Did you know? Tumblr DOES have a post length limit. Strangely, though, it's based on how many blocks of text you have. Supposedly this implies that you can have any length post so long as it's one block of text? Very strange, will have to investigate further.
Two limits! You can have a maximum of 4,096,000 characters in 1 [one] tumblr post. I would work out how many combinations this is, but 26^6,000 is already considered to be "Infinity" by most calculators, and a program I wrote threw an error code.
26^95,000 is already over 134,000 characters long - which would take 33 different text blocks to convey via tumblr. Whenever somebody says we're running out of posts, don't forget that tumblr is needlessly designed for MASSIVE amounts of information [no matter how detrimental it may be for mobile phones].
There are SOME works of fanfiction which are lengthy enough that you couldn't fit the whole thing into one tumblr post, but this is enough to fit Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy in it about 14 times over.
The Lord of the Rings is generally my go-to measuring stick for "long-ass pieces of text", so I must additionally point out that, if written out optimally, about 2 full Lord of the Ringses would fit into one Tumblr post, apparently.
Though I'm not certain if that character count includes spaces, unfortunately, as I got that figure by googling "how many letters are in lord of the rings" and came upon a TikTok that counted the number of letter characters in LotR in order to figure out how many Spaghettios cans would be needed to re-write the entire thing, if one were to cut and paste each individual letter from the cans blackmail-letter style.
For those curious, the numbers are 2,261,081 letters in LotR, which calculates out to 8,795 cans of Spaghettios needed, which would cost about $12,225.
What a way to start my day. The internet truly is a beautiful place.
Hey! Guy who programmed most of the core pieces of the editor here!
So, those are the theoretical limits, yeah. But in practice, the editor is not even close to be optimized to handle these kinds of huge posts: there is a point, far far away from the size of the lord of the rings, that your browser would just crash.
So if you are planning to post long fanfiction, or anything, you better work on something that's optimized for long form (locally, or some alternative to Google docs) and then post in chunks.
So no, Tumblr is not designed to support these massive posts. It's theoretically possible, but that never was a real scenario we were trying to support
I'm honestly very curious of what it would happen if someone tries something like using the API to post the entire Lord Of The Rings. I would assume the request would timeout, but it would be a cool test to run. Anyway, if it works, anyone trying to reblog that post would just insta-kill their browser :D
oh yeah, almost a million characters, 365 text blocks, and the editor is handling it pretty well
Honestly, it works way better than I expected! I guess being plain text and not having to render any fancy formatting is enough for a modern browser to handle it well. Reblogging it took a few more seconds than usual, but went through too. Good job tumblr!
Summary: Morpheus spends a summer afternoon in the park feeding the birds, looking entirely too dramatic for the weather. What begins as teasing ends up more dreamlike between the two of you.
Warnings/Tags: Morpheus x GN!Reader, fluffs and whatnots, holding hands for the first time
Notes: ~1.7k words, I literally cannot be bothered to study for the finals worth 50% of my grade. Not edited past spellcheck.
Main Masterlist || One Shot Masterlist
“Don’t you get hot wearing black all the time?”
Morpheus looks up from where he sat on the grass, a stale loaf of bread in his hands and a swarm of pigeons and robins swirling his still body.
A pigeon pecks at his shoe lace as he ponders an answer. He’d been sitting at the park for a good few hours now, his still and calm nature making the birds fearless of him. Or perhaps it was the 3-day-old bread loaf he took with him from The Dreaming. A robin perches on the toe of his black boots, chirping a series of notes as it waits for a few more crumbs.
He, ancient and terrible though beautiful as midnight, regarded the question and you with the expression of a king being interrupted at court.
“I am not uncomfortable,” he finally mutters, the slightest suspicious eyebrow twitching upwards.
“That’s not what I asked.”
His gaze leaves you as he returns to feeding the birds. A breeze moves through the park, soft and bright, carrying the sound of childhood laughter with it. Grass was freshly cut, and the nearby lake glimmered like the gems of a hoard guarded by a fearsome dragon, all while the air felt slightly heavy from the melted sugar of the nearby food vendors.
None of it did anything to Morpheus, who sat there in his long, black coat despite the day being aggressively sunny; it almost made him light up like a beacon.
