#liked the twitter takeover so much

[kamianimation]

Team Heroes this, Team Dark that... Team Fluff time!!

[lilwoofs]

I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I think what saddens me the most is that shadow doesn’t really seem to like adventuring. Sonic and shadow are similar in that they both go fast and go on a lot of the same adventures, and even though adventures just like, happen to sonic he kinda starts them, or at least seems to enjoy them after all “what you see is what you get, just a guy who loves adventure”. He didn’t choose to have chaos unleashed, turn into a werewolf or have eggman make a war, and I’m sure there’s moments (like metal virus and frontiers) where he’d rather that all not have happened, but overall he seems to have fun doing all of this stuff, it’s his hobby, even in the twitter takeovers most of the time when a question about what they is asked he basically just says running and adventuring.

Meanwhile shadow just kinda has that stuff happen to him, his memories are altered and someone wants him to destroy the world, he has amnesia (also metal sonic is mad and making it everyone’s problem), he has amnesia (also someone’s trying to make him destroy the world again), and whatever was going on in 06. He never seemed to relish in the adventure like sonic did, he only really seemed to fight when he had too. (Okay in some games he seemed like he wanted to kill sonic??? (og generations) or just fight sonic for little reason (not to mention what happened to infinite) but it feels like they’re kinda fixing that and it’s pretty out of character for him). For sonic danger is a challenge, it’s fun. For shadow it’s just something happening to him, yeah he might get a little smug about it, but “if the world chooses to become my enemy I will fight like I always have” shadow wouldn’t be fighting if he didn’t have someone trying to make him destroy the world every two seconds-

It would also make sense shadow doesn’t seem to enjoy danger like sonic does, he knows what its likes being attacked and it going wrong (Maria’s death). And to contrast sonic in the twitter takeovers whenever he’s asked about hobbies he says he wants to start a cat orphanage, or that he reads books and plays chess, volunteers at soup kitchens, taking care of his bike, also won’t shut up about flowers. All pretty low stakes things! (He even mentions multiple times in the newest twitter takeovers that he doesn’t fight for fun, only when needed. Now that could just be him not wanting to admit he’s having fun with sonic, because there is a lot of moments we’re he fights with sonic for no reason other then fun, but there’s still probably some truth in there. Who knows maybe we just think that because we always see it from Sonic’s side, and since sonic likes it we assume shadow does too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) And talking to Maria in sh generations it makes so much sense! She seems frightened at the concept of shadow attacking black doom, she’s not scared to talk back to him when he’s being rude to shadow, but she seems surprised that it’s happening, surprised that shadow is so “bold and confident” when shadow fights. Yeah she told him to protect everyone on earth but I don’t think she had shadow stopping earth ending situations in mind. They play chess and go to school, when Maria talks of going back to earth she mentions having food and meeting her family. That was their plan. She didn’t think shadow would have to stop gods and war, she thought he was going to met friends and eat good food! And just help out in small ways when he can.

Going back to Maria’s death we know shadow was powerful at that time, not as much as he is now, but he was frozen for those 50 years (no time to train) which means he was just as strong then as he was in sonic adventure 2 (makes sense he’s the ultimate lifeform). If shadow was back there he would’ve fought the G.U.N agents, but taking in the Maria dialog (“bold and  confident”) and how their life was on the ark he wasn’t used to fighting. If nothing happened to shadow he probably wouldn’t be fighting.

TLDR: where’s my sonic game that’s about shadow owning a cat orphanage and reading books sega?

[welcome-to-green-hills]

Headcanon Time:

Amy likes to make scrapbook pages of places/events that she likes to do with her friends. Since Amy mentioned about going to the Hot Honey concert with Shadow during the Twitter Takeover, she dedicated an entire scrapbook page to the event. And yes, she did snap a picture of Shadow having a good time.

I made a scrapbook page of Shadow and Amy having a great time at a Hot Honey concert!

