A couple of days ago I discovered to my horror -- since they're kind of the point of the whole thing -- that a lot of my gifs were not animating on the webpage version of my blog, which is to say duckodeathreturns.tumblr.com.
They worked on my dash, they worked when I reblogged the posts to my back-up Tumblr, they did NOT work on my own page. ARGH!
Because I use a different theme on my back-up Tumblr, I figured that was probably the issue, and indeed it was. So after a lot of experimenting, I've found what I hope is a suitable replacement with a nice simple layout that seems to have solved the problem while also showing the ask button -- I don't understand why, but of my three major requirements that's the one that turned out to be the hardest to meet.
I've also installed Disqus which is something I'd never even heard of until about a week ago, but seems to be everywhere now and should make commenting on posts a lot easier.