An update for users in Brazil and the United Kingdom
To continue our commitment to user safety and to comply with local laws, we will start using age groups to determine access to certain experiences.
People in Brazil or in the UK, who are 18 or older, will soon need to verify their age to change content label settings and view mature-labeled content. Until then, the settings will be locked to hide.
As a reminder, verification is handled by our age-assurance partner, k-ID. Tumblr won't have access to the information you submit, just the final age-verification result. Documents are deleted after confirmation, and facial scan data never leaves your device.
Questions? Contact Tumblr support or learn more about these changes here.
This is a complete breach of privacy, and needs to be talked about in the same way the reblog update was. We shouldn't need to hand our personal information to a company. Even if you dont live in the UK or Brazil, you should be talking about this. Because if they realize they can get away with this bullshit on a small scale, they'll implement it everywhere.
Be sure to submit your feedback about the new age verification
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
I do not expect to hear back from @staff but this is what I sent them:
Hello people of tumblr. Tumblr is like an online home to me, I've been here since I was a teenager (now [age]), and now that I have adult money, I even support the site by purchasing an annual subscription to premium.
That being said, my premium renews soon, and in the past year some rather malicious patterns have been pointed out to me that make me question if I will renew or not.
Firstly, there is the issue with Staff banning trans women left and right for no reason. Like, seriously what is up with this? Almost every single person on this site is gay or trans. You claim to be the "gayest place on the internet" but the rampant homophobia and transphobia persists. One of my mutuals got nuked by you guys recently for the "crime" of pointing out blogs that were deactivated for no reason. What reason did you have to nuke a whole blog that did nothing to violate the terms of the website? This is insane and needs to be examined. Someone, or maybe everyone on staff, needs to come right out with it and say they hate trans people and get it over with so that we're all finally clear on what the heck is happening there.
Secondly, I am still very skeptical of the "we will make reblogs better" post. People come to tumblr because it is set up the way that it is. We stay on tumblr because it is a chronological dash with no algorithm, and because everyone is able to view all reblogs. The correct people already get notifications for the things they post. I am anxious in a bad way to see what new "improvements" will be made, ones that may essentially make tumblr the same slop as the rest of the internet.
Thirdly, the new age verification. Tumblr has changed since the days of "go nuts, show nuts, whatever." Why does a website that doesn't even allow NSFW content need to have age verification? There is no NSFW side of tumblr. It was all scorched ages ago.
As we all know, the "mature content" label is unreliable in most cases. I saw post that was literally just a picture of the color yellow labeled mature. The "mature content" label does nothing to actually signify if content is mature or not. I ran a fan works event and the introductory post was labeled mature despite the event going on for the past ~8 years without issue.
Restricting access to blogs and posts via age verification to something that is still in worse-than-beta stage is completely unhinged and utterly absurd.
And more to the point, I will not be trusting you with my government-issue ID. No one in their right mind would trust tumblr.com with their government-issued ID. You might say "oh, we don't store the information" or "the verification is secure" but no one will believe that. If someone does give tumblr this information, I feel sorry for them because it is 100% going to end up in a data breach by the end of the week.
I might enjoy tumblr as a website, but I will never trust you with anything more than my email address.
If this website keeps doing more to piss everyone off instead of doing things the users have been asking for for the last 15+ years (like being able to send asks from side blogs) then people are just going to take their money and leave. Tumblr might be the most popular bastion of anti-algorithm blog posting, but it is not the ONLY site left like this. It is not the last place on the internet where people enjoy a setup like this. We stay because it is convenient to stay.
If tumblr continues to get more and more inconvenient, there will be no reason to stay. Tumblr may be special in our hearts, but at the end of the day, it's not so special that it cannot be replaced.
I think that if tumblr found some balance that included staying in their own lane, we could all continue to coexist, but every time users draw a line in the sand, Staff pretends it isn't there. It is getting old. Tumblr may be counting on the older user base to phase out and new users to not ask questions because they don't know any better, but that will take another 15 years to accomplish, and by then there will already be a better alternative to tumblr.
As you are acutely aware, there is only so much that we can take (changing the color blue, moving the reblog button, making us have to use xkit extensions to make the desktop version even slightly usable). This grace that the users give to you will not last forever. It is a finite resource.
