#a functional hellsite?? imagine

[offonaherosjourney]

Yet another PSA for Reddit Refugees

How to use the Search bar to find old Tumblr posts

HAHAHAHAHA YOU DON'T

Ok, but really, how can I track that one post that a friend showed me seven years ago?

By being VERY LUCKY and willing to invest A LOT OF TIME. If there's something you really want to find, here are your best bets, in no particular order:

If you remember specific keywords, try a google search. However, even if you get a hit, the link won't take you to the post, it will take you to the main page of the blog. Have fun dumpster diving (affectionate) in their Archive tab.

If the post belonged to a specific fandom, try finding blogs that only reblog stuff about that fandom and have fun dumpster diving (affectionate) in their Archive tab.

Plead to the void and hope the void answers. Make a post giving as much info as you can about the post you are trying to find and hope someone else remembers it and knows where to find it or has better luck than you tracking it down.

Go to r/tumblr or r/curatedtumblr while you still can and try asking there if anyone remembers the post and has a link.

Learn how to code. Get hired by Tumblr. Fix the Search engine. Submit your resignation.

[shapoopy178]

"Likes don't do anything" wrong likes give me serotonin don't be a hater

[shy-mouse]

twitter is apparently punishing users for *checks notes* using their website too much

[alteredphoenix]

Hey Muskrat you proud, tech-illiterate asshole, get your fucking shit together so I can get back to clicking Follow on the people I want to see on my platform >:V

[borealtwilight]

i can now see my own posts (whether reblogged by me or created by me) in my dash again

what gives, tumblr???

....so am i the only one who can no longer see posts i've reblogged on my dash or?

like the posts are showing in my blog but they're not in my dash feed at ALL.

eta: i also cannot see this post on my dash.

[riacte]

Funny how Tumblr is usually more "positive" compared to Twitter and Reddit when it comes to fan reception of things such as Hermitcraft / Life series / MCC, yet most CCs (naturally, and rightfully!) do not come here often because they have to brave the waters of shipping and other Tumblr "weirdness". Tumblr is for fans by fans.

Maybe some MCC participants don't like seeing predictions and tier lists on Reddit. Hiii, we don't really have that on Tumblr. Just fanart and clips of Scar saying "dong" and people unable to get over teams from 2020 and writing found family fanfiction. And Tumblr usually has overwhelmingly positive reactions to HC / Life series stuff. BUT we have the fanfic and the shipping etc etc.

Tumblr may be a hellsite, but the discourse / negativity is kiiiiiiind of more contained compared to Twitter and Reddit. Like, it exists. Of course it exists. But it appears less frequently on main? And the blocking function is better here compared to Twitter.

Pick your poison! Tumblr has the shipping and fanfic and all of that, but Reddit has the criticism. Reddit has some fanart, but basically no fanfic and God Forbid, shipping. Here on Tumblr, we love your stuff so sincerely and deeply that we sometimes make the block people kiss and are inspired to write novels. But please do not see our kissing fanart or our fics or else we'll die.

You know how some MCC participants don't really like tier lists / predictions because it adds stress? Imagine if that entire genre moved off Reddit to Tumblr so fans could still continue to do that and have fun with each other away from CCs' eyes (yes, exactly like how shippers do with shipping). And the MCC Reddit becomes the equivalent of the Tumblr maintags with only appreciative / helpful posts and fanart and skins (but still no fanfic lol). And maybe all the unconstructive criticism / bashing from the Life series Reddit can get moved to dedicated tags on Tumblr, so fans could still discuss that with less risk of upsetting CCs (yes, once again exactly what shippers do, or like how people bitch about petty things in private circles as not to bitch on main). Idk, just throwing thoughts out here on this fandom hellhole of a webbed site.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

Hi! I'm currently doing my MA in archaeology (European Prehistory specialization) and I love it. I always thought I'd get my Masters and dip, but lately I've been seriously contemplating getting a PhD. I love learning and studying my topic and I'm having so much fun at my uni and suddenly starting my working career at 22 doesn't sound very appealing anymore. However, the idea of applying to a PhD program is very overwhelming (luckily where I want to apply has a pretty cohesive sign up step by step), still the idea of funding (especially) and having to write a proposal and possibly getting rejected from the place I've spend the last three and half years walking around is very overwhelming. How can I have that be not so overwhelming to the point of giving up bc if sounds like too much? Do I need to worry about funding that much? Is it expensive?

(I tried to find your advice masterpost before sending this ask to check if you'd already talked abt it, but I couldn't find a working link, sorry)

Thanks in advance :D

Hi dirtling,

First, here's a link to my advice master list—sorry that wasn't working for you. Our blue hellsite is fickle like that.

From what you say, it sounds like you have a great attitude for starting the journey to a PhD. Ultimately, the love of learning and a dedication to the field are the most important parts. The application and the proposal and the funding are daunting for everyone, but they are doable. I find that breaking things down into bite sized pieces and establishing your sense of self worth outside of academia are critical.

Now I feel the need to point out that my experience and advice come from a uniquely American viewpoint, and may not be applicable to European schools at all. Europeans please feel free to chime in with your own advice!

