
oozey mess

Origami Around
DEAR READER
$LAYYYTER
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

roma★
tumblr dot com
Monterey Bay Aquarium

#extradirty

JBB: An Artblog!
taylor price

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hello vonnie

ellievsbear

pixel skylines

Discoholic 🪩
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Misplaced Lens Cap
Keni
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@scorpion-soup
the other thing about Internet dogpiling is that it is just not possible to think clearly during the acute stages. it’s so easy to criticize people for responding defensively or tactlessly to mass criticism but I cannot overstate the degree to which your brain becomes a rat in a trap. I think we do have to temporarily recalibrate our expectations in these circumstances and accept that they do not necessarily represent how that person responds to criticism. the skills for self-regulating and reacting to normal interpersonal criticism are not the same skills needed to respond to viral callouts.
as other people have pointed out:
for most of human history, if a bunch of people are really mad at you specifically all at once, it means you’re about to die badly. obviously that’s not the case with internet controversy (…usually) but our nervous systems don’t know that. I just think that’s a variable we have to consider inherent to the circumstances rather than an aberration.
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers
Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.
Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.
There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"
I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.
There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.
when I was in university one of my modules was about internet slang and for our grades project we had to compile and analyse a small database of 100 words used by a specific community of our choice. I chose tumblr and that's how I stumbled across Gretchen McCulloch's research and discovered that yes not only did tumblr have its own vernacular and syntax (as @lierdumoa demonstrates), it was at the time a crucible of slang and memes probably unrivalled by any other part of the internet. and it's stayed that way! even the very title is McCulloch's book because internet is an example of this specific phraseology.
sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought
I am holding the side of your face and looking deep in your eyes and telling you that love is stored in the syntax, and that we are rotating words together all at once as we all nod at their new and baffling meanings. if the devils sacrament be tumblr then the devils gospel is our collective voice. thanks for coming to my tedtalk
I am being perceived.
“…use things to have good days.”
the loading screen trying to convince me to use even one of my 3000 consumables
Ben and Jerry’s is dangerous ice cream... capitalizes on the evolutionary human instinct to dig for chunks... before you know it half the pint gone
the children yearn for the mines
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
Fuck Meyer-Briggs whatever typology. This INTFP shit is only for redditors up their own asses to substitute for a personality. Use my new typology instead!
Your ideal environment is:
Hot/Cold
Wet/Dry
Bright/Dark
Loud/Quiet
HWBL - beach boy
HWBQ - tropical fish
HWDL - dingy club bathroom hookup
HWDQ - the swamp woman
HDBL - CoachellaBurningmanSouthbysouthwestACL attendee
HDBQ - Lizard
HDDL - Vegas babeyyyy
HDDQ - Trapped in a slot canyon
CWBL - Rowdy Lobsterman Crew
CWBQ - penguin living
CWDL - port angeles basement show
CWDQ - bruminating amphibian/hypothermic mammal
CDBL - ski resort
CDBQ - Christmas in Nebraska
CDDL - mcmurdo station rave
CDDQ - corpse
keep thinking about how I wrote in my dissertation about how every time a new form of public/social space emerges it's immediately popular with kids and teenagers who see it as a chance at freedom and then adults colonise it and kick them out. this happened with malls in the 80s and diners in the 50s and pool halls in the 20s. my dad was doing research on this trend in like 1975. and I was like "yeah so this is going to happen to the internet" and then five years later every government suddenly decided to ban kids from everywhere online. I hate being right especially when I don't even get paid for it
Machine Cultists
EVERY YEAR
has anyone noticed that after the porn ban of 2018 tumblr was essentially killed from the mainstream and everyone flocked to other social media sites like twitter and meta. then those sites got enshittified to where twitter became Nazi Central and meta sites had an entire meme around getting “zucced” aka mark zuckerberg himself would ban you for saying a no-no word like fuck. and then the mainstream shifted to tiktok where infamous toddlerspeak sentences like “he got unalived by a pew pew” were born because if you once again say a no-no word like kill or gun or any other word that isn’t corporate i mean kid friendly then the algorithm will bury your post into the ground. and somehow we’ve come full circle and tumblr is now the most bearable social media site because although we can’t have female presenting nipples we can at least talk to each other like adults. has anyone noticed that at all or is it just me and the flaming skull
favorite genre of joke. starting a collection
It's incredible how all of the censorship on the modern internet doesn't actually seem to be making society kinder or more wholesome hmm maybe there's a lesson in this
This was on a post about how it's ignorant and privileged to wear headphones in public and I fear its already become a part of my vocabulary. Must everything harbor a moral failure.
i love that almost everyone has their own unique bedrooms thats such a cute human thing
no bedroom looks the same just like no human is the same. are you getting what im putting down here
you walk into someones room and its like walking into a part of their soul This is so special to me <3
this reminds me of a series of photographs documenting how different people live in identical base apartments