Jules of Nature
Kaledo Art
PR's Tumblrdome
Claire Keane
cherry valley forever
oozey mess
No title available
KIROKAZE
ellievsbear
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
JVL
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Product Placement
🪼
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
almost home
noise dept.
$LAYYYTER
Stranger Things
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Romania
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from India
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from India
@vania-alvarez
[The Witcher, Polish tv series, 2002, dir. Marek Brodzki, music by Grzegorz Ciechowski]
Geralt and Jaskier, again. Friendship, love and tears - because when Jaskier sings, Geralt cries.
English subtitles by me. Jaskier’s song belongs to Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher book). Song’s translation: David French.
Cis people have a great advice for us trans folk.
1- We don’t need to violently mutilate our bodies. We’re just fine the way we are.
2- We don’t need to wear, like, special clothes because clothes have not gender. So where’s the need. We keep going the same way we have up until now and everything is perfect.
3- Same with names. And pronouns. We know all that stuff is made-up, so why bother.
4- Actually, do we really really REALLY need gender? Can we just be fine with the sex? Sex doesn’t stop us to be whatever we want to be, right? And we all agree that sex is a thing, don’t we?
5- Since we made it all this way, we can, like, just NOT be trans. They’re cis and they’re happy, aren’t they? If they can do it, certainly we can too.
Thanks, cis people, for saving us.
I am sorry. I’m bashing Apple here. And for good reason.
This is a plea to my followers.
Stop buying Apple products. I know you’ve used them for most of your life, and I know it’s inconvenient to move to a new brand because in most cases, you cannot take your contacts with you on various chat apps.
I know this is inconvenient. I truly do.
But Apple is not the company it was before. There is now no difference between an Apple computer and a Windows computer in terms of graphic design. I know this for a fact. I had to use both in college 20 years ago, and non-apple computers are now generally better for design work than Apple computers.
Most non-apple companies encourage self-repair of your own devices, while Apple refuses it. I also know this for a fact, as I watched Apple computers become slowly less reparable through the late 90s and early 2000s. Where I was once able to do the repairs on our office computers, we had to start sending out our Apple devices because they started gluing things down on their logic boards. Notably the glue they used was not heat-resistant and led to device damage should the heat sink system fail. But they did this because they wanted to dig more money out of their customers.
Apple software is also designed to fail. I cannot believe people are still buying new devices after the scandal where Apple was slowing their phones in order to force people to purchase new versions.
Apple hardware is designed to become obsolete. Motherboards and logic boards are designed to hold exactly what comes attached to them and will fail if upgrade attempts are made.
Apple refuses to work with software developers despite promises of cross-compatibility. One of the very first coding problems I discovered was to discover a gigantic hole in a software program that made a plotter (giant printer) compatible with iOS. This caused a memory leak, leading to necessary resets of the computer after every 2 feet of printing.
I know that it’s not possible for most of you to just throw your devices away and buy a new one. I wouldn’t be able to do that, either. But eventually there will come a time when you have to upgrade, and I encourage you to take the plunge and purchase a non-apple device. I don’t even have a recommendation for you because literally anything is better than Apple. A rock that you write on is better than an Apple phone.
Unfortunately I expect to be shadow-banned on Apple devices because of this, and I’ll try to report on decreased activity as much as I can.
It’s time to stop trying to beg Apple to change. They won’t. It’s time now to just stop supporting Apple.
Stop wasting your money on easily broken garbage!
I have a perfectly working iPhone 6. I got it because the iphone 7 no longer has a headphone jack and requires you to buy Apple’s shitty bluetooth headphones. Last month Apple decided they will not be updating the iphone 6 to the new iOS… for no real reason. They wil still release bug fixes but are not releasing version 13 for iphone 6. ALL apps in the istore now require you to be on version 13 of the iOS to download the app. HOWEVER apps I’ve already installed and downloaded work perfectly. There is literally no reason for this other to encourage consumerism and to put my perfectly working phone into a landfill. I’m upgrading to Android as soon as I have the money. I’ve already switched from mac to windows after Apple wanted to charge me $2000 for a macbook with only 100gigs of RAM. That’s less than a fucking PS3. Apple Products are inherently awful, and there is literally no benefit to buying them whatsoever. Other than to look like a complete tool. Fuck Apple.
