9.21.21. got a late start today and grad apps are kicking my ass, but a cup of tea and a Nick Cave album are pushing me through.

pixel skylines
Sweet Seals For You, Always

blake kathryn

Origami Around
Mike Driver
One Nice Bug Per Day

Kaledo Art

titsay
KIROKAZE

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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
will byers stan first human second
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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Discoholic 🪩

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wallacepolsom
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Today's Document

#extradirty

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@weirdshroom
9.21.21. got a late start today and grad apps are kicking my ass, but a cup of tea and a Nick Cave album are pushing me through.
random bitter aspiring authors on "writing advice" blogs: Don't make your main characters super special mary sues. don't make them better than other people or more interesting. your main characters should be boring average guys with the personalities of wood pulp
the Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh was objectively the best man ever. He was the hottest, sexiest, most gorgeous hunk of pure manly awesomeness that ever lived and he used a sword that weighed 120 pounds.
The lesson here is that your main characters can be as special, overpowered, and unrealistically skilled at everything as you want, as long as this has the purpose of driving the plot via all the problems they cause (because they're an egotistical nightmare and a gigantic raging asshole).
The second lesson here is that no matter what randos on writing blogs say, people like stories where the characters are unique and iconic. Or at least they remember them.
(I have a theory that the stories that form long-lasting fandoms, and/or are recognized and referenced frequently in pop culture, are stories that have the same sort of "iconic" elements that are long-lasting in folklore and mythology. I think superheroes are particularly well suited to lasting centuries/millennia into the future because they're just so simple and memorable conceptually.)
Hi my name is Gilgamesh Hammurabi Ziusudra Euphrates Ishtar and I have the same heroic build as my lordly ancestors (that's how I got my name) with bulging muscles and chiselled features moulded by the goddess Aruru, and icy blue eyes like the limpid waters of the Great Flood, and a lot of people tell me I look King Enmebaragesi of Kish (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da Kur out of here!). I’m not related to Ishtar but I wish I was because she’s a major fucking hottie. I'm a demi-god but I'm not immortal. I possess extraordinary strength. I'm also a king and I rule a city called Urduk, where I force my subjects to erect lots of ziggurats (I'm known for my cruelty). I’m a Sumerian (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly animal skins. I love the forbidden Cedar Forest and I slay and skin all my beasts from there. For example today I was wearing a skin made from the Bull of Heaven with a matching sheep hide skirt, gold armlets, a carnelian headband, and black combat sandals. I was wearing black kohl eyeliner to ward off conjunctivitis. I was walking outside the twin peaks of Mount Mashu at the end of the earth. I came across a tunnel which no man before me had ever entered, which I was very happy about. Two guards that were giant scorpion monsters stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.
This is objectively genius writing but the size of the audience that can properly recognize its brilliance is so small
I'm just glad to be part of it
I am simultaneously hella mad and hella impressed at how well this narrative style FITS Gilgamesh
I mean, when you think about the main narrative arc, “My Immortal” actually wouldn’t be an unreasonable title for the Epic of Gilgamesh to have.
He's not immortal though, that's the whole point
"My Mortal" would be a very accurate title
But it’s about his quest for immortality! And the ultimate realisation that his only path to everlasting life is to loom large in the memories of those who come after him. Having a legacy is his immortal 🤣
I am THRILLED by the existence of My Gilgamesh and I read it out loud, with true fangirl inflection, to my partner. We are laughing and this is fantastic.
He looms large in our memories, just as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way.
Going back to the point about Mary Sues, though...
Everyone: You're the worst character I've ever heard of!
Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way: But you have heard of me.
Simone Ashley as Kate Sharma
Bridgerton Season 2 | Official Trailer
Young playful … a bit naughty 🤍
I’ve seen people pass around the “hold up, I’m googlin’ something” image but it cropped out the part where he was googling “how many guys can one guy take”
this page, in isolation, is possibly the funniest thing i have seen in any manga
i’m so ready for autumn
i hate “content”… i hate calling everything “content”… what is it. is it art? is it a video? is it makeup? is it comedy? what is it. labeling everything as “content” strips away the effort and passion it takes to create things and homogenizes everything into a giant mass to be consumed i hate it ….
poem in which the vulture flees, by silas denver melvin
[Text ID: how do i say thank you & goodbye in the same sentence? how do i tell you vultures only eat what they know is dead? /End ID]
You know how we keep finding shitposts that accidentally predicted all the bullshit that's actually happening?
I'm gonna start making shitposts about good things happening.
Posts from before The Billionaire Plague, the plague that killed all the billionaires
actually fuck this im gonna walk into the deep sea and never come back. bye
THERES CREATURES
Woooow you walked into THEIR home and called THEM creatures??
Astronauts talking about viewing the earth from the moon, from The Overview Effect: Awe and Self-Transcendent Experience in Space Flight