[jorrated]

I'm so tired of sonamy being ship teased in stuff

[sonknuxadow]

i cant get screenshots of it because my laptop starts shitting itself every time i try but "i find my magnetic personality quite attractive" "and yet when youre near me i feel repulsed" LOVE LOSES 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[nightowlqueen]

Trivia I’ve learned about Shadow while listening to the 2022 Sonic Twitter Takeover (the only one I've listened to so far):

His favorite Chaos Emerald is the purple one because it reminds him of lavender

The beauty of a tiny rock in the shape of a horse was enough to bring a tear to his eye

His favorite dessert is tiramisu on a cold night with a warm coffee (he says there's no better combination)

Uses gender neutral language when referring to a potential romantic partner (insert pennysnapcube sonic voice "whoa, he's bisexual, I didn't know that!")

However, he has a strict set of rules for any potential partner (A) they must help him iron his linens nightly, (B) they have to cook food exactly like they did on the ARK (which according to Eggman means he likes his food dried and stale; turns out he wasn't kidding), and (C) they keep in mind that he has a 20-step skin-care routine

Related to the above he eats cereal dry

Okay so turns out he's a big fan of lavender in general as he said in the 2021 takeover that he smells like it and he offers to meet a potential suitor with a bouquet of them (lavender's his thing now)

He eats raw coffee beans with a spoon (because water dilutes the flavor and he wants coffee not "coffee flavored water". Also the best things in life have a crunch. Which means he's eating the previously mentioned tiramisu with warm raw coffee beans)

He's a Swiftie

He volunteers at his local soup kitchen as he's been thinking a lot about what Maria would have wanted. Unfortunately he hadn't been there in a few days as his cooking isn't very popular (apparently they had some rather uh... choice words about it)

Doesn't like water that's too "minerally" (same)

thinks Chainsaw Man sounds awesome

He's raising a Dark Chao that he plans on protecting with his life (oh my god 🥺)

In conclusion I love this weird little alien hedgehog

[cheetahsprints]

(If you don't like mentions of a slash ship featuring certain anthro hedgehogs just scroll past!!!! Quickly!!!)

TL;DR (You can skip this blurb if you want the full story)

I went from being like neutrally aware of the Sonic franchise characters' existence to totally obsessed practically overnight with Shadow and Sonadow. Went full speed ahead brainrot on them because of a freaking dream where cartoon (unspecified) Sonic & co accidentally entered the dimension of live action Sonic. Shenanigans ensued, most notably a dreambrain-hatched live action Shadow fighting his cartoon version because of his attitude toward Sonic & co.

(End of TL;DR)

[Text wall below for details]

A few nights ago I had a random as hell dream about Sonic the hedgehog and I am now here I have watched freaking Sonic Prime on Netflix because the mental images wouldn't leave me alone so I treated it like a weird message from the universe e send Help

My only previous interactions with sonic stuff was some person I followed on twitter for something else posting art of it (mega long time ago), watching the sonic live action movies why I have no idea (super long time ago), and that joke game that went surprisingly hard The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog which I completed even though the minigames to progress got hard AF for me (pretty long time ago) and like even before all that I knew of Sonic from ads, memes, and various posts on social medias. But I didn't fully engage with it.

Side note: the twitter posting was mostly sonadow and I would look it over like uh-huh ok the vibes check out and just keep scrolling like lsdfkjdskl but that is pretty much the main reason I knew Sonic/Shadow existed but at the time I didn't actively seek it out or try to learn more.

Onward...

My brain is so so so weird and the dream was somewhat vivid like watching a movie omg where the live action sonic and pals met the cartoon versions of the characters?? even though I never watched any of the cartoons before??? as such it wasn't a specific series, I just knew it in the dream they were from a generalized cartoon universe

Specifically it was Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles in the movie group, while the cartoon group had Amy and Rouge instead of the other two alongside Sonic, who I only even really knew about because of the April Fool's game. And Shadow was also there in both groups because why not I guess and they (the Shadows) fought each other because the movie one thought the cartoon one was a jerk lmao idk? Yeah my subconscious decided it couldn't wait for Sonic 3 and made up its own version of movie Shadow.

Early in the dream there was also a little kid clone of Sonic who belonged with the cartoon group. There were some cute interactions but in nonsensical dream fashion that character just disappeared later like he was never there lol

…There was some plot about the cartoon group needing to get back to their dimension because Sonic accidentally got them blasted into the movie one somehow... after watching Sonic Prime I'm like my dream was so FREAKISHLY similar to that show's plot, but I SWEAR I knew nothing about the premise of SP before the dream. Although, in the dream they were like... multidimensional travellers doing hero stuff and had met other variants before, just this time it wasn't intentional and it messed something up.

Uh getting off track... (which the dream itself did a lot tbf)

Anyway, what I remember is the movie dimension made the cartoon group look in the more realistic style so at first Shadow thought the actual movie group were the ones from his dimension (Shadow & Amy got separated from Sonic & Rouge) and was rude to them because he was so ticked off blaming Sonic for being a dumbass and yelling at Tails for not preventing whatever happened or something, so actual movie Shadow appeared like. don't talk to my friends that way asshole and beat the absolute shit out of him. There was an explanation Tails gave that the movie Shadow was more powerful for some reason I don't remember and Amy told cartoon Shadow to stop trying to beat him. But yeah bro was so pissed movie Sonic had to step in and physically stop him because he wouldn't listen to and/or overpowered anyone else. He reminded Shadow that the other Shadow was still him, in a sense.

Cartoon Sonic and Rouge appeared and Sonic started bickering with cartoon Shadow. but the movie versions were best friends so they were watching them like wtf is wrong with y'all. Movie Shadow got fed up quickly and punched cartoon Shadow again and stood protectively in front of both Sonic versions bristling and wouldn't take his eyes off his counterpart. Cartoon Shadow was so goddamn confused by Shadow's protectiveness and asked how Sonic had made movie Shadow his loyal bodyguard (derogatory) Amy and Rouge like explained the backstory to the movie crew, which is fuzzy to me but it was something along the lines of, Shadow had been brainwashed to rival Sonic, tricked to think that Sonic was evil (unbeknownst to that Sonic who in his pov had this random edgy hedgehog start attacking him out of nowhere during a mission) and they had a lot of intense fighting before Shadow found out the truth. But the two of them never quite got over the misunderstanding. Listen I didn't know Shadow's backstory, literally none of it, but I have read the wiki since ok

Meanwhile movie Shadow, in the dream, was made and raised in a lab and similarly believed he was made as Sonic's rival/equal. Behind the scenes some government thing or whatever were afraid of Sonic's power and wanted a backup plan. But some evil guy stole and unleashed Shadow. At first it was basically just a duel, Shadow admired Sonic, but the evil guy had put a chip in his head that when activated made him try to kill Sonic. Eventually he was subdued and the chip deactivated- and despite everything Sonic insisted Shadow come with him to his home and the rest was history. This unfolded in like flashback style.

There was a funny part where Shadow questioned Sonic's home like "What kind of base of operations is this?" In a very unimpressed tone. Sonic said sarcastically "Oh, sorry if you were expecting my own Fortress of Solitude." And I guess Shadow was allowed to watch tv because he got the reference and shot back "Does that make me Lois Lane?" Didn't make a whole lot of sense sdlfkjds but movie Shadow delivered this line very confidently and flirtatious and just walked away leaving Sonic shocked LOL

And then later Shadow complained that the government people would always rewind and loop the villainy parts and he never got to see if Lois and Clark kissed (It's been too long since I watched any Superman movies so I couldn't tell you if this makes sense) and Knuckles teased him for being a romantic, and then the whole team binge watched every Superman movie.

In the "present" at some point movie Sonic and Shadow pulled their alternate versions aside and like told them off for being mean to each other lmao cartoon Sonic was kinda like uwu I didn't know Shadow had feelings he's like a lone wolf and like was surprised by his counterpart's vehemence. Movie Sonic told cartoon Sonic that Shadow can be a great friend if you give him a chance. I don't remember the Shadowses convo much but it was a lot more chill despite the fighting before (though still prickly) because Shadow's reasons were more valid and it was more of a pep talk from movie Shadow that if he opened up more it might give the others around him more opportunity to know and accept him.

I remember there was this one specific heavy emotional line in the dream that stuck with me when I woke up said by cartoon Shadow about Sonic, "He's my best friend but I'm obviously not his" DFKLJDSKJ

Additional small detail that movie Sonic and Shadow had known each other for over 2 years during dream events. And they were quite close and in sync. But still bantery

My brain basically conjured a LITERAL FANFICTION in my sleep and I have been thinking about it a lot What's hilarious is I knew next to fuck all about these characters my brain pulled the plot points of this dream out of its ass

Typed out, this dream probably sounds a lot longer than it was... the "scenes" just felt oddly detailed for how mashed together and quick passing they were.

