The sentence: "National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism." is always bouncing in my head.
Everyone is right to dunk on Yahoo and "tumblr is the new PDF" because yeah, everything about that era was stupid.
But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.
But first, some context.
See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.
Adobe changed all that with PDF.
Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.
Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.
Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.
Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.
Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.
If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.
(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)
So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.
The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.
"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"
Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".
@sreegs or @cyle or @jv can probably explain it better, but that's what I remember hearing at the time. Please feel free to correct me.
the details here aren't correct, but as i've said many times, yeah, the PDF thing was in direct response to the Neue Post Format, which is how post and reply content is stored on tumblr. it's not as dumb as it sounds. (without that context, it does sound dumb.)
yeah yeah every Zionist becomes a hard core Zionist because people are so antisemitic and rude to them, every hindutvawadi goes hard Hindutva because of “Hinduphobia”, every man “becomes” a misogynist because women are just so nasty these days, blah blah blah. No disrespect to people engaging the argument seriously you’re doing the good work actually much admiration it’s just frustrating to me how selectively this is understood (why is it so often different for white?)
Cuba expanded incentives for importing renewable energy equipment, as China delivered another 5,000 photovoltaic systems to the island.
Aug. 10 (UPI) -- Cuba expanded incentives for importing renewable energy equipment, as China delivered another 5,000 photovoltaic systems to the island -- part of the country's efforts to increase solar power generation amid a prolonged electricity crisis.
A Ministry of Finance and Prices resolution signed Wednesday replaces regulations approved in February and consolidates into a single document tax benefits for individuals and companies that adopt renewable energy technologies.
The resolution eliminates tariffs on imports of photovoltaic solar systems and their main components. The benefit also covers solar water heaters, photovoltaic pumps, small wind turbines, biodigesters, solar lighting and air conditioning systems powered by renewable energy sources.
The measure seeks to make these technologies more accessible to the state sector, private companies and individuals as Cuba tries to increase renewable power generation and ease pressure on its deteriorating electrical system.
The electricity crisis continues to affect much of the island. The Electric Union said Monday that blackouts persisted throughout Sunday and into early Monday.
For Monday's peak demand period, the company projected that only 1,100 megawatts would be available against demand of 3,300 megawatts, enough to cover approximately one-third of the country's needs.
The blackouts are also affecting other basic services. The state-run Aqueduct and Sewerage Co. said in July that about 225,000 people were having difficulty receiving water, largely because power outages prevented pumping systems from operating.
The Chinese government delivered a second donation of 5,000 photovoltaic systems Friday for rural areas and essential services in the country's 169 municipalities, Granma reported.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel thanked China for the assistance Sunday and said it adds to Cuba's efforts to "change its energy mix."
"We deeply appreciate this gesture by the Chinese people and government, which adds to the efforts Cuba is making to change its energy mix, amid the genocidal blockade," Díaz-Canel wrote on X. "We continue alongside our brothers in building the Community with a Shared Future."
"Agradecemos profundamente este gesto del pueblo y Gobierno chino, que se suma a los esfuerzos que está haciendo #Cuba para cambiar su matriz energética, en medio del #BloqueoGenocida.
Seguimos junto a nuestros hermanos en la construcción de la Comunidad de Futuro Compartido. https://t.co/EzH7u0EZwe— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) August 9, 2026"
Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva said the equipment will benefit rural areas, healthcare centers, day care centers and bank branches, El Economista reported.
China had already donated another 5,000 photovoltaic systems whose installation began before the latest delivery. The Electric Union said in March that 2,671 of those systems were intended for essential services and another 2,329 for isolated homes.
The expansion of solar energy goes beyond those donations. At least 41 medium-sized solar parks and 18 smaller ones were built over the past two years, according to RenewAtlas data cited by La Tercera.
The government also announced plans to build 92 medium-sized solar parks by 2028.
The new projects could provide about 1,000 megawatts when operating at full capacity, compared with typical peak demand of about 3,200 megawatts. The Cuban government says solar power currently covers about 10% of the country's electricity needs, up from 3% at the beginning of 2025.
China has become the main supplier of equipment for that expansion. It shipped $117 million worth of solar equipment to Cuba in 2025, up from $3 million in 2023, according to customs data compiled by Ember and cited by El Periódico de la Energía.
However, the solar expansion has yet to resolve the electricity crisis. Cuba relies on aging thermoelectric power plants that suffer frequent breakdowns and faces fuel shortages, while insufficient storage capacity limits the use of electricity generated by solar parks after sunlight is no longer available.
It is so unsettling that Obama has killed thousands via drones covered up that children were being killed and families were wiped out and relatives have to live with the fact theyll never get justice and now I have to see people repost his reading list every year. Liberals would be horrified if Putin did something like that but when its Obama or Bush or Clinton they just dont care
to clarify for anyone who doesn’t know, since the screenshot cuts off:
A double tap is the practice of following a strike with a deliberately timed second strike in the same place several minutes later, usually in an attempt to maximize the casualties of an attack. The term is usually associated with instances where emergency responders and medical personnel rushing to the site hit by the first strike are hit by the second strike.
Because Tumblr is very English speaking and some ppl like France a little too much I just want to remind you of a few things:
- France abolished the Code Noir 2 months ago. That law project that said hey you can enslave, mutilate, kill, cross breed, etc. black people at will bc they're not people they're property ? Yeah. Abolished 2 months ago. We are in July 2026.
- the last human zoo closed its doors in 1994 in France due to social pressure. Not bc they were running out of business, no. Ppl still visited that place until it closed its doors. No, it was bc (black) French people were fed up. That human zoo was specialized in displaying black (presumed Congolese) people in fake huts in enclosures, for white entertainment.
- now while this might no longer be the case, when I was growing up, I went to a French school (as in. It was an international French School w the French flag n all) and the way we were taught French geography was that France has the biggest and largest access to the sea in the world. And they'd show us a map of France and its colonies around the world. It's all occupied indigenous lands. I don't know if they still teach that. I hope not. But they absolutely did until I graduated high school in 2017. Again, I write this on July 21st 2026, for the record.
Anyways that's all I have for now. Y'all don't hate France enough. Y'all need to hate France more.
I was wondering if you could explain “fandom is marketing”? I think I get what you mean but then also maybe I don’t?
If something has a big fandom, publishers and studios know they can make money off it. This is why we see publishers openly acquiring and selling things that were originally posted as fanfic, like Alchemised, Heated Rivalry, etc. It’s why the horrid wizard woman considers people participating in her fandom to be supporting her political causes.
Word of mouth is the most effective way to sell people on media, and fandom is word of mouth that costs the creators/owners nothing. Doing Fandom Stuff used to be subversive, but media companies have now figured out that fandom is a form of advertising and they’re no longer worried about it. Those of us who still think of fandom like it’s a livejournal-era secret club we can never let the corporations discover have got to update our self-concept
it’s kind of crazy that “he has a sadness in his eyes you only see in Eastern European gay porn” took off, because the joke is, like, exclusively about people being sexually exploited due to miserable economic conditions.
Unfortunately to the majority of this site Eastern Europe is not actually a real place full of actual human beings, instead a vague concept where everything's grey and miserable and (to the slightly less ignorant) full of violent ethnic tensions, and if you try to explain why that's the popular Western conception of the place and why things got so miserable from the late 80s onward they'll just call you a tankie
Nothing really annoys me like the automatic rejection email that gets sent without any other response. Like if I had actually interviewed I might care. But all I did was submit an application just ghost me I assumed I was rejected weeks ago.
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