shout out to the people who are still paying me here on tumblr
occasionally subtle
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

blake kathryn
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
One Nice Bug Per Day
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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i don't do bad sauce passes

Kaledo Art

ellievsbear
Show & Tell
d e v o n
will byers stan first human second

Love Begins
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Kiana Khansmith
h
Jules of Nature

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@fukuotest
shout out to the people who are still paying me here on tumblr
I ❤ gyaru girls!! ヾ(≧ ▽ ≦)ゝ
A couple job interview hacks from someone who has to give a job interview every single goddamn day: (disclaimer: this goes for my process and my company’s process, other companies and industries might be different)
1. There are a few things I check and a few questions I ask literally just to figure out if you can play the game and get along with others in a professional setting. Part of the job I interview for is talking to people, and we work in teams. So if you can’t “play the game” a tiny bit, it’s not going to work. Playing the game includes:
- Why do you want to work here? (just prove that you googled the company, tell me like 1 thing about us, I just want to know that you did SOME kind of preparation for this interview)
- Are you wearing professional clothing? I don’t need a suit just don’t show up in a ratty t-shirt and sweatpants.
- Are you able to speak respectfully and without dropping f-bombs all the time? Not because I’m offended but because I don’t want to be reported to HR if you wind up on my team.
- Can you follow simple directions in an interview?
2. Stop telling me protected information. I don’t want to know about what drugs or medications you’re on, I don’t want to know about you being sick, I don’t want to know if you’re planning to have children soon, I don’t want to know anything about your personal life other than “can you do the job?”
3. When we ask, “What questions do you have for me?” here are my favorites I’ve heard: - What does the day-to-day look like for a member of your team?
- If one of your team members was not performing up to his usual standard, what steps would you take to correct that?
- What can I start doing now to accelerate my learning process in this job?
- What are some reservations you have about me as a candidate? (be ready for this emotionally….it will REALLY help you in the future, and I’ve had people save themselves from a No after this, but can be hard to hear)
- In your opinion, what skills and qualities does the ideal candidate for this job possess?
- What advice would you give to a new hire in this position/someone who wanted to break into this industry, as someone who has worked here for a while?
Those are just my tips off-the-cuff. I work in sales in marketing/SAAS, so these can be very different depending on the industry, but I wish the people I interview could read this before they show up.
It's curious to read liberal Zionist arguments that a single, binational state would be equivalent to a pogrom, and what we need is a "two-state solution." A two-state solution adhering to the 1967 borders would require the expulsion of half a million Israeli settlers from the West Bank, which the same liberal Zionists would also decry as a pogrom if it were actually a concrete possibility. The appeal of the two-state solution is that it will not happen—it has virtually no political constituency in Israel itself outside of a couple marginal Arab parties. A supermajority in the Knesset and in Israeli civil society is in support of annexing all or part of the West Bank, with a substantial minority holding ambitions far beyond this.
I can see two reasons this argument persists. The more charitable reading is a kind of liberal pragmatist fantasy: a "two-state solution," hypothetically, would require no fundamental change to the Israeli state. It could continue to exist as it does with a few modest concessions. This ignores the fact that the Israeli state as it exists is thoroughly committed to expansion. The only debate within Israeli society is how much to expand—will we simply absorb "Area C" of the West Bank? All of the West Bank? The Golan Heights? Sinai? But the liberal Zionist perhaps earnestly wants to believe that Israel as it is can somehow be made content to stay within the Green Line. (This requires either a superhuman optimism, or simple ignorance.)
Alternatively, the liberal Zionist knows that the Amos Oz "fair divorce" fantasy is long dead, and is doing what colonial liberals have always done: providing humanitarian cover for the genocidal project of colonization. "No, we promise, a humane solution is possible within the existing institutions!" If the liberal Zionist in question is writing for a major bourgeois outlet, cynical propaganda is the safe assumption. Anyone who can read a map immediately sees the issue with the proposal of "a Palestinian state, alongside Israel:" where are you going to put it?
Ok, this is an actual question because it really hurts my head to try to think about all the factors involved and actually compare outcomes.
Assuming:
- either a two state solution or a single pluricultural state is not going to be accepted by the Israeli society and will need to be forced on them (similarly to what happened with South Africa)
- banishing 8 million Jews from Palestine is out of the question.
