#guide to text post making

[reasonsforhope]

Given the misinformation that's been going around and will be going around, thought this might be helpful to some people

For a lot of reasons, I'm very good at this/at searching, to the point where I have worked as a professional fact-checker for two different publishers. So, here goes:

My Article Fact-Checking Protocol

Thorough Version

Read the full article. Keep an eye out for emotionally loaded words, and all-or-nothing language

Keep an eye out or anything that sounds too good to be true, and in contrast, anything that sounds so awful it must be true

Run the website/source through the amazing Media Bias/Fact Check. They'll tell you about a publication's bias and history of accuracy

Go to the website's home page and read through the headlines. Look at what topics they cover/prioritize, sensationalist headlines, and whether they're framing anything in a way that feels odd/off to you

Do a search related to the topic. This can be keywords, a question, or even just copy-paste the article title (Recommended: use DuckDuckGo so the results don't change based on what Google thinks they can sell you)

If multiple highly credible sources that say the same thing pop up, and there's no major societal biases that might affect the coverage of the topic in those sources (e.g. anything related to the Israel-Palestine conflict/Palestinian genocide, no matter which side), then I'm done!

If there are major societal biases, or I can't get a consensus of sufficiently credible sources, then I do some combination of:

(1) search the topic again + the words "controversy" and/or "fake"

(2) search the opposite of the topic, or do some sort of other filtered search

(3) look up a sufficiently credible news outlet with the opposite point of view of my source, and see what they have to say

(4) if it's a big enough topic, start by looking up 2 of the top national papers and 1 major paper for your region (I usually do the ones in the US, because that's where I am In the US: the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the NY Times)

Adjust "news" to "relevant type of source, e.g. tech, environmental" as relevant for all of the above options

If no red flags come up, and it's a topic I understand enough to smell huge bullshit,

Then I'm usually done!

If there are red flags, or I actually need a certain amount of detail/understanding, then it gets more complicated, but that would be a whole other thing to break down and such

or

tl;dr

Quick Version

Read the full article. Keep an eye out for emotionally loaded words, and all-or-nothing language

Keep an eye out or anything that sounds too good to be true, and in contrast, anything that sounds so awful it must be true.

If I don't know the website:

Run the website/source through the amazing Media Bias/Fact Check. They'll tell you about a publication's bias and history of accuracy

If I trust the source, but something else pinged my radar:

Do a quick web search to verify anything that sounds suspicious or too good/bad to be true (Recommended: use DuckDuckGo)

[basilpaste]

i know ive been deep in uty recently, but dont let that fool you. silly timeloop game still has full residence in my brain.

the song is The Right Wrong by The Dear Hunter!

[solanumflare]

wanna hear about plants that can kill you?

[eatsless]

A Guide to Tumblr Communities

Hi everyone!

Communities are the newest Beta feature that Tumblr staff has rolled out, and it looks very promising! Unfortunately it's also incredibly confusing. So here's an informative guide on how to make your own, or join another, community using my own experience alongside information from the Tumblr help article "Communities". This article seems to have been posted when it was still freshly in Beta, so the information may not be entirely up to date. As new updates roll out I will update this guide accordingly.

Not sure if communities work well on mobile, but can confirm it works okay on desktop! Message me with any questions or concerns and we can work it out together. As always, thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!

Making a Community

Making a Tumblr community is easy, but not guaranteed. Right now there is a waitlist and communities may or may not be approved. When making your new community, first you must choose a name and your tagline. Your tagline will basically be describing the page for your audience and prospective members.

Next, choose whether to be public or private. I recommend public, as it is a community and you want more people to see it and to join.

Your community appearance is up next, and you need to choose your banner and avatar for the community.

Finally, your tags! Add up to ten tags to describe your community.

MAKE SURE that you are completely satisfied with all of these, as of right now there is no way to change them. At all.

Now it's the waiting game to see whether or not Tumblr will approve your community! If it is approved, Tumblrbot will message you saying "Your community was approved! 🎉 Check it out here: ..." and send a link to your new community.