The very first thing you should do is talk to your advisor. Please send them an email right now if you have not already done so! Your (potential) advisor is going to be your champion in any sort of application process going forward. If you want to continue at the same university you're already at, your advisor is the single best person to help walk you through that process. Even if you wind up going somewhere else, you're going to need to make inroads with another advisor at a new program.

Finally: grad school is expensive (at least in the United Stated). However, many programs will have tuition waivers and assistantships that they offer their grad students because if everybody had to pay for it, nobody except the very rich would be able to afford to go to grad school. Exactly how affordable it is depends on the cost of living in your area and how much the school pays you (and whether you're able to work outside to supplement that income if need be).

Honestly, I think you've already done the hard part by getting into (and nearly completing) a Master's program. That's a great step towards proving to PhD programs that you have what it takes, and it should give you a decent idea about finances. What are yours like right now? How about your peers? I would imagine there isn't going to be a vast amount of difference from a MA to a PhD, and in the US a PhD is sometimes cheaper because they're funded while MAs often are not.

There will be differences from a MA to a PhD. Doctoral students are going to be expected to take on larger magnitudes of their own research and function more independently, but a good advisor and program should help you through that process. Again, the key is to take things piece by piece. Start with talking to your advisor and maybe the graduate program director. Take a look at that step by step guide with them and break it into separate tasks you need to do.

Don't psych yourself out about this too much. One thing at a time.

-Reid

[greater-than-the-sword]

Op of this blocked me but i thought it was important

So I left out their part of the post but copied everything under it

quote, “

Just saying: Tumblr loses several million of dollars per month. It has been losing millions of dollars per month for ... years. We are not even close of changing that and make this site profitable yet.

And if that doesn't change, you may not believe it, but tumblr will close. Back in 2019, if Automattic hasn't bought it, I'm pretty convinced Verizon would have closed before the end of the year. This time, once Automattic says "we can't keep losing millions per month on this"... I don't think there will be anyone else willing to buy this hellsite, even for a single dollar.

Personally, I would prefer Tumblr to be paid by its own users and not being reliant on advertising. I work here, I could have almost everything for free, but I pay my own blazed posts and crab gifts because of this. But we are FAR from getting enough income from people subscribing, blazing or buying gifts. FAR.

And we are not talking about Facebook-like greed here, "Tumblr wants to squeeze us to make even more money!!!". We are talking about Automattic keeping Tumblr alive for three years already, losing millions and even if doing it costs a significant percentage of the income of the company. And no company would let something like that happens forever.

So if you like tumblr, if you enjoy this boiling cauldron of feral goblins, boicot advertisement if you want, but then toss a coin to your tumblr each month.

GIF by imagine-all-the-things

And it's ok if you can't, but then please, let people, or companies, blaze their posts in peace. If they bother you so much, just install an ad blocker.

But if you are actively trying to make advertisers to flee Tumblr, or bullying people who blaze posts, you are actively working towards the closing of this site. So why don't you just move your shit to TikTok or wherever and stop trying to ruin this place for the rest of us?

jv

Oh I have looked through the notes and holy f-ck, how does some people even function in the outside world?

There are several variations of "we have to keep this site unprofitable!!". And holy shit. Christ on a stake.   Forgive my French, but me cago en la puta hostia como se puede ser tan corto.

Repeat with me:

You.Don't.Keep.Any.Site.Unprofitable.

Because if it's unprofitable,

you don't get to keep it for long.

Full stop.

Do you know why Tumblr has stayed around for so long while being unprofitable??

Because it had been run by FOUR DIFFERENT COMPANIES IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

So each one of those companies tried to make it profitable for two, three years and failed. And at that point, they just sold it to someone else to try.

The last time, Verizon sold it to Automattic for the business equivalent of a jar of peanut butter and a half-full cola bottle. Because they were going to close it anyway, so better to get that than nothing. And you know why Automattic could get it for cheap? Because. No. One. Else. Offered. Anything. Verizon announced very publicly they were trying to sell it and they got one (1) offer. Because purchasing Tumblr means you are purchasing a thing that puts you several million in debt PER MONTH.

So can you picture, can you imagine, what it will happen if the current owners decide that they can't keep having this thing that costs them so much money per month to maintain?? It has been owned by Automattic for three years already, longer than what it was owned by Yahoo or Verizon. Can you imagine what it would happen if they decide to stop losing money on this thing??

No, there won't be any new owner.

And no, there won't be any fucking tumblr anymore.

akorah

I see your point. The problem is we've seen every single social media site turn into an algorithmic hellscape once they started having major advertisers like this. How can we be confident Tumblr won't do the same? How can we be confident that Tumblr won't get dollar signs in their eyes with these brands escaping Twitter, and start changing the site to accommodate them? We've heard promises before from other social media platforms that things will get 'better' once the money comes in, and we've been betrayed by algorithms and absolutely heinous business practices.

jv

Because the presence of big brands or not is not the symptom of being an algorithmic hellscape or not. Data collection is.

Big brands were advertising on the internet way before the hyper focused ads and data mining became The Way of paying for internet services.

If tumblr starts asking you to fill a profile with your personal info, ask you to connect your contacts, etc, that's the symptom of a turn towards an algorithmic advertising business model. But Tumblr could have done that at any point in the last 10 years and become a money-making machine like the other major social networks. And it didn't happen, for a reason: neither the current management nor the past one wanted to do that and they always have been trying to make Tumblr the platform that manages to succeed while respecting its user's privacy.

