Comments

Yesterday, Disqus migrated us to the new version of their comment platform. This means that we’ve lost the colorful badges we had on the old version, and perhaps more importantly, we lost the ability to muffle trolls without actually deleting their posts. (More on our original badge/greying-out system described here.)

We held out as long as we could, but Disqus decided to migrate everyone to the new platform and discontinue the old one.

We’re still looking at what our other options are, but for the time being, please be aware that previously-greyed-out trollish posts will now appear normal.

-jon

Posts

Some pieces of life needed to get taken care of for the past little while, plus I started another side-project a while ago, so I took a sort of unannounced hiatus from posting FUoS. New posts will be back soon!

But just to explicitly Manage Your Expectations going forward, take note that the post schedule will be a little sparser.

I speculate a few reasons for this. BEWARE! This is going to be very inside-baseball and contain a little editorializing on my part, so remember that I’m speaking only for myself (gtz) right now. :)

It’s been well over two years since FUoS began as a silly throwaway joke idea that somehow actually materialized. I could write a million things about different aspects of the project, and maybe I will on my own blog elsewhere, but for now: the posts. At the beginning we were posting every day, maybe more than once a day. Eventually it went to a steady thrice-per-week. This was a fairly accurate reflection of the number of ‘usable’ posts we’d get over time. Now, I’m thinking we’ll go to once or twice a week to continue to reflect our submission stream. And it probably won’t be as regimented in terms of the day-of-the-week that posts go up, so please! Follow on Facebook or Twitter to see new posts, as many of you already do. :)

We can never really know how traffic constructively-interferes with its own waveform, but we can speculate. When the traffic is ‘normal’ then the submission queue often reflected that. When a traffic spike occurs due to a major link / article / TV news report / whatever, we’d usually see an increase in submissions. I think this is due to FUoS being more “top-of-mind” when it received a big link. As in, a reader is more likely to be reminded of FUoS and thus remember to go through and submit images from their inbox. Or they remember to submit when some new message is sent in the next couple of days.

But that’s not really what we’re seeing now. Something’s… different.

When articles will reference “Fat, Ugly or Slutty” in the title without ever actually mentioning the site itself, when there’s a TEDx talk that uses black-bar versions of several FUoS images in the presentation without mention or credit, when Penny Arcade links FUoS for the third time (and more prominently than before) and the traffic spike dies down faster, I think all those things make it fair to say FUoS has achieved a level of consciousness in the innerwoobs gamer culture where it’s, uh, A Thing. It appears to be a thing that people have at least “heard of once.” The shock still exists, oh we still get shocked emails, but it’s less. (Hey, did you want to see some of the emails we get? I hesitate because I don’t want FUoS to get too meta when you ostensibly came here 4 da pix. Maybe on a separate Page rather than a post?) Whatever the hell FUoS is, it IS that Thing now, and I think it’s serving its purpose(s) as that Thing.

I think that Thing is an archive of hundreds and hundreds of posts that serve as evidence on discussions relating to gender, online behaviour, and gaming. I think it’s also funny to a lot of people and has made them laugh. (yay!) Sometimes it made people sad or mad. (aww.) It has continued to serve these purposes without a few weeks of updates, and it will continue to serve these purposes regardless of how often the posts are now made.

Let me be clear: this is a fun, funny, rewarding, money-losing side-project and it will be that for as long as it serves these purposes. That’s more than worth the web-hosting bill. But the shift in our cultural landscape and measurable reactions mean I don’t feel as pressured to postpostposteveryoneisexpectingthisohgod. The way that FUoS is being used by others, in that archived format, is indicative of how it can and will be worked on going forward.

I hope that’s acceptable to you! Feel free to express yourself below. I think I speak for everyone here when I say that it’s been fun, it will continue to be fun, and it’s all because of you being here and being part of this project. Thank you for your continued support and involvement, everyone. :)

-gtz

“I reported him. I got this very creative message on my Xbox 360 while playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.”

“A random message I got on my PS3, I think I just played Call of Duty with him.”

“Random message I got from a guy at the bottom of the scoreboard after a great game on Black Ops 2.”

“I was playing Borderlands 2 with my boyfriend and our friends when I randomly received this message.”

“This was sent to me while playing Gears of War 3. After winning against his team I might add. Charming.”

“You know you’re doing well at Call of Duty when you get a death wish.”