That’s a great point about the poster and the contest, I’d never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn’t think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.

Made in Abyss vibes, 10/10. A great worldbuilding aesthetic of a city of would-be adventurers hanging on the edge of the ruins they want to but can’t explore.

Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker’s logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.

I agree with you that it’s a complicated issue with no right answer and I don’t think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don’t think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.

This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can’t remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren’t just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they’re ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn’t make those views okay. Because they’re super fuckin’ racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that’s not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth preserving so that we don’t lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the “better days” or something.

As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera “Mix it Up” posters of the girl with the giant “package” under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that’s the point. They’re intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people’s bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.

There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler’s bunker had been. But even then, it’s vital to preserve that past so it can’t be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can’t happen again. We can’t learn from our mistakes if there’s no evidence that they even happened.

There’s a great video on this that was made when YouTube first started rolling this out called The Cobra Effect: Why Anti-Adblock Policies Could Hurt Revenue Instead, and one of the points mentioned in the video is the rising number of people who use an adblocker, and not specifically mentioned but shown in the video is a graphic from an article from 2015 which shows that just under 43% of people use an adblocker. That number will have obviously changed in the past 7 years, but if we just use 25% of viewers as an estimate, that’s 25% of all viewers on YouTube who may turn to more “malicious” forms of adblocking such as things like AdNaseum and ReVanced or sites that host YouTube videos without the ads, and tell others to do the same if they’re sick of ads. And even if they do give up and watch the ads, the science says that people who use adblockers are much less likely to click on an ad and make a purchase, which is bad for advertisers since they pay for the number of views an ad gets and their clickthrough rate would go down, making it more expensive and less profitable to do business with YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0

I dunno if I’d call it a massive corporation now. Data grabbing? Most likely, it’s got ads at the very least, so it’s got ad metrics. But it’s owned by the same people who own WordPress now.

Honestly, the best part of modern Tumblr is that the creator sold it to Yahoo for just over $1 billion, and then Verizon sold it for less than $3 million 6 years later. They tried to monetize it, royally screwed themselves in the process, and ended up selling it for less than .3% of what Yahoo bought it for in the first place.

The original owner took his money from the sale, disappeared from public life, and only pops up occasionally when he makes a donation to some charity or another. All while Verizon gave themselves hemorrhoids trying to make it into another data-grabbing social media blackhole like Twitter X or Facebook.

Tumblr, too, once upon a time. Started out as a side project built by a guy and a programmer from his company he paid to help him. He hated social media sites like Facebook and wanted to build a social media site that he would enjoy using. Someplace where he could post his photos and follow people he liked so he could see their content, and that was it.

They even helped develop the COVID vaccines.

Furries need high paying jobs to be able to afford all those commissions and fursuits, after all.

Be the change you want to see in the world!

I decided one day that I was gonna try growing my hair out, as I had it basically buzzed my entire life. I went from that to now having a ponytail so long that it reaches the small of my back (when it’s not in a ponytail I have to be careful that it doesn’t get caught when I put on pants or sit down), and along the way I inspired boys I worked with to try growing their hair out on multiple occasions. One didn’t like how his hair basically turned into an afro and cut it, one has been rocking a shoulder-length viking-esque look for about 8 years now, and the last looks so much like white Jesus that Catholics do a double-take just to make sure the Rapture hasn’t happened.

Being a boomer is a choice, not an age.

I’ve seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it’s down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.

They’re tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they’re not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.

Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to “go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already.”

I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they’ve matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.

Damn right! I was jealous of these kids who had the courage to express themselves how they wanted and explore their identities outside of what was deemed “socially acceptable” back then, and I will fight tooth and nail for kids to be able to do the same today, even if I don’t exactly understand what’s “it” nowadays.