Wouldn't a two state solution (going back to the green line border), enforced by the UN (I'm talking about blue helmets controlling the border) be a potentially more stable solution than a single, integrated state? Why not?
Jews, Muslims, and Christians all lived in relative harmony in Palestine until the Zionists fled to Palestine and effectively did to the Palestinians (of all religions, by the way) what Nazis had done to them: genocide and banishment for existing.
I’m not really sure at what point the whole “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” thing stopped being a common mantra of people advocating the two-state solution, but what Zionists did to Palestinians always was and always will be genocide. Couple that with the permanent open-air imprisonment and worse than prisoner-of-war conditions (when they aren’t even at war, often, too), Zionists are a terrorist organization. This isn’t even new information: they’re the extreme right-wing of Judaism.
So no, taking into consideration the removal of all citizens of Israel really shouldn’t weigh that heavily on anyone’s conscience IF THE REMOVAL OF PALESTINIANS FROM WHERE ISRAEL IS CURRENTLY ALSO ISN’T MORE SIGNIFICANT. Anyone that can claim removing all of the Israeli citizens from Palestine is out of the question need to read up on the history of Israel. Why? Because that’s EXACTLY what Zionists did to MAKE Israel in the first place. And they’re doing it even more now under the pretense of war and rooting out Hamas, but the goal has always been the fully eradication of Palestinians. Israel should never have been there, and the removal of Palestinians should have been out of the question.
The land was colonized and the colonizers should have no claim to it. End. Period. Discussion over.
This doesn’t necessarily mean all the Israeli people would have to leave, however.
Once the appropriate individuals were tried and convicted for war crimes, genocide, etc., and all the reparations were paid/completed as fully as possible, Palestine could elect to allow former Israel citizens to remain. Who can say? (This is assuming Hamas is not the group in charge of the new Palestine, which is certainly possible since the people of Gaza don’t like Hamas at all.)
One thing is clear: Palestine needs to be made whole. With its people.
Pontificating about them living in harmony in Palestine again isn’t only a possible outcome, history shows it could be normal again. Root out the extremism and you might actually be able to manage it.
But the decision lies with the people of Palestine. It is their land, AND they’ve been the victims.
Hello everyone!
We have always loved sharing the work of talented theme creators with you, and we have mostly focused on promoting those that are available for free use.
However, we have recently been considering expanding our focus to include the promotion of paid themes as well! So before making this change, we want to get your feedback and see if this is something that you would be interested in seeing on our blog.
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Yes, I don't mind at all 🤝
No, please keep promoting free themes only 🗣️🫵
If you have an opinion on this, please reply to this post as well. Your input is important to us, and we appreciate your participation in this decision! 🙏
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this is a generational ink blot test
Red beans and rice babey!!!
Lack of smoked ham hocks around here required me to use super smoky slab bacon.
it's still really funny that Matt Tumblr engaged in a power struggle with his own userbase for like three years during which time he irrevocably fucked up the site permanently while literally thousands of people told him a fairly coherent, fairly consistent list of ways to either avoid doing so or to make the site better, until he finally got so mad he flounced back to his own blog and now the site is officially doomed within the next few years and we're all just waiting for the next buyout/shutdown while sort of agreeing not to discuss it anymore because it's all pointless. I think about it a lot
he also made a "why is everyone so mean to me" post about it (and then deleted it??) which I have never seen a CEO of a major website do and which is frankly just goofy behavior from the managerial class. like have some dignity
watching "oh tumblr's always dying lol" posts circulate like this time is no different is pretty sad when you understand what cutting staff to ~70 people to run a site with millions of daily active users in... 8 days will do? it's a big deal this time? also buying in on the promises that it will be fine from the guy pushing the recent changes that have pissed people off
meanwhile the david karp kimono photo has been circulating forever and that guy never took it down or told people to quit being mean
I have hacked together a system for automatically emailing a daily digest of my Tumblr posts to two dozen friends. I use the Tumblr RSS feed, and pipe that through the Mailchimp free tier. It works, but it's kind of ugly. I would love it if Tumblr offered its own, native capability to let people subscribe to daily email digests of posts to an individual Tumblr, perhaps with the resulting output looking like the default Tumblr theme or the dashboard. Thanks! P.S. I have been quite enjoying Tumblr for the past year or so. I've had a blog here since about 2011, and always liked Tumblr, but most of that time I just used automated tools to update it in sync with some other service that I considered my primary blog (mainly the late lamented Google+). Lately, however, as Tumblr settled in to Automattic, the service is looking great!
