A little space, Just for me! @not-a-mongoose - Tumblr Blog

Pinned post ig...

Ask reblogs may not appear properly on my normal blog view, so if you can’t see the text properly i’d advise using dashboard view or highlighting the text if you don’t want to use dashboard view. (sorry i don’t know enough about html to fix it, but those are my current solutions)

I go by mirror pronouns! Your pronouns are now also mine!

for my regular posts, i tag with #tobs talk

i tag any art i draw with #my art

I don’t have a writing tag yet but when i post more writing i will try to update it!!!

Please ask if you want me to tag something!

I also don't respond to asks for mutual aid unless I know the user somewhat well. (I will try to reblog a donation post from your blog when i check through my asks though!)

My Art Blog: @tobsart

Bluesky: not-a-mongoose

My AO3

#tobs talk #my art

atlasofaffinities

Andy Goldsworthy

Early morning calm

knotweed stalks

pushed into lake bottom

made complete by their own reflections

DERWENT WATER, CUMBRIA

20 FEBRUARY & 8-9 MARCH | 988

ryebreadgf

my dad is very intensely involved a battle with his city’s public administration over a playground they have tried to forcibly remove like five times in the past 20 years and DID remove once in like 2005 but then had to rebuild because my dad was such a pain in their asses and came through with undeniable receipts of the zoning plan from the 60s/the historic/cultural value of the urban planning…. like there’s a woman in the city office who is his arch nemesis. he is literally the daredevil of urban planning

ryebreadgf

everyone in the tags needs to stop saying they want to fuck my dad.

bethanydelleman

I have been listening to this podcast called Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal & Society, and it's really reminding me of the main reason that you should listen to experts. It's not because of the reason media usually shows, them having encyclopedic knowledge of their subject (though many do have that) it's their ability to sort.

This podcast demonstrates that ability really well because sex scandals tend to be used as propaganda, so it's difficult to tell if they are true or not. The host will ask the historian guest, "Did he have sex with men?" and the guest will say something like, "Well four sources say so, but three were written after his death and the one from his lifetime was from a dude who REALLY hated him, so I'm going to conclude no."

That is what an expert can do, that we've perhaps forgotten about because we have so much information at our fingertips, an expert can tell which information is good & valid vs. bad & unreliable. An expert can sort much faster than a layman because they've been doing it for years.

It's the same for my field. Some things I am absolutely sure are wrong, like if someone says "We only use 10% of our brains." No, we use all of it and I can even tell you what every part does. But other claims, if I see a news article claiming something that sounds fishy, I can read the research article behind it and judge the validity of the source. I can sort. I know which parameters to sort on. That was the entire point of my education and it was pounded into my head.

Knowledge isn't enough. Researching isn't enough because if you don't know how to sort you'll just be led astray down dangerous rabbit holes. That is why experts are so important.

geopsych

street garden painted blue

headspace-hotel

That's quite a nice variety of species. Looks like Persicaria virginica, Plantago major, Polygonum aviculare, a couple grasses, and some other stuff I'm not 100% clear on.

helloitsbees

check out the mourning doves’ new single “hooOOOO hoo hoo hoo” if you get the chance. sound of the summer.

helloitsbees

….?

???????????

helloitsbees

oh wait this is EXTRAORDINARILY delightful. this isn’t a case of Blorbo From My Shows this is Henrietta Pickles From My Porch

voidindite

Hey all friendly reminder because I've been seeing it both on tumblr and other places

let's not use psychotic, insane, or narcissistic as insults! I understand being upset with A&M, I am too! But those are actual conditions. the words you're probably looking for are abusive, manipulative, egotistical-

but those? Those are conditions people in the fandom actually have. conditions your friends and mutuals may have. strangers, who are just as hurt and upset about this situation as the rest of us

don't stoop to their level

kitsuneisi

Take my revolution 💗💜

kushblazer666

prudencepaccard

we unironically need more of this though

parkchanwoohoo

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.

@ocdheritageposts

OCD Heritage Post

bad news, vermont is missing

hellenhighwater

if only there was some kind of map....that could tell us where vermont is....

psshaw

lilifred

everyone's talking about the ibs/autism haha funny comparison thing while I'm still stuck on the concept that hamsters exist in the wild. like naturally

tf do you mean they're a wild creature. you find those ankle-biters at the pet store

psshaw

Not a biologist, but the evolution of mammals is way more granular than you might expect. Humans are the sole surviving species of the genus Homo, which was a real party before the other ones went extinct. You're in for a fun time.

Domestic cats are believed to be domesticated not from tigers, but from the African wildcat:

Which evolved to be small just because it's sometimes more useful to be small.

And no, hamsters are not off-brand rats. They're part of the rodent order, which includes beavers, moles, capybaras, guinea pigs (yes, also wild) and lots of other fun things: