I've udderly had it.

I'm totally not a cow passing as a human trying to get access to a shiny telescope to look at the moooooon

[memewhore]

[spleenyz]

[fallout-lou-begas]

[kermittingacrime]

ask and you shall receive.

[gayvampyr]

[blankpointdankmemes]

[matt-ruins-your-shit]

[spaceshipoftheseus]

Look, this is my litmus test: I pretend I am the original Earl of Sandwich. I have asked for non-bread foods to be brought to me inside bread, that I might more easily consume them one-handed while gambling.

This does not enable my wretched regency habits. This is not what I asked for. I do not deign to grace it with the name of my house.

[dirkbolero]

This is the most important addition to the sandwich discourse I have ever read.

[powerfulwizard]

i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”

[feynites]

When my sister and I were kids we had this one action figure, who was actually a brutalized batman doll without his cape (the dog chewed half his head, too), who we dubbed ‘Evil Chancellor Traytor’. The idea was that in the fictional society of our toys, ‘chancellor’ just came with the word ‘evil’ in front of it, as a matter of ancient tradition. Like ‘grand’ or ‘high’ or something along those lines.

Anyway, the running gag was that the king (an old Power Rangers knock-off doll) had absolute and unwavering faith in Evil Chancellor Traytor, who basically comported himself like a mix between Grima Wormtongue and Jafar from the Aladdin movies. Everyone was always sure that Evil Chancellor Traytor had something to do with the nefarious scheme of the day. The dude even carried around a poisoned knife called ‘the kingslayer’.

The additional twist on the joke, though, was that he never was behind anything. The king was actually right. Evil Chancellor Traytor was the most devoted civil servant in the entire Action Figure Dystopia. He spent his nights working on writing up new legislature to ensure that broken toys had access to mobility devices, was always on the lookout to acquire new shoeboxes for expanding city infrastructure, and drafted a proposal that once got half the ‘settlement’ in my sister and I’s closet moved to the upper shelf so that vulnerable toys were less likely to be snatched up by the dog.

The knife, as it turned out, was as symbolic as the ‘evil’ in his name. See, Action Figure Dystopia had a long history of corrupted monarchs getting too big for their thrones and exploiting the underclasses. The job of the Evil Chancellor was to always remain vigilant, and loyally serve a good ruler - or, if the regent should became a despot, to slay them on behalf of the people.

But since killing the king would be a terrible crime, the Evil Chancellor had to be the kind of person who would willingly die to spare the people from the plight of a wicked leader; because the murder would be pinned on them, in order to keep the ‘machinery of politics’ working as smoothly as ever.

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor had a diary, in which my sister I would take turns writing out the most over-the-top good shit he’d done behind the scenes. Usually after everyone else had finished talking shit about him. I don’t know why but we got the biggest kick out of being like:

Barbie With the Unfortunate Haircut: Oh that Evil Chancellor Traytor! Why can’t the king see how wicked he is?!

Charmander From the Vending Machine: Char!

Jurassic Park Toy of Jeff Goldblum With Disturbingly Realistic Face: At least if someone puts a knife in the king’s back, we’ll know where to look!

Evil Chancellor Traytor’s Diary: Today I was feeding ducks at the park when I noticed another legless action figure sitting by the benches. I put a hundred dollars into his bag while he wasn’t looking. I really need to increase budgeting to the medical treatment centers. If only we had enough glue, I think we would see far fewer toys trying to get by without limbs… *insert iconic evil laugh*

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor eventually fell victim to one of my mom’s cleaning sprees, and she decided he was too busted up to keep and tossed him out. My littler brother, who tended to follow my sister and I’s games like he was watching a daily soap opera, cried so hard that we had to do a special ‘episode’ where one of the toys found the Evil Chancellor’s diary, and so he got a big huge memorial and the king threw himself into the empty grave and then ordered the toys driving the toy bulldozer to bury him so that ‘Traytor’s grave would have a body’ (this seemed very important for some reason).

And then we had the Quest For a New King. Somehow or another that ended up being a giant rubber snake called ‘Tyrant King Cobra’.

[callmebliss]

::closes tab, shuts off computer, and proceeds to have the best day ever just by knowing this exists::

[fierceawakening]

i will always reblog Evil Chancellor Traytor

[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.

[rainbowgod666]

TEN

FUCKING

YEARS

[vettir]

Anyways, they fucked it up because they brought unnecessary censorship onto the platform, and killed a lot of the draw for it.

[witchmarsh]

Romance option?? (no)

Wishlist Witchmarsh on Steam now!

[cowinatrenchcoat]

One my favorite song lyrics of all time has to be:

"I was willing, but she wasn't ready

So I settled for a burger and a grape snow cone

I dropped her off early but I didn't go home"

And the dude just goes down by yhe river and drinks with his buddies. Maybe sucks a little dick with the homies.

[meangirlnurse]

oh my god

[meangirlnurse]

[smallbabywerewolf]

[sprinkledsalt]

Going through my likes in reverse chronological order is very cursed and yeah I'm gonna be that person

These posts were from 2012-2013. Look at those note counts. I’m sure that actually trying to go through the notes would reveal deranged reblogs, but there’s no way any post praising a Democratic politician would get a lot of notes on here now, let alone that many. Yeah, yeah, you can argue these simplistic posts weren’t great either because politicians shouldn’t be stanned, etc, etc., but I’m pointing out how you used to be able to express positivity towards a Democratic president on here, and that this was a popular sentiment. Now, you can’t even tell people to vote for Democrats against a raping white supremacist without bloggers screaming bloody murder and accusing you of genocide. Forget about praising a Democrat as a person, as the above posts do: you can’t express preference for general Democratic policies over Republican ones without being called a bootlicker. You can’t point to objectively true things about Democratic policies—such as blue states having abortion rights and trans rights and red states not—without people losing their shit and lying about the parties being the same

I’m a broken record yet again but these posts were pre-2016, and the impact of 2016’s combination of online ratfucking campaigns, Bernard Sanders turning a whole generation away from Democrats due to his and his ilk’s “both sides, all corrupt, no war but class war” bullshit, and the birth of fucking cringe culture cannot be overstated. You used to be able to talk about how bad Republicans were on here without adding caveats that Dems totes suck shit too and omg plz still think I’m cool, guys!1! You used to be able to say you supported a Democratic politician without people having a Fox News style meltdown on you. I remember the 2012 election and people on here were able to say “omg Romney would be terrible, vote for Obama!” without much pushback. Compare that to what liberals faced when pleading with people to vote for Democrats against Trump.

And people on here will go “well yeah we were dumb kids in 2012 but now we know how evil Demokkkrats are.” No, you're just engaging in a different kind of childishly simplistic politics because your brain got nuked in the microwave by text posts, memes, and short form video content made by a bunch of morons and malicious actors who—for various reasons—were very invested in getting you to sit on your ass and spend all your time online tearing down the liberal party instead of teaming up to defeat the fascist, forced birth, white supremacist GOP. Letting the tankie micro-blogging website inject a Fox News level of hatred against Obama and other Democrats into your brain is deeply embarrassing, but that’s been the average user on here over the past decade

[anarchomikeism]

[ancaporado]

[wageronvoluntaryism]

Never forget what they took from us.

[wageronvoluntaryism]

For those asking how it compares today

[cheese-sample-official]

and also

[bmxpotato]

Mid-year 2026 update (this is without tax):

[sharkgirldick]

Just to round out the comparison.

[possessable]

it's fine i don't even need to be part of social groups or friend groups anyway (giant hole appears in my chest spontaneously) ? what's that

[bogleech]

Why are there just blobs of fake rubber meat that a bunch of unrelated microbes can build in the dirt but they've only ever been found in china and can't be classified any further than "biological objects"

[cryptidjeepers]

just watched a star trek episode about a planet that relied so heavily on it's computer system that they all forgot the basics of their own knowledge. and that allowed them to miss the fact that they were being posioned with radiation and nearly ending their civilization. because they couldn't use their own knowledge to figure things out. i bring this up for no reason in particular

[jadagul]

Found myself wanting to say that "consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch" and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say.

[kiragecko]

#well. on tumblr you get the thunderous applause. #I recall watching Hank Green talk about how under intense stress he didn’t want to read a bunch of text #he wanted a video to explain things to him #and even though it should have been obvious that a VIDEO CREATOR likes video #my mind was moderately boggled #what do you MEAN you find video EASIER and lower effort #that’s not a real thing - via @tuesdayisfordancing

[wisegirlandseaweedbrainforever]

THIS! Give me a book, or simple audio, a video takes way too much time and energy to waste in my life!

[cowinatrenchcoat]

So I actually work on websites and when it comes to info like a college admission process or other clear/specific info seeking, I found people preferred text to video or audio so they could scan, screenshot, read on the train, etc. Or at the very least they wanted an easily accessible complete transcript of an audio or video file.

Curb effect strikes again!

[wordfather]

someone at work told me 'oh, just ask chat' when i raised a casual question and i asked what she meant and she said 'you know, chatgpt' like im an idiot. and i should get an award for the fact that i did not start snarling and biting and killing

[wordfather]

i know everyones justifiably mad right now but do you wanna get madder? i work at a school. a teacher said this to me.

[wordfather]

im glad this version of the post is making rounds now. the amount of casual ai use i see some teachers do these days is disgusting and they genuinly dont see the problem with making school assignments for children using chatgbt, and even encourage them to use it themselves. school is about teaching kids how to think and they're taking that away from them. this is a sickness and we should be calling it out more so people realize the damage they're doing

[wordfather]

i subbed a 7th grade class a few months ago and i gave them a written assignment and they had to use their textbook to find answers and weren't allowed to copy the text, they had to rewrite the answers in their own words. a simple thing i was taught as a kid. i banned the use of ipads and phones for the duration of the class.

50% of the kids couldn't find the many of the answers, even though they only had one chapter to read. the other 45% didnt know how to rewrite the answers in their own words. only 5% finished the assignment properly. they asked me repeatedly if they could ask chatgbt. almost all of their handwriting was on 1-4th grade levels. i struggled to read most of it.

this isnt their fault. the school system is failing them. the adults are failing them. 'we're evolving with the times' we are losing our ability to think for ourselves, and its all thanks to the system being set up. we should all be angry. why aren't we more angry

[datadegroove-deactivated2026042]

penis isn't real. pussy isn't even real. the only thing that is real, is the pleasure of combat

[were--ralph]

the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists

[were--ralph]

we're going to try again witha little but minimal casting

IT will happen in August of 2026. like to charge and reblog to cast but cast sparingly

[were--ralph]

Wait stop. everyone +like now and spread it a little but cast on the same day in August. lets try August 6th or something.

[were--ralph]

CAST NOW

[cowinatrenchcoat]

Monday morning: Ok, I finally got some sleep over the weekend, i'm ready to tackle my work.

Thursday: If one more person asks me another fucking question, I will commit a murder.