48hr tumblr blackout proposal

tumblr mobile has seadily become near unusable these past few updates. not just from a user experience perspective (which is important enough in itself) but also from an accessibility perspective.

examples include the new way the image viewer works (if you can call it "working"), the tumblr live button replacing the profile button, and that newly created blogs will be forced to have their main dashboard tab be the 'for you' page.

the demands of the protest would be along the lines of:

to protest against these usability issues, and inspired by the recent reddit blackout, i propose a 48 hour blackout (where you don't use tumblr at all). preferably of both mobile and web (since web has problems too) but mobile is the focus here.

I suggest the 48 hours between the 30th of June to the end of the 1st of July.

this marks the end of pride month (for the "queerest place on the internet") and the start of disability month (since accessibility is a massive issue here).

tumblr office is in San Francisco, USA, so the times and dates will be calculated using their time zone (PDT).

you can find out the times and dates for your timezone here.

i can't afford to blaze this post so please spread it around as much as possible! protests only work if significant numbers show up!

tumblr rejected the blaze campaigns for this post because they know it would hurt them. let's make this an indefinite blackout - it's the best way to get results.

(so the blackout would be from June 30th onwards)

@one-time-i-dreamt @i-am-a-fish @lizluvscupcakes tagging some larger blogs to hopefully get the word out more

Subpar Parks by Amber Share

... i bet the folks at the Parks Service would love this

Bear Paw Armor Cuprum Arm Guard, Indo Persian Islamic Empire Dynasty

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new 0 notes post dropped and it’s the sickest gauntlets I’ve ever seen

Boy heroically puts horse conditioner in princess’s hair without a moment’s hesitation

I’ve never seen so much discourse about horse-and-people hair products but please know that your comments have absolutely made my day

The feminine urge to walk into the woods never to return.

The masculine urge to walk into the desert to never return.

The androgynous urge to walk into the ocean to never return.

For the oysters.

I can’t believe australian prime minister harold holt was nonbinary

hold on I gotta google something

I probably could've pieced that one together myself tbh

via @123i321 you can't just leave that in the tags

[Image descriptions in order: two tweets by Joseph Mullins @josephmulli... The first says "Today, nobody showed up to my 8.15am class.

0 students of about 40. Sitting in the empty room, I email them, trying to disguise my hurt feelings.

2 mins later, I get a reply: "Professor, we think you might be in the wrong room." So anyway off I go to live in a hole forever.

The second says "My wife really wants me to mention that I was sleep deprived because I got up at 4am to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in Australia."]

[Tags that say #Sad professor in a room alone #Students no love me? Why students no love me 😭 #All 40 in the other room #Where our beloved professor? Why he not here? He ok?!]

All I can think about is the ENERGY in the room with the students when the first one looked at their email... absolutely incredible.

There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider

So to set the scene, it's the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed 'the Suicide Kid' at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.

On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he's found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he's exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.

However, right when he's half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn't know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.

All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.

So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa's transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.

My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.

And then another say, "Don't bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one's been there in a while."

And they leave.

Because my grandpa didn't swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.

After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.

There's the man himself. Go grandpa!!

They can reach each other as long as the difference is less than 4 percentage points! Good luck!!

all the “weird” content on tiktok feels so fabricated and performative. whereas on tumblr you’ll meet someone who will casually admit they eat paint

this sort of sums it up perfectly

me, wearing nothing but a sheer plunge-neck ballgown that’s plastered to my skin from the rain, soaking wet and trembling with cold and fatigue as i stand outside the entrance to the castle: p-please help me ;) i’m s-so lost and s-scared ;) ;) i have no where to stay for the night ;) ;) ;)

the sexy vampire lady who answered the door, and to whom the castle belongs: of course ;) you poor thing ;) ;) come inside, you must be freezing… you may stay as long as you need to recover from your ordeal ;) ;) ;)

You walked up to that house in the rain on purpose

the fuck else would I be sloshing around in a wet ballgown for

I drew it…. & animated it…

why aren't there more mysteries that take place in nursing homes & retirement communities. i want to watch a group of deranged retirees-cum-amateur-detectives combine their powers of:

and solve crimes. this should be an enormous subgenre.

flattered that my tags passed peer review:

#their sidekick/Watson/pet hacker is a 15 year old grandkid who hangs out with gram gram on the weekends. her only power is that she has above average search engine skills and flexible knees--which is completely sufficient to round out the group's skill set.

#they involve her in heist style operations. on the rare occasion she gets caught housebreaking she explains her grandma locked herself out of the condo and asked for help getting in. then this sweet slightly addled old lady shows up and explains she got the address mixed up, it's so confusing when you're old & all the houses look alike and oh she's so sorry to have caused so much trouble!......and meanwhile the teenager is rolling her eyes bc she's aware gram gram was a highly successful career criminal & con artist for 50 years.

ANYway gimme a 80+-year-old con-artist-turned-amateur-sleuth who loves getting older because people are less suspicious of little old ladies (#this all takes place in florida naturally)

I just know I'm in the minority on this one, but let's prove it. If you had to pick one that you could turn on or off at will, permanently losing access to the other in your home,

Bonus: tell me about the climate where you live in the tags

Much closer margin than I was expecting by this point. Overwhelming amount of the heating votes coming from the UK, y'all are real ones 🇬🇧

before i hit play i was like “I’m sure ‘bad music’ is subjective” … and then

Those people who constantly reblog your stuff but you never really talk:

I do notice my regulars. You guys are the best.

