 which is also International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
This ban is disgusting, and while I (and plenty of others) welcome porn bots and child porn being banned, the Tumblr filtration system is broken. It tags artistic work’s nipples as NSFW (when it is art), it tags SFW art as NSFW (when it is not), and does not stop the porn bots, neo-nazis and dozens of other issues.
This ban is discriminatory. This ban is ineffective. This ban is unacceptable.
To protest, log off of your Tumblr account for the entirety of December 17th. Log off at 12 am EST or 9PM PST and stay off for 24 hours. Don’t post. Don’t log on. Don’t even visit the website. Don’t give them that sweet ad revenue.
Tumblr’s stock has already taken a hard hit. Let’s make it tank. Maybe then they will listen to the users.
Reblog to signal boost! We must force change.
If you don’t like what’s going on, this is an easy way to protest. Takes zero effort. They may not listen, but it’s fun to watch their stocks plummet.
The casting call for Artemis Fowl described him as a boy with a “fun-loving, open heart” so you knew before they even landed their eyes on the first mediocre white person the movie was irretrievably fucked
The casting call described him as what now
last i checked back in 6th grade, artemis was a fuckin dick of a child
“emotional intelligence” artemis fowl literally would rather die than express an emotion
im pretty sure he actually has on multiple occassions
im reblogging this again because i just remembered that artemis fowl hates being a Human Being With Feelings so much that he emotionally and mentally devastated *several* psychologists so badly that they gave up the profession, just because he didn’t want to admit that his father being declared dead and his mother falling into severe untreated mental illness such that she couldn’t recognize him on most days might, maybe, have upset him a little.
He literally found a way to kidnap a fairy and hold her for ransom in order to use half of said acquired funds to buy his mother a cure so that he wouldn’t have to admit to anybody that his mother’s mental health actually made him feel sad. You know, like any fun boy with a sense of humor.
Well, here are the salient points, and you’ll have to forgive the America-centric lens despite the wildly international community that’s on Tumblr.
The ~reason~ that Tumblr went into panic mode re: nudity and adult content was because Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the store due to child pornography on the website. Or at least, that’s what they’re telling you – the single largest paragraph in the Staff update re: this change was on child pornography, how abhorrent it is, what all they’re doing to combat it, etc.
But that’s honestly bullshit. That’s not why they’re /really/ doing it, though it’s certainly a flashpoint.
1. They’re rolling it out /now/ because Apple removed their app from the store. Which is on brand for apple. They have a history of removing “adult content” from their products. Here are some posts on Apple and it’s so-called “Walled Garden.”
Which is fine, if Apple wants to purge adult products from their content (ie things they own and moderate, such as a social media network), that’s their prerogative. But what Apple is ALSO doing is policing what kind of content developers and companies are allowed to have on their own websites that might be accessed by users of Apple technology, which is in exact opposition to principles of net neutrality. Apple preventing users from seeing certain content on their iphones or imac computers, or the safari browser, and preventing them from accessing certain apps/websites that don’t meet their approval, is part of a technology monopoly that controls how certain aspects of the internet are going to develop.
IE, Tumblr purging its nudity content to get back on the Apple apps store, because they want to make money.
There was a lawsuit over this in 2014, which resurfaced in 2017. Here’s the court case on Apple Inc vs. Pepper, if you wanna read more on it:
But the big issue here is, when Apple begins to create a monopoly, net neutrality laws are part of what helps combat this. And if there are no net neutrality laws in place, it’s an awful lot harder to deal with corporations like Apple throttling ~sensitive content.~ A heading under which Apple has notoriously included stuff like LGBTQ+ content (see: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/08/31/apple-censors-pride-watch-face-in-russia/), which is obvious unethical on a number of levels.
2. They had been planning on doing this for a while. You may have seen the vox interview article re: this, but I’ll post it below:
The NSFW ban had been underworks for 6 months already. Six months! They were planning on doing this with or without the CP issues that got them kicked off the Apple app store.
And here’s the thing. Tumblr was bought by Yahoo in 2013, with the intent of making $ through advertising, a goal which was not met. Marissa Mayer was at the helm of this project, and reportedly she was mocked and belittled for a lot of the ideas she had re: Tumblr, and insiders have reported that in general Yahoo really failed to do anything with Tumblr because they didn’t understand how it worked and really didn’t care to learn. Here, we have a case of a MAJOR communications company purchasing an internet social media platform, and basically stagnating it. Every report that we’ve had about Tumblr post Yahoo purchase is that they’ve been hemorrhaging staff – esp senior staff – because they won’t do anything with them, or they’ve actively pushed them out of leadership roles to push their company agendas onto the already existing culture of Tumblr. Basically, they’ve been strangling Tumblr as a website. We joke about @staff being terrible with coding, but from 2014-2018, pretty much all of the dysfunction we’re seeing is in tandem with the Yahoo takeover.