The Roles in a Community

According to the Tumblr guide "Communities", each community has a few different roles available. Admins, the one who makes the community, can invite users, see (and cancel) pending invites, and delete posts and comments. The moderator role is upcoming and not yet available, but they will only be able to delete posts and comments. Members, the person who joins a created community, can interact through reacting to posts, leaving comments, making new posts, and reblogging posts into the community. Non-members cannot do any of this, but they can lurk and see the public parts of the community without interacting.

Joining a Community

Joining a community is a murky land, but let's navigate it together!

To join an active community, first you must find it. You can only access a community through a direct link, as they are not searchable in their own section yet! You can either look through the tag "Tumblr Communities" and try to find one through posts there, or maybe someone you're following has shared a link to their own community. Mine can be found at https://www.tumblr.com/communities/weheartit if you want to test any of this out ;)

Go to the page for the community! See if they have any posted rules, their about page, etc and make sure it's a good fit for you. Once sure, you can message the admin (their username should be publicly available) and ask for them to invite you. At this point I'm not sure when you can request to join via the community directly, but it's definitely upcoming. It's important to note that you cannot join a community as a side blog! I repeat, to join a community it has to be through your main blog. (this is where I ran into trouble for writing this section!! so if you guys can crowdsource this with me I would appreciate it!)

The maximum amount of members in a community is 500, and has potential to be increased in the future depending on popularity of this feature. The roles of each community member are outlined above, which details their range of actions.

To join my community of WeHeartIt♥, please leave me a comment here or DM me and I'll send you an invite!!

To reblog posts there, it so far appears that must be done through the desktop site instead of the mobile app, and can't be done through quick reblog. You need to manually choose to reblog it to the community you're a member of, and share it to the community. Note that the community admin or mod (upcoming) may remove it at their discretion. If it's a public community you can lurk without joining, but remember that as a non-member you cannot interact with the posts and some features will be locked for you!

[bread--quest]

as a tumblrologist i actually love whenever there's a sudden influx of tumblr users from another site. the response of the users is like a whalefall of information

[tip to new users: tumblr users are easily won over by references to whalefalls.]

[amourists]

A guide to decluttering your phone

If you’re someone like me who uses their phone the moment they wake up till the second they fall asleep (7 hours screen time yikess) it’s important to keep your phone organised and up to date. some of these i’ll do every few weeks and others once a year depending on how cluttered it feels.

clean out contacts and update info - every year i’ll go through my contacts and delete any numbers I don’t want anymore, add names to numbers I haven’t saved etc

delete any unused apps - this saves so much storage and space but I don’t have to do this often as I try to be mindful of what i download - think if you really need an app for it or if you could just use it on your google browser. optional; organise your apps into folders for different categories e.g games, school

update apps - something I do every few months; go into the app store and update the apps I have so everything runs much smoother with no bugs

delete unwanted photos and videos - one of the biggest reasons for lack of storage is your photos app. I know so many people who have basically the same picture x15 or 5 minute long videos of fireworks - whilst memories are important to keep, having a cluttered camera roll can make going through these memories hard - clip videos so they’re under a minute, clip the main parts, delete any duplicates and get rid of screenshots you don’t need - I do this every few weeks

organise photos and videos into albums - mostly just for aesthetics, i like to make albums of photos i’ve taken in different countries, an album for food, nails etc something that can be done in a car ride if you’re bored

delete unneeded text threads - this also takes up storage and most of these you wont even look back on. it can also be good for your mental health - delete that text thread with your ex so you can stop looking at it

reminders app - I have so many random to do lists there that I just forget to check off heh

clock app - delete those alarms you don’t need and all those different world clocks you won’t refer to

calendar app - add new events like peoples birthdays you need to remember and delete any reoccurring events you don’t need anymore, organise with different colours based on if its for school, work or personal.

