Bluesky Labels My Sexually Suggestive Adult Content

Bluesky's website describes itself as "Social media as it should be." I'm all in favor of that. In fact, I use Bluesky to publicize every single new post on this very blog.

Imagine my surprise then when I found one of my posts on the platform had been dinged Wednesday by Bluesky's moderator, possibly a bot, as "Adult Content." I had been promoting my recent post on illustrator Edward Sorel's depiction of God creating autumn and its source material from the Italian Renaissance. What then was my offense?

The label applied to my supposedly adult content by @moderation.bsky.app was "Sexually Suggestive." They added, not very helpfully, "Does not include nudity." I take that to mean nudity alone is not deemed to be sexually provocative.

Here then is my "sexually suggestive" "adult content," revealed:

I immediately submitted an appeal, of course, but the label hasn't been removed as of this posting. The censored image, for the sake of Bluesky employees and others who may have never seen it before, is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (c. 1512) from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's right there in the Vatican at the end of the museum tour. You can't miss it unless you don't look up. I borrowed the image from Wikipedia.

Note:  You can follow me, docnad, on Bluesky here. Who knows?— I might even post more sexually suggestive adult content.

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Now We Are Six

E. H. Shepard, "The Morning Walk"
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927, pages 84-85

http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/Now_We_are_Six/pages/51_Now_We_are_Six.htm

E. H. Shepard, "Anne's Balloon"
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927, page 86

http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/Now_We_are_Six/pages/52_Now_We_are_Six.htm

Now we are six. Six years ago today, your mild-mannered cartoon correspondent brought into being a brand spanking new blog. Yes, you're looking at it now. This sixth anniversary finds me on the cusp of meeting some long-term goals, goals I once foolishly expected I could meet handily more than a year earlier, but which have come to mean less and less to me over time. Hitting a million page views on the blog, for one, makes for a nice round number indeed, but it is hardly a ringing endorsement when only thirty-four people worldwide have opted to follow the blog after six years. Similarly, winning five thousand Twitter followers sounds impressive enough, but it has done very little to drive new traffic to the blog. Rather, I seem to have gotten caught up in a senseless churning process on Twitter where accounts follow me for little reason other than that I will follow them in return. Thus the engagement on Twitter isn't all that much better than when I had but a few hundred followers who were more interested in my actual posts.

Attempted Bloggery All-Time Overview Stats
June 23, 2017

Twitter Followers, June 23, 2017

More to my usual point, Now We Are Six, the title of this post, is first and foremost the title of A. A. Milne's 1927 book of children's verse. Three original illustrations by E. H. Shepard from "The Morning Walk" sequence were sold as a set at Sotheby's in 2012.

E. H. Shepard, "The Morning Walk"
Original art
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927

E. H. Shepard, "When Anne and I go out a walk"
Original art
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927

E. H. Shepard, "Anne's balloon"
Original art
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927

E. H. Shepard
Sotheby's Item Description, December 12, 2012

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/english-literature-history-l12408/lot.184.html

Quick Links to the Attempted Bloggery Archives:

E. H. Shepard

A. A. Milne

Anniversaries

Attempted Bloggery's Ambulatory Index

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The Missing 1,800 Twitter Followers

By January 16, 2015, I had reached 1071 Twitter followers and I set myself an admittedly ambitious goal.

My Twitter Stats as of January 16, 2015

This goal was that I would add about ten followers each day and that I then would reach some 5,000 Twitter followers handily by January 1, 2016. This in turn would generate a large increase in traffic to this blog, as I would promote it daily with an unending stream of brilliantly compelling tweets. It seemed like a good enough plan, but things didn't quite work out as foreseen. In fact, I'm about 1,800 Twitter followers shy of my goal. What happened?

One of the easiest ways to add more followers—or so it seemed—is to follow more Twitter accounts yourself and hope they follow you back. Unfortunately, this strategy falls apart once you follow 2,000 accounts as the total number of accounts you can have subsequently is limited to no more than ten percent more than the number of accounts already following you. This forces a sudden change in Twitter strategy to include more aggressive unfollowing of accounts which don't readily reciprocate your interest. The end result for me is that I could get just a little more than halfway to my goal of 5,000 followers by yesterday's deadline. 

My Twitter Stats as of January 1, 2016

Even more perplexing, despite my generating almost 6,000 more-or-less earthshaking tweets last year, my blog readership remained unchanged at 15,000 page views each month, give or take.

Attempted Bloggery All-Time Page Views

I hate falling behind. Going forward, I'm going to continue to try to grow my Twitter followers. My new goal is belatedly to reach those 5,000 total Twitter followers by Columbus Day 2016. That should be a piece of cake. What could possibly go wrong?


Note:  Regarding social media, I'm active mostly on Twitter and Google+. I'm not really sure what the others are for.
Follow me on Google+.

Follow me on Instagram.
Pinterest pins from this blog

Follow me on Tumblr.

Follow me on Twitter.

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An Unmet Goal

In January I very rashly set a few ambitious goals for this blog. I wrote that by Columbus Day, today, I would increase my Google+ views from five million to ten million. Piece of cake, right?

One problem with this goal is that I have no idea what a Google+ view is. Is it someone seeing a post of mine on Google+? Is it a page view of this blog? Is it a view of any photo I have on the blog in any social medium where it appears? Is it watching a YouTube video? Maybe it's all of these. Maybe it's something else. At any rate, my views are now at 6,400,000 and my goal is therefore very much unmet.

Google+ is an interesting social medium. I spend very little time on the site, mostly to try to promote this blog. I get very little feedback and have very few followers. For example, over this same time period my Google+ followers have increased from 50 to 61, while my Twitter followers have increased from 1071 to 2848. The interactions are more satisfying on Twitter as well. I should note that neither site sends very many readers to the blog. For that, Google's search engine remains my main referral source.

My Google+ Stats as of January 16, 2015

My Google+ Stats as of October 10, 2015

So what should my revised goal be? I now have a better sense of how fast these views accumulate on Google+. With that in mind, I'm gong to give myself an extra year to reach those 10,000,000 views. To make it interesting, I'll also add a goal for reaching 100 Google+ followers by Columbus Day 2016. Anything's possible.

Here's the current status of my other goals:

Goal:  One million page views of the blog by Bloomsday 2016.

Status:  It would now require over 1400 daily page views for me to reach this goal. In all likelihood that is not going to happen. Instead, I should be able to exceed 750,000 page views by the deadline.

Goal:  Five-thousand Twitter followers by New Year's Day 2016.

Status:  I'm on track to reach only 3500.

Goal:  To have Siri write my blog posts for me.

Status:  She's stubborn.

Goal:  To win the Moment Cartoon Caption Contest four times.

Status:  I have won it three times and I am currently a finalist. So this one is within reach.

Goal:  To become a finalist in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.

Status:  Nada.

Goal:  To have Attempted Bloggery cited in print.

Status:  Who would cite a blog in print?

Goal:  To interview Thomas Pynchon.

Status:  You've got to be kidding.


Note:  These goals were originally set in Blog Post No. 1400. What was I thinking?

Earn my undying gratitude by following me on Twitter and on Google+.

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Sheldon Cooper's Twitter Milestone

I never thought I'd say this proudly, but....

Sheldon Cooper and I now have something in common! My Twitter account has reached 101 followers, so I can boast that I've achieved the same exalted milestone as the most socially inept character on television's "The Big Bang Theory." One might even be tempted to say, "Ooh, 101! Air's gettin' a bit thin up here!"

One-hundred one Twitter followers! Zero dalmatians.

Of course, the number of one's Twitter followers is not exactly a scientific measure of popularity or indeed of anything in particular. Many Twitter users follow you not out of any keen interest, but rather out of a desire to have you follow them in return. What's the point of all that? To date I have followed 484 others on Twitter, mostly, but not entirely, out of genuine interest. Some of the mutual following that goes on is part of a polite give-and-take. This exchange is a quirky social media convention Sheldon Cooper would surely never be a party to, and that alone makes his tally of 101 Twitter followers considerably more impressive than mine.

"The Big Bang Theory"

Season 5, Episode 12

Sheldon and Amy's Date Night 

Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper

Mayim Bialik as Amy Farrah Fowler

Kaley Cuoco as Penny

July 18, 2014 Update: I now have 200 Twitter followers. I still don't get it.

Note:  My Twitter account was created mainly to promote this blog, although today I use it for other noble purposes as well. You can follow me on Twitter here. In fact, more people choose to follow me on Twitter than on this blog, almost five times as many. Make of that what you will. I myself haven't quite figured it all out.

If you care to, you can also follow me on Instagram here. Instagram is still new to me, but at this time I am not using it consistently for any blog-related activity. Generally, I share my Instagram photos on Twitter anyway. Is this at all confusing?

You can catch up with my few blog posts on the subject of various social media here.

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New to Instagram

I have a new Instagram account which I just learned how to use. While I'm not much of a photographer, what I do snap looks much better with this application.

I don't think this account will have very much to do with Attempted Bloggery, but who knows? My Twitter account, on the other hand, should keep you up to date on both this blog and the Instagram account.

My photo of the Verrazano Bridge on Instagram

Note: You can follow me on Instagram here.

Follow me on Twitter here.

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Spam I Am

Last Wednesday evening, Facebook decided to warn my friends that my own links to my own blog might very well be directing them to an unsafe site. The links are generated by my Twitter account and are automatically posted to my Facebook page where they serve more or less as status updates and blog publicity. Facebook has since relented, but I've preserved their alarming warning for posterity:

A Spam Alert from Facebook Regarding Attempted Bloggery, April 24, 2013

Note:  You can follow me on Twitter @doc_nad.

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