Here’s an article that describes some of these problems, though it’s by no means comprehensive:
Even with all that, Yahoo did somehow manage to mostly leave Tumblr alone, and relatively functional. Yahoo actually wrote Tumblr down for something like half the value that it was worth, counting it as a loss.
The real issue is that Verizon acquired Yahoo in June of 2017, about a year and a half ago. Like Yahoo, Verizon laid off tons of people involved with the programming and management of the website. Then in early 2018 they implemented to “Safe Search” filtering of ~sensitive content~ which was something users could opt out of it they chose. Which, most of us did. It seemed silly at the time, but in hindsight it was very obviously a test run of this current plan to implement the NSFW ban.
For the purpose of Verizon and Tumblr under Verizon, “sensitive content” was defined as “anything that might not be suitable for some members of the Tumblr community” such as “nudity, //////including/////// in an artistic, educational, or photojournalistic context.
INCLUDING.
For all that Tumblr @staff’s “A better, more positive Tumblr” said that the ban wouldn’t include, say, expression of political nudity or artistic nudity, it’s quite clear from the TOS that this is something they’re slanting against, and I really don’t think it’s purely from the ~bad algorithms~ that posts with topics dealing with sexuality, nudity, LGBTQ+, trans issues, disability issues, body positivity, and etc are being targeted. It’s not a coincidence that the NSFW ban included the language of “female presenting nipples” – as if women’s bodies are inherently sexual in nature.
And it’s sure as hell not a coincidence that Verizon was one of the telecommunications and media corporations that was actively lobbying against net neutrality along with Comcast. Verizon wants to control what kind of content you see, and wants to charge you for the kinds of content you can see. Verizon is a company that has admitted to actively throttling the content of its competitors.
And the fundamental issue here is that, with a large corporation that doesn’t care about its userbase, it’s trying to streamline a website like Tumblr into being something that it wants, instead of trying to work with the website culture that’s already in place. Where Yahoo was at a standstill, Verizon is actively dismantling parts of what make Tumblr so successful and tight-knit as a social media and blogging platform – particularly with content that might otherwise be deemed as “inappropriate” / “sensitive content” in other places like Facebook – talking about trans issues, talking about sexuality, etc. And the fact that this is actively harming sex workers and targeting quote unquote the female form suggests that they want to throttle freedom of expression. So when we talk about fandom leaving FF.N, and LiveJournal, and the kinds of fandom history that younger folks have maybe even only vaguely heard of (the infamous “What’s a lemon?” question comes immediately to mind) we’re talking about how a major mainstream corporation is looking at how to turn its userbase (which is just numbers to them!) into a profitable scheme, and it’s always going to be an upward ladder that harms the communities down below.
Those of us that are looking at the situation and going “Why don’t they do x, y, z? And make it actually functional?” are underestimating in a big way the fact that they want to spend as little money on this project as possible while still trying and double their userbase and profits. The fact that they mentioned BLM as a marketable niche suggests the fundamentally misunderstand why these movements exist in the first place, and the fact that BLM was mentioned in tandem with Game of Thrones fans and Manchester United Fans means that all they’re seeing is demographics and theoretically untapped markets. Making the website more palatable to quote unquote the mainstream is an attempt to bring in more advertisers, which is why they were more than happy to put together the NSFW ban.
The NSFW ban is also probably a response of SESTA, which caused a lot of website platforms to double down on their TOS without actually doing anything meaningful to help combat sex trafficking and child pornography:
With that said – they’re also probably not unhappy to have a left-leaning, pro-net neutrality website like Tumblr die, which is honestly what it’s heading toward. Tumblr spent over a decade building the communities that it has, and a lot of people use it as an alternative to “mainstream media” and as a way to get a lot of information on politics and current events, as well as on obscure topics. It’s been a way to connect social justice activists, queer people who often didn’t have anywhere else to connect with other queer people in a way that wasn’t inherently sexualized (looking at grindr, fetlife, etc), academics, and more. The amount of information dissemination on Tumblr is truly incredible, and, if you’ll excuse the tin hat for a moment, it’s the antithesis of how the media currently functions – with about just 15 billionaires controlling most of America’s media corporations.
I don’t trust Verizon to do right by the userbase. They’ll do whatever they can to make it profitable and fit their company vision. And if you want a reminder of how utterly evil Verizon is, just refresh yourself on the fact that they were manipulating firefighter cell plans to make $ on them while they were actively in the process of combatting California wildfires.
And to cap it off, it’s 100% not a coincidence that some of the posts that were initially getting throttled on Tumblr were Tumblr/Staff critical posts. Not even on bit. Companies, particularly large companies with huge financial resources, actively scrub their internet presences so that only positive things come up.
To start this off, I’m pretty sure this post is going to be flagged because I’m using 1 image that I know gets flagged on its own. I do wonder what score this post is going to get though. (Update: this post scores 0.07455623894929886, aka exactly the same as the image below on its own.)