You know, I personally don't care about Marvel, but I have gotten blazed posts by Tor books and I was delighted. And if you think about it, marvel blazing its posts is EXACTLY what we want to happen all over the internet. Being realistic, we are not going to make this site to be 100% user funded for a long while, so ads are inevitable. That being the case, what's a better option than the brands sending their ads to everyone, without any segmentation, paying for N impressions and that's it. That was how internet ads were before Google and Facebook became the big brother and started selling our info to advertisers so they could convince your uncle to embrace fascism.

And if Tumblr manages to get to profitability with a mix of "old school ads" and users paying for stuff, we will be demonstrating that there is another way to make a social platform sustainable without it being a facade for a user-data mining gig. But if we boycott every single other way to make money here, not only we would kill Tumblr, but we will also make it the case study proving that privacy invasion and data selling is the one and only way to make money with any social network.

jv

@catfluff

I already wrote about this in another post, but let me do a quick explanation of what's going on here. Before Automattic/tumblr, I used to work in an ad network, so I learned quite a bit about online advertising and how it works.

So…

Why do I get ads that seem to be tailored to me on Tumblr if Tumblr doesn't sell my data 101

So. Most of the ads you see on Tumblr are not really something a company contacts Tumblr directly to put in here. There's is this thing that's called "ad exchanges" that is where a big chunk of internet advertising comes from. Basically, when you have an app, or a site, and want to put advertising on it, you reach a deal with one, or usually several, of those ad exchanges to 'sell' your ad space through them.

Basically, they are like ebay, but for ad space and only used by computers. When you are browsing tumblr and the app decides that is time to show you an ad, what it does is pinging one of these ad exchanges telling it "hey, I have space for an ad of these characteristics (size, format, etc)". Then the ad exchange put the space 'on sale', all the potential advertisers bid for it, and the one with the higher bid sends the ad you are going to be shown. All this bidding happens in milliseconds, so there are a lot of folks like me who work on making computers smart enough to win those bids over other competing advertisers, etc.

The thing is that when you are one of the services that are bidding for that ad space, you get some data from the ad exchange so you can tell if you want to bid or not. The most basic info, the one you get from apps that don't really share personal info, is just things like the ip address, the advertising id from your phone, maybe your general geographic area (mostly, your country), the languages your browser or your phone accepts. Then, if the app is doing some spying on you, you may get some extra data: Your gender, your age, all kinds of "profile" info advertisers can use to decide if they want to bid for that ad space or not.

Now, the advertisers are continuously getting this info and there's really no way to tell them what to do with it. And they are smart enough to not just let it waste. Every time they get one of those ad opportunities, they store the data, even if they don't win the bid. And then… they can do things with that data.

Imagine you use, for example, an app that's mining your data and selling it to advertisers through an ad exchange. The advertiser gets the opportunity to show you an ad, and whether they bid or not, they store the data they get. Your ip, your ids, the profiling data the app is sending to them, everything.

Now, you close the crappy spying app and decide to spend some time browsing this hellsite. Tumblr also wants to show you an ad, so it sends the request to the ad exchange with the minimum information possible: your ip, your phone unique id, your language. The advertiser gets pinged to be told about this chance to show you an ad, but they can't profile you, so it's not particularly interesting. Unless… oh yeah, they have a record from 10 minutes ago that matches your ip! And in that record, they have that you are in Calatayud, Spain, that you are a woman between 25 and 30 years, and that you like dogs. So … yeah, they decide to bid for the tumblr ad, and send you an ad based on the information about you they have recorded. Bam. You get an ad about a pet shop next to your street and you go "WTF, tumblr is selling my data!". Fair, but not really what happened.

The best example of this is when you travel internationally. Let's say you are in Germany, and your phone is full of german-language ads. But you turn it off and take a plane to Portugal. When you land, you turn your phone on again, and, for a while, you are still getting german ads all over. Why? Because the advertisers stored your phone id back when you still were in Germany, so if they are sending you an ad in an app that's not really sharing much about you, they are just checking you up in their databases. And it will take a while for them to get enough information about you for telling that you are now in Portugal and adjust the ads they serve to you.

How is this even legal?!?!? well, if you are in the US … mostly everything is legal there. If you are in the UE, they are technically not storing any personal information about you (because IPs or phone ids aren't considered personal info), so there is no link to your name anywhere, they are ok to store all that data about you (if you ask me, that's A HELL of a technicality). Everywhere else, I really don't know the legal framework to talk about it.

So… yeah. That's it. That's the thing. That's how an advertiser can profile you even on tumblr, even if tumblr doesn't tell them much about you to them.

deactivated-662bce

One correction: IP address is protected personal information under GDPR.

