Falling For Tragedy

Hi, I'm Maddy, I'm 28, and a Capricorn, this blog is like 99% mobile, I am asexual panromantic and tbh I’ll respond to any pronouns, but I’m leaning towards they/she rn. I am Japanese and Jewish, I have no plan for life, if you’re gonna talk to me please don’t be a dick, but just remember I want to talk to and get to know people, I just am too anxious to start conversations myself 😊

[fliesandlilypads]

frog cake / credit

[tsarina-anadyomene]

i kind of hate it when they cast the same 10 superstars who are in literally everything in a movie. celebrity-sickness

[tsarina-anadyomene]

not every movie needs to be an ensemble cast of timothee chalamet, zendaya, tom holland, robert pattinson, and anya taylor-joy

[tsarina-anadyomene]

i've really never understood this. there are probably tens of thousands of aspiring actors in LA, even if like 1% of them are good then you can just pick out a few new stars

[phaeton-flier]

Studios are apparently incredibly risk-averse and prefer as safe a bet as possible—thus the regression to the mean on many other aspects of film

[earhartsease]

they're also picking the same five stories over and over for the same reason

[decemberwinter]

I need all of these annoying scam bots gone from tumblr

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

"Not dating or having sex isn't even a source of discrimination in real life-" How many rights and benefits are tied up in marriage contracts though? How much of our economic and societal structure is built with the clear expectation that people couple up and support each other? Where's the security nets and affordable options for people who will never have a partner/spouse to take care of them? How many people save serious commitment only for people they have a romantic and sexual relationship with? How many people will unquestionably prioritize their sexual and romantic relationship above all other social connections in their lives? And where does that leave the people who don't want that at all, ever?

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

imagine you had a friend who constantly made jokes at the expense of something you loved. they're never funny, but they seem to expect you to laugh even though the punchline is just, "this thing you love sucks ass". it's not even really a joke, there's nothing funny about it, you can tell that they genuinely actually believe it. but they insist it's just a joke!

no matter what the situation is, they're always bringing the social interaction to a screeching halt with these jokes. nobody ever wants to participate in this joke with them. nobody agrees with the premise. nobody ever knows what to say afterwards, it's just an awkward moment and a subject change. but they just keep doing it.

you have to stop with the self-deprecatory "humor", it's not fun for anyone including you.

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

#actual advice: switch to self-aggrandizing humor #have the biggest ego in the world even if it's fake #does wonders

as the smartest and most beautiful woman in the world, I can confirm this

[covington-shenanigans]

as the hottest and most fuckable world expert on 17th century Finnish erotic art I couldn't agree more

[dogpuppy]

[pupangelremade-deactivated20211]

[bestiarum]

[theawkwardqueerturtle]

this is the one meme that manages to age like a fine wine

[charnel-doll]

this pride month we need to start being kinder to trans people who don’t pass. no matter what the reason is.

[charnel-doll]

sometimes someone is only out online. sometimes someone is newly out. sometimes someone can’t access medical transition. sometimes medical transition isn’t a magical perfect transformation. sometimes the ambiguity of someone’s presentation is the point. many many other reasons why someone might not perfectly pass. respect is deserved regardless

[gyrovagi]

the really annoying thing is that even when you're making something with your dick it still takes effort. like this thing is going to be soooo good and appealing to my personal tastes. once this stupid motherfucker finishes it

[elliejaybird]

my drive home from work yesterday

[elliejaybird]

Tumblr is the only place with enough patience to suffer my minimum effort Pictionary-style self portrait of myself in my car long enough to get to the ducks. I can check analytics on other sites that show most people are clicking away before the ducks.

[bgm05]

[anarchopuppy]

The GI Rights Hotline is a non-profit run by civilians that offers free, confidential counseling and resources for anyone trying to leave the US military, whether by conscientious objection, going AWOL, or any other means. Their toll-free number is 1-877-447-4487 

The Center on Conscience and War is a non-profit run by civilians collects resources for people who might be targets of the US military’s predatory recruitment process, including this list of alternatives to enlistment, organized by state, that offer the same benefits that the branches of the military (claim to) offer, such as experience, travel, money for college, etc - without killing people in the name of western imperialism. If you want to register as an official conscientious objector or otherwise avoid combat in any way, their toll-free number is 1-800-379-2679

War is a racket. Don’t throw your life away for a government that doesn’t care about you. If you know anyone who’s considering enlisting or who’s already enlisted and considering getting out, please talk to them and share these resources

[snarling-through-our-smiles]

[hypokeimena]

image description: tweet by olayemi olurin @/msolurin, reading: There's no high like making a successful hail mary argument. A prosecutor once asked for bail on my client because he had like 63 convictions and I was like judge... 63 convictions sounds like a man who showed up to court at least 63 times. And the judge was like yea you right /end description

[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.

[vixvigil]

it’s never a normal temperature anymore it’s always some fucking bullshit

[tuttle-did-it]

and yet billions of people insist there's no such thing as climate change.

[the-haiku-bot]

and yet billions of

people insist there’s no such

thing as climate change.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[notaplaceofhonour]

if you haven’t spent a lot of time deep in The Bible Belt or very specific communities you probably don’t even know what The Christian Flag™️ is, but if you do, seeing one in the wild after years of Getting Out feels so weird

[notaplaceofhonour]

We had to pledge to this thing in school.

[notaplaceofhonour]

I think it’s primarily a Protestant thing, and even then, skews towards the less seeker-friendly fundamentalist/Evangelical churches.

Out of the handful of Christian schools I went to, I think only 2 of them really used it (one because it was already there in the Methodist church next door we used as a chapel, and the other had like… a full on Color Guard about it; that was the one that made us pledge allegiance to it).

The churches I saw it in, outside of school, tended to be, like, Very Old Southern Baptist or Lutheran churches.

[notaplaceofhonour]

We had to pledge allegiance to the Christian flag,

And to The Savior™️ for whose Kingdom™️ it stands,

One Savior™️, crucified, risen, and coming again

With life and liberty for all who Believe™️

And to the Bible, the Holy Word™️,

To make it a lamp unto our feet and a Light™️ unto our path

And hide its Word™️ in our hearts that we might not sin against Gawd.

[notaplaceofhonour]

The one school that was super into it had a teacher who was an Aggie, and ran her class accordingly (her equivalent of a gold star sticker chart was military ranks with corresponding medals we could stick on our school uniform).

There was a Color Guard (I think that teacher ran it?) for chapel that would carry in a big leather Family Bible and folded Christian and American flags in a big procession where they would raise the flags and the whole chapel would pledge to them.

[olicrosse]

[cephalopodvictorious]

fixed it

[star-thief]