yo man! I'm not sure if you're even still here but I have a quick question. Do you plan on continuing to update the Lisa tabletop doc? I have seen some stuff there (like bleeding that has no point requirement and the fact you don't mention where are our armor poins) that need some fixing. I'm asking because me and my friends are planning on running a oneshot with that system. I understand if you want nothing to do with the system anymore too. Peace there.
Thanks for writing. I'm happy you like the LISA Tabletop, but I lost interest in working on it years ago. Your best bet is to open the menu in the upper left of the google doc and hit "make a copy" to get your own version you can edit.
Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.
The Diagnosis
In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience.
Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content.
To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.
Our Guiding Principles
To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.
Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.
Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
Retain and grow our creator base.
Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.
Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.
Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.
Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up.
We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.
Actions & Next Steps
Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.
Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.
Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.
The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.
Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant.
Actions & Next Steps
Deliver great content each time the app is opened.
Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are.
Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds.
Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.
Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.
Actions & Next Steps
Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.
Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs.
Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.
Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread.
Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads.
Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed.
Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.
Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.
Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.
The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.
It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.
Actions & Next Steps
Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it.
Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.
Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.
Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.
Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.
Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.
Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.
Actions & Next Steps
Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.
Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.
Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages.
Test what the right daily push notification limit is.
Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.
Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.
The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.
Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.
Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users.
Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.
Conclusion
Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.
Dwarf Fortress Premium is available on Steam. My mood right now:
Hopefully the additional devs will continue to improve polish, performance, and bug fixing, while Toady One can keep doing what he does.
Yet even in this excitement, I shudder to imagine the sanity damage that the Kitfox Games' devs may have suffered from years of exposure to this game's code base.
After playing the Steam version for 43 hours, I don't recommend it at this time. There are stability issues, the UI improvements are marginal and in many ways are a downgrade from free community made tools, and there are significant changes from the previous version not documented in change logs or the wiki yet.
Looks like we're still years, at least, from Dwarf Fortress having the UI polish it's concept deserves, if that will ever happen, even with the millions in funding it's just received. If they invest that back into the UI, then maybe it will get better, but right now it's nowhere near what I would call a 30 $ interface.
Now, if you already play and financially support Dwarf Fortress and would see this merely as the next version, then I suppose none of that matters. (I'll probably still keep playing for a bit before going on hiatus for a few years, as I have the past times I've played DF.) But wait a bit if you're just getting into it.
This is about where I’m at. They’ve got the skeleton of a decent GUI but the labor management interface is worse than Dwarf Therapist, and the announcement system is worse than the one in the base game to the point that it’s basically non functional. I’ve missed migrant waves, strange moods, life and death combat... all because updates are squirreled away in a series of tabs on the edge of the screen. Instead of pushed to a centralized blotter, like the one that’s been in the ASCII version for 15 years.
I wonder if there’s any prospect of the developers bringing in the people who made the community tools to implement them in the Steam version. That’s what the Nuclear Throne devs did with Nuclear Throne Together, and the Isaac team with Spidermod.
lots of choice for the player - what vehicle to find, what types of powerups to get, whether to attack other players or play it safe,
unbalanced options - some vehicles are just… blatantly better for certain challenges than others? which adds a feeling of risk assessment / chance, since you don’t always know what the ending challenge will be
lots of “secrets” that can be discovered fairly quickly - walls that you can break through, powerups that are slightly out of the way, etc. - all of which are visually distinct to attract attention. allows players to feel mastery after several games.
good mixture of ~Flow~ and ~Fiero~ - a constant state of blissful productivity (tracking new vehicles, picking up powerups, exploring the city), punctuated by moments of exciting victory or triumph (finding a really good vehicle, knocking out an opponent, building a legendary machine, winning the challenge)
that fucking addicting achievement system- seeing those little blocks break apart on that grid and slowly unlocking little extra shit was SO pavlovian i swear. hearing that little “unlock” sound at the end of the match is the closest many gamers have come to experiencing true euphoria
it’s so fucking cute - kirby is adorable and everything is so bright and colorful and the music is so fun
LOCAL MULTIPLAYER IS MY FAVORITE THING - i wanna play games with my friends on the couch
uh yeah idk it’s honestly a groundbreaking achievement in modern game design tbh
City Trial was a crowd favorite at every Thanksgiving gathering of cousins because people of different skill levels (and ages) could play it and have fun. Nobody wanted to play Melee or Mario Kart because the one guy who was good at the game would wipe the floor with everyone else. City Trial had enough randomness that a skilled player was never sure to win any individual match, even though they would on average win more games than everyone else.
Sketches from a bar scene that ended up set in the world of Finder, which is a superb comic everyone should read.
The name on the bar is a Javecek death marking. Someone died sitting there and they commemorated it by stamping his name into the wood. The Javeceki are major assholes in all other respects, the death markings are a nice touch - they believe everyone who dies deserves to be remembered.
The lady in back is a construct - a ghola created by super science. Constructs are only supposed to have four fingers to distinguish them from human beings, you can see she’s one finger on each hand split at the knuckle by a backalley surgeon to make 5. Less for practical utility, more a literal middle finger to her creators.
A Medawar, drawn from memory. Clans in the world of Finder are families that practice eugenics on themselves, aspiring to physical and behavioral uniformity. Medawar men are soldiers and police, and look like total dorks - the kind of guy you’d expect to see in a fanny pack and cargo shorts, taking his kids to the beach. The facepaint is a form of behavior modifying drug Medawars use to enhance performance at specific tasks. The ink he’s wearing heightens introspection and deep thought.
Lady Medawars are doctors. It took me a long time to realize that the name of the clan is a lame pun - Med War, because they do medicine and fight wars.
Trio of Ascians. The curved dagger on the left indicates that the owner is either a man or a very butch woman.
Lady of clan Llaverac on the left. Dude on the right had his head bound as a kid - the latest fad in modern medicine is “New Medievalism”, reviving techniques like leeches and lobotomies. He’s making the hang-ten sign with his hand because that’s how he activates the communications implants in his head. Similar to the phone trait from Transmetropolitan. (If you aren’t familiar with Finder, imagine if Transmet was written by Gene Wolfe and Ursula K Leguin).
Bunch of non-clan people.
Bonus: A city dweller outside the dome. Arcology residents overestimate the dangers of the outside world, assuming it’s a radiation blasted wasteland and the sun will kill them if it touches their skin.
Haven’t posted here in a while. Have an image I made after a lovely game of treachery.online, a browser based remake of the totally kickass, recently re-released Avalon Hill Dune board game.
I’m legit surprised to see this in the wild. When I created it I only got a couple replies.
Because I like you, have the original (besides the Virgin’s wrist, which I forgot to color in the original), high quality version. Don’t save thumbnails, guys! Open the full image before you right click!
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