This is not hearsay. This is not rumour. Apple settles iphone slowdown case. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51706635 They really did deliberately sabotage their products to make people buy the latest ones.
[ID: A digital illustration of Caleb Widogast and Essek Thelyss from Critical Role. They sit kissing behind a desk laid out with spell books and papers, lit by two tall candles. Behind them are bookshelves. End description.]
Study break 🕯️
Boba finding Fennec left for dead in the dunes of Tatooine and helping her because of the empathy he felt instead of leaving her for dead because everyone left him for dead too in bitterness like a hardened and cold bounty hunter very well could have is one of the most clone-esque things he’s ever done
we are already living in the cyberpunk future and i know this because within a span of 3 days we went from this tweet:
to thousands of people making phony images and replying to them with their passionate desire to have them as a tshirt to overload the bots with nonsense and junk and send out warnings to shoppers like this:
and now we even have people replying to pictures of baby yoda with “i want this on a tshirt” knowing how ravenous disney is being with copyright in hopes to get the stores taken down altogether
i dont know what it is about stuff like this and the whole turn mei into a symbol of hk protesters thing but, its really reassuring for some reason
And the next step…
https://teezyli.com/
Holy shit y’all look at the front page of the site right now
Oh my god
Anyway, I just emailed [email protected] to report the site for very evilly stealing Disney’s IP! Because obviously that is very evil and bad and shit.
I’ve never seen such a perfect example of fighting fire with fire.
Holy fucking shit
I’m DYING.
More accurately
NFT bots have met their match in the form of t-shirt bots stealing their 'exclusive' works. Here's how it's all going down.
The next generation…
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/10/nft-bots-tshirt-online-twitter-war/
This is beauty
The Sandman + Tumblr’s banned tags
@neil-gaiman @staff why would they ban poor goldie!?
In all seriousness
1. Goldie is a real name. That’s like banning Richard or Rick.
2. They banned the word Death!? Not only does this impede Death from Disworld and Sandman but what if you post about a Death in the family or Deat of a beloved pet?!
They really didn’t think this through very well.
I know nothing. But it’s going to make it hard for people to tag things in the show…
oh molly
May I interest you in… Ashton w prismatic freckles…..
heyhowareyou gorg
man idk i just think the preppy pretty boy genasi and the punk rock genasi should like do their eye makeup together or something
Oh, God, I wish I was Dorian SO bad...
I dozed off with Tumblr open. Had a dream in which both David Tennant and Michael Sheen were now acting in Good Omens with ridiculous quantities of glowing Gold Leaf on their faces, and i was told that was their angel marks. I felt guilty for not having known when someone on Tumblr asked. Then I realized I'd added a sentence I had thought was being emailed to David Tennant about him looking like David Bowie with a golden forehead circle to a gigantic ongoing work of fanfic on Tumblr and I was about to get into trouble with Amazon for revealing what Crowley now looked like. Meanwhile Michael Sheen had seen a rough assembly of Good Omens 2 and was trying to tell me important things about it but was speaking so obliquely that I couldn't tell if he didn't like what we'd done or was just complaining about being all golden and less human. I woke up trying to work out how to Google an image of Bowie's golden forehead circle...
We give Gaiman nightmares. We shuold be ashamed of ourselves.
Eight Rules For Writing -- from a long ago piece I wrote for The Guardian.
1 Write.
2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7 Laugh at your own jokes.
8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
Genasi characters are so fun to make :’)
Genasi are the new tiefling are the new drows
Do you ever wonder what happened to the weird girl from your middle school?
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning
Don’t fuck with flamingos
alright let's talk about Apple and Tumblr's current predicament. If you don't know already, I used to work at Tumblr as an iOS engineer. Though I keep in touch with current staff at Tumblr (what little that are left that I know) I do not have picture of what's going on internally. The banned word list is absolutely perplexing and I can only theorize why tags like 'long post' are banned from appearing on iOS. What I can do is give you a peek into how the Apple App Store review process works, so you have an idea of the hell that Tumblr staff is dealing with right now.