update software - if my phone is glitching out 9/10 its because i haven’t updated it in a while

delete unwanted notes - the amount of notes i have with random letters or numbers… it makes it hard to find the notes i actually need so i’ll go through them every few months

notifications - go to your settings and turn off any notifications you don’t want to receive and go through any notifications you might have missed aka those 99+ messages

emails - delete and unsubscribe from any you don’t need

delete tabs on google/safari - all my safari tabs stay open if i close the app so sometimes tabs i don’t need pile up

change phone layout - change your wallpaper, make different lock screens, change app icons, add widgets and change the layout to make your phone feel more refreshed

most of these can be easily done in road trips or just when you’re bored, lmk if i missed anything you do!

[ct-multifandom]

I don’t know if this is a controversial hot take or something a lot of people feel, but I’m tired of hearing people unironically describe Ace Attorney as being “about gay lawyers”. Because it’s not. Do the lawyers act gay? Yes. But that’s not what 99% of the playtime is about.

At the end of the day, Ace Attorney is a satirical story about the corrupt justice system in Japan as represented by a kind-hearted defense attorney protecting (mostly) innocent defendants from having their lives ruined by misguided prosecutors. Its goal was to flip the cultural narrative that defense attorneys are trashy scum who make money off of sympathizing with criminals. And they did this through episodic, goofy murder mysteries.

So where does the gay come in? They wrote some accidentally romantically-charged dialogue, fans were obsessed, and the writers decided, yeah it’s pretty good, let’s do more of that. So they proceeded to toss in more gay side-banter and whatnot amongst the homicide investigations and court sessions.

Now, it’s not like Ace Attorney is the deepest, most poetic social commentary ever written, but it still has a meaningful theme inspired by a real life issue, so it’s pretty discouraging seeing people either not process it or straight up ignore it in favor of “the gay lawyers”. And that’s not even getting into all the other meaningful, non-romantic character relationships that have way more presence in the plot.

I know there will always be uncritical, shipping-brained people in every fandom, but what gets me about how bad it is here is that people who only know as much about AA as what they’ve heard really think it’s “about gay lawyers”. I was watching Drawfee recently, and genuinely all they know about the games is contextualized by Karina’s gay lawyer ship art and brief plot description of how gay the lawyers are. My friend recently told my other friend that Ace Attorney is about gay lawyers to which he was like oh yeah I heard about the unnecessary feelings scene. This is all he knows about the games.

I don’t want to make this sound like a bigger deal than it is, but damn. It truly feels like a lot of people refuse to engage with media in any way that doesn’t involve smashing male characters together like dolls. If you comb through the entirety of the Ace Attorney franchise, you’ll see that such a small fragment of everything that happens is homosexual law, yet that’s the thing that gets amplified to ridiculous proportions. All I can do for now is focus on the posts from fans that love the games themselves just as much if not more than they love the ships.

[neixins]

[ID: a screencap from the “yona of the dawn” anime, depicting gija looking over his shoulder with a vexed expression as he’s walking through a forest; a text post by lantern-hill has been edited into the corner; it reads: “cats will be like oh you're walking somewhere? no we’re walking somewhere. and i will get there first. where is 'there' btw”. end ID.]

i miss my silly little guy so much

[matzofficial]

previous anon here, tysm for replying to the first one! this beef has been going for days, and i'm honestly just so tired of it. like you, i'm not taking sides, but, it's really frustrating seeing a valid conversation about making sure that fics with dark content are tagged properly turn into personal drama. this really needs to be settled elsewhere, not in the tags. or better yet, just block each other and move on. 😭 this isn't fucking high school, it's the internet. and, it's starting to affect the wider community which in itself is upsetting because this community is supposed to be a place where we come to escape whatever's affecting us in the real world. it breaks my heart ngl.

