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The Blender Artists Censorship Situation
Blender Artists is a website for blender users to discuss and share blender-related things. Blender is a program to model 3D models and do various other graphics related things. The program is very good and I like it. But the Blender Artists website is the kind of awful place where I don't want to be. Until recently I had an account there but I requested multiple times to delete it ( since the settings do not have this option ). The moderators were fighting with me over deleting of my stuff. They claim if I delete my posts I will ruin the "flow of things" or whatever the hell. So it turned out to be a very complex manual process to delete everything myself. The funny thing is, it all started because they were the once deleting my stuff without me wanting it to be deleted. And now they are fighting to keep me on the platform. What the actual fuck?
By the time that I write it the account has been finally deleted. And now it is just simply called
The Situation
I have written an angry review on The Spark short film on blender artists comparing it to my movie Moria's Race. I had a point to make about the perceived rivalry of people on the website toward my movie for one reason or the other. And that a similar project will get much more recognition despite my movie being as well if not better made. This was the message that I wanted to tell. That the website is shadow-banning me and my film.
As soon as I have written it this appeared.
In other words they censored the part where I suggested the possibility of them censoring me. Which is on the same level of "what the fuck" as the Amazon's censorship of 1984.
I have then posted the full text of what I had to say to my website here. And then the moderators decided to censored this link as well saying this:
Asking me to stop fighting for my rights. Which made me angry and made me try to delete my Blender Artists account. Just to find that there is no easy way to delete the account. But rather to beg the moderators. And they would decide what they want to delete and what they want to keep. Pathetic!
This is not the first time
Back when I was still making I'm Not Even Human I already had a fight with the same moderators on the platform for a very minor offense that wasn't even in their rules. I used caps to emphasize certain words.
Me pointing out to them that there is no such rule in the terms of the website didn't stop their attempts at censoring how I use language. But rather it resulted in my account being banned. Back in those days I made an angry video on the subject that I have archived on Odysee.
Why return to the platform?
Making a movie using Free Software only, while you are relatively unknown, puts you into a desperate position. YouTube or buying ads online is not something that you can do. All of those things require running proprietary javascript code. And buying ads is a direct endorsement of surveillance on the internet.
Putting your movie out in an ethical way, on the other hand, is nearly worthless by itself. Tor network is easy to host but it's often thought of as being a place for pedophiles and serial killers, so people do not want to be a part of it. Putting it out through torrent is an option. But people feel like captains Jack Sparrows using it for some reason. Like if attacking ships had something to do with file-sharing. Odysee is kind of an option. Though it was much more of an option while LBRY still was a thing. And if you scroll on the main page of Odysee you will see why people would like to stay away from this platform. Everybody who was banned from YouTube are using Odysee now. On PeerTube at this moment the movie has 14 views.
A lot of people are trying to point out the stupidity of my distribution model. They want me to use things like YouTube. I'm not against you downloading the movie and uploading it YouTube. I don't want to do it myself because again, YouTube is proprietary. And all of this seems like I just hit nails into the coffin of the movie.
Sometimes I think that it's okay. And that it's fine to work for 3 and half years to make a piece of art that nobody will ever see and enjoy. But then I'm reminded that this is the kind of reasoning Jack from The House That Jack Built had. And I don't want to turn into a psychopathic killer. While this "nobody will see nothing I did" thought is very psychologically destabilizing.
So instead I'm being desperate. And I made an account on Blender Artists again specifically for the purpose of advertising the existence of my movie. There was no other reason for it. If I had been featured on Blender Artists that would have been good for the view count. And me showing how hard I worked, I hoped, would make them make me featured. But they didn't make me featured. They did put me on a post that nobody will see, as a tiny icon nobody will click on. Thanks for that, I guess. But I wasn't prominently featured on the site. Therefor me being on that site made no difference.
I tried a few desperate attempts. One of them was to try and write an article for Blender Nation ( a website of Blender related news moderated by the same people as Blender Artists ). And at first they responded positively. But since they saw the movie they responded with a decision that what I had to say wasn't in a good enough taste for them.
People pointed out that perhaps me failing was a result of me not uploading to YouTube. And I swallowed that pill. But then suddenly there was The Spark. A movie made by a Free Software enthusiast and also not uploaded to YouTube. The main link was from PeerTube. And guess what. This movie got featured on Blender Artists. I got furious!
It was indeed something I had to say that was the problem. And me pointing this out made everything even worse. I took the chance. I knew that I would be removed from the platform. So I made myself as loud as I could be. This sparked ( pun intended ) a new interest toward my movie. I've gained another view or two. And then my account for deleted. What a victory!!! I ended up having what I wanted to have. I ended using Blender Artists to advertise my movie that nobody wants to see.
Conclusion
I think I'm Not Even Human succeeded more because it was vulgar and repulsive. Because it didn't afraid to use "fuck" in the sentences. Moria's Race with it's cleanliness made it so nobody was interested to see it. So then perhaps maybe the promotional material of it should be fucking insane, to make people care.
Happy Fucking Hacking!!!
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