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[grayarcadian]

Damn, how I have missed this format!

Look, I was part of the whole LJ thing and loved the unholy hell out of it before the Russians screwed it up. (Well, there was that one run-in with Archie Comics, but...) Then I went to Facebook like everyone else on the planet.

Facebook sucks for nuanced thoughts though. It's terrific for networking and shitposting and meme, but being out there too long just ups your blood pressure. There's not enough friendly content between the, "Aw, fuck, what did the GOP do now?! You get quick cuts of friends, nice pics, and then it gets swallowed whole by the next thing.

I remember everyone going to Tumblr there for awhile. Tumblr always seemed a little chaotic, not a deep thought kind of place, and very reactionary - like a step down from Twitter. I'm learning to use it now that I'm on this break, but after all that shit with the censorship and Yahoo and all that...nah. It's just not going to be my primary.

I'm also just not into the ads everywhere.

I mean, I wish more friends would come on back here; but I'll enjoy what I have and make some new friends while I'm at it.

Comments

[refuse2shine]

Tumblr is great, especially if you end up finding a good slice of fandom, but I do find that Dreamwidth is much better for deeper discussions.

[greghousesgf]

what was the run in with Archie comics?

[grayarcadian]

So I was part of a large DC comics RP community called JLA_Watchtower. Among our ranks was Chris aka MightyGodKing who is now a major comics blogger out of Canada. Chris had 3 hobbies when knew him:

1) Utterly destroying conservative trolls who came on liberal boards and tried to ruin his day.
2) Talking about comics while making Archie Comics the buttmonkey of many of his jokes.
3) Role-playing a roster which included the likes of Aquaman and Lex Luthor. I used to joke he was our designated asshole.

One of the comic projects he had was something called Improved Archie which parodied Archie Comics in a crass, R-rated kind of way. This was well before the new management that allowed characters like Kevin, much less Riverdale. So Archie comics sent him and LJ a C&D. He complied with all their demands to make it more in compliance with parody law in the US.

But this is where I strongly suspect that the Trolls got involved. There was a weakness and they kept reporting the site along with any other boarderline kind of post blogging about movies and such until LJ just suspended all his accounts.

Which meant all those play-by-blog posts also got deleted. It was the equivalent of several comics vanishing overnight and many others having panels go blank.

Thanks to the bots on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine we were able to restore quite a bit, but the hassle was immense.

So, since this is one of my areas of expertise: Yes, he was in compliance with fair use by most standards. Fair use though is like self-defense, and in order to argue for it, he'd have to travel from Canada. Also, LJ as a private entity can have whomever they want around or boot whomever they feel like.

But Riverdale is never, ever going to cease to be weird AF for me.

[juniperberry]

(Sorry, I've been caught up in my own stuff the last few weeks!)

Re: Tumblr--I use both an ad-blocker in my browser (uBlock) and an X-Kit extension for Tumblr in particular, which has lots of little extensions you can use just for the site. It might be too much trouble for you if it's not your primary, but if you have X-Kit, look up the "Anti-Capitalism" extension. Between those two things I never see ads on Tumblr.