i completely agree with you anon, you bring up a lot of valid points. take this as my two cents:

putting aside the fact that the entire thing seems to have become an absolute shit show, it definitely is in everyone's best interest to remember the core problem which is appropriately tagging. i have nothing against dc writers, but given the fact that a lot of themes found in dc works can be hard to swallow at times and could potentially trigger someone unknowingly, i do think there's an extra layer of caution needed. which is clearly not what happened here. but idk why the dc blog concerned wasn't approached privately first?? i think resorting to immediately writing a call out post was rash bc like it or like, this fandom tends to operate with a herd mentality. many take things to face value and end up spewing the most vile things i've ever read without doing prior reading. i don't think either side deserved the hate they got (despite this being a monster of their own creation) but it was incredibly thoughtless to publicly air their argument instead of trying to solve whatever grievances there were amongst themselves first. and not only that, they've also subjected the rest of us to their pettiness as well. i have no interest in reading up on their drama but it does seem that neither side approached the other privately at all and they've just been clogging the tags with their posts. if there's anything to learn from this, it's tag your posts properly.

[three-dee-ess]

Hi there! Every time I find your blog I just feel so happy mostly cause of the fun I have had (and will continue to enjoy) with my own 3DS!!

The guides are beyond useful and I just wanted to say thank you for being so awesome!!! Your love for the DS systems is both amazing and shared! Thank you for being a beacon for information and silly posts!! If I might be so bold, gotta say that we love you lots!! Thanks again for everything you do that helps keep the community alive!

awwwww :3c i really do appreciate it! Honestly it's kind of incredible the amount of interaction I get on here, even though I have a relatively small follower base. Even though the 3DS community is small in number, we are very powerful I think :3c

[windor-truffle]

MY COLLECTOR'S EDITION ITEMS ARRIVED 🎉🎉🎉 Ngl I almost forgot they were coming since I placed this order back in November 😅 huge thanks to @lildoodlecat and @v0eu for directing me to Zenmarket, it was a very friendly and easy to use proxy service!

Everything came in a very pretty (albeit flimsy) box. (bean!asbel not included I just let him watch my unboxing bc he was already on the desk 😁)

The posters were an Asobi-store exclusive pre-order item so I'm glad I got ahold them!! Too bad I'm not the type of fan to preserve limited edition items, I'm gonna wear that shit down with all my love 😤 so they were hung up immediately with mounting squares. Please ignore how horribly asymmetrical they are, I couldn't find a ruler 😅 (fun fact about me, I stole a ruler from the art room when i graduated college and was cursed for my evil deed and now i can never EVER find a ruler when I need one)

The pins are very cute ^^ I put them on my laptop case with all my other fandomly enamel pins :) I have vague plans to display the stickers and cards in a Graces themed binder (that I also will be hopefully printing fanfic for) but I may have to slap an Asbel sticker on my laptop too for everyday enjoyment :)

And lastly, the item I was most excited for!!!!! The acryllic standee is SO CUTE IT'S THE TITLE SCREEN AAAA 💜💜💜 I can hear the music every time I look at it 💜 Honestly it's the perfect art for a diorama display 💜💜

Super happy to have more Graces stuff lining my room!! Though I'm putting myself on a merch purchasing hiatus for now, I really oughta save my money for a while 😅

[clericofmystra]

Gale is standoffish enough (unusually for him!) towards Astarion that I was curious what their first interaction looks like, if Gale's already along when you meet Astarion and gets the cut scene.

Sure enough:

[doostyaudi]

I know EVERYTHING abt madcom lore!! Except for like.... Most of it

[marley-manson]

man, i was a visual genius when i was 16

there are some definite awkward choices in this old wip that i'm changing as i go, but the timing, the rhythm, the match cuts, the musicality, even some recolouring apparently... i nailed all that and all i can do now is try to match it

[cloysterbell]

Only 400 more to go.......

[pocketramblr]

Who knows what Gerudo culture or fashion would have evolved into by 'Rule's time but it's nice to think about him getting to experience a bit more of it in another universe... Before BLYGanon sours it for him... Also been thinking about that Great Fairy of the desert...