beeswax @jupitersbees - Tumblr Blog

Posts

wolfythewitch

Art school is so funny

wolfythewitch

Letsgooo

cosmonautroger

papersnowflake42

its "It's Thursday the 23rd and I'm so bored" Thursday the 23rd

000l

shrewreadings

like to charge, reblog to cast.

andmaybegayer

it still makes me go insane that somehow no social media site bothers to implement interleaved text and images. Fediverse cannot support it broadly, Bluesky can't handle it, Facebook can't do it, Twitter can't do it, fucking, LinkedIn doesn't do this, somehow only Tumblr has this, and it barely even counts as a popular social media site.

palant1r

well you see we're the new pdf

anarchistmemedistro

nonetoon

robertreich

Live Nation/Ticketmaster is a monopoly, which is why it can get away with awful service, charging exorbitant prices, and tacking on fees as high as 75% of the ticket. Biden sued to break it up. However, after intense lobbying from MAGA world lawyers, Trump's regime tried to cut a sweetheart deal. But 34 of the 40 states that had joined the federal lawsuit balked at the terms and continued the trial on their own. Today they were victorious. This is a big deal, and a reminder that we still have power at the state and local level.

abyssaldyke

It's spring now which means the kids in my city have started drawing hopscotches on the sidewalk and as a rule I do every hopscotch I see because 1. Use it or lose it (ability to scotch) and 2. If a child got down on the hardscrabble streets of Boston Massachusetts to draw a scotch the least I can do is use it, but in doing the hopscotches, I've learned that about 50% of them are the typical 8-10 step scotch and the other 50% are. Somewhat avant-garde. And of course I'm not vetting the entire scotch before I start it so sometimes it's like haha 8 steps woo! Childlike whimsy! And sometimes they're 20 steps or 30 or they've got a section with three squares instead of two where you have to do a little Charleston to step on all three, or, memorably, FORTY one foot squares. A full BLOCK of jumping on one foot but I'm no quitter so once I've started Jigsaw Junior's fuckin hopscotch gauntlet I'm there til the end just a daily pot smoker in her thirties jumping kasa-obake style through an affluent suburb while some little proto-kennedy watches from his bedroom window rubbing his sadistic little third grade hands together and cackling. It's amazing. I love spring.

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

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.

My favorite thing about traveling to countries where I don't speak the language is that there is actually a universal language spoken. That language is football ⚽️

#drink a beer and watch barcelona v athletic madrid lol

chongoblog

ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

FETCH ME NEIL

chongoblog

HAPPY BIG TWENTY NEIL

thiefking

actually you know what that's exactly it i would rather someone add 5 parantheticals after every sentence than use tone indicators it's 1. accomplishing SO much more in terms of clarity 2. extremely funny to look at depending on how they're used

thiefking

observe:

"is this real? /gen" — i thought /gen meant "general" for ages. i would not be able to understand this on first sight a few years ago and is thus ineffective

"is this real? (genuine question)" — i fully understand this without issue

"is this real? (genuine question) (can't tell) (very realistic) (looks real) (scary) (photoshop?)" — is not only incredibly clear it's also very funny to read all of these thoughts stapled together while also in their own parentheses. it's also the most useful because now i can actually address all parts of what they are asking me with as much specificity as BOTH of us need

lady-sanguis

parentheses my beloved (they are for bonus thoughts) (and questions) ( and sidetracks) (like a 2nd conversation on top of the first)

homunculus-argument

"Don't speak ill of the dead" my ass. If you didn't want people talking shit about you when you're no longer there to defend yourself, you should've been a better person.

bisquid

I always took it to mean, like, don't bitch about Mrs. Obnoxious in front of her grieving children, not 'you can't say anything bad about a dead person ever' but let me tell you some people really do seem to take the latter approach and it's EXHAUSTING. "don't speak ill of the dead" are Ronald Reagan's descendants in this room right now?

acidtheater

"Halloween adults are just as bad as disney adults" "Furries are worse than disney adults"

I gotta be real, I thought we were critical of disney adults for aggressive loyalty to a really gross mega-corporation, or refusal to engage with media that isn't for kids, not because people... have hobbies?

raccoonmilf

Kind of fucked thinking about the fact that there is one single American legally authorized to research the critically endangered pygmy raccoon in Mexico and it is, in fact, the same person who did Dashcon.

raccoonmilf

This person is also this person

And is currently the only person from the United States legally permitted to research the critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) in Cozumel, Mexico.

For reference, this is me, BTW! I was 15 when I started Dashcon and 17 when it actually happens, and now study tourism’s impact on the critically endangered pygmy raccoon. I’ve been researching them before now, but due to Mexico’s laws, I’ve only been allowed to do data collection from abroad (so think surveys to tourists and video analysis on social media.) But now I’m authorized for in situ research!! Yippee! I even got a grant through my university as well to fund the whole project 🥺

markscherz

This is the reason this hellsite is truly a homesite. We grow here. You can go back and see how it happened. I was a Bachelor’s student when I started my tumblr. Now I’m an Associate Professor and Curator, with my own lab and Denmark’s national collection of 70,000ish reptile and amphibian specimens in my care.