so i have a mildly popular “reblog and put in in the tags” post going around and its. very clear how many people don’t know how to interact with a tumblr post

so, first of all, tumblr’s culture has changed a lot in the past couple years. there’s a genuine community effort to not start any drama, and ironically a lot of the current hostility is an effort to keep things calm. there’s also a change in how people interact with posts, so if you haven’t been here in a while please skip down to the tags/replies/reblog with text section.

for newcomers: you should be reblogging posts about as liberally as you would like something on twitter. if you only like stuff, people will think you are rude/a bot. you’ve probably heard people talk about “cultivating your dash,” and thats because this platform is 100% centered around your dashboard. trending matters less, unfollowing and blocking in order to shape your dash into it’s best form is widely accepted, the majority of the content you’ll find and interact with will be because of your dash, and the only way to put things on your dash is to reblog them. tumblr users are deeply distrustful of algorithms and have largely turned off the “see posts your friends have liked” function (i recommend you also turn of the various algorithms in settings → general settings → dashboard preferences).

so, once you’ve reblogged a post, there’s three ways to add content to it. the tags, replies, and reblogging with text. all of them have different connotations

the tags: an inside voice. originally they were meant for organizing your blog (and they’re still used for this), but they’ve also morphed into a way to share thoughts that aren’t funny/insightful enough for non-followers to be interested in. when in doubt, put your comment in the tags

replies: basically talking to your friends in class. your followers have no way of finding your replies (they don’t pop up on the dash, nobody gets notified except for the original poster) so chances are, only the person who made the post is gonna see your comment. it’s for quick one-offs that you’re okay with other people overhearing, but really is only made for one person. they’re like a public dm

reblog with text: an outside voice. you’re getting up on a stage in town square and entertaining people. make sure it’s funny or insightful— bottom line, add something new to the conversation. you should use this the least

general rules of thumb: 

Finally real advice for new users. This is a solid guide for how to make the transition from Twitter to Tumblr.

In particular, artists need you to reblog. A reblog helps them get seen. A like doesn’t help them at all.

And I would like to add image descriptions and audio/video transcriptions can really help increase reblogs. Please remember to make your posts as accessible as possible.

I just saw an AI depiction of what Freddie Mercury might look like if he was alive at a Pride event in 2023 and I know it was supposed to be an innocent viral photo but I feel like it missed the point that Freddie Mercury isn't here because he was one of the hundreds of thousands of queer men who died because of the AIDS epidemic, which fuelled the stigma and violence against the queer community (and that stigma and violence is the core reason we have Pride).

the aids epidemic is also why we DONT LISTEN TO THE CDC AND KEEP WEARING MASKS CUZ COVID IS STILL A THING

lmfao this is so funny 😭

OH MY GOD. HE STOPPED GETTING IMPRESSIONS BECAUSE HE PAYWALLED THE API

AHAHAHAHAHA

I’d assumed his followers were mostly bots because his feed is deeply boring, but I’d never put 2 and 2 together before.

YOU KILLED YOUR BOT FOLLOWERS IN COLD BLOOD MY DUDE

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*deep breath*HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Could you explain this to me so i can appreciate how funny this truly is?

Yeah, I’ve never written a Twitter bot before but let me give it a shot based on my understanding of what happened.

APIs are kind of complicated to explain to someone who’s never coded for web before, so I’m just going to explain the bits that are relevant to this issue.

Probably the most important thing to know is that websites operate on two levels: the visual interface, which is how humans interact with a website and involves buttons and pretty colors and nice fonts and fights over how many px wide a border should be. And then there’s a more computery level where, eg, the text you typed into the interface actually gets packaged up and saved to a database somewhere and then retrieved and displayed.

There are a lot of different ways to make this background computer-doing-computer-things part of the website. For simple websites that won’t be updated much you can get away with a very simple version that’s just built from a couple of relatively simple scripts and html documents. However, once you’ve built a website that’s complex and going to be updated frequently, particularly by users, an API helps manage those actions and make internal updates and expansions easier.

An example: Let’s say leaving a ❤️ on a tweet actually requires 3 actions in the background: you have to tell the database(s) that store twitter information 1) the user id of the person who is leaving the ❤️ and the user id of the person who is receiving it 2) you have to check that the person leaving the ❤️ is not blocked by the person receiving it (they have permission to leave ❤️s on that account) and then 3) save the actual ❤️ to the Twitter database. Rather than making the user do those three actions on their own, the API has a “leave a ❤️” option that you can just send two usernames to and it does all those steps for you.