“You asked whether I become hot,” he restates, as if repeating the question slower would make you realize how absurd it is. “I do not.”
“Sounds like a fake answer.” You narrow your eyes at the back of his head.
“It is not.”
“You’re telling me you don’t feel temperature?”
“I feel many things. I am the entire subconscious of the human mind, king of dreams, and can feel the emotio–”
“But temperature?” You cut him off.
“Not as you do,” he finally answers after a dramatic pause.
You sit down beside him on the grass, close enough that your shoulder almost brushes his. The birds all but scatter at the movement, but then second-guessed their judgment before fluttering back. The fat pigeon that was pecking at his shoe laces gives you a look before returning to eating a fresh wave of crumbs.
“I just didn’t expect you to show up in the park, in the middle of summer, dressed like you’re ready to star in a teenager’s emo garage band.”
His brows draw together, and his lips pucker with displeasure. “A what?”
“You heard me.”
“I am Dream of the Endless.”
“Soooo edgy,” you teased.
Morpheus looks away first, crushing the loaf up to its last crumbs, and you count it as a victory.
The birds once again descend in a flurry of wings and tiny, bickering chirps. For someone who could summon nightmares and could walk through minds like doorways, he fed birds with a startling sense of tenderness. His fingers moved carefully, making sure some of the larger pieces were broken into small enough pieces.
Morpheus always looks out of place in the waking world. Not necessarily because he failed to blend in, but because people passed him without staring too much, though a few did glance back with that unconscious human awareness of something beautiful and strange. But, he seems less like a man sitting in a park and more like a shadow that just learned manners.
Yet, here he sat. Grass and pigeons and robins.
“So then… why black?” You lean back on your hands.
He stills for a second and you wonder whether you had asked something too personal. Morpheus didn’t always understand casual questions as casual. Sometimes the smallest human curiosity became an excavation, sometimes a joke lands too close to an old wound.
But, he answers. “It is familiar.”
You tilt your head at him. “That’s it?”
“It is sufficient.”
“That’s not an answer,” you scoff.
His eyes flicker to yours, a swarm of galaxies under a fan of soft eyelashes. Stars lived in them when he let them, an impossible distance to travel when you meet his gaze with purpose, and looking directly into them felt like standing at the edge of sleep before falling forever into the abyss.
“You are persistent today,” he says.
“You like that about me.”
“I have not said so.”
Yikes. “You haven’t denied it either.”
He looks back at the birds, who now wander further now that the bread is all gone. Your hands grow slightly sweaty, awaiting your doom.
But then you see it. The smallest shift to the corner of his mouth. Tiny and almost nothing, but you see it, and your heart does something frankly embarrassing in your chest.
“I wear black,” he finally says, slowly as he often does, “because it is the color of the space between stars. Of ink before it is shaped into words, and of the moment before sleep takes hold.”
You blink at him. “Well damn. That was annoyingly poetic.”
“Merely the truth.”
“Yeah, well, there’s your problem.”
“Me problem?” He asks, his eyes returning to yours.
“You make everything sound like a prophecy. I asked if you were sweaty.”
“I am not sweaty.”
“Again,” you shrug, “suspicious.”
Morpheus’ expression turned long-suffering, though you were beginning to suspect he enjoys this more than he admits. With anyone else, he might have risen in a swirl of coat and offended dignity, leaving behind only a cold breeze and the faint feeling that reality had been judged and found lacking. With you, however, he stays.
A child runs past along the nearby path, laughing wildly as a parent calls after him. A dog barked at the pigeons and was promptly ignored by every bird except for one robin, who hopped back and forth with theatrical disdain. Somewhere in the distance, bicycle wheels clicked over pavement.
The world was painfully ordinary.
Well, until it wasn’t.
At first, it was nothing obvious. Nothing grand enough to split the sky open or to make the ground tremble beneath your hands. It was only a soap bubble drifting from somewhere near the path, likely blown loose from the sticky plastic wand of a child’s new toy. It floated lazily past the two of you, catching the sunlight in its thin iridescent skin.
But when it passes in front of Morpheus, the reflection inside it changes. Instead of seeing a warped version of your surroundings, you see the stars. A whole field of them, deep and endless, scattered across the inside of the fragile little sphere as though someone had trapped a piece of night in a breath.