But yeah I kept thinking about the dream and like daydreaming more scenes and it somehow turned even more into Sonadow (like, I imagined Cartoon Sonic & Shadow finding out in a very abrupt way that the movie versions were an item. <- to my delight I did find a fic with a premise very similar to this just not movie universe related. Also played with the idea of Sonic and/or Shadow accidentally kissing the wrong counterpart in their excitement at being reunited which Awakened Some Things for the receiver of the unexpected passion😂 )

The dream kinda acted as a base that inspired daydreams to spiral out from my brain without permission but I just... mentally jumped into it because ships sometimes grab you like that.

And Sonic Prime made my sprouting interest worse, basically fuel to the fire, so now I am obsessed with them... like what a fucking way to get into a ship

[utilitycaster]

The thing about the "official" CR Reddit is that it was founded by the same person who founded the Fandom Critical Role wiki. At the time of founding in late 2015 he was 18, and in my experiences with him through the Fandom wiki I found his management and personnel skills to be...shall we say, understandably lacking, given that he's a programmer in his early 20s. He also stopped keeping up with the show with the end of the Vox Machina campaign if not before; and I think was just generally entirely unprepared for Critical Role becoming more than what it was in late 2015 in terms of actually having large fandoms in need of serious moderation in spaces like Reddit. He also equated being a frequent contributor to the Fandom wiki (cannot personally speak to the Reddit) as being a worthy moderator to the point of asking someone whom a more competent admin had once admonished for outright plagiarism if they were interested in being an admin. This persisted, despite, at the time of his leaving, him and one of the other moderators of the Fandom wiki having held those positions while being almost entirely absent from editing for years.

So anyway I say all this because as result of those communities being created by someone young, inexperienced, and lacking in the awareness to realize these limitations, these issues have propagated. Moderators in a lot of fan-run Critical Role spaces have been selected not on the basis of any merit or community consensus but rather by sheer volume or by ingratiating themselves to the previous mods. From personal experience on the Fandom wiki and from reliable hearsay about the Reddit it seems that they tend to embrace their privileges as mods while eschewing their responsibilities. I also find that there's an ongoing hangover in both these spaces of not really knowing how to deal with the fact that Critical Role is still rolling nearly six years after the end of the Vox Machina campaign, because a lot of these people were ultimately fans only of Vox Machina and more generally Critical Role as it was during that era. They're still acting as though the cast is very directly involved with the fandom and are the final word on various decisions, as they were in the very early days, even though that's long since ended. This in turn is I think behind the knee-jerk resistance to change - moving away from the old chapter system on the Fandom wiki and even implementing basic infrastructural changes to accomodate the fact that there are now multiple campaigns, for example, was met with pretty significant pushback. They still really struggle to cover anything that's not Exandria canon because, well, in late 2015 no one could have predicted Candela Obscura. And on the Reddit side, I think that's why changes that are purely production-related and should not affect your enjoyment of the show as a work of fiction (pre-taping, merch, having other people GM one-shots sometimes, taking longer breaks) are similarly treated as harbingers of doom.

And, that in turn is why I suspect the other CR-related subreddits that have since sprung up have such a reputation for being all negativity - it's people who got understandably fed up with the ridiculous rules and culture of the first Reddit, so their roots are in venting, which is valid. But it can be very difficult for a community built on venting to stop being only that, especially under Reddit's structure, and they're also still largely influenced by that Reddit and share and propagate those biases towards what the show was in 2015-2017.

[jouska-the-deer]

Okay, thanks to a reply on my Sonic Twitter Takeover 2023 Masterpost (which you can find here) I noticed that one of the TikTok responses was deleted, specifically the one about what the Chaos Emeralds taste like.

That was pretty weird, so I'm combed over the Twitter and TikTok posts to see if anything else was deleted. Since I painstakingly transcribed every response as they were posted (right here), I can safely say that's the only one that's missing (unless I missed any when they went up).