Companies can decide how much of their API is open to the public. I’ve never had to set up this but of a website on my own, so I’m not as clear on how this works (maybe someone else can weigh in). But there are ways of making an API’s actions only available to the website’s devs and the user interface. Or you can chose a subset of the API’s actions and allow them to be used by anyone who knows how to write a script that can interact with them. That free-to-use part of the API is called an “open API”.

Up until very recently, Twitter had an open API. It had a lot of different uses. Some people used it to run anti harassment tools. Others used it to scrape data. And you could write Twitter bots to use it. I followed a bunch of bots that tweeted images of art by various artists. (Mikhail Vrubel and Remedios Varo were two favorites I discovered through those bots.) And of course it was also how fake followers and harassment bot armies of various descriptions also used Twitter.

On February 2, Elon announced that the Open API, which up until then had been free, would abruptly become a paid service, effective February 9. Basically everyone who used the open API was incensed: One week is not really enough time to decide if you want to (or have) the budget to suddenly start paying for something you weren’t paying for before. A lot of people who wrote just-for-fun bots had to suddenly let them die. Some peoples’ security tools were rendered useless. Elon was banking on people paying to continue using the service anyway, but it was pretty clear that what was actually going to happen was everyone would use Twitter even less than they had before.

And as we all remember, the rollout of this pay-to-play option went super well and Twitter definitely did not accidentally revoke its own API access when it first implemented the paywall. 😆

The Super Bowl 🏈

As we see above, Elon’s followers are MOSTLY bots. Who knows what kind. Maybe some are are purchased, some may be part of various far right bot armies, etc. How many of those bot owners decided to pay to keep the bots going? How many of them even still have control of them after an utterly disastrous pay-to-play rollout?

Of course Elon got surprisingly low engagement on a Super Bowl tweet!

He killed 70% of his followers 3 days before.

Pretty good explanation of APIs! And I'm chortling with glee at Elongated Muskrat's self-own.

Anti-gay senator Cory Bernardi accidentally walks into a 'Vote Yes for Same-Sex Marriage' photoshoot, 2017

[image description: white brunette man in a suit ducks and hides his face, looking harried, or like he’s bracing against an explosion or gunfire while descending a white marble staircase. Behind him is a group of people arrayed in two rows, wearing white and black t-shirts with a rainbow print, saying ‘it’s time’ while holding signs saying ‘YES’. behind them is a lit room and a masculine figure stands out of focus, watching from within. END]

It's ok that white autistic people aren't familiar with autistic people of color's experiences. That's not the problem.

The problem is how many white autistic people seem to think their experiences are universal, that they can speak for and over autistic people of color.

Being autistic doesn't take away white privilege. Being white and autistic still has privilege over autistic BIPOC, and even neurotypical BIPOC.

Neurodivergence doesn't exempt anyone from deconstructing and unpacking white supremacy.

"Oh, but our RPG protagonist has to be a teenager, or else they won't appeal to our core 16-to-19-year-old player demographic" literally just make them a DILF.

"But what about straight boys" to the modern heterosexual male gamer the DILF is an aspirational figure. Don't give them what they already are – give them what they want to be.

Play a warlock character who calls himself Vithimorex or something like that. Always mention how grateful you are to your patron, Frank, for the wondrous powers he gives you.

Slowly reveal that the powers you get from Frank are things like “sense of smell” and “verbal communication”. As it turns out, Vithimorex is an extradimensional Thing possessing the person formerly known as Frank. All the eldritch blasts and shadow conjurations are boring powers according to Vithimorex. He can’t wait for the level 14 ability to understand and appreciate music.

Also, I realized something about the name I made up, so here’s a song:

When the moon splits in two and your nightmares come true, Vithimorex...

When the world seems to bleed since the dead god was freed, Vithimorex...

