The Romantic Fitzgerald

[plaidadder]

Why It Is Not Surprising That There Are Old People On Tumblr, and Why We Are Surprised By It Anyway

I don’t know how the whole debate about the X-Files’ original demographic got started, so it would be foolish for me to enter into it. But I have been interested to see the information going around about tumblr’s actual demographic breakdown, and to discover that the percentage of people on tumblr under the age of 18 is comparatively small.

I’m 46. I can tell you why I’m on tumblr, and why it makes sense to me that a lot of people in my age range or slightly younger are on it. And yet I too had the impression, when I first signed on, that tumblr was basically a teenagers’ site, and quite frankly felt very weird about that at first. I’m going to talk about what ‘social media’ (we were not calling it that then) was like back in the 1990s when we first started using it, and why I think tumblr replicates some aspects of that experience, and how and why I think tumblr creates the impression that its main demographic is 13-18 year olds. This is all subjective opinion and you don’t have to believe any of it. But you know, old people, we are always trying to share our wisdom. We can’t help it. I know it’s annoying.

Keep reading

[undertheponderosa]

100%.

[redwooding]

If you are at all (a) interested in an experience- based history of the internet or (b) curious about what brings older people to Tumblr, read this. I was there, and it’s pretty accurate.

[shawnhatosys-biceps]

Shawn Hatosy as Rusty in Dallas 362

Save a horse, ride a cowboy

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

tiktoks with vine energy pt. 8

[mysecretlittletmblr]

You gotta watch this one the whole way through.

[footlongdingledong]

idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms

[footlongdingledong]

"ah but all of this is important and true and if i dont reblog all of this important stuff waga baga THE WORMS! THATS WORMS! THE BRAIN WORMS!

[footlongdingledong]

i do not think you are doing activism chief i think what you are doing is sitting in your room flagellating yourself expecting something to happen

[izloveshorses]

'theatre is dying' okay but everyone is flocking to see a beautiful hit musical now that it's been released in the cinema, something more affordable and accessible to most people, and ticket sales in the west end in particular have spiked

'cinema is dying' okay but everyone is flocking to their local cinema to see a beautiful hit musical, and so many have shown up this weekend that licensers decided to extend its theatrical release for another week, a massive rarity in the current climate

maybe the answer to saving art is... seeing art?? and making art accessible??

[loveridden1999]

having a hometown is such a fucked up concept. i grew up here so i do not want to stay here anymore. i miss it when i am away but once i am back i realise why i wanted to go away as far as possible from it. i am familiar with every corner of this place i did not realise when it slowly changed into something unrecognisable. i would probably like to be buried here but i'd rather die than live here

[vibrantstarfire]

i just don’t get it. where are all the women. where are all the women in your fanfictions. are they all out of town? did they all go on vacation together? do they all have a dentist appointment at the same time?

[unfuckablebogtroll]

How it should feel to be right all the time:

How it actually feels:

[byjove]

Someone mentioned how they were having a hard time creating a world for their fantasy fiction geographically because they kept reinventing the island of Britain, which also happened to my good close enemy George R. R. Martin. I would like to suggest North Carolina. I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous but North Carolina has an awesome geographic setup for a fantasy kingdom, I think. Inhospitable barrier islands, constantly shifting shoals in the sound, swamps with alligators, venomous snakes and carnivorous plants, lots of very flat and somewhat sparsely populated farmland, foothills, mines, mountains full of mysterious phenomenon that were originally very difficult to navigate and people still get lost in today. It kind of rocks.

[the-ice-queen-623]

AND VENUS FLYTRAPS ARE NATIVE TO THE CAROLINAS!

[byjove]

There are actually 36 carnivorous plant species native to North Carolina, roughly half of all carnivorous plant species in the United States are found in North Carolina! I added the carnivorous plant detail because that’s something I love about the state. We have so many fucking bugs that the plants keep evolving to eat them.

I love that giant man eating Venus flytraps are worldbuilding staples in untamed tropical fantasy settings but they’re actually native to a small region in the Carolinas.

