Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It’s hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.
Basic Features of the Site:
Reblogs drive the entire site. If you’d upvote something on Reddit, you’d reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you’re not required to.
The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
You can send an ask to someone, and it’ll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don’t want.
Tags aren’t actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can’t use quotation marks (“) or commas in them without fucking it up
You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you’ll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.
Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don’t:
Very old posts (I’m talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There’s no such thing as a post being "too old” to reblog
Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
You can screenshot someone’s tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called “peer review”
Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not “creepy” like it is seen as on other sites.
Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a “yes, and?” attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say “I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd” and nobody gives a shit.
General Etiquette:
Don’t try to do epic clapbacks here, you’ll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask “hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?” and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It’s generally polite to oblige, but “no” is still reasonable.
Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don’t get involved in it. Ever.
Don’t put fandom tags or jokes on someone’s posts about serious matters or personal shit
You’re responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don’t like, that’s probably on you. Don’t be afraid to unfollow.
Follower count doesn’t matter much here and you don’t have to make yours known if you don’t want to.
Reblog, don’t repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn’t “steal” engagement like Twitter retweets.
If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There’s a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.
Tips:
Get XKit Rewritten if you’re on desktop, it’s a really helpful extension
In the little drop-down menu next to the ‘Post now’ button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It’s good for spreading stuff out over time.
You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.
“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.
Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.
Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.
Thank you that’s…very disturbing
It’s not my fault you’re human.
Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.
You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.
Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”
“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”
“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”
At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)
You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.
And that’s what a human is!
Well, there’s another few steps, of course.
Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.
A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,
and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“
“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)
“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”
“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”
And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“
“Like an egg.”
“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”
“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”
“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”
“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”
You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.
“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.
“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.
“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”
Everyone waits.
“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”
Everyone looks uncomfortable.
“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”
You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.
The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”
And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”
That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.
It has been MONTHS, @elodieunderglass, and I am still mumbling “furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship” under my breath as a comfort phrase, and the FUCKING INDIGNITY that it came from this godforsaken post about THE HORRIBLE WETNESS OF MAMMALS!
“The horrible wetness of mammals” would make a great band name.
“hold hope, internally, at 37.5 degrees” and “Mammals internalize everything (eggs, grudges)” Now live permanently in my vocabulary
1. Oh, it’s about birds, not people. *tosses aside a rock*
2. How were the birds picking up the bott- oh.
3. Cracking open the boys with a cold one
…and with regret, I have to admit that “Stand by the ancient beer bottle when the thrush knocks and the setting sun with the last light of St. Gambrinus’s day will shine upon the keyhole of the Lost Brewery of the Gods” wouldn’t have quite the same cachet…
[Czechs after a successful referendum on their way to annex Kaliningrad Region from Russia]
A friend shared this in the group chat and I had to look it up….
[Petition to announce a referendum on the annexation of Kaliningrad to the Czech republic
1 246 signatures (1 357 by the time of posting)
Kaliningrad, in Czech known as Královec,is a Russian city founded in honor of the Czech king Přemysl Otakar II. During its existence the city has belonged to Prussia, Poland, Germany and now Russia. We believe, that Russia has had its fun with Kaliningrad for long enough and that it is time for another country to take its turn in owning it, as has been the tradition for the 800 years of its existence. And since the city has been founded in honor of a Czech king, it should go in the hands of its rightful owner - Czech republic.
As Russia has shown with Crimea and now with east Ukraine, it is perfectly fine to march into another country’s territory, announce a referendum and then annex that territory. This has given us a unique opportunity to expand Czech territory and finally gain access to the sea. So we ask the government of Czech republic to finally send soldiers to Kaliningrad, announce a referendum that will end with 98% positive vote for joining Czech republic, and then annex Kaliningrad and rename it to Královec.]
[Slovak, Trnava: And when we reunite Czechoslovakia we will have access to the sea!]
[Czech, Olešník: Why shouldn’t we march up to another’s territory and annex it if others can]
[Czech, Prague: Signing, because Kaliningrad has always belonged to Czech republic just like trdelník and dill sauce]
(neither trdelník nor dill sauce is originally Czech)
[Czech, Prague 3: The area is inhabited by a czech-speaking minority suffering discrimination from the locals. For the temporary Russian population we will create humanitarian corridors to Belarus. We aren’t barbarians]
[Polish, Katowice: Hit the insta story Make Life Harder…. Now it’s going to be a flood of Polish signatures, because to Königsberg for Czech beer we’d love to drop by!]
[Signature from Netherlands]
[Three signatures from Poland]
[Three signatures from Poland, two from Czech republic, one from Ukraine]
[Polish, Poznań: We cheer the Czechs on for access to the sea]
[Polish: Gliwice: Yes. There will be good beer in the north. I like this]
[Polish: Kraków: For the glory of the great dumpling empire]
[Polish: Poznań: Signing, Czechs are such cool neighbors I want us to share more borders]
[Czech, Prague: Královec was never independent, if not for Přemysl Otakar it would perhaps not even exist. By denazification and demilitarization we will ensure living space for thousands of future Czechs as well as access to the sea, for which we have a divine historic right, just like Shakespeare has wrote]
(Shakespeare spelled phonetically for comedic value)
[Czech, Prague: Not enough as reparations for 40 years of terror but as the first payback it should do]
[Polish, Straszyn: In addition I ask for Moravian wine, Studentská and Kofola in every shop in Pomerania]
[Slovak, Dulov: Signing this petition, because Russia has shown us that when you want something you should take it even if you’ll look like a total bully and a moron. So why not, let our Czech brothers have this one]
[Czech, Prague 9: More legitimate than Russian referendums]
[Czech, Brno: According to Putin it’s perfectly legal so why not?]
[Polish, Olsztyn: As a representative of the Polish nation, I think it will be better for us to have Czechs in the South and North, and Russian friends as far as possible, preferably in some dark Siberian ass end of nowhere]
I have been cackling the entire way to the train station
Here in Nova Scotia there’s a pumpkin race in October called the Windsor Regatta where farmers grow pumpkins that big (or bigger!), hollow them out and row them across Lake Pesaquid. It’s about half a miles race.
It’s been a hot minute since I went to one but it’s wild. Highly reccomend looking up some of the paint jobs on the pumpkins.
ALT