But yeah, tl;dr

tumblr costs millions to operate and is not profitable

3rd parties WILL harvest your data wherever you go, whether it's legal or not (something something Cambridge Analytica)

use Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, Ghostery, some Ad Block, VPN, whatever

enabled Do Not Track in your browser and phone

reset your phone's Advertiser ID every couple of weeks anyway

also remember that an INSANE amount of information you share (and even which don't share!) on facebook, youtube, instagram, google, tiktok, etc all get scraped, processed, and sold to third parties

even if you never say "I like cats" on facebook, but interact with a lot of cat photos, facebook WILL KNOW THAT YOU LIKE CATS, and WILL SELL THIS INFORMATION. Tumblr doesn't - but if your blog is public, anyone can scrape it and derive this information themselves.

by default FACEBOOK FOLLOWS YOU on every site that has the cursed Like button, fb comment section, or similar widgets! Disqus, Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, all similar embedded widgets harvest your data as well!

TIKTOK READS WHAT YOU TYPE INTO OTHER APPS, UNINSTALL THAT SPYWARE JUNK RIGHT NOW

you joke that "your FBI agent this or that" but NSA genuinely has tons of information and a psychological profile on every single one of you, whether it's obtained legally or (most often) not. They know if you're a climate activist. They know if you joke about blowing up . You Are On A List.

"Over 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency". [source]" <- this was in 1976, long before Internet, what do you think they have now?

do not blame Tumblr for trying to survive financially

pay for ad-free tumblr, $40 a year is very likely less money than facebook+insta+tiktok+youtube+reddit makes off of you every year

this is not a hellsite, this is a hellworld, and Tumblr (the company; not your blog as such) is somehow the smallest privacy concern that you can possibly have (today)

[redhead-reporter]

12. what roleplay trends do you remember from the year you started tumblr rp? how did you feel about those trends?

º ✧ 。 @reputahtion had a question for the mun !

oh GOD. talk about ancient history ... i first joined the tumblr rpc back in the early 2010s. in the GLEE fandom of all places (hi @theoriginalbadass icb we found each other again) so i'll preface this answer by saying a LOT of the "trends" i remember were heavily influenced by where on this hellsite i was. and if you can't tell by the tone of my disclaimer? most of them were BAD. but i'll try and be balanced here by giving one negative and one positive 😊

the GOOD: 👏 magic 👏 anons 👏 HELLO ??? i will never forgive the hate filled assholes who forced most people (myself included) to turn off the anon function on their blogs for their own safety because this was the one true JOY of the rpc. i remember having so much fucking fun being on BOTH sides of the equation when silly hours popped off - spamming my mutuals AND being spammed by them. it was deeply UNSERIOUS and led to all kinds of crack filled chaos and i just miss it a lot okay ???

the GROSS: bruh, the whole era of celebrity rp. not VERSES, which are fine (hey i have one). i mean where like, people weren't playing the characters from a show they were playing the actual real life ACTORS. i came across so fucking many rp blogs of the glee cast members where they were shipping with other cast members and. dude. i shouldn't have to tell you that you don't get to write REAL FUCKING PEOPLE in rp ?!?! that's so gross and creepy and i can't imagine how these poor people would feel if they EVER found out about it. i mean it was bad enough that it happened in speculation in the tabloids but people PRETENDING TO BE THEM ON THE INTERNET WRITING SMUT BETWEEN THEM AND THEIR COWORKERS ??? 🤮🤮🤮

fuck, i still see it sometimes and it needs to DIE.

[greenhappyseed]

Honne is more about expressing one's ugly feelings to family and close ones rather than one's true self and as Pikahlua pointed out feelings can be complicated and messy. I don't see Toga getting involved at least not on panel because Dabi has been saved but it's also just the very start just like how Shoto being saved by Deku was only the start but then he had to go on a long journey. This is Dabi's start line but he has a long journey in front of him and yes Toga will be apart of that but not in a way where she magically changes his mind but more in a way like how others such as Shoto's friends were apart of his own journey as much as his family was.

Honne isn’t just negative feelings or emotions too “ugly” to show to polite society. Honne is what someone feels free to express among family/friends instead of what they feel they must repress due to societal pressure. Honne is a person’s true feelings and desires, regardless of the content of those desires. For kind, harmonious, polite characters, honne could well be “ugly” feelings. But when the character is a villain? Let’s look at some panels.

Is this Toya’s honne or tatemae? Telling people they’re useless, garbage, kindling, etc? Is this something he feels free to express?

How about this, when he’s with his family? Are these feelings he feels free to express?

Now, how about this? Does Toya feel free to express this? Notice how much here is dismissed as “he’s lost his mind!” and how the rest is seemingly inside Toya’s head.

Which brings us to this panel in 390. Toya is telling his whole family, to their faces, that he wants to die and take them with him. I don’t doubt for one second that this is what Toya wants. But is it REALLY the #1 thing he wants? Based on the panels above, I think it’s clear that his true desire is for his family to see him, listen to him, and be proud of him — you know, like the eldest son of a functional family! He just thinks it’s too late to have that, so he’s going for plan B instead. He’s getting the attention he wants one way or another (more on that in a bit).

Fatalism and inflexibility are perfectly on brand for Toya, so yes, he needs his family to show him it’s NOT too late. But I think he might need something more to truly heal, just like Shoto did. Until the match with Izuku at the Sports Festival, Shoto was determined to deny his father by never using his fire in battle. Afterwards, Shoto kept his determination to be different from his father, but he became much more flexible in how to use his power and how to view his relationship with Endeavor. Someone needs to play the Izuku role for Toya, and given Ochako’s lingering regret about not saving Bakugo, I was guessing that Ochako might intervene to bring Himiko Toga to Toya. If having fun imagining what-ifs for MHA bothers you, then you don’t have to read or interact. There are lots of great MHA blogs on this hellsite!