You’ve stopped talking, the next witty quip dying at the back of your teeth and getting stuck like taffy.
The bubble bobs once in the air between you before popping into nothing. For a moment, neither of you moved.
Then the robin, who was still offended by the dog, hopped closer to Morpheus’ boot again. Its shadow stretched beneath it, too long for the angle of the sun. For half a second, the shape on the grass wasn’t a bird at all, but something winged and vast, made from smoke and starlight.
Then it was gone.
Just a robin again. Just grass and the park and the summer afternoon.
You slowly turned your head towards him.
Morpheus’ face remains composed, but there was a slight tension at the corner of his mouth now. Not exactly irritation, something closer to embarrassment (though you’re sure he’d rather turn into sea foam than admit to something so mortal.)
“Forgive me,” he says.
“For what?”
“The Dreaming is…” he pauses, his gaze drifting to the place where the bubble had burst. “Nearer than I intended.”
You look around but the park continues as if nothing happened. The child laughs, the dog barks, and the pigeons resume their petty war over imaginary crumbs. A breeze moves thorugh the trees and for a strange second, sounded like distant bells.
Morpheus looks at you carefully, as though bracing for unease. “Are you not disturbed?”
“No,” you smile. “I like it.”
“You like it,” he repeats.
“Yeah.” You lean back on your hands again, trying very hard to seem casual despite the way your pulse suddenly picks up. “For someone who rules dreams, you’re weirdly good at making real life feel less boring.”
“And you,” he says quietly, “male the waking world less foreign to me.”
Oh.
Your fingers curl into the blades of the grass, green and warm from the sun. “That’s… a very intense thing to say in front of a pigeon.”
“The pigeon is indifferent.”
“He’s nosy.”
As if summoned by insult, the pigeon puffed up and waddled between you two with the entitled confidence of a landlord.
You glance down at it. “See? Nosy.”
You expected Morpehus to say something grand. Something old and devastating, the kind of sentence that sounded like it belonged written in silver across the inside of a tomb.
Instead, his hand shifted beside yours, knuckles brushing yours in the grass.
It could’ve been an accident if it were anyone else. But he was Morpheus, and Morpheus did very little by accident.
You glance down, and his hand remains there. For all his titles, all his power, all the endless darkness folded into the line of his coat, the gesture felt almost shy. A question without words.
And you answered by moving your hand the rest of the way, fingers sliding against his.
Morpheus did not immediately close his hands around yours. For a second, he simply let the touch exist, as if learning its shape. Then, slowly, carefully, he laces his fingers through your own.
The world did not become less ordinary.
The child still shreiks with laughter, the dog stil strains against its leash. The pigeons are still fat, the vendors still sell sugary confection. But the grass near your joined hands shimmers faintly, dark as midnight beneath the bright afternoon sun.
You flex your hand in his, looking down at the intertwined fingers.
“It’s sweaty,” you murmur.
Morpheus looks down at your joined hands.
“I am not hot.”
You sigh.
Ohhhh you want me to update my ongoing series? Umm... bye.
The year is 2042. Your daughter is awkwardly silent as she eats her dinner. “Something wrong sweetie?” She sighs and puts down her fork. “I was digging really deep in AO3 last night…Why didn’t you finish that coffee shop au?” It happened. Your past has come back to haunt you. Nay, it never truly left.
OKAY BUT WAIT. This has happened to me. Recently. Because I am old and I have things out there from previous fandoms with previous pseuds and one day my teenager begins a rant at me about people never finishing any WIPs on the pit of voles (which he does not call the pit of voles because he has No Knowledge of such a thing but yet he still reads on which I didn’t think anyone did any longer) and he points out an example to me of something I WROTE AND LEFT WIPing for ages and he has NO IDEA #1 that his mom wrote this and #2 How much it still haunts me to this day that it will. sit. there. for. eternity. because I am too lazy to pull it down.
Precisely why everyone just likes him even more T_T. I'd still pet a biting, scratching cat, like, what do you mean you don't wanna be cuddled? Yes you do, you're so cutee!
I reblogged her late last year and my 2024 has been very satisfying work-wise and (secure enough to not stress out) money-wise so far. Money Snake is wise and good.
