#do people even remember gpoy anymore

[alderaanplacesss]

“I never see you at the club.”

Okay??? Well I never see you yearning for an undead Count in the depths of the long winter night.

[dasenergi-diary]

Hello Friends! I'm avoiding doing actual work that I'm getting paid for, so I thought I'd document some of my history on Tumblr:

My first Tumblr post was on August 24, 2009. I was a LiveJournal guy, but my gf at the time (Kristi Hart) used Tumblr. I joined because of her.

My first posts for the first couple of years were actually syndicated from LiveJournal. I didn't reblog anything or post any content original to Tumblr. Then in 2011 I started syndicating pictures to Tumblr using a site I'm surprised still exists today called Moby! I just looked, all of the pictures are still there! Here's one of my kids from 2011 at the Salton Sea.

A year later, in June of 2012 I decided my Tumblr needed a focus. I had a pretty large collection of behind-the-scene images from movies, so that became all I posted.

Some random examples: Behind the scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, The Dark Crystal, Phantasm II, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Neverending Story

That continued on for several months, I probably posted 100+ of them.

In July of 2012 I created my @frankenbuddha account, since @dasenergi was solely "Behind The Scenes" movie posts, I needed someplace to post all my nerdy, lgbt, Buddhist, spiritual stuff.

By the end of 2012, I had given up on the "Behind The Scenes" posts on DasEnergi. They weren't getting any likes.

I abandoned FrankenBuddha and resumed posting all my nerdy, lgbt, Buddhist, and spiritual stuff on DasEnergi.

Two years later, my youngest child joined Tumblr in 2014. They were 13 years old. They came to Tumblr for all the cat posts! So I then used Frankenbuddha to collect all the cat and animal posts I could find, and share it with them. FrankenBuddha is STILL cute animal and humor posts now.

On DasEnergi, I started making a lot of my own memes and then added a bunch of tags to them, trying to attract followers. Here is one that was 100% true "I am desperate to just really connect with one other person." I was so depressed and felt so alone at the time. Here's another, "I have a crush on everybody who is nice to me."

I also posted a lot of selfies, trying to make that human connection with others. Here I am trying to look tough.

I also posted more about my life and my feelings back then. There's this one: "I’m considering shaving the beard. Maybe I’ll find someone who’ll love me if I’m clean-cut." I felt so broken. So unlovable.

Here's a creepy one from a year later, November 2013 - "Why yes, I did just go through the GPOY tag and liked a bunch of strangers pictures. I couldn’t help myself. They’re cute!"

As my tags strategy wasn't working, I was Liking people's posts trying to make connections and build my followers.

For those who may be too young to remember, GPOY is an acronym for Gratuitous Picture of Yourself. I don't think it's used anymore, is it?

Looking back on my archive, I had also realized in 2012-2013 that the only way to get followers on Tumblr was to reblog others work. So I started doing that a lot more.

I've always collected quotes. In high school I would spend my lunch break in the school library reading quotes from Bartlett's Book of Familiar Quotations. In 2013, I see I started posting a lot more text posts of quotes from my archive. I remember Tumblr even had an automated template I'd use for quotes.

Wow, yeah, as I'm scrolling through the archive they're mostly text posts, of quotes.

In 2014 I see I started posting A LOT more, and it seems to be 50/50 memes and text quotes. I also see fewer posts about my life and fewer pictures of myself. My mental health was much better. I wasn't seeking validation from Tumblr. This was the year I had my Awakening experience and fully embraced the magical and the spiritual. This was also the year I started dating Geronimo, my first boyfriend.

Right now I'm scanning through April 2014 and it looks nearly identical to what I'm posting now. Yep! The blog as you all know it now has been around for nearly ten years.

8,882 Posts 1,062 Followers 1,060 Following

I currently have 302 posts in my queue. I only queue five posts a day between 7pm and 10pm (Pacific time).

@male1971 has been around since September 2016 for all my nerdy posts, most from my childhood. (I identify as a male and I was born in 1971.)

@bi-buddha has been around since February 2019 for my LGBT posts.

@moovees and @melodiousmonk are both new, created last year for my music and movies posts.

And that's about it for my main side blogs. If you actually read this whole thing, THANK YOU for your interest in my Tumblr history.

I had some cringeworthy moments there, mostly healing from my 15 year relationship with my ex-wife and my five year relationship with Kristi Hart. But I'd like to think I made it out of those dark times a better, wiser, person. (Or I'm in deep denial about how depressed and messed up I still am.)

Okay, back to work...

[jusky]

What is this tumblr place even like now? Remember when we were all young and hot and funny and interesting? I met so many of you back in the day. “You”? Is that right?? Are you guys still here? Or are you newer? Have you deleted your accounts and made new ones? Is sst still a thing? gpoy? Truthful Tuesday? What about people asking each other questions? Tumblr is like my high school if I were to go visit it now. See that room? I took Chemistry in there. Her? I had the biggest crush on her ever but she hasn’t posted a thing since 2015. Hmmm. I met him in 2012. We used to tell so many jokes over there. So much flirting back then!! This guy, yeah he actually died a few years ago. So did he. And so did she. Yep her too. And her. God. I’ll never get over that shit. Things happen. Too much now to even express. We are not as young and hot and funny and interesting now. Well maybe we’re more interesting? Or would be if we had the energy or time or the right audience—by which I just mean a community like we used to have on this thing. Maybe it still exists but with new peope? Or the same people but I’m just deeply out of even the loops outside of the loop I’m looking for? I remember so many of the souls I found here. Amazing folks. Remember them? Had brunch with them. A lot of them actually. I was always grateful to those of you I got to meet, Give or take a few folks? 2 bad apples maybe. More good apples than I can count or even fully remember with any specificity now. I don’t know where they even are now! Maybe some are still here? More aren’t here anymore but must be somewhere. Older. Wiser or not. Happier or not. Doing just fine, maybe, probably, hopefully. Tired-er for sure. Still complicated and still funny. Less into sharing their complications and jokes with a ragtag band of internet pals I imagine. Or—god forbid—now into sharing such things on facebook like some normie shitty ass middle aged aunt or something. Sigh. Years have passed. Wherever that community is now, however scattered we are, I still think about all of us and what we had and how it felt, about those vibrant messy tumblr days when we were all so intertwined. Intertwined by our own freely made choice, not by any necessity of geography or career or social convenience. Intertwined only by our choice to be. A bunch of deeply profane but surprisingly kind misfits on a never cool social media platform which is today a ghost (and ghosttown?) of itself that died by some kind of corporate madness and slow senseless suicide. I really liked that community we had. I have not forgotten it. It truly mattered to me and it is not at all gone from whatever prayers get prayed these days in the tiny little church of my intensely goofy heart. Not at all. So that’s I guess what I wanted to say. Maybe I should (ah, same as ever) walk away from this post now and hit the publish button on it before I’m tempted to get literary and overly nostalgic and quotation-happy? Nah. Too soon to hit that button. Better for me to stay on brand as the kids used to say here—and say with a level of irony (or not) I can’t quite recall now with any confidence. I’ll offer you a passage from a fancy book, a passage that I hope evokes in you some of the feelings about the old days that I still feel tonight. And if it evokes nothing, maybe I’m being ironical and silly. That’s also on brand for me. My brand was large and contained multiple attitudes. Anyway, i miss those days. And I’ll wrap this up now with something a tough guy writer type (who like tumblr also died by suicide) once said about someplace where he had lived and loved for a time. And what he wrote was: “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”