But I do hope you can see through these panels how rudeness and anger aren’t always indicative of honne. For a character like Bakugo, his rudeness and delinquent posturing are just that. They hide his true heroic honne. For a character like Toya, his rudeness and his desire to harm his family are how he actually feels (honne), but they are ALSO a form of posturing (tatemae). He knows he is playing the role of villain and is determined to do so in dramatic fashion. Toya wants to burn everything to “leave a mark on this world,” which sounds like honne — but that’s only because Toya hasn’t gotten his family to see him, hear him, and love him, which is what he really wants. I’m not sure when he will feel free to express that sentiment, but I do hope it’s soon.

[offonaherosjourney]

"Aww, it's so cute that Tumblr users keep old posts circulating". Thanks, it's because the search feature is irremediably broken

[insipid-drivel]

Y2K’s Forgotten Heroes And The Looming Threat of 2038

I feel like sharing some information about the 90′s to people here. Particularly about Y2K, aka Internet Armageddon That Didn’t Happen In 2000 Thanks To People You Haven’t Heard Of Like My Mom.

My mom, among her teammates and people tasked with similar roles to her, never get any recognition for the work they did in keeping computers across the globe functioning in 2000. She was a project manager among a group of overstressed, underappreciated people that worked at a company called Intel that are responsible for preventing a global societal collapse in 1999. Y2K being allowed to happen the way people thought it would (and really, it was going to be worse than even Intel could forecast and they still don’t know how bad it would’ve been) would’ve undoubtedly destroyed the fabric of the internet in 1999 and 2000, and therefore, no social media platforms like this Hellsite right here. She’s actually on tumblr and has been following the Muskrat’s destruction of Twitter with mute, techie horror.

In the years leading up to 2000, the world was panicking on its tenderhooks due to the looming crisis that was Y2K. For those of you that are either too young to remember or just didn’t know about it, Y2K was a big deal. A planet-alteringly big deal. A “We don’t know how much would’ve crashed and burned in our world’s society and economy if we’d ignored it,” big deal. tl;dr: All computer software around the world wasn’t programmed to have their internal clocks transfer to January 1st, 2000. Instead, what was going to happen was every functioning computer in the world running Intel software - on New Years Eve, 1999 - would change calendars to January 1st, 1900.

This was a catastrophic prospect for everyone impacted by the computer age. People receiving social security benefits and paying off formal loans with interest rates would suddenly receive benefits and payment rates documented in 1900. NORAD, the international weather-tracking service kids use to track Santa on Christmas Eve and that warns people of natural disasters like hurricanes, would have gone dark with no timestamps to indicate major shifts in weather. Entire governments would lose all digital contact with one another. The WHO and CDC would go dark. Hospital networks would’ve gone down. The Stock Market would’ve gone to shit. No one in the world would’ve been immune. If Japan suffered a massive, horrific famine due directly to the 1929 crash of the US Stock Market before the Internet, imagine what would’ve happened if the very screens that displayed the global stock market records to major metropolitan cities around the world just... stopped working in 2000. Went dark. Blue-screened. An entire system built upon split-second trades, bids, buyouts, and reports for trade around the world would’ve shut down for a lot longer than just a split second.

By the time it was almost the year 2000, the Internet as we knew it was like a gigantic, invisible, planet-sized Rube Goldberg machine that a comparatively microscopic group of people were tasked with repairing before it could fail in ways they couldn’t foretell, without being able to live-test any of their solutions. It was “Fuck it, we’re doing it live!” to the extreme. Most of the programmers that had built the infrastructure for the Internet and computer technology as we recognize it, all the way back in the 60′s, were retired, dead, no longer working in those sectors, or simply hadn’t kept up with changes in the technology and couldn’t be brought up to speed to help in time. Even the highest echelons of the management at Intel itself didn’t really consider Y2K to be a big concern, except for my mom’s department. I still have lingering anxiety and trauma from hearing the sound of a woman’s voice shouting with panic and anger, because she was the one literally shouting into her phone to “Nah, we’ll be fine,” Luddite tech giants that NO, NOTHING WAS FINE AND EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO BE VERY BAD from the time I was born in 1992 to January 1st, 2000.

Any programs and companies relying upon Microsoft software, even Word and Excel, would have either suffered catastrophic errors, or ceased to function altogether, too. The team handling Y2K didn’t know how bad it could’ve actually gotten at the time, and they were still responsible for stopping it. To this day, my mom and the rest of the team members that worked with her can’t actually say how much of our technological lives would’ve been destroyed if they’d done nothing. The potential destruction was literally unfathomable. The global economy relied on computers and tech by the time Y2K became a major topic of concern to experts, much less casual everyday users.

This was before WiFi. This was before smartphones. HotSpots? The stuff of cyberpunk fantasies. This was before most cell phones had a text feature; you carried your cell phone and a pager separately, and if you thought character limits on Twitter were bad? lol. Ever had to make a collect call in a phone booth? Do you have any idea how badly we’d freak each other out over the thought of the germs on those things? If you couldn’t afford a collect call, which cost for every minute you were talking, you had to get creative and learn to say who you were and where you were to someone in the, “Caller, at the tone, please state only your name, beep” 3-second window of free time you got to contact someone.