Quick recap if you’ve missed my previous technical musings on the content of flagging and explicit content: – For each post, tumblr keeps check of a number of variables. One of these is the NSFW score for each post. The score is a value between 0 and 1, and predicts how likely it is that the post is NSFW. for example 0.048 means it has 4.8% probability of being NSFW. In case you wonder, yes that’s enough to get flagged. – Other variables that are stored on the post are checks if a post is NSFW (yes or no), if a post is NSFW based on the score (yes or no; I’m not sure what the exact difference is, as I’ve only seen them both being no or both being yes), the classification of the post, and here it’s getting interesting, because a classification of ‘explicit’ means it gets flagged, and ‘clean’ means it won’t get flagged. Easy as that.
Very early this morning I wrote a small tool that lets you see the score and the other variables for the last 10 posts of any user. Instructions are meagre, but the tool is located here.
The above story by Coeur got the following scores: post type: text is NSFW based on score: false is NSFW: false classification: explicit
score: 0.07757801562547684
As you can see, the score for the post was 0.077…, otherwise known as 7.7% probability that the post is/might contain NSFW content. I did some more testing. First, I copied all the text of the fic, and put it in a new post and had it tested. The score was 0, and classification “clean”. So the text was not the problem. Next I posted the image as both a text post and a photo post for comparison. Both returned the same result: not NSFW, classification explicit and a score of 0.074…
The next step was do a comparison of image moderation tools. I’ve prior experience with Microsoft’s cognitive API, in fact I’ve used it to create a porn blog blocker that would screen new followers and block them if they were a suspected porn blog (unless I was already following them). Here are the scores for several major image moderation providers: Microsoft cognitive: “adult”: { "isAdultContent": false, "isRacyContent": false, "adultScore": 0.023388456553220749, "racyScore": 0.037842851132154465 } Google Cloud Vision: “safeSearchAnnotation”: { "adult": “UNLIKELY”, "spoof": “POSSIBLE”, "medical": “UNLIKELY”, "violence": “UNLIKELY”, "racy": “LIKELY” } Amazon Rekognition failed to find anything in the image that could be suggestive or explicit adult. Since there was nothing found, there weren’t confidence scores given either.
The last one I tested is far less known: it is called open_nsfw and was actually created by Oath/Yahoo itself, which based on the scores above makes it the most probable to be in use at Tumblr. There is a lot of information not known about it, but here’s a description with references to the paper. I downloaded the model that they released, didn’t fine tune it, and ran it over the above image: NSFW score: 0.02013823203742504
So in conclusion, I have absolutely no clue how Tumblr is able to come up with a score of 0.077 for this image, if the highest score found by other content moderation providers is at 3.7%, barely half of the score tumblr gives it. And that’s not even the actual problem, because this just brings me to the next part.
As I mentioned before, each post gets a couple variable flags for content, including “is_nsfw_based_on_score”. The interesting part here is that this flag appears to only be true, or “yes” if you prefer, when the score is above 0.98. So even when the moderation is 97% certain the image is NSFW, it won’t be flagged as NSFW. However, if your post is only having a score of 0.048… the lowest I’ve seen so far, equaling to 4.8% probability of it being NSFW, it will be flagged as explicit. Keep in mind that the Yahoo paper had the following paragraph:
Our general purpose Caffe deep neural network model (Github code)
takes an image as input and outputs a probability (i.e a score between
0-1) which can be used to detect and filter NSFW images. Developers can
use this score to filter images below a certain suitable threshold based
on a ROC curve for specific use-cases, or use this signal to rank images in search results.
I know that it got pretty technical there, but what they’re saying is that the score on itself is just as-is: a score, a probability. Tumblr’s implementation of the flagging of content however appears to have all content with a score higher than 0 as flagged. I’m not sure if any of you have seen the post about deep learning and unexpected results recently (http://psychopathic-bandaid.tumblr.com/post/180751390174/squiddity3-rubitrightintomyeyes), but tumblr managed to one-up this entire post with the new flagging: Tumblr doesn’t set a threshold, they just decide that if their content moderation says that a post could potentially have a more than 0% chance that content is NSFW, it will flag the post, and that’s it.
Machine learning 101: Even if you’ve created a model that is working pretty decent, you’ve to figure out how to use it. As for tumblr, your model might work decently, the way you use it does not. If content is 90% likely to be NSFW, please flag it as such. If it does not even reach the 30% yeah it’s likely not going to be explicit.
Actual example of a post captioned “caught giving daddy a blowjob”, featuring a single image of a topless woman holding a man’s penis in her hand, the man just wearing a tshirt and socks and that’s it. I got this from an old log file, old meaning September this year, so before the flagging got introduced. As a result I only have the score and NSFW values. The score for this post was 0.92, otherwise known as 92% probability that the post has/is NSFW content. The conclusion with the “is_nsfw” and “is_nsfw_based_on_score” flags was that it was not NSFW. I’ve seen other posts with a score of 0.99 and 1.0 finally getting flagged as NSFW, however, I haven’t seen a single post with a score below 0.98 being marked as NSFW.
Thus concludes this long overview on tumblr’s new flagging system.
Organized Chaos 