Let me be clear about this from the get-go: I think Apple's censorship policies are wrong and they have no grounds to be policing adult content within apps on the app store. Apple's power to set content policy over apps is absolutely fueled first and foremost by internal policy that goes back to Steve Jobs. After that, they're beholden to payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn. Finally, there's lawmakers and policy that influence them as well. I think these are the 3 things that shape their policy decisions, in order.
What happens when you submit an App to the App Store?
You compile an app and submit it to the app store, and it proceeds through an automated and manual process to review your app to ensure it meets Apple's standards. Apple's standards are 1) non-malicious, functioning programs, and 2) programs that adhere to the App Store's review guidelines that cannot be asserted in the same way a program can. These guidelines are judged by a human being assigned to your app during the review process. The review process used to be long, sometimes it would take weeks, but in recent years they've got it down to about 24 hours.
Now, there's a laundry list of things in those guidelines, but we're going to focus on adult content because that's the most relevant. If a reviewer runs your app and finds porn, your app is rejected and you're told to correct the problem.
What's Tumblr dealing with now?
In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits' and finding porn. Sometimes they would search something more innocuous like 'socks' (yeah, i know) and find porn. Sometimes they would search something completely innocent and find porn anyways. Tumblr would get rejected.
This happened regularly. I'd say once every 5 updates (every time Tumblr updates the iOS app, they have to re-submit the app for review). A reviewer would find porn, and respond by sending us the steps they followed to find it and a screenshot of the content. Tumblr staff would remove the porn, resubmit, the reviewer would find nothing, then approve the app. Once in a while Tumblr would get a really persistent reviewer. It would take a handful of porn scrubs and re-submissions before they'd finally green-light an update.
Sometimes, however, Tumblr would get a reviewer who flags tumblr for porn, and when Tumblr opened the rejection notice, the screenshot would be something completely not porn. I'm talking stuff like a woman in a bikini. Not even posing in a porny way. Something you'd see in like, a laser hair removal ad. In these cases, Tumblr would appeal the rejection, saying the content doesn't violate our policies (and to the best of our knowledge, Apple's) so we won't remove it.
In this case, the appeal gets bumped up to a developer support contact that would manage the appeal. Usually when it got there, the contact would look at the report and say "oh, yeah, that's not porn" and tell us to re-submit the app again. It then would usually be approved.
This process, I believe, is where the problem lies. Of course, the bigger picture is Apple's adult content policies, but the relationship between reviewer, developer support, and policymakers is completely fucking discordant. Since the review process is human, some reviewers interpret the guidelines more strict that others. Since the review process chooses a random reviewer, the review experience is random every time.
The developer support contact is not in direct contact with the reviewer and does not communicate with them in any way, other than the report they receive from the review (that Tumblr has too). The dev support contact also cannot tell Tumblr whether they'll pass review if they were to propose hypothetical changes to Tumblr.
Here's the kicker: your developer support contact will also, like the reviewer, not be consistent from case to case. They stick with you until your appeal is complete, but when you have to open a new case for a subsequent rejection, it's someone new. And every one of them had different answers to the same questions about policies regarding adult content.
I really don't think the people enforcing Apple's app store guidelines have a clear answer on what's porn and what's not, and they're left to decide on a case-by case basis. Apple is fucking massive, and it's a waterfall organization where orders come from the top down. If Tumblr gets rejected because a reviewer decided a woman in a bikini is pornographic, no one in Apple gives a shit. I bet no more than a handful of people in Apple right now are even aware of the situation with Tumblr, and just one person (the dev support contact) is deciding what Tumblr must do to resolve it and stay on the App store.
The 2018 porn ban
I was present for the 2018 app store fiasco and boy, it was mind boggling. The removal was legit since Apple had received a user-submitted report of CSAM, and by policy they immediately yank an app that contains such content. That was 100% understandable, and if I were in Apple's shoes, I too would remove an app that has CSAM in it. But what followed was a gauntlet of rigorous reviews over adult content in general. The app was rejected repeatedly until the infamous adult content ban was fully enacted.
While Tumblr was actively working on the ban, they were asking Apple for any sort of guidance on what would meet approval, because as you know it's impossible to scrub a UGC site of adult content. The answers we got were either vague or unhelpful. Tumblr had to just keep re-submitting over and over with a half-baked porn finding algorithm until it finally looked clean enough for Apple.