I plan on fixing some mistakes in the transcription (I already added some words I missed as well adding a notes section) so I'll continue to keep an eye out for any more funny business. I have no idea why that particular post was deleted honestly. Did they think it was imitable?

Sonic says, "Kids, don't lick Chaos Emeralds to see if they're fruit flavored."

Except... that can't be the explanation considering they kept the response about them eating paint.

[antirepurp]

something needs to spark the part of my brain that has the potential to create niche readings of sonic and shadow and probably some other characters too i know the juice is there but accessing it is a different story

[housedyke]

I've been trying to update my site since November but the longer it takes me the less I want to deal with it

[thedailyplatypics]

ARTISTS, STOP POSTING TO DEVIANT ART

(Gen Ai/BDS)

Learned today that DeviantArt is owned by Wix, an Israeli company listed under boycott by the BDS Palestinian human rights organization.

Under Wix, who acquired DeviantArt in 2017, DV has been pushing Israeli occupation propaganda and allowing Generative Ai to completely takeover the platform and be sold on it.

It’s clear that under Wix, DeviantArt DOES NOT CARE whatsoever about the art or the artists it was originally created to cater towards. It only cares for profit.

Even if you are not well-versed on the current politics surrounding the Israeli Occupation and the erasure of Palestine for some reason, everyone can agree that Wix has changed DeviantArt for the worse and the best case scenario is that they sell it to someone who actually cares for art, not profit.

I absolutely adore to death so much of the art there, but for now I will stop posting my art there and I suggest that other artists do the same. They DO NOT DESERVE YOUR ART.

Please transition towards using alternatives like Tumblr, Insta, Twitter, and Newgrounds. Newgrounds especially is the best alternative to DeviantArt. Please suggest other alternatives as well.

[molinaskies]

I rewatched Sonic Twitter Takeover 7 recently and been thinking a lot about this question (this is only part of the answer given) because I had a little epiphany about it.

Obviously these aren’t really ”””canon”””. The lore revelations to be had in these takeovers aren’t supposed to prove any major theories, BUT I like to look at the takeovers as a general guide for how the characters are meant to be perceived at the time of their release.

I remember people reacting to both this takeover and takeover 6 (sonic frontiers) a bit poorly because of how Amy’s feelings for Sonic were downplayed. Given the recent stuff with the Gens remaster, too, this still feels particularly relevant.

Amy’s romantic feelings for Sonic have been downplayed—there’s no denying that—but I don’t think they’re being erased. With the exception of that one clip from takeover 6 (where Amy says she loves Sonic, Tails teases her about it, and Amy backpedals, saying she said “like,” not “love”—very Boom! Amy, btw), Amy’s feelings have still been on prominent display.

However, two things have changed:

1) Amy’s love has matured,

And, more importantly, in my book—

2) Sonic’s response has matured.

In the above clip, Amy states emphatically that Sonic is “her’s” and that she loves him and that he’s perfect, but kind of stumbles over herself once she realizes what she says. Important to note is that she doesn’t take it back at all, meaning that she meant what she said, but probably would have said it differently if she had given it foresight, given the setting they’re in.

This reads to me like Amy is still very confident in her feelings but is making a conscious effort to be less pushy about it—perhaps for Sonic’s sake. However, sometimes it just gets away from her because her love is just so plentiful. It’s cute!

And what makes it even cuter for me is that Sonic is, just, like, totally okay with this?

What does he do when she goofed up and gets flustered about it? He laughs! Short and sweet. He’s very aware of her affection, and he doesn’t mind it at ALL. He loves when he can get reactions out of her (directly or not). It’s in this same takeover that Sonic rags on strawberry shortcake (Amy’s favourite cake flavour) again—specifically to tease her—and he laughs the exact same way, there, too!

(It’s also implied, there, that Sonic gets Amy to chase him, so he seeks out the game just as much as she does.)

Sonic’s response can still read as distinctly neutral on a romantic level, for those who’d prefer that, but objectively it’s a lot more overtly positive. There is no denying that he enjoys her attention.

