I just e-mailed this to the guys that run the Gawker Media websites, the editors at the three that I read, and Mark at boingboing (cause I love mark), not sure if any of you caught it, but they had a picture of tubgirl up on their front page for the better part of an hour. (they claim 20 minutes, but if you read their site via RSS, it’s still up) Luckily, my boss was out of the office today, or else I could have been fired. Or at least asked why I was looking at such sexy images whilst at work…
I enjoy visiting Kotaku from work. At least I used to, until I went to the site and found an image of a woman shitting all over herself while sitting upside down in a bathtub. I will no longer be visiting any of the sites that Gawker Media owns, and I will actively promote my other friends and associates to do the same. These blogs had been worksafe up to this point, and it’s a shame to see such reputable sites like Kotaku, Gizmodo or Consumerist fall to such depths. There is a time and a place for everything, and the front page of a video gaming blog is not an appropriate venue for fecal fetishism.
I will point out that this image is STILL being viewed by anyone that uses bloglines or any webbased RSS reader. It’s now 7:37PM est, nearly 4 hours after the original post. Deleting the image from your server would be a good start :
gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/10/tubgirl.jpeg
cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/10/tubgirl.jpegAppropriate action in this case is to either fire or remove posting privileges from everyone involved in the posting of the image. Once appropriate action is taken my stance on the Gawker Media empire may change, but until then…
I say good day sir.
—
Tiki
This E-Mail has been posted on my blog: www.myconfinedspace.com
As many of you know, I’m all for the insanity that the internet brings into our lives, and the scarring that it inflicts on people’s minds on a daily basis. This is something different though. These are “worksafe” blogs that are trying to pull in as much readership as possible, something that MCS is also striving for… this is why NSFW shit is put behind a cut. I want you to surf from work / school. I need you to this. Since I know that you’re going to be somewhere that people will see your monitor, I don’t post NSFW / NSFM images where you could get fired / divorced / suspended. This is why there are the <–click here for more –> features on practically every blog known to man. This is why I felt betrayed by kotaku. I never would have expected this from them. Now 4chan…that’s another mindfucking set of expectations 😛
Calling for a boycott of Gawker? Umm, overreact much?
Someone at kotaku screwed up. It’s pretty apparent that they know they screwed up. The tubgirl links now go to pictures of (ZOMG!!!) unicorns. So now they learn it was a mistake and avoid issue in future. Now what other site has made NSFW muckups in the past? Oh yeah, myconfinedspace.com has done that a couple of times in my recollection with messed up cuts.
But asking your viewers to make a choice between you and Gawker is a bad idea. Do you really want folks to make a decision of relative value between yourself and all the Gawker sites?
Speaking personally I get a lot of useful information from Lifehacker and Consumerist.
Pot meet kettle, kettle pot.
P.S: Stop being such a big vag tiki.
I can’t tell you much about the other gawker sites, but with out my consumerist, I just don’t know *where* I would go for my spastic, epileptic e-vomit. I mean, the internet is virtually devoid of sites where you can passively pretend you’re crusading against an invisible, omnipresent authority.
But kudos anyway: Claiming that Tiki gave us an ultimatum is the best straw-man I’ve seen built in months.
Seriously, I’ve come across naked/semi-naked women at least 3 times on this site when you or someone else had neglected to throw them behind a NSFW until an hour or so later. Nothing recent, but still.
You notified them, nobody needs to boycott.
I certainly didn’t mean to give the impression that I was going to use MCS as my personal army, but dammit, if I have a soap box, I’m going to stand on it once and a while.
Fair enough with the straw man comment. Tiki didn’t say boycott so it’s unfair of me to equate the word with the statement, “I will no longer be visiting any of the sites that Gawker Media owns, and I will actively promote my other friends and associates to do the same.”
But I am curious about your “spastic, epileptic e-vomit” description of Consumerist. I sub to the Consumerists Deals RSS feed and find it a nice low volume way to track the steepest discounts on the higher volume deal site’s feeds. A quick review of their current front page articles seem to be chock full of non-invisible authorities like Best Buy, Comcast, WalMart, DHL, US Bank, SouthWest Airlines, etc. So I’ll see your straw-man and raise you an accusation of ad hominem attack.
Looking for porn, and all I find is a pair of unicorns. 🙁 😛
I don’t have anybody looking over my shoulder, and being the network administrator means I would be the one to incriminate myself, and that ain’t happenin’!
There’s way too many other sites that manage to slip something in front of the cut instead of after the cut, and I’ve managed to seem some stuff that I just wasn’t prepared for. Oh well, it happens. My last employer realized that it would happen. The favorite site to hit for training purposes was whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, being a state institution. It was deemed just safe enough to show. I showed some people goatse for the real gross stuff. They wondered why I knew about it. I then explained about how people would make the text of a link totally irrelevant.
There’s an apology, sort of, up on Gizmodo.
If you folks have to worry about “stumbling upon nudity” or other inappropriate things on the web at work, THEN STOP VISITING SITES THAT ARE POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS AT WORK!
Stop surfing and do your fucking jobs.
Oh wait…..I am at work right now. Crap.
@Kerry
that’s my point exactly. who would have thought a video game blog would be NSFW? Imagine if you will, that you’re browsing xbox.com and BAM. goatsie all up in your face. I’m not crying about the images, I’m crying about the context of the images.