You could’ve been stuck in a bad neighborhood at 3am. Taxis didn’t pick up hitchhikers like they do in New York, and you could screw off if you didn’t have cash on you; credit cards were mostly used at malls and supermarkets, and retail workers from the 90′s to this day still have the question “Credit or debit?” burned into their souls. You needed coins as well as bills and credit cards. It was still common to pay for groceries with a paper check, because you carried a checkbook around with you everywhere as an adult. There was no RideShare service with anyone but a serial killer, because yeah, serial killers loved targeting stranded pedestrians back then and that’s why nobody hitchhikes anymore. Homicidal freaks like The Green River Killer (Gary Ridgway) and BTK (Dennis Rader) were still at large and unidentified. It was thanks to revolutions in tech and computers that they were caught at all; BTK having been busted thanks to metadata and TIME STAMPS on a floppy disk.

AOL was still one of the top ISPs and email services to the United States. You would receive installation CDs for AOL in children’s cereal boxes like prizes. Dial-up was still a normal part of life. Blockbuster was renting out Nintendo 64 games along with VHS movies. DVD players were revolutionary. Barnes & Noble and Borders were still competing. The FBI still warned you at the start of a movie that piracy was illegal while almost every VHS had a “record” setting you could use with impunity. Amazon was primarily an online bookstore. J.K. Rowling was just some closeted TERF that just published her first weird, popular British fairytale about some kid that went to a school for wizards where goblins were real but black people weren’t. You could get a copy at the Scholastic Book Faire if your school library didn’t have it. MySpace wasn’t a thing. YouTube didn’t exist. Cell phones were big and sturdy enough to be used as a lethal weapon. AskJeeves was one of the most popular search engines because, fuck it, Jeeves was a dapper butler and asking him questions was fun. A phone call could disconnect you from the internet unless you paid for multiple lines. DSL was seen as the newest, hottest, next-gen concept. The World Trade Center was still standing and present in the generic backdrops of nearly every daytime or New York-based news or talk show. Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye, and Bob Ross were amazing children on PBS between episodes of Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street while people were shell-shocked over Princess Diana’s death. Pluto was still classified as a planet. Wishbone was a Jack Russel Terrier that reenacted famous literary adventures.

Germany was being cajoled into reunifying after Mr. Gorbachev agreed to take the wall down. Namibia was a new country and no longer part of South Africa. We were losing our minds over photos from the brand new Hubble Space Telescope. Yugoslavia existed. Czechoslovakia was splitting. We were learning to call the USSR “Russia” again. Yemen was being unified. The Human Genome Project had just been announced. The Cold War was finally over!

Meanwhile, my mom worked as a project manager at Intel specifically tasked with replacing and/or reprogramming any and all Intel computer software with extended time stamps past 1999, for the entire technological world. You’re here, right now, reading this very post in part thanks to her and her team’s exhaustive years of work to change and update the entire world’s software. If it required anything from Intel to function or had to co-function with Intel, it was part of my mom’s job to beat the literal countdown to January 1st, 2000.

If she and her team failed, it was lights out. She was bouncing me on her knee while fielding calls from everywhere from Silicon Valley, California, to London, England, to Beirut, Lebanon, to Tokyo, Japan. My every day around her was nothing but tech-talk when it was actually in English. Those incredibly intelligent, clever, gifted men and women from around the world spared not a single second for themselves when it came to their singular, united focus on stopping Y2K from bringing the entire global economy and communications to their knees.

My mom didn’t take maternity leave with my baby brother in 1998; she telecommuted instead in order to keep working. When she would go on business trips almost every week, she would bring me back plush toys of dolls in clean-room Intel Bunny Suits instead of stuffed animals. Stopping Y2K was too important.

And you know what happened? Nothing. 2000 rolled around, and the first thing to start were conspiracy theories that Y2K had been made up, or that Y2K itself had been its own conspiracy theory to trick users into buying new computers and software. In fact, the people responsible for preventing Y2K turned an impending global disaster into what is now known as “the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met.“

And yet, to this very day, the real people responsible for fixing everything before it had a chance to break go unmentioned and unrecognized. They never received fanfare or thanks, but scrutiny and skepticism instead. Can you imagine doing a job so well and so efficiently that the entire modern world either ignored you, or even got pissed at you because things didn’t fall apart? Their children - me included - grew up steeped in the understanding and fear that if we tried to demand more attention from them, we were stopping them from saving the world as we knew it.

So, as you finish reading this, I ask you to go out there and learn about “The 2038 Problem”. While it’s being handled differently thanks to the precedent my mom and her fellow badass, dedicated teammates set, it still has to be handled in time, just like Y2K. The original team may have been left to disappear into obscurity, so the very least we can do is thank the hard-working people that are toiling away as we speak to keep the lights on again in 2038.

