ambhis101 @ambhis101 - Tumblr Blog

Posts

cannibalchicken

myjetpack

My cartoon for this weekend’s Guardian books.

p.s. my latest book cartoons collection is Revenge of the Librarians: tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2

queerbit

insert-content

non-binary?? that's like if a man and a woman had a child

lyridmeteorshower

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.

Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.

Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.

Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:

Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.

The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top

You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.

Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up

You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff

You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.

holy shit it's a poll

cool!

ooh clicky clicky button!! i wanna press it!! lemme press it!

you can add up to 10 options btw

Voting ended onJun 19, 2023

Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog

Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.

If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.

You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"

Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.

Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.

We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.

Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.

Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.

Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it

You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.

Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.

Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit

You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.

Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.

Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.

If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal

Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension

In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.

You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!

Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs

Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

Watching @wwe with Sadie! She's hulking out! #LifeOfSadie #WrasslingBaby

#lifeofsadie #wrasslingbaby

demonprincex

Academic Publishing is a Goddamned Exploitative Farce

In order to succeed in academia, you must succeed in academic publishing. The length of the published works section of your CV (the academic equivalent of a resume) determines your job offers, promotions, pay scale, whether you get grants, and whether you get tenure. If you do not publish, you die.

Different schools have different expectations. A school that is not rigorous about research might expect you to publish one peer-reviewed journal article a year; a more taxing school might require three or four. Along with these publications, you are also expected to present your work at numerous conferences, poster sessions, symposia, and visits to other universities.

An academic who fails in this task will not get tenure; they probably won’t even get a job in the first place. If you do not participate in this game, you’re a failure, a fraud of a scientist.

But generating academic articles is not just a matter of hours upon hours of work. You must conduct research projects, organize them, analyze the results, make sense of the results, write the results up in a theoretically interesting way, and submit the articles to multiple journals, one at a time, waiting months to (in all likelihood) earn a rejection or two. Finally you get in, but you must edit the work– that’s another month or two of conversation. Then formatting. Meanwhile, are you conducting new research? Going to conferences? You better be.

The problem with this system is that academics are obligated to perform all these duties for free. If you publish a journal article, or even write a chapter in an academic book, you do not get money. None. You do not even get a free copy of the fucking text.

A few months ago, my colleagues and I published an article, and were told that if we wanted the charts to be in color, we would have to pay for the color ink. In every single issue. We would have to pay to have our article run the way it was written. This was in a top-tier social psychological journal.

After you are published, an journal may ask you to serve as a reviewer. This is a great honor, in some ways; you are now one of the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge. Peer review and criticism is an essential part of academic discourse, and it is why journal articles are of such high quality and rigor.

But you don’t get paid for it. Again, you are expected to review dense drafts, critique them, and write careful, fair reviews of the work. This allows the journal to run high quality work. But you do not get paid. Neither the author nor the editor gets paid.

And this is the case for a publication that costs thousands of dollars a year to read. A subscription for an academic journal is a few hundred dollars as an absolute minimum. Most people cannot afford this. Universities must spend thousands of dollars acquiring access to hundreds of journals so that professors and graduate students can perform their work. These journals make huge gobs of money. None of it goes to the people producing the content.

Imagine if fucking The New Yorker did not pay its writers, demanded its editors work voluntarily, and charged $500 a year for a subscription. Imagine if in order to do your job, you had to pay for this subscription, submit work that took thousands of hours to complete, and received no pay. That is the reality in academia.

It doesn’t end there. Let’s say you submit some research to present at a conference, and you get accepted. Yay! You are getting a line on your CV, and you get to share your research with hundreds of other people from around the world. And you are helping the conference to fill out its schedule!

You spend hours preparing a riveting, TED-worthy talk, spend the whole week of the conference practicing late into the night, fly out to the conference, and deliver it perfectly. You provided high quality content to hundreds of paying conference-goers.

You did not get paid for that. You just did a massive, highly prepared speaking gig, based on years of research, and got nothing in return. In fact, you lost money. You had to pay the conference a steep “registration fee”, between $300 and $700 dollars if you’re a professor, for the honor of providing content for the conference.

Every person at that conference paid hundreds of dollars in registration fees, plus membership fees and travel expenses. Many people provided free lectures, presentations, classes, and posters, because they had to. They are expected to.

Academic journals and academic conferences prey on their necessity, draining money and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of free labor from the graduate students and professors that are obliged to work with them. It is an exploitative, wasteful, disrespectful pyramid scheme. And I am not buying into it.

This is one of the many reasons why I am not applying to tenure-track positions. My (forthcoming) PhD took a lot of work to earn; that expertise is worth something. When the degree is in my hand, my days of unpaid labor are done. And if other academics similarly refused to provide writing, research, editing, curation, and presentation services for free, the publication-tenure system would finally crumble.

demonprincex

24-7prose keeps unearthing old favorites of mine!

ambhis101

This makes me feel better about teaching at a Community College with my Ph.D. Teaching is fun, even when it's frustrating, and they even pay me overtime. :-)