Answer: Hey there, @atomicrobotlive!
We love this idea. We would certainly consider it a paid feature, or a perk of such a paid feature, sometime in the future. It’s worth adding it is not on our immediate roadmap right now, but things can change, so keep an eye on @changes and consider this idea stuck to our drawing board. This is where we want to use that screengrab of Charlie in It’s Always Sunny… you know the one.
In the meantime, thanks for your feedback and keep the questions coming.
Best,
—Bohdan and Cyle (Tumblr Engineering)
p.s.—Thank you for your thank you! It has been such a joy to see some really lovely feedback from you folk recently, and we’re made up to hear good things from you. We hope you continue to enjoy it...
Translation of Internalspeak to Externalspeak
A P2 post I made internally a month ago on October 5th about what's next for Tumblr leaked as a screenshot. This is super rare, so I'll try to translate what was said for y'all here. It was also incomplete, so here's the full thing.
We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have its revenue and usage above its previous peaks. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (Hat tip.) It is better to have tried to summit the peak and failed than never to have tried at all. We have learned a ton on the journey, and honed skills we can use to approach other summits.
This is me saying we've worked on Tumblr for four years with ~200 people full-time, and spent well north of $100M above revenue trying to turn the site around, but it hasn't yet. That sucks, but I also want to recognized the effort of everyone who tried and gave their best.
As we talked about in the past, if it doesn’t work we’ll have a backup plan and set up the business so we don’t need to let anyone go, we’ll just need to reflect and decide where else we should concentrate our energy together. This plan is happening now: the majority of the 139 people in Bumblr will switch to other divisions. No plans for any switches in Happiness or T&S.
Bumblr is the internal team name for the product side of Tumblr, and the link was to our internal company directory which showed the ~140 people currently in that team. There are also other teams that work on Tumblr that aren't affected or changing, so this tries to say specifically who's impacted. "Happiness" is our term for customer support, and "T&S" means trust and safety, which is the team that works on fighting bots, spam, dealing with illegal stuff, etc. While Tumblr was burning cash, we managed the rest of the products and company to support and subsidize it because we thought that would turn it around.
We assume the first choice for everyone working on Tumblr is to continue working on Tumblr, but we’re going to give everyone an opportunity to have a “top three” ranked list of what other things around Automattic they would be interested in working on. To infuse some Tumblr mojo.
As we've been telling the Tumblr team for over a year, if we can't get revenue up we need to switch some portion of them to work on other things within Automattic that do generate revenue and can support their salaries. We offered a survey where people could rank stack choose what they would be interested in working on instead of Tumblr. The team has actually been performing really well in their work, which is why we aren't letting people go, they just haven't been getting results, which usually means we're working on the wrong things and we should try working on different things. We've also learned a ton working on Tumblr that I think will make our other products better.
The leak was actually incomplete, here's the rest of the post:
This survey will be posted early next week, alongside some 2-minute videos from WP.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Day One, Pocket Casts, WP VIP, .Org, Applied AI, Texts, self-serve advertising (Blaze), Newspack, Pressable, and Gravatar talking about why you should consider picking them as one of your choices. In the meantime, feel free to bounce around the products linked on Automattic.com to get a feel for them as a consumer and see what tickles your fancy. We’ll crunch through those preferences with what the opportunities for growth are in the various products and businesses, come back with a plan, get feedback on that, and then post the final plan. The switchovers will happen on December 31, so we start 2024 completely fresh. We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s performance in 2024.
What followed were a bunch of comments that actually caused us to update the survey, other teams around Automattic posted videos pitching Tumblr folks to work on them, we did the survey, and then posted a first draft of where people could go actually just this week. (Which is maybe why the leak happened, perhaps someone didn't like the proposed changes first draft.) As a reminder, there still are no people switching, it's just planning for what will happen on December 31st, 2023.
As I mentioned this was posted on October 5th, a few weeks before we announced the acquisition of Texts on the 24th, which actually didn't leak. I do appreciate whoever shared the screenshot trimmed it down to not prematurely break the Texts news.