“Regulars” makes me feel like a bar-tender…

Wiping down my dash at the end of an evening, I see your read-more, over-hear your rant in the tags, so I pour you a drink.

“…what’s troubling you, kid?”

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday As the regular crowd tumbls by There’s an old fandom queen blogging next to me And her little gray tags catch my eye

She says tumblr I’m feeling like shit today can you send me some posts for a smile can we talk about slash, can you fill up my dash so I won’t have to think for a while

Laa dahdah didee dah La dahdah didee dah dadum

Fill up my dash, you’re my followers Fill it with pictures and fic Yeah we’re all in the mood for some memery And occasional pictures of dick

Now Jill is a centaur novelist And she writes of her girlfriend and wife She reblogs from Toni, who’s in My Little Pony, And probably will be for life.

As the staff implements wretched changes And we think of how aliens bone We are writing a lot about loneliess: It’s much better than writing alone.

AND sometimes we blog about politics

And sometimes we blog with a beer

And when I proudly boast that I’m older than most, 

They say ‘gross, what are YOU doing here’. 

*wild applause!!

last 2 days to vote!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

my writing fundamentally changed forever ten years ago when i realized you could use sentence structure to control people’s heart rates. is this still forbidden knowledge or does everyone know it now

?????? *raises hand* I’ve been writing for years and don’t know this trick by these words! do tell?

Okay, so a few people have asked for me to cite the dark magics at them, and i’m super happy to share because it’s my favorite thing ever. 

so, let’s see if i can explain this the same way that i learned. read a sentence out loud. you come to a full stop when you hit the period, and you take a normal, breath. but, when you hit a comma, you take a slightly longer pause. and when you hit a dash - you take an even longer pause. 

this is a natural rhythm that we pick up when we’re first taught to read; we do it without even thinking. but when you start to think about it, you realize that it can become a tool.

think of your heartbeat. a period is badump. a comma is badump-dump. and a dash is thump badump. one breath. a longer breath. two breaths.

that means what you read automatically affects the rhythm of your breathing and your heartrate. which means that you can control the amount of physical tension your reader feels… by altering your punction and your sentence structure.

for fast paced scenes, you use short sentences. a lot of hard stops. mostly periods, with just a few comma’s thrown in for the full breath. your reader’s heartrate accelerates. their breathing is slightly and unintentionally, on their end, quicker. you hit the dramatic ending of the scene - and your reader’s body phsyically feels the gasp, the breath of fresh air, of these longer sentences.

now, read that paragraph again ant take note of your natural pauses, and how it subtly affects your breathing. 

the same thing can be said of comma’s and dashes. while they can be used as a breath of fresh air, they can also cause a new line of tension as they lead your reader to hold their breath. during this section, you should use longer sentences; breaking up the harshness of the pauses by using variations of punction. read this paragraph out loud from the start and take note of how long you go between pauses and full breaths. 

and then, comes the biggest trick.

the hard stop.

the paragraph.

because while the periods, commas, and dashes are variations on a short stop, the paragraph is a hard stop. you take a full breath. you pause for a moment, then move to the start of the next paragraph.

which means you can create an entirely new sort of dramatic tension. read the sentences that are in bold. see how you take a naturally longer pause at the end of each paragraph?

see how it makes you feel? 

how it makes you breath different? 

how doing it once, twice, or three times creates a different line of tension? 

this little magic trick can be used to cause a reader’s heartrate to speed up during a fight or chase scene. it can be used to cause their breathing to slow down during moments of dramatic tension, sorrow, or softness. and it can be used to create hard breaks that add a new level of physically felt emphasis to your written work.

i hope these examples make sense! it’s my favorite writing trick!

history, art,

this figure is so lovely that i felt compelled to look it up, and it’s even more fascinating than i’d imagined! this is from Cussac cave in France. it is actually a burial site that also has cave art, which isn’t very common from what i understand. but it gets wilder: this cave was once an ancient cave bear den! long after the bears left, it was presumably found by humans who *also* thought it was a pretty special place. they layered red ochre in the cave floor hollows that the bears had made to nest in. the humans then laid their dead there to rest with hundred(s)* of depictions of animals, people, and abstract figures on the walls.

i’m not sure how to be coherent about this, but the idea of people 25-30,000 years ago finding an old cave bear den and thinking the marks left by those past creatures’ lives would make a fitting place to say goodbye to people they apparently cared a lot about really does something to my brain.

what were they thinking? “the bears left their mark here. these fierce predators used their giant claws to dig out a place to tenderly raise their loved ones. let’s stop awhile here and carve out our marks too before we say goodbye to our own.”

it’s so strange that, all of those years ago, people saw something worth remembering in that cave. and now we do too.

content warning for the following links: there are pictures of human skeletal remains in both sources.

*i’m seeing conflicting counts of how many figures were depicted in this cave. this source says, “At present, more than 100 complete or partial figures have been counted.” but I don’t see a date on that site. whereas, this article from 2020 says, “more than 800 figurative engravings of animals and humans”

the next time the shitpostcalligrapher opens their ask box, someone needs to send in like. "I'm Merobiba", "Waluigi fucks, dude" or "Mayonnaise is food lube". I would but it's always open on the one day I can't get any service LMAO

got this for you

"average cat owner spends 3 years in prison" factoid actualy just statistical error. average owner spends 0 years in prison. Miette's mother, who kicked her body like the football and went to jail for One Thousand Years is an outlier adn should not have been counted