Tor @maybeimawhale - Tumblr Blog

Just wanted to make a note that if you’re a ffxiv blog that I followed from here, my ffxiv stuff is on @actualkomodo!

@maybeimawhale is my main and personal blog.

weird thing about writing is that like, even if no one decides to rep me and I don't get published and don't become a bestseller, if not one of those things happen, I've still got the book. I still have the story. It's a thing that you don't have to commit your entire life to but that you never have to give up if you don't want to.

it's just ingrained in my head that I will never stop writing, regardless of whether I'm empirically successful or not, cuz it's not about the success. It's always been about the stories.

#writing

dambiex

the problem with parents is that they are undiagnosed

#parenting

crab-justice

fullfrontalfish

Watching this forever goodbye

fullfrontalfish

WHOS SEXY IM SEXY WHOS SEXY IM SEXY

monochrome-merchant

Thats a ShrimplyBeautiful video! And that's a critically endangered cardinal sulawesi shrimp!

The accounts are run by a person named Timothy Utterback, he's a conservationist who posts videos of his shrimp "dancing" (this is how they eat!) to rave music and uses the revenue to fund their maintenance. There's typically a couple of shrimp rave livestreams a week over on tiktok, so check it out!

t.A.T.u. in a Japanese Snickers commercial (2013)

estrogenesis-eeveeangelion

when you gormless whinging fucks cry and cry on main about how you got gaybaited by the latest marvel slop i want you to remember that you are spitting in the face of history. THIS is gaybaiting. have some fucking respect

#tatu #gif #uh #interesting updates in the notes

puckobo

Blue heron art study that decided to ascend to illustration-level

#puckobo #art #heron

damnwyverngems

Monster Hunter 15th Anniversary official posters

damnwyverngems

Today is the 22nd Monster Hunter Anniversary. Official posters from the 15th anniversary.

#monster hunter #oh my gods??

meoware

I just think that choosing your own name should be a part of everyone's life, whether you're trans or not. You should be allowed to choose something you like that suits you rather than just accept something given to you before you were even aware you existed. And if you like your given name good for you, but you should be able to just... pick a new one, without question or pushback from others, including the people who named you.

#self #yeeee #me tho--thinking about a name for years #think I can hurry it up a little??

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.

#tumblr

sugiichi

Aegithalos caudatus [エナガ,Long-tailed Tit]

尾羽が引っかかってますよ～～😊

#sugiichi #bird #long tailed tit

petaltexturedskies

Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters

trauma dumpling

🥟

Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites. Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions. Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers. Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.” “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.

anarchopuppy

noai.duckduckgo.com blocks all AI content in search results automatically

adibkhorram

So I saw this news last week and finally switched over to duckduckdo and the difference is STAGGERING. It's like...search from 20 years ago. The results I want are at the TOP. I can't believe I waited so long to switch.

tjalexandernyc

agreed, switching to duckduckgo last year was the single best improvement in my life. just remember to change the search settings > manage ai and turn all the different toggles to Off (duck.ai), Never (search assist), and On (Hide ai images)

thisisevenharderthannamingablog

Just bringing this down from above quotes:

“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.

So when the news sites go out of business, the content creators give up, the only places you can buy things from are the ones big enough to pay Google's going rate for being included in results, and the entire internet has been turned into an AI-generated ouroboros of shit... then what?

#google #genAI #so this is important but #ddg is not great either #I see AI results everywhere even if I turn it off #in fact if I turn it off in image search I see MORE ai #maybe I'm doing something wrong #it is indeed better than google is now. but it's not good.