So now you have the full post I made, it also got 45 comments which I'm not going to share out of respect to the privacy of colleagues, but you can imagine it generated a vigorous debate internally and a lot of discussion about how to make sure we're setting up Tumblr for success in this next chapter, a lot of tech discussion about maintenance, libraries, open source, and how small teams can move faster than big teams, if they have the right environment. I'll take further questions in the Asks.
“Our previous approach wasn’t working.”
in case you missed it, here's the news. I frankly do not see how cutting Tumblr's anemic staff in half will improve things. all the bullshit talk about "reorganizing" and "focusing" from the top is just that: bullshit. business speak. this site's burning too much money and they had to cut costs
i have little faith it will make it through next year. it's just too complex and too large of a scale to keep up with less than 70 people (and not all of those people are engineers)
i guess i should not expect people outside of the tech sphere to see through the statements made in the article. i'm seeing a handful of posts saying "oh so this is good, they're going to focus on making tumblr better without adding anything new"
but the issue is, tumblr's huge. it's a massive pile of complex code built over decades and serves a number of users at a scale that's massive compared to other companies who maintain a larger employee count without issue. it bleeds money because advertisers dont want to be here, not because too many people are working on it
when you "downscale" and "focus" engineering teams, what you do is shed institutional knowledge of how complex systems work and shove the workload of many engineers onto few. before tumblr can get to the point where they "focus" on making it better they have to first grapple with the machine as it is before taking it apart, without breaking anything
that task must also be accomplished while making sure the day to day operations and bugfixes continue. bugs, as they're reported and filed, are triaged to determine their criticality and priority to fix. the less people you have to handle bugs, the lower priority bugs become unless they're absolutely huge problems. furthermore, the less people you have on hand to triage bugs, the less people you have who understand what bugs are more important to fix for tumblr users who will be bothered by the bugs
last, but not least, the less people working on tumblr, the more it amplifies individuals with bad ideas who do not understand the userbase. and probably the biggest offender in this remaining team is Mr. Mullenweg, who has been the driving force behind all the changes lately that have been pissing users off. automattic is very much his company (it is named AutoMATTic for a reason), and he takes a very active role in deciding what to change on tumblr.
there's a long trail of former automattic employees that will warn you of the weird, cult-like atmosphere in the company (tw: deadnaming), and to stay away for the sake of your sanity
if there's one thing i learned in the tech sphere, it's don't believe what any C-level is saying. never take their word as gospel, unless you're willing to be a lackey instead of helping your coworkers. when they talk to the press, they will try to paint the picture as rosy as they can. it's just marketing.
I bought this last night. This is a total game changer. Internet fame, here I come.
world heritage post
Holy shit what. This is like if someone in ancient sumeria had a camera
Delicate spring florals
Hey friends 🫂
Be nice with staff today, folks
Ok I wasn't planning to share anything about this because I was waiting for any official comms, but I'm seeing people from outside of Automattic sharing this screenshot in a WordPress-related public discord server, so I guess the cat is out of the bag:
Image screenshot-20231006-005401-2-1 hosted in ImgBB
TLDR: most of the current staff is being moved to other automattic divisions and Tumblr will be run by an skeleton crew
For folks not incredibly tech/business savvy; this basically means the website will still exist, it will still be functional for the most part. However you may find that fun updates won't be as frequent, or full on stop occuring. Reports for harassment or bugs might be slow to reply, or you may receive no reply at all (from a human, automatic messages are still a thing) depending on the situation.
The wording states that the majority of the 139 staff in Bumblr will be moved to other projects. That means at max 69 people will stay while at least 70 will leave the project. That's at bare minimum cutting the team in half. Have no idea if Happiness and T&S are also tumblr-centered crews, so them not being affected could be a blessing or at worst have no affect on the matter.
Google really doesn't offer any good indication whether Bumblr is a goofy name for tumblr or an actual team that manages something specific to the website. Any tumblr staff member is welcome to clarify any of that if they want to, and can (nondisclosure agreements are a thing).
If Bumblr is a specific subset of the staff then they might be in charge of content updates, like check marks, events, things like that. In which case the usability and moderation will likely see little to no changes. Which is good! Trust us; you'd rather want a functional website with no new content than a non-functional one desperate to pump out updates.
