My name is Helion, and I welcome you to my Cave.
I'm a 28 year-old guy from the UK, who found his way to tumblr originally for the porn, and has stayed for the porn, the shiny, the interesting, the romantic and the cute, and occasionally post some things of my own. Just to make this clear, 18+ NSFW.
I'm open to asks and requests so don't hesitate. :)
My queue has now been cleared. The shadowbans and mutings are coming thick and fast, twelve days before the supposed deadline of 17th December.
As such, I think this will be my final post on this blog. I’ll let it post (hopefully I’ve not been muted yet), and then wait for the export to be ready to download. I’ll still be here, still talking to people (and watching out for contact details and so on), atleast until the 17th, or the banhammer descends.
When I return to NSFW blogging, my expectation/hope is that Pillowfort will have gotten out of beta, and gone genuinely live.
Until then, my Soundgasm is safe and sound where it is, as is my Pastebin, my Fetlife profile and my Reddit profile. I’ve set up a new twitter in the hopes of atleast keeping track of a few of my favourite content creators on here, and links to all of them are below.
I said in my previous post on this NSFW ban that I hoped that by the time it came to write this post, I would have something deep, meaningful and coherent to say, but truth to tell, I don’t.
There’s the broad-strokes, macro-level stuff, the sex workers who’re going to be missing rent, the deep and vibrant communities that are being destroyed, the many LGBTQ people who will be left without their support structures, the catastrophically incompetent algorithms currently being deployed to police the site…
But those have all been dealt with elsewhere, much better than I can, by people with far, far bigger followings.
So let’s bring this down to a small scale. What has Tumblr meant for me? What has it been for me? And what does the Tumblrgeddon mean for me?
Tumblr has meant far more to me than I realised - it was somewhere I could get off yes, but also somewhere that I could find and share and appreciate beauty, memes, the occasional bit of politics and other nonsense. It was increasingly allowing me to just be, just express myself in a stream of consciousness across difference subjects and topics.
It has allowed me to learn, to enjoy, and to explore my sexuality as well as my beliefs. Before the news broke, I’d been intending to record a potentially long ramble about switchy things, about being something of a reactive switch, about why the sub side of my switch has remained so privately held, and about the actual core of my kinks (enthusiastic consent). I’d thought it could be a helpful break point, after which, rather than just liking posts about femdom and pegging I would start posting and reblogging. Possibly even get into posting msub audios in addition to my maledom ones.
That obviously won’t happen now, but I’d only ever really gotten to that point thanks to some of the blogs I’d been following and the people I’d been talking to and messing around with.
I can but hope that I’ll continue down that path… Who knows, I may even edit this post later with a link to that ramble. But the path itself leads away from here.
And the new path does have it’s upsides - projects that had been delayed, or ignored, or just not chased with as much energy as they should have been, because that energy was being spent procrastinating here, or recording audios for friends here…. Those will hopefully all benefit
Of course, the lack of social contact could just kick a person with my mental health struggles off the deep end. :P
Either way, I have loved my time here. It is sad that it is ending in this manner.
But it is.
I wish I had some grand and poetic sign off.
But I don’t.
I wish all who read this the best and I hope to see you again, in happier times and in a better place.
Until then, I will hold you in my memory, and my heart. Go with peace.
tl;dr: fill outthis form if you wanna stay in touch with me.
55,312 followers. 3,161 posts (plus 41 more in queue). 1,980 posts in drafts - but let’s be honest, drafts is where posts go to die anyway. I don’t even know how many years.
All of it.
Gone.
On December 17, 2018 Tumblr will kill my blog.
It really pisses me off how cavalier they are about it - “oh, you people can just go get your smut someplace else”. Yeah, sure. I can, and you can, and I’m sure we all will - including the execs who made this decision. Ya think they don’t watch porn? Those sanctimonious bastards, of course they do.
But there is no replacing this ridiculous community. People sharing of themselves. People oversharing of themselves. People honestly and openly discussing their desires and their kinks and their raw, unfiltered needs. People expressing a truly essential part of themselves, and other people, appreciating it.
So much creativity and passion and generosity.
Gone.
I am mourning this loss today, as we all are.
But I do know this simple thing: I like writing smut. Captioning images and gifs was my favorite medium, and Tumblr was the perfect platform for that, but it’s not the only option. I’ve had several people ask me if I have written any longer form erotica, and urged me to do so when I said I haven’t.
Here is the plan.
I will keep writing smut. It won’t involve any pretty pictures, but if you have been following me for my words, you can be sure there will be plenty of those. I have no idea how long it’ll take me, or what form it’ll take. I’m not making any specific promises here.
If you want to hear about it when I come up with something, fill out this google form. I promise I won’t spam you, or sell your email address to Chinese hackers.
Please share the shit out of this post, and thank you for all the good times.
Once, I encountered the funny story of an AI image descriptor with a sheep obsession. It had been trained on pictures of fields of sheep. Therefore, it tagged anything in a field as 'sheep', including an empty field, because they work on statistical probability. Therefore, it thinks "ah, a field! there's probably a sheep here." (It's a bit more complicated but basically that.) It also couldn't recognise sheep in places that weren't fields, such as petrol stations or barns. [cont]
Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?
this really does sound like an episode of black mirror
…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.
This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.
Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.
Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.
This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.
As has been pointed out before, there are no humans behind this at all. The review process just reruns either the same algorithm or another algorithm, but people have posted screen shots showing obviously SFW pictures that were still deemed NSFW on review, despite the fact that any human, no matter how overworked / tired would have seen that these pictures were not porn.