Background Character A

I’m the answer to the question “What if a manic pixie dream girl was none of those things?” Katy 20s She/Her ig (icon by ginalestrades!)

[romancenjoyer]

GazaDirect - Discover and support Gaza fundraisers in need

Indexing and tracking progress of Gaza mutual aid campaigns

[headspace-hotel]

Do yall ever think about what is your rarest achievement?

Like I was thinking about it today and if you thought of all possible human experiences as achievements you could receive in a video game, it would be clear that there are millions of possible achievements, with some distant reaches of the achievement trees so obscure that only one or two people have ever seen them.

For example, there is like, one guy who has gotten to the achievement See 10,000 species of bird.

I think eating every kind of fruit awards a unique achievement. I only reached Eat a pomegranate last year. And there are exploration-based achievements, like Visit New York City or [Hidden] Discover the abandoned barn with the huge Cathode Ray Tube TV and the deer skulls.

People's achievement trees would look really different. I haven't unlocked hardly anything on the Sports, Recreational Drugs, Physical Feats, or Travel achievement trees. I have a wide range of rare achievements on the Textile Arts achievement tree. I definitely have the most achievements on the Nature achievement tree.

Some of the achievements with the most EXP that I have are Witness a total solar eclipse and Forage and eat wild mushrooms (without getting poisoned). I think that [Hidden] Get shot at might also be up there

Recently I've unlocked Have a conversation in a second language with a native speaker and Warp a loom

But I still haven't unlocked Ride a skateboard or Do a cartwheel

My dad recently unlocked Become a cyborg (he got a surgery where he gets an implant that he controls with a remote). That has to have a pretty big EXP reward. But there are a lot of low-stakes achievements like Skip a rock across some water or Buy something from a vending machine

[crazy-brazilian]

[mynorthernattitude]

please accept my sincerest oopsie daises

[depsidase]

[feldfrog]

Imagine your bike has been at the Wright Brother’s repair shop for weeks and you see Orville suddenly whiz over your head in a contraption

[butchfagminotaur]

[greelin]

let me just park in a way that brings shame upon my entire family line

[surlifen]

can you read me a bedtime post?

[say0ranarts]

i will decide the truth. 🐦‍⬛

[zurin]

[mollymux]

Seems to be bunny in the trough Thursday

[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

[sleepy-salami]

i'm just saying that if i was kidnapped, tortured and killed, my broken body dumped to rot in the dirt next to the people i failed to protect, and my brilliant and terrifying goth crush came to look for me, and saw me, and understood me, and gave me what i wanted without having to ask, gave me fangs and claws and my murderers at my feet, gave me the power i never had in life, gave me the justice i never got in death, gave me the pure catharsis of letting the bastards get what they deserve without worrying my pretty head about anything else, i would also look at him like he hung the moon in the sky until the end of time. and what of it

[sleepy-salami]

and if you thought the "i give you permission to repay them in kind!" line was straight fire, how about this being the last line of the chapter in the old version of mdzs

“Since none of you will admit it, then I’ll let him point out the culprit himself.” As if he had been waiting for those words for a long time, a black silhouette stiffly rose from the ground.

[sleepy-salami]

i can't fully relate to any takes that treat wei wuxian raising wen ning as a fierce corpse as straightforwardly violating/reprehensible act, bc like. yes sure there are lines that should not be crossed and these two are full speed drifting across that shit in circles, and the fact that consequences are still real but their long-term planning is for a few hours ahead tops, and the inescapable power imbalance this event creates between them, and the obvious danger of not only letting someone have full control over you but blindly trusting them to handle it, and obligatory murder is bad don't do it at home kids. but it's not as if wei wuxian only used wen ning's body as a convenient tool to vent his frustration without sparing a thought for wen ning's own feelings on the matter?? as if it's not explicitly framed as an ultimate power fantasy fueled by wen ning's OWN anger and desire for revenge that wei wuxian is giving him a chance to fulfill?? it's always “remember that wen ning is powered by resentment and not a pure uwu sunshine boy” to argue that he's secretly a bitch or something, but when his spirit is taking revenge on the fucking. labor camp officers who beat him to death in a dedicated torture shack suddenly it's “wrong” and “bad” and “disrespectful” and “how could wei wuxian do this to him“? smh. wei wuxian crawled out of a mass grave as a vengeful ghost himself!! HE GETS IT! HE GETS IT!!! they're each other's worst enablers because there are things they understand about each other better than anyone else!

[fibrearts]

Starry Night Microsweater

2022 1.3" x 1.6" ~50,000 stitches, 76 stitches/inch 500+ hours in the making. Over 70 different colors of silk thread including thread combinations

[jabberwockypie]

That’s Althea Crome’s work. You’ve seen her work before if you’ve ever seen the movie Coraline because she did the teeny tiny star sweater and gloves for the stop motion puppets to wear.

She does, however, work even smaller.

[littlefluffbutt]

Holy crap that is so tiny!!!

[cpericardium]

happy pride

[daughter-of-sapph0]

happy pride

[lindleland]

[learningtogirl]

I've seen this clip many times, but never really appreciated the power of "what was her problem?" Just casually assuming that lesbians come in a wide variety of shapes and being inclusive. As a transbian who is probably still closer to Homer shaped than to my ideal, that's huge!

[soyalexnajera]

[bundibird]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We need a "This is absolutely NOT mature content" feedback button on posts. You can report a post as missing a community label. We should also be able to report posts as having a community label when they dont fucking need one.