Writing Sucks

20-something | Male | Gay as hell

[writingruss]

Don't get attached to any words. They are only stepping stones, to be left behind as quickly as possible.

- Eckhart Tolle

[genderqueerpositivity]

Minnesota’s Giant Rainbow and Leather Pride Flags

June 28, 1998. Both flags measured approximately 50 feet wide and 75 feet long.

[ryuutchi]

Friendly reminder that the leather flag predates almost every other flag. We owe this community to leather daddies and kinksters

[nightmarechamillian]

In the era of corporate sanitization never forget it was leather daddies and S&M folks who protected some of the earliest pride parades.

[glamourweaver]

Three years after that last comment and the corporate backers are fleeing as the moment the political tide turned - the kinksters aren’t.

[shamebats]

"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry

[roselalonde]

you are like an empty tip jar

[niklas-sagara]

Ready to be filled!

[roselalonde]

BECAUSE YOU DONT HAVE ANY CENTS!!!

[daughter-of-sapph0]

[what-is-love-babey-dont-hurt-me]

You guys ever see a DNI that makes you break out into laughter and almost cry

[what-is-love-babey-dont-hurt-me]

If graphic design is your passion then !!! GET OUT !!! 🚫🚫👎‼️🥶🥶🚫

[swampthingy]

[actuallyapathy]

[the-lumpfish-queen]

I love environmental storytelling

[belphegor1982]

[hotlegsharker]

[berlynn-wohl]

[harleyklawz]

Its fucking hieroglyphs with you people

[yay-bunnies]

christian bunny: god himself guided my faithful .nose to this leafs 🥬

agnostic bunny: it's impossible to know how i found thid yumy food ☘️

athiest bunny: the material confitions of my sniffy nose allowed me to find a berries 🫐

[ashhx2]

in the senate straight it killing it. And by “it”, let's just say. My Julius

[sawbuckplus]

[gummypaint]

here is your bunny :)

[prahty]

Lets fucking gooooo, so good. thank you

[carlithiel]

The X-Files + Scully’s Darkness Falls Jacket

[delightfullyvague]

(source)

[badbloodalltheway]

Still my favorite X-Files post on this whole damn site.

[megmca]

Peak 90’s outerwear.

[william-snekspeare]

working memory bad 💚

[william-snekspeare]

ALTERNATE ENDING:

there are lots of coping mechanisms out there but this is the only method that (sometimes) works on my wretched brain. can't remember? predict the Future

[crittizen]

this is a poem

i couldn’t not draw this

[i-say-ok]

ok…!

[blackstarcafe]

i literally cant find a version of this post without the comic in the notes, and the original post was edited, so . hi, im the guy who made that comic 4 years ago. it has been killing me the whole time because i changed the words by mistake and did not realize until after it had already taken off. so now, 4 years later, i have decided to remake it so i can sleep at night

here it is with the right words

[halflifegifs]

Honest to god I could write entire books on the fucked up little micro societies that exist solely in isolated gmod servers

[spooks-burgerton]

my buddy and I were crawling some servers on gmod one day, just dinking around and being mild nuisances. we found one server where everyone had some ridiculous rank/title–various mythical creatures and wizards and stuff. We bothered someone badly enough (probably made a big mess of barrels or something) that we got put in jail, but we weren’t really interested in playing gmod as much as just goofing off, so we hung around the server for a while. the residents were chatting pretty casually, until someone, in a frantic tone, says “Janus is coming! We need to get this place cleaned up!” Janus logs in, and he has the title of God. Someone sheepishly asks “hey what’s up Janus?” Janus replies with an ear-splittingly loud buzzing static noise that drowns every sound on the server out. me and my buddy absolutely lost our minds

[one-time-i-dreamt]

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

[red-mercer]

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

[sreegs]

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

Yahoo’s grand plan for Tumblr was to turn it into a “next-generation PDF”

They didn't really get it.

[noctumsolis]

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

[sreegs]

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

[virdigrishammer]

you left out the best part of that article. the poor yahoo emplyees at those meetings were just as confused as the rest of us.

[ralfmaximus]

Everyone is right to dunk on Yahoo and "tumblr is the new PDF" because yeah, everything about that era was stupid.

But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.

But first, some context.

See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.

Adobe changed all that with PDF.

Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.

Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.

Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.

Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.

Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.

If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.

(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)

So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.

The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.

"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"

Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".

@sreegs or @cyle or @jv can probably explain it better, but that's what I remember hearing at the time. Please feel free to correct me.

[cyle]

the details here aren't correct, but as i've said many times, yeah, the PDF thing was in direct response to the Neue Post Format, which is how post and reply content is stored on tumblr. it's not as dumb as it sounds. (without that context, it does sound dumb.)

[hugtheteadrinkthekitten]

Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.

[dipdieddreams]

This makes sense, I think.

They saw in tumblr potential for a universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms, and potentially becomes the dominant form of interconnectivity between platforms.

Except they fumbled it massively?

That’s my understanding of the above.

People frequently ask me why I’m still on tumblr and one of the things I tell them is the fact you can post anything on here. It’s not limited to one form of media. And yes you can post videos and reels or whatever now. But not back then. And gif sets are still best on tumblr. Sorry.

[athelind]

Look, at this point, I'm not going to blame Yahoo! or any of this hellsite (affectionate)'s other owners for dropping this ball.

A "universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms"? We had that in the 1990s, or the seeds of it, back when the internet was focused on protocols and not platforms. "Web 2.0" was a deliberate move away from that, made possible by some really terrible legislation.

No matter how good Neue Post Format may be, and no matter who was helming the company, that level of interoperability was never going to fly in the face of unified opposition from Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

The other big social media sites don't want interoperability: they want to lock you in to extract value from you while providing you with an increasingly-miserable experience. If you can read their feeds and connect with your friends on their sites from any number of other sites, then they have no hold over you. This is called "switching cost".

Fed up with the ads on Heebee? Tired of the algorithmic bias on Gumpy? Why would you put up with it if you could just go to Poob and get the exact same contact, and stay in touch with all of your friends, relatives, and moots?

If you want a more thorough (and certainly more articulate) discussion of these ideas, check out Cory Doctorow's book, Enshittification -- or just read his Tumblr blog, @mostlysignssomeportents. I've been reading his stuff for 25 years now, and he has thoroughly warped my mind opened my eyes.

[wingdingle]

attention to all dashcon attendees

someone urinated into the ballpit while it was empty and posted it in the tag

stay out of the ballpit

[wingdingle]

there are people who think this is a joke

this is not a joke

please stay out of the ballpit for the safety of your health

[defunctblog1]

Ancient scribes detailing horrible events

[thetyrannosaur]