Does it suck people are technically being fired from such a great (fingers crossed it's great at least) job? Oh definitely, but this isn't THE end of tumblr.
There will be change and we may not like it.
You should definitely save anything important just incase; less people means sometimes accidents will happen more frequently. Share your contact info with anyone you want to keep in contact with.
Prepare for the worst but hope for the best.
Some clarity:
Happiness -> Support
T&S -> Trust & Safety
Bumblr -> Product development, editorial, marketing etc.
The "reduction" don't affect Happiness or T&S because they weren't "Tumblr" to begin with, they are a different divisions within automattic that are cross-product (cover all the products from the company). So if automattic has (I have no idea of the real numbers numbers) 100 people working on T&S, maybe half of those were working on tumblr until now. But if tomorrow they decide to left only 10 of them working of tumblr, they don't need to move the other 40 anywhere: they are still in the same team, just looking at a different JIRA board every morning. Same with Hapiness. So the fact that there are no changes in those divisions doesn't have to mean there won't be less people on them working on tumblr.
Technically, people are not being fired over this (though some of them had been, today), they will just be moved to other projects (WordPress, WooCom, Day One, etc).
But yeah, your post is very good.
You can export your Tumblr (it becomes a static site, includes all the media) and import it into WordPress - either the hosted .com version or self-hosted on your own domain.
If you have an old/media-heavy blog, exports will be large and take a long time (and take multiple tries if it fails) - my own was 85GB zipped.
If anyone wants to stay in touch on other platforms DM me.
About this theme
Getting started
Once you purchase and install the theme, you can customize the colors and layout!
Since this theme offers a relatively wide range of theme options to explore, I personally believe it would be helpful to provide you with a list of customization guides below.
How to add a custom link to this theme?
How do I change the blog layout?
How do I enable the latest post under the popup?
How to add the featured tags on the popup?
How to customize the colors
Please play around with the settings below for the live preview:
How to add a custom link to this theme?
You can add as many custom links as you want through Tumblr pages (click here for more information), and the process is very simple, here’s how:
Go to Customize page
Scroll down until you find ‘+Add a page’
Enable ‘Show a link to this page’
Select “Link” from the dropdown menu (for custom links) and if you want to make a custom page (for example, an ‘about’ page), just don’t change anything from the dropdown menu and leave the ‘Standard layout’
Add the URL, page title, and page body text as you wish and save
How to change the blog layout?
It’s very simple. Under the “Blog Layout” option, change the dropdown to select the layout you prefer. The options are:
Normal: This displays a single-column layout
Masonry: This presents a grid layout to showcase your posts on 2 or 3 columns.
Tabs: This layout is a unique feature of this theme. It displays tabs for each existing post on the left side and the activated posts on the right side. There is also a toggle button layout to minimize the post preview.
What is the purpose of the Blog Container dropdown theme option?
There is a distinction between having the Blog Container enabled/on and disabled/off.
This setting essentially contains the blog posts within a container, adding spacing around it. To better understand, refer to the comparison below.
Left: Contained — Right: Not Contained
How do I enable the latest post under the popup?
On the customize page, enable it by scrolling to the theme options until you find the Blog Latest Post dropdown. Change it from Hide to Show.
Once done, tag your favorite posts as #text, and they will automatically appear in the section.
It might take a moment for the posts to show up. If you don’t see any, try hard refreshing and clearing your browser cache.
You’re all set!
How to add the featured tags on the popup?
Navigate to your blog's settings (https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog)
Scroll to the Featured Tags section
Click the pencil icon and add a tag, then click the Add button.
Once you're done, Tumblr automatically generates a list of tags on the popup!
How do I install this theme?
The theme has been uploaded on Tumblr theme garden which means you don’t have to manually copy-and-paste the code on customization panel, just go to this link and click ‘Install’ button and your blog automatically will be changed.
You said that this theme is mobile-friendly, but it shows the default theme provided by Tumblr! How do I disable it?
Easy! Just go customize, scroll down until you find ‘Advanced options’ → disable ‘Use default mobile theme’ → Save
Please remember that this theme is free to use, you are not allowed to remove the credit and claim this theme as your own! I have sacrificed my time to make this theme for free so in return just don’t touch the credit, okay? Enjoy!