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Blastcanister. Home of streams, memes, and other machines.

[gertritude-art]

going slightly insane trying to draw something so i drew grace in a hostage situation to calm down

[trickstertime]

Huh? What's this?? Something is on this 5c coin???

ENHANCE

[pitchburgh]

saw someone trying to roast this guy on reddit but all the comments were just like "fuck off, that's based"

nature is healing

[augustdementhe]

FUCK YEAH.

[hyde-the-toad-bard]

FAT HEROES LETS GO!

[lazarus-lazuli]

i have no comment this is just the funniest fucking thing i’ve seen all day

[lilianaloo]

strive to be as slutty as the english language

[one-time-i-dreamt]

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

[red-mercer]

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

[sreegs]

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

Yahoo’s grand plan for Tumblr was to turn it into a “next-generation PDF”

They didn't really get it.

[noctumsolis]

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

[sreegs]

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

[virdigrishammer]

you left out the best part of that article. the poor yahoo emplyees at those meetings were just as confused as the rest of us.

[ralfmaximus]

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.

[cyle]

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.)

[hugtheteadrinkthekitten]

Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.

[muttsys-deactivated20260425]

Anyone else noticing theres no websites anymore. You never go to website.com anymore its always some bullshit like "go to the smeeple app store and download the flubi app" i dont want toooo what ever happened to websites. I do not like it

[twoblogger]

It kind of fucks with me that somebody killed ötzi the iceman because ötzi himself is like whatever but the silent presence of human hands that drew back the string of the bow that shot the arrow that killed him is crazy. the idea that there were various people involved in that situation and while one of them has had his last hours painstakingly reconstructed and studied to no end, the others now only exist insofar that an arrowhead had to get into his shoulder somehow. imagine killing someone and then suddenly your entire existence is only a vague shadow implied by the fact that you killed them. much to consider

[twoblogger]

Testing the mummified bone marrow of ötzi to figure out his ancestry whole time there’s definitely another person, maybe more than one, standing in the room with us but I can never see or speak to them because I only know them through the assurance that they were there too in the form of one single arrowhead. I hate prehistory so much it’s unreal

[angel-derangement]

I hate it too tbh

[rainintheevening]

Okay, we got a new one, boys.

[headspace-hotel]

it is so fucking sad to find a cool fanartist on here and then see that their last post was from like 2018 and they were announcing that they were moving to Twitter.

It's like being a space colonist and finding a little abandoned space cottage and there's a diary in it and the last entry is like "i have now gone to seek a better life on [name of planet that got overtaken by axe-wielding octopi that feed on human blood]"

[blignick]

[ampervadasz]

[tits-n-trix]

Boys will absolutely destroy their living space for a joke and I’m glad they take the time to film it

[hypothetical-menace]

how could you leave this in the replies

[gophergal]

@isthehumanvideo-cute

[isthehumanvideo-cute]

NOT CUTE!!! Where do I even start? FIRST OF ALL, fireworks are NOT safe for humans and should NOT be provided as toys! Injuries that can be caused by fireworks include SEVERE BURNS and BODY PARTS BEING BLOWN OFF (and humans, being organics, CANNOT JUST GET THEIR LIMBS REATTACHED! A human with a missing limb will be missing that limb forever, and though prosthetics exist they won’t be the same as the lost limb!)!

Then there’s the issue of the floor. Slipping and falling on a wet floor can cause injuries to humans, especially if they are moving quickly. The severity of injuries possible from falls depends on the body parts that take the impact, but head injuries (if a human slips and falls and lands on their head) and spinal injuries (if the human lands on their back) are especially concerning, and twisted ankles should also be watched out for if one of your humans slips and falls.

Which brings us to the fact that even though the humans who made the floor slippery and chased the other humans in the video with a firecracker probably think they’re being playful, the humans being chased are legitimately scared, yelping and running away when they see the handheld explosive pointed at them. Some humans will playfully antagonize each other, but if they are causing each other legitimate stress or even danger, that is a behavior that should be corrected if your humans are going to continue living together safely.

[acidtheater]

"Halloween adults are just as bad as disney adults" "Furries are worse than disney adults"

I gotta be real, I thought we were critical of disney adults for aggressive loyalty to a really gross mega-corporation, or refusal to engage with media that isn't for kids, not because people... have hobbies?

[reagan-slayer69]

“but what if you abort the baby who’ll cure cancer?!” sir the baby who will cure cancer is an organic chemistry major who works at a Home Depot because you use AI to go through your resumes

[hareofhrair]

[jethroq]

dialectics

[deadseacorpse]

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Fellas, is it counter revolutionary to eat.

[biglawbear]

This is a reminder that any insane extreme position can be couched in progressive sounding language to try and persuade you of its validity, even positions that are totally contrary

[imyourbadjew]

[marshemillow]

how the heck porn addiction is not real

Because scientists have studied it and they've found insufficient evidence to prove that it's real. It's really quite simple.

[the-consistent-anti]

There are literally scientists who went into these studies genuinely believing in porn addiction who were eager to study it and its effects who came out no longer believing in it. Why? Because they're good scientists who changed their minds in the face of new evidence.

The key point in studies like this is that they always expect porn-related problems to go up as porn use goes up, and you would expect that because that's how every addiction works from gambling to cigarettes to alcohol to crack cocaine, but what they actually find is that the people with the most distress over their porn use is actually related to how religious they are, not how much porn they're watching. This is significant, because it means people who identify as "porn addicts" are not actually watching more porn than the average person; They just feel worse about it because they think they shouldn't be watching it AT ALL.

I really can't stress this point enough; Are there people whose lives are badly impacted by watching 22 hours of porn a day? Sure, they do exist and they have my sympathy, but the majority of cases of "porn addiction" are completely religiously motivated and have nothing to do with how much porn people are actually watching.

The key takeaway here is that shaming people for their sexuality is harmful. It's bad for people's mental health to make them feel shame over something they have no control over, like how horny they can get. It's wrong to force people to suppress their emotions and make them feel guilty for not harming anyone. As Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic once said; You can't shame someone out of feeling horny any more than you can shame someone out of feeling hungry.

Christianity often does this as a form of control by selling you the sickness and the cure; We are created sick and commanded to be well.

[the-bar-sinister]

Remember when I told ya'll last month to be ready to start looking for a Discord alternative?

Yeah things aren't looking good for discord.

[the-bar-sinister]

#what is the alternative anyway

If you want a direct alternative there's Revolt, which is a free, open source discord clone.

Revolt is the chat app that's truly built with you in mind.

[the-bar-sinister]

Oh...

It's even worse than I thought.

[darker-than-darkstorm]

Time to go back to IRC.

[howtoimpersonateanadult]

I recommend Element; it's very similar to Discord and has basically the same features but it's privacy-focused and both servers and DMs can both be encrypted so only the actual users of those rooms can read the messages.

This means unlike most popular chat apps, including and especially Discord, Element doesn't sell your conversations or tracking data to advertisers, because the company literally doesn't have access to that data in the first place.

I've used it for years and I think it's a natural fit for Discord users.

[give-grian-rights]

sighs. saves for later

[cell113]

The problem with this is transferring YEARS of Discord usage to these new alternatives. Until a tool is made that allows full back up if not transfer of All That, then transitioning to these alternatives isn't feasible for the baseline everyday user.

[hjbender]

GitHub - Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter: Exports Discord chat logs to a file

Exports Discord chat logs to a file. Contribute to Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter development by creating an account on GitHub.