I see somebody hit level 14

This is the best response I’ve ever seen

gotta say just cuz i havnt seen it brought up anywhere; HUGE fan of this new era we are entering here. of unions and blackouts and attempts at criminalizing transness failing.

like yes obviously all of these only arise because situations are getting ridiculously bleak. but there are victories happening. people are taking stands. and right now a lot of it seems like hopeless shouting at deaf corporate ears but people are still shouting yknow.

thing will probably still get worse before they get any better, but the ground work for that better is being laid right now and im excited to see where it goes

you know how which animals we think are for food is mostly cultural? Well, which plants we think are for food is mostly cultural too. But we don't talk about that one as much

What are some examples of that? Like I feel like at worst I'd go "I didn't know that was edible" rather than like, be surprised someone was eating a plant I already knew was edible.

Acorns. You can boil or soak the tannins out and turn them into flour.

Amaranth AKA pigweed. It's the USA's worst agricultural weed, but for Native Americans it was a crop and for some fucking reason it hasn't occurred to us to just...eat the stuff. It makes high protein, gluten free flour.

A lot of people know dandelions are edible, so I think that one's starting to change.

Crabgrass was brought to the USA by enslaved people as food iirc.

Cattails are edible (the roots if I remember right)

Every part of Kudzu is edible and it was once the main plant used to make clothing in China.

Virginia springbeauty has underground tubers that are like tiny potatoes and can be eaten similarly.

Acorns. You can boil

or soak the tannins out and

turn them into flour.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

you'd think this sort of thing would pop up more in apocalyptic fiction

I'm trying, but writing a book takes a long time.

To be fair, when people write this stuff into their books, slick little assholes insist it is Actually Bad.

There was a whole extreme backlash to foraging of native edible plants in The Hunger Games, for example.

Wasn't aware of that, will probably not be aware of it in the future

Colonizers specifically slandered many Native foods and perpetuate(d) myths that they were not edible. This is both to set many foraged foods as ‘unfit for human consumption’ in order to reassert racist class notions, and to commit further cultural genocide. Some small part of it is also that colonizers are notoriously  bad at feeding themselves but unfortunately a lot of this is intentional erasure and insult.

^yup sadly

Hot take apparently but i do not think trans men should feel bad for being men. I love being a man! Being a man does not make me evil or dirty or violent! Being a man is not an inherently bad trait! I love all of my fellow trans men <3

So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.

Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”

It’s a reminder, I guess, that they’re coming for all of us. The fash and the white supremacists will not make nice distinctions between the queers when they put us up against the wall. There is no gatekeeping, no label-policing, no purity-purging and no assimilation that any of us can do that will save us. They want us dead, and while they’ll start with whoever is most vulnerable at any given time, they’ll get around to all of us eventually.

Queer solidarity means all of us because the fash are coming for all of us.

All Dividers are Feds. Stand united or die separately.

I feel I must reiterate because it seems to have been lost in the sauce.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/anti-trans-transgender-health-care-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/

The anti trans shit you see being pushed everywhere is a coordinated group effort to dismantle the queer community by targeting vulnerable members. It is a unified push to target and isolate trans people from everyone else.

Every single time you see the gop and bigots push the same argument, it’d them coordinating a campaign in secret. It’s all bullshit top to bottom.

There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters

“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying

“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.

hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters “The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.

No idea if this commentary adds anything or not but since monsters are generally couched in terms of danger and threat, and therefore fear, in my mind these posts broke themselves down kinda like this:

The “was not a deer” monster speaks to fear born of deception, dangers that approach under the guise of familiarity, with varying levels of success to infiltrate the familiar before lashing out

The “not a deer anymore” monster speaks to fear born of coercion. Whatever it is was once familiar and perhaps even comforting but through the action of another agent the familiar has become grotesque and dangerous.

The “…and maybe never was a deer” monster speaks to fear born of self-doubt. Most people spend most of the time in a sense of vague assurance that they’re doing the right thing, or at least a right thing, in the situation they find themselves in. This fear lies in the danger of *thinking* you understood, only to be eviscerated by the cruelty of “no…you were never correct, and this is your consequence.”

Yes this. Good analysis. 

Actually, in light of this I’d like to propose yet one more type of monster to this list. The monster is a deer. But you realize you were very, very wrong about what deer are like.

The deer itself has not changed, you were just wrong about deer from the very start.

I would like to add a fifth here.

The “Thing That Was Almost A Deer” something that, despite it’s best efforts, was never able to truly attain deerhood, and now spends it’s days being something wholly different.