This is 100% new and 100% Tumblr with 0% ads.
If you love ads, then this post is not for you. If you love Tumblr but hate ads and want the one to continue without having to endure the other, then this post is literally for you. Hello, you.
As of today, you can set up ad-free browsing on your personal desktop computer, from anywhere in the world, and then enjoy the same effervescent Tumblr you know and love (yes, including mobile) without the interruption of ads. Scroll away.
Some caveats:
It’s $4.99 for a month of pure, unadulterated nonsense.
If you like a discount, you can get 33% off (that’s four months for free) at $39.99 for a whole year. Imagine.
This is opt-in. You don’t have to do this. We won’t make you.
How do you opt in?
Easy! Just go to your Account Settings on desktop and hit "Go Ad-Free." From there, you can choose to pay monthly or yearly:
And that’s it! You’ll be able to enjoy your favorite blogs and posts without any pesky ads getting in the way.
That’s all for now, Tumblr. Back to your blorbos.
Tumblr is dying.
This isn't funny, this isn't me doing a meme, this is me putting on a very temporary Serious Hat.
Tumblr is dying.
The recent attempts by staff to make the site profitable are the desperate gasps and grasping arms of a site that is well past the point of no return.
Tumblr was never going to survive very long in our current world. It's not profitable. It was never going to be very profitable. It's vitally important to the history and culture of the social internet (and, really, the world in general, to some extent), but it's been mismanaged, haphazardly-run, and just a general design train wreck for years.
Because here's the important thing to remember about Tumblr:
Tumblr is a bad social media site. More specifically, Tumblr is bad at being a social media site.
I know what you may be thinking -- "but it's better than [Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok], so it can't be that bad!" And that's incorrect. Tumblr is, by any standard measure, much much worse at being a social media site than any of those four sites. And there's one crucial reason for that that people keep overlooking:
See, people think of social media as being about connecting with people, or community, or social blah blah blah whatever and I need you to understand that all of that, all of it, is bullshit. That's not what social media is, and that's never what social media has been.
Social media is about selling your information, mostly to advertisers -- which, on the internet, mostly means to Google. Meta doesn't want you to find art on Instagram or talk to friends on Facebook. Meta wants you to spend time looking at your feed and putting in information. For all Meta cares, if it kept you on the site, you could kill all of your friends and only follow Instagram accounts that posted blank white frames. None of the "content", none of the "community", none of that bullshit is important to them. They just want you on the site so they can get your information -- via ads, trackers, cookies, harvesting your posts and comments, whatever -- and sell it.
I can't be any clearer about this next point:
Social media is bad. Anything that you like about Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram, or whatever, all of the stuff you like about those sites are either incidental or counter to the intention of the people running the site.
Instagram DMs are only there to keep you on the site.
Your TikTok FYP is very carefully curated to keep you on the app.
Twitter shows you exactly the trends it needs to in order to keep you browsing.
Ever wonder why social media makes people so angry? It's because anger keeps you engaged. It's 100% intentional.
All of the most addictive and engaging emotional states -- anger, fear, smugness -- are all really bad for your mental (and often physical) health when taken in large doses, and are also the only thing social media wants from you.
Now we come back to Tumblr.
Why is Tumblr better than, say, Twitter? And it really is -- we don't talk about this enough, but Tumblr is absolutely a better experience than Twitter. Or Facebook, or TikTok, or Instagram, or Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Imgur, or any other successful social media site. But why?
The reason Tumblr is so much better of an experience than other social media is because Tumblr is so much worse than other social media at being social media.
All of the stuff we like about Tumblr -- the crazy, shittily designed, chaotic reblog system? the fact that your dash is basically only chronological? the fact that the tag system is so fundamentally broken that the ways that it's broken have been culturally rebuilt as a part of the way we communicate on the site? the way that reblogs distribute content creation? the culture of crazy fandom people? that one werewolf fucker? the memes? the fact that, by and large, you don't get spoonfed stuff from around the site by an algorithm? mutuals? the lack of censorship, and, in turn, the fact that said lack of censorship drives away advertisers? the weird culture that keeps "normies" from tiktok away? -- all of that is absolutely counterintuitive to being a successful social media site.
Let's compare Tumblr to an actually really well-designed social media: TikTok.
TikTok is a goddamn masterpiece of social media design. If you install TikTok on your phone and give it even the tiniest amount of engagement, it'll nail your interests and dopamine triggers in under a week. Give it a month and it'll have its hooks in your brain. The algorithm is so finely tuned, all the systems are so carefully designed, the goddamn interface is hardwired to trick your brain into scrolling.
Stitches? Duets? Likes? Even cultural things, like trends and sounds going viral? Hell, the idea of TikTok sounds at all? All these are built to drive engagement.
Funny video? Duet your reaction. Someone asked a question? Stitch your answer. Someone singing? Duet for a literal duet! Sound going viral? You can do a TikTok of that sound, easy! Interesting conversation in your comment section? Reply to comments with quick videos!