[byjove]

And I agree with the notes, the Chesapeake Bay + Great Dismal Swamp (partially in NC anyway) and the South Carolina Lowcountry would be good geographic additions to this.

[lasrina]

OK, now I wanna run a campaign where you have to trek from mountain cryptid country to pirate country and in between you gotta avoid a big steel dragon (the Charlotte Motor Speedway).

[evincemii]

i finished southland and i want to give sammy a big fat kiss.. in a perfect world i am sammy bryants loving girlfriend who tucks him in every night ok?

[waifu-of-hargon]

"but you don't look sick"

me, feeling like i'm in the process of dying: okie

[maelwife]

Maybe one reason time seems to speed up in adult life is because when your full time job leaves you roughly 5 hours of free time a day plus two days off a week your life turns into a sort of monotony that makes the days blend together and creative pursuits move in slow motion as you can only get to them when other your commitments are done.

[maelwife]

When you look back and think damn 2019 wasn’t that long ago where did the time go? Job. Your Job took it.

[shawnhatosys-biceps]

Shawn Hatosy and his love for a uniform

“She said she wants to fuck me with my uniform ON!”

[shesnake]

There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

[lostxanadu]

the thing about being bullied for being weird as a kid is that even if you've always embraced being weird your brain is still always looking for the line where it's too much. you can be as proudly and intentionally weird as you want and you can love being weird but your mind is still convinced there's a point where you get too weird and people start treating you like a weird looking bug again. also it feels like you reach that point 500 times a day even if everyone you've spoken to today found you pleasant and likable and even if you're completely alone in your house with nobody looking at you at all.

[ober-affen-geil]

I do it a lot here anyway, but allow me a moment to get on my archivist soapbox because this is not only cool af but important too.

The US National Archives (and this may certainly apply to other countries but this post is about this specific institution) has a lot of material. And that may seem like an obvious statement, but what I mean to say here is that it has a lot of unprocessed material.

“Processing”, in the archive world, is the word we use to mean “organizing the collection materials in a way that makes sense and describing the collection so people know what’s there”. Essentially, processing a collection or material is what makes it accessible to researchers. Think about how you organize yourself or your space. Most of the time when we acquire material we get it exactly how the creator kept it, which is ranges from neat as a pin to literal garbage dump, but mostly falls into the middle area of somewhat organized but also not really. Processing gives the archivist “intellectual control” (we go through everything so we now know exactly what’s in the collection) and gives researchers something to look at that’s a lot more manageable.

But, like I said, the National Archives has a lot of material. Which at this point includes a massive backlog. So what they have done, with the advent of the internet, is turned to crowdsourcing. (Using a large group of volunteers over the internet to accomplish more than the few people who work for the archive can do, and/or using group knowledge and skills that they don’t have to their advantage. Wikipedia or any fandom wiki is an example of crowdsourcing.) This is a long process, because anything they put up has to be digitized first, and that is not as easy as it sounds. I won’t rant here, but it’s time consuming, labor intensive, and in some cases not even feasible with the material.

Anyway, the National Archives crowdsources through a program that they call “citizen archivists”. It’s something that’s free and obligationless, it’s totally voluntary and you do things like add tags to pictures, transcribe documents that are handwritten or otherwise not word-searchable, and add comments about things that are missing information or context.

The reason I bring this up is because they have divided the work into what they call “missions”, basically just categories of material to work on. They have a new one that’s just been made public (likely because they finally got the digitization completed) that is a large collection of pictures consisting of Native subjects, and they need help tagging them.

So if you feel antsy and need something to do or you feel down and you want something positive, consider helping out the National Archives. Because the work the citizen archivists do makes the materials more accessible to the public, and ultimately to any and all future researchers out there. 

[chiefoftherevolution]

Please do this! Its really helpful, especially for researchers

the Library of Congress has something similar- I’ve been transcribing Spanish legal documents for them

https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/herencia-centuries-of-spanish-legal-documents/

[theseformerthings]

It is happening. And it’s getting very, very dark. Not one but TWO Season 5 trailers (click on the link below the video for the second).

und

Babylon Berlin - ard.de