[emrysthirteen]

ive seen many complaints about the way the new Tumblr mobile update has handled pictures. but i have only seen a couple people talking about how deeply inaccessible it is. and i want to go through it.

first I'll explain the changes for anyone who is new or who uses desktop because I'm fairly certain it's different there.

before when you were scrolling on your feed and you tapped on a picture to view it, if there was a margin around the picture it was black. if you double tapped the picture, it would zoom in. you could do this twice and the third time would return it to normal zoom. if you scrolled up or down, it would close the image and put you where you were on your feed before opening the image. if you scrolled to the sides, it would scroll through any other images that were on the same post.

now when you open the image, the margins are filled with a zoomed, cropped, and blurred section of the image. when you double tap, it likes and zooming is difficult. when you swipe up, it gives you a different post, generated by an algorithm to be similar. if you scroll to the side, it brings you to the posters blog. both of the swipe functions also do this when you are zoomed in as well.

i can only speak to my own accessability needs, but there are several and i know i can't be alone in any of them. for context the relevant things are that i have low vision which requires high contrast and photosensitive migraines which require low brightness. as you can imagine, this is a very specific balance of things that is easily made difficult.

firstly, the background of the image. i used to open the image specifically because of the background. increasing the contrast around the edge of the image and removing irrelevant details made it significantly easier to see. there were frequently posts that i straight up couldn't see properly until i opened them. with the new background feature, images that i have opened are impossible to see clearly. i can barely tell where the actual image is and where the background is. i functionally understand the aesthetic value of the change but there are regularly posts that i straight up can't see anymore because of this. there should be an option for high contrast backgrounds available so that people who need it can still have it.

next is the zoom. the double tap to zoom was one of my favorite features. because when something was small or hard to see it was easy to make it visible and i didn't have to change how i was holding my phone. now if i need to zoom, i have to shift and the pinch to zoom is very buggy. it is difficult to get the zoom where i need it on the image and it regularly causes glitches that alter the image. and i have to zoom out and back in to move when i am zoomed in to or else the new swipe features engage. this is hard on my eyes and hard on my hands that have fucked up joints because it requires a lot more small repetitive motions to do the same thing. this change seems to be mostly conformist to be more like other sites which is disappointing for the hellsite, bit it could easily be made at least accessable if there were an option to have the double tap zoom or even if the bugs on the pinch zoom were fixed.

lastly is the swipe feature. while this is mechanically and aesthetically obnoxious to me i will hold my focus on accessability. it interacts very poorly with the zoom feature, making it hard to navigate the image viewer when zooming is needed. from a dexterity standpoint, it also makes it more difficult to see what i want to see. if my hands a shaking i will sometimes open an image and get an entirely different one because of the algorithm swipe. I've had to scroll back up to three times to get what i actually clicked on because the swipe function is so sensitive and buggy. it is also more difficult to close the image. i often have to give it multiple attempts to close the image because when i swipe down, it doesn't go away and i can't get my back button to come up without it going to a new post. the bugs should be fixed and it needs some mechanical fixes, but this should also be made optional.

tldr for @staff: the new image viewer is deeply inaccessible for visually impaired people and people with dexterity issues and the bugginess makes it so much worse. all of the new features around the image viewer should be made optional for both accessability reasons and aesthetic reasons. i understand the attempt to streamline the site to look and feel more 'modern' but please don't forget that disabled people still want to use this site

[schismusic]

Redecorating

I've done some pretty stupid shit in my life but this, this whole thing (imagine I'm gesturing around indistinctly with a ghastly look on my face), totally takes the cake. Is it funny if I do the tapping-the-mic-to-check-if-it-works gag in a written post?

It started when I was about to turn fifteen and trying to bed a girl - she honestly dodged a bullet when she said no, I cannot lie to you all. Anyway I guess I absolutely had to find an outlet for being an annoying teenager and being an asshole irl simply didn't cut it sometimes, you know how it is, most of us are here for that exact same reason.

A number of things have happened since I last posted on this hellsite. The short version is as follows:

I had an identity crisis, or two, or five;

I got a driver's license, somehow;

a worldwide pandemic hit, but I guess this is another one of those things that make us equal on this postapocalyptic landscape of a microblogging platform;

just as inexplicably as my driver's license, I also got a beautiful and lovely girlfriend of almost three years now;

who knows, I might even get a degree before 2024 is over.

This is all fine and dandy, of course, but sometimes a dude just needs to scream into the void, wherein "the void" in this case is about two hundred (!!!!) strangers on the internet, which probably includes you, dear reader. Thanks for sticking with me over these troublesome years of absolutely nothing happening on this blog.

What's new then?

Number one: "what the fuck kinda name is schismusic?"

Hi, my name is schismusic. I thought of this ungodly name when I was, as mentioned, a very pretentious fourteen-year-old, and it absolutely shows. However,

one could argue it's part of the charm in a way;

it grants a bit of relative anonimity compared to my other, more beloved Internet alias (which will inevitably come crashing against my inevitable post concerning my band and the record we made a while ago - more on this later);

somehow, it stuck. You people will eat up just about fucking anything, really!

(Another thing that happened: I learned a tiny bit of HTML, because Letterboxd is yet another hellsite I'm not-quite-proudly a part of. Gotta catch 'em all. I love being annoying with HTML formatting as a matter of fact, it's quite liberating to pretend to know that you can code in front of a billion strangers on the Internet.)

Number two: "so is this asshole gonna post fake hipster music on my timeline yet again?"

