Maybe I Should Calm Down @paytiepup - Tumblr Blog

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.

Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.

Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.

Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:

Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.

The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top

You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.

Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up

You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff

You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.

holy shit it's a poll

cool!

ooh clicky clicky button!! i wanna press it!! lemme press it!

you can add up to 10 options btw

Voting ended onJun 19, 2023

Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog

Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.

If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.

You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"

Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.

Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.

We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.

Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.

Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.

Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it

You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.

Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.

Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit

You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.

Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.

Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.

If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal

Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension

In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.

You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!

Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs

Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

jessepinwheel

my very serious writing advice for people who are trying to write more morally complex characters is to stop caring about their morality and focus instead on their individual motivations

it’s hard to articulate exactly what I mean, but the essence of it is basically: when a character does a murder, not only do I not care about whether they’re justified in doing so, it’s straight-up irrelevant. a character’s moral standing from some nebulous universal standard has no bearing on the plot or their interactions with other characters and has no use in the story for me as a writer. what does matter is why the character thought they were justified and then if it comes up to other characters, what they think about it.

you can obviously think about your characters’ morality but it’s not your job as a writer to interpret your stories for your readers and tell them how to judge your characters. your readers can see the evidence for themselves and draw their own conclusions. your job is just to understand why a character is motivated to act in a certain way and have it make sense

focusing on character motivations is a much more versatile framework than trying to give them specific personality traits or moral alignments, and frankly more useful to understand why a character would do a certain thing instead of just what they do. that way when something fucked up happens and your character starts acting differently, there’s an actual logical reason for it that isn’t you forcing characters to do things because it’s what’s required to make the plot go

when you write your characters with the understanding that people are not static and they act differently under different circumstances, complexity in character and morality follows naturally.

pancake-breakfast

This isn’t just helpful for writing characters for fiction. It’s also helpful if you’re GM'ing a roleplaying game. Understanding this revolutionized my approach to running games, allowing me to both help my players build better, more nuanced characters, and to get them to go where I wanted them to for the story without having to drag them along or otherwise force their direction.

When you understand a character’s (or a person’s) motivations, you can better predict the trajectory their actions will take under a given set of circumstances. BUT! It only works if you can develop a sympathetic (if not empathetic) connection with the person/character. If you can’t, then you’re simply hearing without understanding, checking off a box that says you know their motivations when, really, they’re just written down somewhere so they can be read off later. This is something you’ll see with big businesses from time to time, where they try to gather the motivations of their employees and/or their customers but still manage to come off as tone-deaf.

And it’s also worth noting that even the most nuanced of characters lacks the nuance of an actual human being. There’s just too much variation in experience.

So, when building a character, start with motivation. Really learn to understand how that works its way through their interactions with other characters and the world around them. How does it affect how polite they are? How does it affect their thoughts on death? How does it influence the way they dress, or the kinds of items they buy (or refuse to buy), or their approach to being offered a new food?

All of this is so much more important than where they might fit on a 3x3 grid. This is what determines why they fit where they fit on that grid, as well as the ways they don’t really fit it at all.

misterknife

lungsys

actually yknow what fuck it heres a google drive of all the new dhmis episodes for my non british friends but PLEASE WATCH THE SHOW LEGALLY WHEN YOU GET THE CHANCE.

luluxa

The Kraken

REDBUBBLE

soyalexnajera

FUCK DISCOVERY HERE'S THE 4 SEASONS OF INFINITY TRAIN

chadchadington-deactivated20240

quizzical-is

himboskywalker

Okay but the humanity and kindness and empathy to Anakin’s line “I am not your failure,Obi-Wan.” There is so very little good in him,and we have seen it so deeply buried beneath an ocean of hatred and blinding pain. But I am so stuck on this line in particular,the entreaty and wavering earnestness to his voice as he bids Obi-Wan to not blame himself. This is the only real humanity we see in him until Luke,this small moment of Anakin so clearly shining through. It is not Vader’s pain in his voice,it is Anakin’s. We see the yellow recede from his eyes and the rounded, desperation to them as he says the words. It’s such a curious thing,that as much pain and misery he wanted to inflict on Obi-Wan,in this he did not want him to shoulder the blame. This line better than anything in Star Wars so perfectly illustrates that Anakin knows what he did,and he knows what choice he makes every single day. He killed the light within Anakin Skywalker,not Obi-Wan or anyone else. I killed Anakin Skywalker.

tsurumyaru

did u know u can send images in asks now

YOU SENT ME THE ENTIRE MORBIUS MOVIE IN GIF FORM?

hidingoutbackstage

Ngl I was not prepared for where this was going

femmeharlequin-deactivated20240

Me: oh okay she’s lipsynching her song

Me: Is that-

Me:

stygian-river

I LITERALLY had the experience of seeing Tony Hawk and going “a man” and then he picked up a skateboard and I was like “TONY HAWK???”

icemavslastbraincell

Tony Hawk is literally the irl equivalent of Perry the Platypus and Dr Doofenshmirtz. We see him out and about in public and we’re just like, “Oh, a man.” But then he whips out a skateboard and we all gasp and screech, “TONY THE SKATEBOARDING MAN?!”

nitashinori

Those tags are a big fat mood, hen

artistefish

(O_O).

veryhiddenreki

HERES ALL THE 4-TOWN MEMBERS DESCRIPTIONS

JESSE IS A DAD???!!!

maggieithink-06

Not to sound absolutely insane but like we should get an 8 year old to play Dick Grayson. Like teen robins don’t work adult robins don’t work, let’s get a tiny spunky little 8 year old and put him on screen with the depressed mess I lovingly call my batman