Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).
Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.
You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.
I was already disgusted just reading about this but looking at the side-by-side comparison of the real speech and the rewrite really brought it home.
So out of morbid curiosity I tried Tumblr’s export feature to download my blog. Pressed the button, waited. After a few hours I got an email it was ready.
For my relatively modest blog of ~5K posts/reblogs, it produced a zip file of about 12 GBs. It didn’t say how big the file was when downloading; I just had to wait until it was done. Once downloaded, Windows 10′s native zip management couldn’t handle it, insisting it was a broken archive. An ancient dusty install of 7Zip popped it right open, though.
Inside were two folders and one .xml file:
“Media” clocks in at 12 GBs and consists of 14K gifs, jpgs, pngs, mp3s, mp4s, and movs. “Posts” has a folder of individual stripped-down HTML docs of every post, plus an xml doc that also seems to be every post in a single 21MB file. (This doc does appear to include my 800 draft posts.) And messages is all your messages/chats (which I admit is nice to have a backup of, though the xml is of course unreadable without some kind of reader).
But the best, the BEST (sarcasm level 8) part of this is that all those HTML/XML post files? They link back to the files ON TUMBLR. They don’t have internal links to the files in that Media folder. So when you open one of your downloaded posts in your browser, the images you’re seeing are from Tumblr’s servers – for as long as those images are posted and you’re online.
So this reblogged post, ‘capped from my downloaded archive:
Meanwhile files in the Media folder are just numbered by the post ID number, not those strings. It would be possible, I’m guessing, to run a conversion, to switch all the media links to using the ID numbers to link to what’s in the media folder – but that’s beyond my limited regex skills. Without that, you’re left with a pile of media with no organization whatsoever, and a folder full of posts with broken media.
(Things like this make me wonder if they’re not trying to repackage the site for advertisers at all but are just trying to kill it quick. Then again, trying to ascribe any kind of firm rational motive to whoever’s in charge of this feels like accusing a clogged toilet of having an agenda…)
Thank you for doing this! (Also … OMG TUMBLR. >__>) To some extent that’s actually somewhat better than I was afraid of, because at least you have all the images and the text of the posts, both in easy to read formats; I was worried it’d be one giant horrible thing that you’d need some kind of decoder program to read, and you’d have to pull out images individually if you wanted them. (I mean, back in Strikethrough days I remember finding a 3rd-party site that would download your journal as a PDF but didn’t include most of the images or comments. This sounds like an improvement over that, at least!)
… but still.
Also, I started a backup running yesterday and nearly 24 hours later it’s still just showing me “backup processing” which is … not promising. (This file is going to be huuuuuuge.)
Oh yikes. Well, that answers my question anyway. Sheesh.
This is a long post, but please bear with me! ♥ And PLEASE REBLOG to help to spread the word! ♥♥♥
By now, probably all of you have heard about the fact that this garbagefire of a website has finally started to collapse. In a lot of ways, I think it’s a good thing, but Tumblr had two things really had going for it:
it was one platform that different kinds of contributors could use for different kinds of content;
the vast majority of the fandom population used it as a home base.
This brings me to my primary fear: our ship’s amazing community may get scattered to the winds if everybody jumps ship in different directions.
This brings me to my suggested solution: I’m going to make a spreadsheet of alternate usernames and sites and accounts and destinations for members of the Roy/Ed fandom. This way, we can at least all see where our longtime fandom friends are sharing their work!
HOW DO YOU GET IN ON THIS? Easy peasy lemon thing!
Just copy and paste and then fill out the form below, with as few or as many accounts as you feel comfortable sharing. Message it to me here, or on Twitter, or wherever you feel like, and I’ll add you to a Google Spreadsheet that will be publicly accessible, to help the Roy/Ed fandom to find each other on other platforms.
sometimes I just want to talk about media theory and its relation to media criticism. stuff like “criticism of media should be proportional to its source, reach, and context in order to be effective” where:
Source: is the media putting itself forward as an expert, educational, or reliable source? Is the creator seen as knowledgeable? Historical accuracy is very important in documentaries, far less so in doctor who episodes. Documentaries should face harsher criticism than doctor who for historical innacuracy.
Reach: how many people can be expected to see this? How accessible will it be? What are the barriers to entry? highly promoted movies should face harsher criticism than unlisted YouTube videos. Obscene content with no warning should face harsher criticism than obscene content with a warning.
Context: where was this published? How does it compare to other similar works on the same platform and in the same time period? How reputable is the platform and the media shown alongside it? Works published in an online journal should face harsher criticism than tumblr posts. 20 year old editorials should face less harsh criticism for not using modern vocabulary.
Effective: how likely is this criticism to stimulate a productive discussion and potentially effect change? Would a change by the creator and/or audience have an impact that’s worth your time? Spending 48 hours to get someone to take down a post with less than 200 views just isn’t worth it, especially if you increase its reach in the process. Sometimes languishing in obscurity is a more effective criticism than anything you could say.
Sometimes languishing in obscurity is a more effective criticism than anything you could say.
This is something I feel like everyone needs to understand a lot better.
tora42's nonsensne 