So, it’s a rebrand. For sure. But I actually find this to be a lot more wholesome? Zainey Amy™️ (when written well and not over-the-top for comedy like in certain games) absolutely has its appeal and deserves its place in canon, but the idea of Amy literally being unable to contain her love for Sonic and her compliments bubbling over is very cute to me. I also find it more powerful and significant because she’s finding her words to express her love instead of just reacting. It’s more thoughtful and reads as more genuine, as a result.

It’s different, but in my opinion, not bad! She’s not boring. She’s still giddy, passionate, loving, and more compassionate than she’s ever been. And Sonic is more accepting (enticed, even) as a result.

[markscherz]

Can I ask how you feel about your Tumblr fame?

I get the impression you just made this account for normal casual funsies reasons, but it kinda blew up by happenstance. If that's right, I'm curious if now you feel like it's kind of a more serious thing, where you have an opportunity to sorta act as a science communicator with a reach you otherwise might not?

Or maybe something else? You gonna see if you can somehow leverage your Tumblr fame to get research funding? Deputize us to harass polluters and developers destroying habitats? Crowdsource name ideas for new species?

It's a bit bizarre, in that it has very little real-world-ness to it. I showed my mother the ongoing tumblr celebrity poll, and she was like 'how many people could possibly be interested in frogs?', to which I replied 'well as of today about 46,000 and counting'.

I have always had an unhealthy relationship with fame. I spent most of my teen and young adult life fawning after it, as is I suppose very often the case.

More after the cut…

I always really wanted to be famous, but I was never really interested in changing who I was or what I represented in that pursuit. That is to say, I wanted to be known for what I was already doing, or for things that were already interesting for me, rather than things that might have much higher chances of success but require more effort or be less in line with the things that I am interested in.

I had my first brush with virality in 2012, when a poem I wrote went a little viral (largely thanks to StumbleUpon). I remember the rush of seeing how much attention it was getting, and staying up late to keep refreshing the page as the visitor numbers went up and up and up.

But not long after that, I had some closer encounters with fame and people becoming famous. That was extremely eye-opening. I witnessed first hand how strongly that can affect someone's life, for good and for bad. That experience also made me realise, quite jarringly, that famous people are still just people; that celebrity is something extrinsic to them; that they also wipe their own butts (if they are able); and that in many cases, it is a substantial inconvenience if not downright pain in the ass for them. I think this is why we see so many of the big celebrities having mental health crises or trying to live as much of their lives out of the public eye as possible.

That experience pretty much stifled my desire to achieve fame, and really changed my relationship with it. I should add that I could say much more on this topic, but nothing so coherent or insightful as John and Hank Green, who have given me so much clarity on this topic over the years through their thoughtful commentary on youtube and their podcasts.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that fame itself doesn't really appeal to me anymore, I do still have a problem wherein I quickly became addicted to the microdosing of euphoria associated with every reblog and like and follow. So I put huge efforts into social media in order to try to gain traction in the space that I felt I could really compete in—Very Niche SciComm™—and build up a following.

Tumblr was the first platform where I felt that really succeed; I managed to fight my way to a few thousand followers with a thick queue of regular posts about herpetology and other science. At that time, there was a great community building up in the rudimentary private messaging system—I am still friends with several other tumblr bloggers from that era (none of whom I have ever met in person). From that early time (2013), I think my most successful post was probably this one about germination of 32,000 year old seeds—a post that, as of today, has 836 notes, but at the time felt huge and exhilarating.

As I went through gradschool, I got more and more active on twitter, and less and less active on tumblr (by the time I wound down, I had about 8,000 followers on tumblr). This was partly because of the pornbot takeover on tumblr, which meant I basically could not go on the platform in public or at work, but also because the audience and interactions are just fundamentally different. Twitter had a different kind of vibe and energy than tumblr, and there were real SciComm experts there, who were doing it just completely differently. More importantly, I became more focussed on doing outreach aimed at colleagues, rather than non-experts.

Then, in 2017, I hit headlines for the first time. The description of Geckolepis megalepis made it big on social and traditional media, and I had my first experience with real media attention. I had a flurry of late-night phone-calls with journalists in the US. This was a different animal altogether than the few viral posts I had had until that point. It was extremely stressful, but exhilarating. Then in 2018, our chameleon fluorescence story made similar headlines, and in 2019 the Mini frogs, and in 2021 with gecko fluorescence and the smallest chameleon.