And vitally, did you miss the last trend? No worries! The next one's coming along! If you joined TikTok today you wouldn't even know about the sea shanty thing. The culture moves at the speed of light.
The camcorder-like nature of recording on TikTok makes making the actual content a snap. The boost given to new accounts tricks you into thinking it's easy, and even in the long run, the distribution algorithms make it much easier than, say, YouTube to get the numbers to go up. Content is easy to make and distribute, trends are so quick that they're easy to follow, and the FYP algorithm gives the illusion of community -- and easy-to-make content and well-designed algorithms makes the numbers go up, and to our monkey brains, numbers = approval = success = dopamine.
Tumblr? Tumblr has none of that shit.
Instead of stitches, duets, or sounds, we have reblogs -- with a post editor that barely works, a following that's 80% porn bots, and a frankly baffling 15-year-old online culture that moves at (for the internet) glacial speeds and has hundreds if not thousands of in-jokes, none of which ever die? Have fun building a following with that, fucker! Numbers? You think we do numbers here? We suffer, and we like it!
Oh, and good luck playing into trends. I wasn't kidding about the glacial speeds and in-jokes. Sure, we have new shit happening -- Tumblr's take on the "your dick cold eeby deeby" meme is new, as is There Are Many Benifits To Being A Marine Biologist, and my Shakespearification posts -- but Colour of the Sky is, I'm pretty sure, older than 50% of TikTok users, and we're still making goddamn Onceler memes, and, for Christ's sake, even the new stuff is blending with the old stuff -- I just did a Shakespeareification of Colour Theory.
There is no algorithm beyond occasional "people you follow liked this". On TikTok, the only two feeds are "random shit you might like" and "random shit you might like from people you follow". On Tumblr, the only feed is "everything from everyone you follow at all times", and the site does not care about whether you want to see it or not.
Because of all this, Tumblr is not, and will never be, profitable.
Which means that, because we live in capitalism, Tumblr will die.
And due to the rise of competent social media sites, the competition is eating away at Tumblr's audience.
Staff is cringe, obviously. But they're also desperate. They're trying to keep this place alive.
And they're failing.
Tumblr is dying.
These are the last days.
The end is coming.
It's terrible, it's beautiful, it's chaotic, and it's ephemeral.
And we're never going to have anything like it ever again.
Enjoy it while you have it.
tl;dr if you want tumblr to survive we need the dash to start being algorithm-driven instead of chronological and we have to start saying "unalive" on here instead of "kill"
but also I would rather fucking kill myself than do either of those things
@violinsandtea I'd like to clarify: I'm not saying Tumblr is dead. Tumblr is definitely extremely alive. I'm saying Tumblr is dying.
Tumblr isn't dead, but it's been dying since before the famous 2018 ban.
Which, once again, is why I think its a good idea to give them your pocket change. $5 a month? According to google, Tumblr has 3 hundred million visitors every year (if we keep 2019's traffic as our average). If they're making just $5 off of every single person every single year, they would make 1 billion dollars every year. That is for the low price of $5 yearly. That is for 1 single month of them not running ads. If you pay that $5 every month for a year, and everyone else does the same? Tumblr would run indefinitely, and you would have $60 less by the end of the year.
Now obviously this isn't how its gonna work out. half of that 300 million is probably bots. Half of you aren't even interested in paying, another quarter can't pay even if you are interested, those two groups have overlap but some of you won't pay out of principle, and obviously there's the issue of Tumblr being so full of bugs that when I went to try to support the site the god damn payment page broke and I couldn't pay the $5. But just think. We could actually save tumblr ourselves, and all it costs is $60 each. We could outlive Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, META. We already outlived Myspace. If you can, help keep this hell alive. Lets be the last standing anti-social media on the internet. We'll ride this bitch to eeby deeby.
nothing feels as good as starting to read again when you haven’t held a book in your hand for such a long time and now the setting sun is in your room and there’s paper under your fingers and you feel so good about letting the words float into you again
i have been spending too much time online. got an email from turbo tax and read it as blurbo tax and that was the last sign i needed. dear god
this has no business being this funny to me
wish my life was like a 90's movie where all my friends work in record stores and bookshops and coffee shops and we see really cool bands in small little clubs and get breakfast together and like hang out on roofs and shit
Not to be that guy on this post but whenever I see it it stresses me out. I know it's supposed to be a fun aesthetic but there's a reason things are not like that anymore. There are no record stores left in my town. There are no bookstores left in my town. There is one terrible gentrified cafe in my town. There is no where for the cool little bands to perform in my town. There are no more cool little clubs in my town. Hell we don't even have a bowling alley anymore. All of these things got bought up and knocked down and replaced with a Dunkin' donuts or some garbage and now we all just stay indoors instead of hanging out on rooftops. Capitalism took these things from us. We're not just romanticizing the '90s, we're romanticizing life before social media and COVID and the current stage of hyper capitalism we find ourselves in.
secret meetings with my lover
Swing sweet Seraphim take me back again or watch me make the messes of men.