I hope wisdom finds you well. Otherwise, you may find that when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
dear tumblr users, the age verification bullshit will not stay exclusive to those in brazil and the UK. this is a start. if tumblr gets away with this EVERYONE will have to do it. and even if they go through with it anyway no matter what DO NOT GIVE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION AND ESPECIALLY NOT YOUR ID OR PHOTOS OF YOURSELF!!!!!!!! tumblr roll back this stupid fucking update
I don’t know how many people are going to see this blog, but I need you people to know that you need to fight against tumblr’s age verification like we did the reblog update.
whether you’re in the uk or Brazil doesn’t matter, age verification affects everyone.
while i am happy people are pushing back against tumblr's new age verification stuff, i think this should be used as an opportunity to look into the surveillance bills that are passing worldwide. a lot of times when a website pulls this crap it doesn't extend very far for most people. (examples: roblox, discord, minecraft)
with that being said!! look into kosa, the appstore accountability act, and the kids act in america — bills that are actively moving through the legal system to require id / facial scanning for anyone to simply use social media or download an app!
look into the laws passing in the uk and brazil!
look into the bills passing in mexico and germany!
pay attention to vpn bans and research controversial legislation passing in your country or state!
Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”
iroh: once, i told zuko that he needs to work on his inter turmoil. he screamed at me that he had no such inner turmoil, and then proceeded to go to a cliff during a thunderstorm to scream at God to strike him with lightning
alfred: master bruce and i have that interaction at least three times per week.
hey bruce spent a lot of his bat-study abroad in the far east and has kind of a weeb weapon collection so proposal, what if Bruce appreciates Iroh’s tea
while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar
further fueling their dad-figures’ passive-aggressive rivalry?
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
I'm getting a lot of requests for the shrimp rant, so here it is.
Okay, so you know how I'm a marine biologist? I mention it sometimes on here. I'm a marine biologist, and right now what I'm studying is mangroves. This means that I am at least somewhat qualified to tell you that shrimp, both wild caught and farmed, is terrible for the environment and maybe the worst seafood there is environmentally.
Wild-caught shrimp are generally caught using trawling, which involves dragging a weighted net across the bottom of the seafloor. This practice is kind of notorious for just ruining the benthic (seafloor) habitat of whatever the nets go over, because weights on nets have a tendency to stir up sediment, cause turbidity (cloudy water) that's bad for benthic primary producers such as seagrass and coral, break stony corals, and rip up sessile (stationary) organisms such as soft corals.
However, farmed shrimp is also terrible for the environment! Historically, according to my marine ecology professor (the one who has such great quotes as 'we've been talking about death and destruction, so now let's talk about sex' and 'dying is always an option. this applies to humans as well as other organisms'), shrimp farms tend to set up shop in mangrove forest areas. They clear out swathes of mangroves, put in the shrimp, let the shrimp ruin the water quality, and then...just move on when the water is too gross to put more shrimp in. Shrimp farming operations often just start over again to clear and foul more areas of mangrove swamp. (Fish farming in general tends to kind of wreck water quality, that's not unique to shrimp).
So, at least according to Dr. 'this fish looks kind of dumb', shrimp is perhaps the least sustainable type of seafood there is.
This is why I don't eat shrimp. I'm not going to moralize at you if you still eat shrimp after reading this, though, because it was super easy for me since I kind of already didn't like shrimp anyway.
This is the like those “remember to be grateful you don’t have a sore throat right now” posts. It IS a beautiful day to not be in high school! Thank you!
quarterly reminder that if i reblog something ai-generated it is 110% and always an accident and for the love of god please tell me so i can delete it from my blog
Feels like a good time to remind certain people that this is coming from Judith Butler, who is not just a leading feminist philosopher, but also THE COFOUNDER OF QUEER THEORY
The literal cofounder of queer theory as an academic field says that abandoning trans people is fascist logic.
The voices in our community trying to exclude us may be loud, but they are not right, and they do not speak for the community as a whole or our history or anything at all.
Trans people belong here. We always have, and we always will.
Meandering thoughts and stumbling positivity @kai-herondale - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