Seeing my name on the BBC News website and in the New York Times and National Geographic—those things have been the most surreal moments of near-fame I have experienced so far. The number of followers on social media is quite difficult to conceptualise, but seeing your own name in a media outlet that you consume regularly, or have grown up with, is more palpable.

In any case, I continued to run with twitter as my main platform for years, because I found the interaction with colleagues and other academics highly stimulating. In 2021, I even posted a twitter thread about a different species of frog from Madagascar every day for the full year. All this work was ultimately greeted with mediocre success; I just crested over 10,000 followers a few months before the Musth takeover. But then the platform became basically unusable. And in the fallout, I came back to tumblr, where, just by chance, I happened to find a post about the Mini frogs and reply to it and it went properly viral and now here we are. In the space of a year, I went from having 8000 followers to having >46,000.

How do I feel about that? It's bonkers. I think it is great that so many people are interested in hearing the Good News about frogs and other creatures. But I also feel like I am not really on the same playing field as most of the others in that poll mentioned above, in that I do not have any of the celebrity that several others have. And I know for a fact that there are fanblogs with far, far larger followings than I have. But perhaps that is the great thing about tumblr; that the playing field is somehow levelled…

What's the point of this ramble? Well, first I guess it is to outline that I have given fame a lot of thought over the years, and I have a long-standing and complicated relationship with it, and take it quite seriously. Second, to illustrate that I have been working on as a science communicator or person in outreach for many years—it has kind of been my social media brand since I started gradschool in 2013. And third, to kind of outline how we got here, because I often feel like you have to know where an arrow has come from in order to figure out which direction it will continue to fly.

You asked if I would somehow try to leverage my tumblr fame to get research funding—I already do that. In fact, my social media activity had a signfiicant role in landing me my current job, and will continue to help me achieve tenure. Outreach is an important part of my job, and funders like it too.

I would love to have the community-building power and tenacity of the brothers Green; Nerdfighteria has achieved some incredible things over the years, and the power of that community is now being seen at an unprecedented scale in their battle for equitable access for tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment. But I do not have that in me; this platform is the wrong one for community activation, and my community is still too small for that. Moreover, it is not organised or structured, in the way that I think effective deputisation would require.

As for the crowdsourcing of name ideas, that is currently off the table. I like to try to name things on my own or with my colleauges; it is a very good part of the process. And I have yet to hear a suggestion for a Mini species epithet that I had not already come up with myself, so I am not convinced that this would really augment the experience.

So for now, I hope that the main way I use the platform, and the power that comes with a few thousand followers, will be to spread the Good News about frogs and other wonderful animals, and the other kinds of science happening around us (and occasional other off-topic content). I hope that you are encouraged to explore the world around you, and to do your own reading to find out more about the subjects that interest you. And also I will continue to try to make meme-worthy content, because it does nice, if addictive, things in my brain when I get the clicks.

Thanks for asking, anon, and sorry for the Wall of Text.

[togglesbloggle]

Why do you think tumblr will die in only a few years?

Answer with jargon: a strong correlation between recent economic shifts and chaotic choices by major tech companies is most easily explained if the 'traditional' social media platforms of 2005-2020 are mostly a zero-interest rate phenomenon.

Longer answer, with less jargon: Even though Musk's takeover is making all the headlines recently, the last year has in fact seen major shakeups at many social media platforms, so Twitter is actually part of a trend. Almost inevitably, these are cases of social media companies trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of their userbase (Reddit), cut costs dramatically (Twitter), or both. This marks a sudden departure from a much more relaxed attitude towards revenue in the Pictures Of Cats industry, where the focus was historically more on expanding the userbase to a global scale and then counting on world domination to sort of <????> and then the company would become profitable eventually.

We joke, correctly, that Tumblr has never been profitable. But the entire structure of ad-supported content curation between human users is deeply suspect as a business model; IIRC Twitter was never profitable either, and Facebook has been juicing its numbers in very shenanigany ways. Discord was actually making money on net last I checked, at least a bit, so they're not all completely in the hole. But even if you take the accounting figures at face value, none of these companies has anything like the amount of money that their cultural prominence would suggest. Instead, they're heavily fueled by investment dollars, money given by super-rich people and institutions in the expectation that fueling the growth of the company now will pay off with interest later.

