Damn @sophstreetdotgov - Tumblr Blog

I am an old person and tumblr is the porch

mozzarella and cheddar when i open my fridge and its not their time to be added to a fuckalicious grilled cheese sandwich

herssian

"there is no way you're not using chatgpt for at least a few things here and there no matter your stance on it" what the FUCK are you talking about

allykatsart

puzzled-on-main

am i allowed to say kill all trillionaires or is that too specific of a threat

mona-l1sa

whendidmythoughtsgocrazy

And if I'm meant to be alone, please take away my desire to be loved.

k.b. // unknown

oh to be thought of, to be considered, to be remembered, to be included

michaelmilkers

tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows

michaelmilkers

for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016

each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen

you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster

in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could

chantrymouse

lest we forget

sreegs

This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.

- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.

- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.

- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.

- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards

- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)

- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work

- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon

- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak

- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself

- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great

- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone

cyle

a whole chapter of my tumblr memoir will be “lizard election 2016”

it was the first project i ever led myself, and i thought i’d be fired for sure by the end of it. completely worth it. would do it all again.

my only regret, echoed by @zacksultan and a few of the other creatives, was that we didn’t get BuzzFeed and other press in the war room with us at the time. it was magical.

raychleadele

So there’s this artist, Alex Schaefer, who makes a bunch of paintings of Chase Bank burning.

There’s just

so many of these

and I think it’s incredibly funny but

I just read this bit from the artist and

This is a "plein air" painting which means I set up my easel right across the street of this Chase bank in my city and painted it like it had caught fire. The police questioned me on the spot. Three weeks later Homeland Security was knocking on the door to my home. The question they kept asking me was "Do you hate these banks?" I can honestly say yes.

And I just think this is the greatest artist statement I’ve ever read.