During this time, we'd be searching Twitter, Instagram, etc, for the same search terms that we were being rejected for, and finding lots and lots of porn. When the rep was asked if other apps went through the same rigamarole that Tumblr was going through, and why they had porn on their apps, the answers we got were "we can't discuss other apps" (of course) and "that shouldn't happen".
Now, I do not want to get conspiratorial about this because I genuinely don't think Apple has it out for Tumblr. What I do think is it's a combination of the discordant enforcement of policy, caused by the complete separation of policymaker, support, and reviewer. It's also less of a problem for other apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc because they have many, many more staff to deal with the problem. They have more staff to build and maintain porn-removing algorithms, and more staff to put out fires caused by App Store rejections.
A little part of me also wants to be cynical and say that since Instagram and Twitter are so big, they can get away with more than Tumblr can. Combine that with Tumblr's history of blatantly allowing porn up until the end of 2018. I can't prove it, of course, but if Tumblr has a reputation at Apple, it can't be a good one.
Apple's reputation amongst developers
As I mentioned I'm an iOS engineer. I talk to other iOS engineers all the time, not only at my current job but also in other places like Slack instances for iOS development. The iOS engineers at Tumblr did not like Apple's bullshit one bit, which is unsurprising. However, my experience thus far is the vast, vast majority of iOS engineers at other places feel the same way. Apple's review process is seen as an asinine hurdle you must clear. Their policies are not viewed in good light amongst iOS devs, though you'll have a mixed bag of sympathy over being rejected for some of them like the adult content one. It really depends if you've worked on any UGC apps on the app store. If you have, you get it.
Outside of adult content, though, the two other big ones that rub iOS devs the wrong way are the 30% cut Apple gets when devs get paid, and the completely arbitrary policy that Apps submitted to the app store must have a "clear purpose". I haven't talked to a single iOS dev who's been on the side of Apple in the Epic v Apple case over the 30% cut, and most of them are hoping for Apple to loosen up their control over the App Store (either voluntarily or by court order). The "clear purpose" policy means that reviewers can reject the app if they think it's useless, which is incredibly discouraging for new developers who are just trying to get out there with something simple. It also squelches creativity and reduces the field for more single-purpose apps.
Aside from App Store review guidelines, iOS developers also have to deal with ever-shifting technical guidelines that can be unclear, with deadlines that change or are vague as well. A good example of this was a recent change that required all Apps that were available on iPad to support split-screen multitasking. Not only did I get conflicting answers on what that means from Apple themselves and devs who were in contact with other Apple reps. No one knew if their iPad app would be yanked from the store, or if there was a way to opt out. This requirement forced many companies to scramble to update their iPad experience to meet this deadline, only for the requirement to be relaxed, and the deadline to be pushed back. Fun times, great use of dev hours.
The Apple fanboy you can picture when I say "Apple fanboy" is very unlikely to be an iOS developer. They probably just love Apple products and think that the company can do no wrong. The more Apple does to piss off their developers, the worse it's going to get for anyone who just wants to use an iPhone.
Anywho, that's Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay. I think I know what Tumblr is working on to appease them. Don't expect this banned word list to last too long. The timing is awful, of course, since everyone on Apple is on vacation, and Tumblr is too. Have fun with the chaos for now. As always, don't take it out on staff. They're doing what they can.
My asks are open if you have any questions. I'll try to answer them.
I think many of y’all need to be educated about the concept of lateral aggression because too many of y’all think that being marginalized yourself gives you a free pass to act completely fucked up towards other marginalized people, even ones in your own community that you share marginalization with, because you’re under the false impression that your behavior isn’t harmful on any meaningful level and that’s not true. Not in the slightest.
Too many of y’all wield your marginalized identity like a shield to try to minimize and justify your behavior and that is causing active harm to the rest of us while simultaneously making it easier for our oppressors to continue oppressing us. Knock it off and get over your bully complexes. The world is not your playground and your behavior is causing tangible harm to those you come in contact with.
The weirdest thing ever is to see someone bullying someone else and then have them be like “but I’m gay/trans/POC” like... and??? That doesn’t have any impact on how fucked up your behaviour is???
