The Secret Knots

I'm Juan. I make THE SECRET KNOTS | Patreon | Discord | Ig

[santapau]

Master post, June 2026

I'm Juan Santapau (he/him), and I make THE SECRET KNOTS, which is a series of short stories in comic form. I live in Chile. Hola.

If you've been on Tumblr for some time maybe you've seen some of these comics: the one about a city of secret names; the one with a misunderstood cryptid; the one about enshittification. 

The full web archive is here: The Secret Knots.

If you'd like to support me with a few dollars every month (which helps me enormously to pay bills and keep making art), you can subscribe to my Patreon, where I post updates about every comic in progress and different extras. You can also follow for free and get notifications for new things.

Here’s the Newsletter, where I send reminders about new stories, and miscellaneous art.

I’m on Bsky and Reddit.

Here’s the PDF store, with some E-comics. Finally, here’s an invitation to the Secret Knots Discord, a community server that always brings nice recommendations, and regular sightings of the weird in the world. Feel free to drop by and say hello.

[santapau]

"The Real Capello", new Secret Knots comic.

Or is this just another way of telling you about The Duke in Shadows?

This comic is possible thanks to the support of kind patrons.

[antlered-vixen]

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

[santapau]

Why indeed, Tim?

An update of The Battalion comic is up un Patreon.

[santapau]

Newsletter: thinking about thought balloons

A free post on Patreon, where I examine some uses of the old thought bubbles in comics.

[santapau]

Here's something that might interest you If you got here after reading my Cryptid comic from some time ago. Here's the (free) Patreon post I made with sources, references and some notes on that comic. Feel free to follow for more free posts or even better!, subscribe for more regular posts with comic progress.

[santapau]

New Secret Knots comic, "The River". I hope you like it!

The Secret Knots comics are made possible by my patrons. Check out my pledge tiers if you'd like to be one of them.

[mangacapsaicin]

atsushi kaneko’s soil || カネコアツシの『ソイル』

[wegottagoback2]

Forget the Manscaper ads and the terrible weird porny phone game ads and the random people’s blogs. THIS is the worst ad I’ve ever seen on Tumblr

[santapau]

[santapau]

Where is this thing going? I guess we'll have to see in upcoming parts 2 and 3.

New Secret Knots comic, The Battalion.

[santapau]

Comic — The Battalion — Part 1 of 3 | Juan Santapau

Get more from Juan Santapau on Patreon

Want to check out the first installment of my new comic The Battalion? It's a free post on Patreon.

[monkeyislandtwo]

fonts will be named shit like viscera antique, 16 bit dreams, doctor's orders, bingo condensed, googly, wish you were here

[equos-bipes]

for your consideration

[santapau]

Messiah of Evil (1974)

[rainbowgaez]

ok guys but imagine how hard it's gonna hit if something good ever happens again

[santapau]

New comic in progress. (A few more panels available on Patreon)

[santapau]

This is a Terry Pratchett emoji I made for our Discord server, if you want, you can use it in yours too! I guess you can just right-click download the PNG from here? Let me know if it doesn't work to share it some other way.

[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

Yahoo’s grand plan for Tumblr was to turn it into a “next-generation 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.

[dipdieddreams]

This makes sense, I think.

They saw in tumblr potential for a universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms, and potentially becomes the dominant form of interconnectivity between platforms.

Except they fumbled it massively?

That’s my understanding of the above.

People frequently ask me why I’m still on tumblr and one of the things I tell them is the fact you can post anything on here. It’s not limited to one form of media. And yes you can post videos and reels or whatever now. But not back then. And gif sets are still best on tumblr. Sorry.

[athelind]

Look, at this point, I'm not going to blame Yahoo! or any of this hellsite (affectionate)'s other owners for dropping this ball.

A "universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms"? We had that in the 1990s, or the seeds of it, back when the internet was focused on protocols and not platforms. "Web 2.0" was a deliberate move away from that, made possible by some really terrible legislation.

No matter how good Neue Post Format may be, and no matter who was helming the company, that level of interoperability was never going to fly in the face of unified opposition from Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

The other big social media sites don't want interoperability: they want to lock you in to extract value from you while providing you with an increasingly-miserable experience. If you can read their feeds and connect with your friends on their sites from any number of other sites, then they have no hold over you. This is called "switching cost".

Fed up with the ads on Heebee? Tired of the algorithmic bias on Gumpy? Why would you put up with it if you could just go to Poob and get the exact same contact, and stay in touch with all of your friends, relatives, and moots?

If you want a more thorough (and certainly more articulate) discussion of these ideas, check out Cory Doctorow's book, Enshittification -- or just read his Tumblr blog, @mostlysignssomeportents. I've been reading his stuff for 25 years now, and he has thoroughly warped my mind opened my eyes.