Restricted Access
I seem to have a recent run of shit catching up with me. Having to volunteer to work shifts at one of the stores Thanksgiving week is not really so bad, I suppose. I also got put in "Facebook jail" twice last month. And right now, I am in the middle of dealing with my entire Flickr account being classified by Flickr staff as "unsafe" because someone reported one or more of my nude photos taken at either Solstice Parade or Pride events, and ever since last week, I have been struggling to find all the photos I have to moderate to either "moderate" (bare butts or breasts) or "restricted" (exposed genitalia or, apparently, even partial pubic area).
It's been a real saga for me, with a woman at Flickr Support getting back to me within three hours on Monday, with a couple examples of the kinds of photos I needed to moderate properly. I did what I thought was all the needed photos, and then emailed—or filled out the "review" request form—daily ever since, getting increasingly irate with each message that no one was getting back to me.
The degree to which this situation is my own doing is arguably a conversation for another place and time. I "agreed to terms and conditions" when signing up; this moderation is my responsibility, blah blah blah. I'm honestly just lucky that I've had a Flickr account for fourteen years and it took this long before some asshole reported me—instead of, say, messaging me directly that I was in violation of terms, so I could make the necessary corrections without getting my entire account flagged as supposedly "unsafe." This means any of the now-many photos flagged as "restricted", currently the majority of them not containing nudity, if viewed by someone who is not a Flickr member, shows up as a warning page reading ADULT CONTENT (which 99% of my photos are not) and that you must be signed in to view it.
It's thoroughly ridiculous, but after five days, my mode right now is just on the work needing to be done to fix it. And I finally heard back from another staff member last night—I guess being the squeaky wheel worked at getting the grease soon enough after all, contrary to what one rather condescending "expert" in related Flickr groups says to expect—with some more examples of photos that I had missed. It seems that in my scouring through all of the Solstice Parade photos of nude bicyclists, I spaced that there are also some nude photos at Pride events. So I went through all of those photo albums as well. I actually did a deeper dive on my account last night than I had at any time previous.
I also had to delete a very short video I had posted from Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 2014, of a push-pop shaped like a cock that slowly squirted Jell-O out its end. "Not permitted on the site," it said. My guess is it has to do with the prohibition of "sexualized" nudity in videos (as opposed to still photos). So, even though it wasn't a real dick, it was squirting kind of like a real dick, even though it was bright red Jell-O. But, fucking whatever. I deleted the video.
I have a lot of photos still left marked "safe," but a shit ton of them flagged as "restricted" whether they depict nudity or not, and what happens to those once my account is finally re-categorized as "safe" remains a complicated mystery. There are plenty photos that legitimately need the "restricted" classification as per their rules, but do they stay "restricted" when they reverse the flag on my whole account? I was given the suggestion to pull up all "restricted" photos in the "Organizr" page and categorize only the ones that really need it, which I tried, and I get an error saying they can't be changed because Flickr staff had already done so. The clarification I then got was that I should keep doing it anyway because it demonstrates to Flickr staff that I know the difference in definition between "moderate" and "restricted." I have already demonstrated that over and over at this point, actually.
At some point when I have the time, I will still attempt that suggestion, filtering to all my "restricted" content in Organizr, moving all the photos that genuinely need it into the edit window, and clicking to change all to "restricted" in spite of the expected pop-up error. This will be very time consuming but still a lot less time than clicking through each individual page of the nearly 60,000 photos on my account (which the know-it-all group moderator on Flickr at first tried to tell me "it's the only way," only to later finally offer me tips on how to search in Organizr). This will also allow me to add a tag called "restricted" to all of them in one fell swoop, which will make it easier to deal with them all as a group in the future.
I will wait to follow up with the Flickr support staff until after I have done all that, rather than the tack I took over the past four days of emailing them daily. After that, though, I'll go back to following up daily until I get a response.
In any case, working on that bullshit took up a bunch of my time last night, which I otherwise spent either making or eating dinner, and I also signed up for a free trial week of the new Disney+ app. The first thing I watched was the stupendous Pixar film Inside Out—the best movie of 2015—and, if anything, I was even more impressed with it this time. It seriously pulled at my heartstrings, which is impressive for a movie that had already done so at the time of its first release. It's also really funny, and incredibly visually inventive, particularly in terms of how it conceptualizes emotions and gives them tangible representation. I would put that movie right up there alongside other Pixar masterpieces like WALL-E and Toy Story 3 (which are both also available on the app).
I have little excitement regarding original content on the Disney+ app. I have much greater interest in its large vault of classic content. And, at only about seven bucks a month, I almost certainly will ultimately cancel my Hulu subscription in favor of signing up for this one. I figure if I watch at least one thing on it a week, that'll make it worth it. Shobhit really wants me to cancel Hulu and also not sign up for Disney+, but he's just going to have to learn the hard way that that's a pipe dream.
Anyway. At Shobhit's request, I stayed up until he got home around 10:00, so I could attempt to restore his iPhone, which stopped working. He didn't even upgrade the last time I did, so this is my old one from two phones ago. It's an 8, I think? In any case, two attempts to restore it using iTunes failed and so that phone is pretty much kaput. I think he plans to go to the AT&T Store today before he goes to work to get a new one. He won't be able to text me again until he has a working phone. I hope they can do that as easily at the AT&T Store as they can at the Apple Store . . . except, he was also thinking about switching carriers. I guess I won't know until at least late tonight or tomorrow how he'll be moving forward, unless by some miracle he gets a new phone that is connecting and working before 12:45 today, which seems unlikely. He had to call me from work yesterday, to ask me to stay awake until he got home.
[posted 12:21 pm]