Not really, or at least not just that. First order of business is that reblogging is fun, but it overstays its welcome when you do it irresponsibly. It also quite literally goes contrary to this blog's original self-appointed mission and this cannot go unchecked. Pretension is law! Bad taste is every single one of this blog's ten commandments! I hate you all more than I hate myself!

Jokes aside, my point is exactly that I want to be a bit less annoying on the Internet for once. Consequently, I have decided to extend the range of posts on this blog beyond the relatively usual songs and reach into short- and medium-form writing (fiction, nonfiction, maybe even reviews: anything goes), pictures I take (the true OGs might remember I used to post my own drawings from time to time: that's not entirely out of the question for the future, it's just that it's been a while since I've last drawn anything worthwhile) and obviously shameless self-promotion (remember me mentioning my band a couple paragraphs above? Well, here is our record on Bandcamp, Spotify and YouTube; and no, my dear OGs, this is not the same band I used to talk about back in the day! This is a whole new project for you to check out), both in Italian and English, and maybe even some Spanish if I actually take my Spanish to a functional level.

As a corollary of this final point, I will not be deleting my old content, so that the new people on here can get to enjoy a whole cornucopia of cringe circa-2014 content.

Finally, since this is primarily a music blog, the obligatory soundtrack to the writing of this post:

Shoutout to literally every single one of you people for somehow not getting tired of waiting through these years of inactivity, or maybe you just forgot that I existed. If it's the second one, I hope this post was a fun throwback, and that this time you remember to unfollow me for good like you probably wanted to do back when I was active and annoying on here.

It's good to be back.

Love,

schismusic

[snugglyporos]

@poisonflowrs [[It's even funnier to me that even the people who pay for it are limited. It's a large limit, but for someone whose job is directly related to twitter (or someone who just likes to scroll all day) this is still going to cause problems. One would think that their paid users of all people should be exempt from the limit, but no.]]

// see, here's what gets me.

I've been on Tumblr for ever. I was on tumblr back before it had an actively page, and we rped by tracking posts on the post page and looking in the notes.

I've seen owners come and go. I was here when it was sold to yahoo, and then verizon, and now the guys who own wordpress.

And through it all, I have seen a lot of incompetence. I mean, we call this a hellsite, because lots of things are poorly implemented and aren't really well put together.

But at no point have any of the owners of tumblr been actively malicious towards their own users.

Even the porn ban, which was poorly implemented and barely functional, was only brought on because tumblr got kicked off the app stores, so it was an 'in case of emergency break glass' moment.

But twitter is actively malicious towards its users. It hates them. It actively thinks they're idiots for using it, and increasingly punishes you for doing so. Its owner actively hates the people who pay for it.

I've been here a long time, as I said. And tumblr's various owners have usually ranged from dispassionate to incompetent; even Verizon didn't really care about the site beyond having it. They only cared briefly when it got thrown off the app store, and once that died down it went back to ignoring it.

At best, the various owners have believed, perhaps rightly perhaps wrongly, that the only way to really manage this site is benevolent neglect. As long as you're not running a crime ring or posting hardcore porn, they don't care. They understand that their bread and butter are weirdos like us. That's the niche.

Twitter, by contrast, seems to actively believe that its users should be directly subsidizing the site, which is sorta the opposite of how a content create model works. There's a reason why youtube doesn't charge you to post videos.

It's kind of wild, really. They're going to be studying this idiocy in business classes for decades.

If you had put a gun to my head and said 'come up with the worst business decisions' I could not have imagined this.

[clown-around-and-find-out]

i know it's probably been said a million times but please please please stop trigger tagging your posts as some unreadable jumbled mess of letters and numbers and symbols. there is a way to block specific tags on tumblr and many users utilize that system. however, it becomes useless when people try to... censor their trigger tagging? i cannot tell you how many times i have had to see a post i specifically have blocked in tags because somebody came up with bullshit tags. and even with the content filtering system, it tends to be wildly inaccurate and feels as though it's barely functional. therefore, i have to rely on tags.

let's say for example you really hate the mayor from powerpuff girls. seeing his fuckass mustache brings you nothing but rage and agony. but your entire dash seems to be filled with him even after youve blocked the main bloggers of him. so, you go to your beloved tag filtering system and hope to never see that shitty ass mayor again. problem solved, right? no. because theres another mayor-hater in town who hates the mayor SO MUCH they cant even bear to truly spell out his name. so all mayor-related hate posts are tagged with shit like 'm4y0r'. well, easy enough. you dont want to see any mayor content (both malevolent and benign), so you just filter out the 'm4y0r' tag. but what's this?! suddenly the mayors number one fan has begun to 'tag him' for mayor haters thinking that if they censor his name, mayor haters wont be so upset. so now theres hundreds of different combinations of tags. m4yor, may0r, mm44yo0r. all this weird shit you couldnt ever imagine. you try your best to tag all of these influx of mayor posts with tags that try to censor his name, but to no avail. the content settings dont help, because now every post about your favorite character (the mayor from nightmare before christmas) is censored!

i know it's a silly example (honestly) but it's a representation of what i go through almost every single day on this hellsite. i know this was longwinded but. please. for the love of god. just trigger tag your posts normally.