Something that wanted to be a deer so very badly, but was turned away from the gates of deerhood, condemned to lurk in lonely the wilderness of liminality.

Monsters are monsters because they can’t be classified. The fear stems from our inability to understand what we are seeing. They are, by their very nature, unable to be understood. Which is why this is the most tragic kind of monster to me.

Something that, maybe now or in the past, didn’t want to be a monster.

There’s also the “Thing That Could Have Been A Deer”, which may be a “there but by the grace of god” situation. Or something that made Choices; some of those Choices being things that may have tempted you in the past…….

I've got several issues with the proposed Tumblr blackout, but chief among them is the fact that it lands on the first day of Disabled Pride Month and the fact that there are people calling for it to become indefinite when disabled folks already have limited access to their communities, and many of us are losing what little reliable access we have because of places like Reddit going dark.

Like... idk. Maybe I'm being uncharitable. But the prioritization of ensuring Pride is minimally interfered with while the first day of Disability Pride is just taken away is rubbing me the wrong way.

And just to be clear. I don't think anyone is doing it intentionally. But I also think that's the problem. No one thinks about disabled people except other disabled people. I wish they would.

I have a chronic illness and I didnt even know there was a Disabled Pride Month.

Yep! It’s been a thing since July 1990 to celebrate the landmark passing of the Americana with Disabilities Act.

We even have a flag which @capricorn-0mnikorn created.

So welcome to your first Disability Pride. I know it’s technically tomorrow, but it’s never too early to find out you have a community and be welcomed by it :)

Who’s calling for it to become indefinite? That, I would be against. But in its current form it seems fine.

And as a disabled person, I didn’t know about this July disability month. It seems US American-centric tbh. Not that it’s totally useless, of course, it just doesn’t have the same significance. I think we have more to gain in a short, 1-2 day blackout than we have to lose. Because a demand of the blackout is to fix some of the accessibility issues caused by recent changes.

There were numerous iterations in the notes from some people calling for it to become indefinite.

And while Disability Pride Month was to originally commemorate ADA, it is celebrated globally, with many other countries aligning with the US celebration.

Many people just don’t know it exists because Disabled Rights and issues are universally overlooked or ignored.

That you don’t recognize it’s importance does not mean it is not monumentally important to many of us and has been since the 90s.

And the blackout will not achieve anything. Fuck, it’s barely achieved anything on Reddit except to displace already vulnerable communities with limited access to community.

If you want to protest Tumblr, leave negative reviews on the apps citing the issues. Withhold money. Not this… token whatever this is supposed to be.

me: wow this person looks like they might be a TERF, I should block them and move on.

me: but then again… I gotta be sure *deliberately exposes myself to transphobia under the guise of trying to see if they are a terf or not (the answer’s usually yes)*

Matilda (movie) remake where Trunchbull looks like one of those hyper feminine bleach blonde Republican women you see on talk shows as the token girl/eye candy. And then Miss Honey is a soft-hearted, handy, tie-wearing Butch.

It is so so important that Miss Honey is also fat.

Five stages of aromanticism

I went straight from 1 to 5 thanks to Tumblr. Thank you Tumblr.

there's this push in media on the idea that it's okay to act aromantic and/or asexual as long as you replace those expected things with ambition. babe i'm just here to vibe. i was not put on this earth to have a fucking career. where are the rest of the chill aspecs who don't do shit

There's no void to fill in my life. I just have more free time and less potential to get tangled up in drama.

every single fat trans mlm is great sorry i don't make the rules

You know, as the concept of “zombifying fungi” becomes more and more popular, I notice it still referred to everywhere as like a “brain parasite.” So I guess a lot of people overlooked or forgot how in 2019 it was discovered that cordyceps and other similar fungal parasites leave the brain and nervous system completely untouched. They only control the muscles. They use chemical signals to make the muscles flex in real time where they want to go :)

It’s funny how many people are replying “but that’s worse!” like you didn’t know that’s exactly why I put a smiley

[Image description: two Tumblr replies from evilkitten3. The first says “that’s so much better idk what these guys are on about,” and the second says “my fingers are typing this of their own free will, if anyone was wondering.” End ID.]

The idea that trans people uphold gender roles is rediculous not only because gnc trans people make it obviously untrue, but also trans peoples attitude on gender roles ranges from ambivalent to abhorred. Real having your cake and eating it too moment for transphobes.