Dutch journalist living in Amsterdam specialised in comic books, film, animation and geek stuff.
My favourite fictional character of all time is Spider-Man.
I wrote the book My Buddy Spider-Man: Superheroes, geeks and fanculture that was published by SubQ in Dutch in 2017.
I'm also fond of many other Marvel characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and the Hulk.
I also like Batman but he's from that other publishing company :)
I usually blog in Dutch on michaelminneboo.nl.
I'll use this tumblr-blog mostly to collect and share cool comic book and geek stuff. And to keep in touch with other comic book lovers around the globe.
Here's a weird one - I'm a filmmaker and I'm workin on a documentary piece about a young black guitar player who identifies strongly with Spider-Man. Where would I write to inquire about using Spider-Man comic art for our documentary?
What happened is this: recently, the Tumblr app was removed from Apple’s App Store as photos depicting child porn were found on its site. In an effort to kill the infestation, Tumblr has now set fire to the whole village.
Tumblr is relying on bots to flag posts containing any offensive material, and as you can guess, these bots are already running amok and flagging just about everything now. I took a quick look at my own stuff, and saw that hundreds and hundreds of my posts have been erroneously flagged. So far, I haven’t received a single notification (via email or otherwise) about this activity, so I’m not entirely sure what to do at this point. Are they expecting me to plough through my enormous archive and report every incorrectly flagged post myself, when I’ve been trying to get them to fix my incorrectly flagged post on Yokai monsters for two weeks now? Will the flagged posts be deleted if I don’t undertake action?
The post you’re reading now has been flagged too by the way:
But then, this has been in the air for a while now, hasn’t it, ever since Tumblr was clumsily messing around with their Safe Mode setting back then. And last year, a similar thing happened, when many of my posts suddenly were incorrectly flagged as sensitive and I had to try and work it out with the Helpdesk to fix them (some were never fixed). The bots were incompetent then, and obviously they are just as incompetent now, when things have gotten serious.
What does this mean for Tales from Weirdland? Well, you have to realize I’m Dutch, and I grew up in a free, easygoing climate, where violence, racism, homophobia, corporate greed, animal cruelty, pollution, and war were regarded as more offensive than a bit of nudity, so this new policy is close to crazy moon man language to me. I don’t often post nudity, but it happens: Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot have both posed nude, French magazine LA VIE PARISIENNE occasionally featured illustrations showing—gasp!—female nipples, displaying a more casual attitude to them in the 1920s than Tumblr one hundred years later, and even some sci-fi art might contain nudity, something that I believe hasn’t corrupted me or any of my 60,000 followers so far. But hey.
Ultimately it’s up to Tumblr though. Their community-destroying policy will be enforced on December 17th, so I’ll just see what happens then. I’ll resume posting later on this week, but warily, as I have enough flagged posts as it is.
I’m not going to limp on a leash in a 19th-century corset though, that’s for sure.
Twee favoriete stripmakers die ik helaas nooit heb ontmoet maar die een onuitwisbare invloed op mijn leven hebben gehad.
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