So what changed?

I'm not an expert here, but I'll do my best to muddle through. The American Federal Reserve has one mandate that dominates all others (sometimes called the 'dual mandate'), and one primary tool that it uses to enforce that mandate. The goal is to maintain low (but nonzero) rates of inflation and unemployment, which in their models are deeply interlinked phenomena. The tool is 'rate hikes', or more specifically, tweaking the mandatory rate of interest that banks charge one another when making loans.

As a particular consequence of this, hiking the rate also means that bonds start paying out much better. When the rate hike goes through, that affects people who let the government borrow their personal cash- that is, people who buy bonds- as well as institutions like banks that lend to one another. A rate hike means that you, personally, can make a little extra money by letting the government borrow it for a while. The federal government of the US is a rock-solid low-risk choice for this kind of moneymaking scheme, so the federal interest rate sort of defines the 'number to beat'; to attract investors, a company has to give those investors money at a better percentage than whatever the feds are offering. Particularly since a company is a lot more likely to go out of business than the state!

To wrap this back around to the Pictures Of Cats industry: the higher the rate hike, the better your company needs to be doing (or the less risky it needs to be as an option) to attract big investment dollars. Very high rates make it very hard to convince people to invest in business activity rather than the government itself, and very low rates put moonshots and big dreams on the table, investment-wise, in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Social media companies were one of these big dreams.

In the great financial crisis of 2008, the Fed took the dramatic step of reducing their rate to zero, trying to juice the economy back to life. And ever since then, they've kept it there. This has produced an unprecedented amount of funding for very crazy stuff; it's part of what has allowed so many weird new tech companies (Uber, streaming services, etc.) to get so much money, so quickly, and use that to grow to massive size without a clear model of how they're ever going to make money. This state of affairs kept going for quite a while, with no clear stopping point; that zero-interest environment has been one of the shadowy forces in the background that shaped fundamental contours and limits in how our Very Online World has grown and developed. Until COVID.

Or rather, the bounce back from COVID: we suddenly saw a massive spike in inflation and an incredibly strong labor market, as employees quit in record numbers, negotiated higher salaries, and found better work, and at the same time supply chain issues and other economy stuff caused prices to climb dramatically. Recall the Fed's 'dual mandate', to control the employment rate and inflation. This was, basically, kicking them right in the jooblies. They responded in kind, finally finally raising their rates for the first time in 15 years. For some of the people reading this, it'll be the first significant shift in their entire adult lives.

The goal, as I understand it, is to fight inflation by reducing the amount of outside investment into private companies, forcing them to hire fewer people and pay smaller salaries, ultimately drawing money out of the working economy and driving prices back down by lowering demand for everything. You get paid less, so you eat out less, and buy at cheaper restaurants when you do, so restaurants have to compete harder by lowering their prices; seems pretty dodgy to me as a theory, but it's the theory. And the first part will almost certainly work- companies are going to see less investment.

For social media companies that are still paying most of their salaries with investor dollars instead of revenues, this is especially catastrophic. Without outside investment, they're just a massive pile of expenses waiting to happen, huge yearly costs in developer salaries and server fees. This is why, all of a sudden, every social media company is suddenly making bonkers decisions. They're noticing that nobody wants to give them any more money! So they're trying to figure out how to live a lot more cheaply, to actually somehow for reals turn their giant userbases in to some kind of actual revenue stream, or both.

Tumblr is kind of the ur-example of this kind of thing, supporting a very large userbase with no coherent plan whatsoever to start paying its staff with our dollars instead of investors' dollars. When interest rates were low and Scrooge McDuck had nowhere else to hide his pile of gold coins, a crazy kid with a dream was the best alternative available to him. But now, unless something changes, he's going to notice he can just buy bonds instead, and that crazy kid can go take a hike.

That's why I think Tumblr is living on borrowed time, though I don't know how much. Like all cartoons, the economy doesn't really fall off a cliff until somebody looks down and notices they've been standing on thin air this whole time. But they always fall eventually; that's the gag.

[sonknuxadow]

the only way the sonic social media team can make up for their crimes when it comes to the annoying ship tease shit in the twitter takeovers and their treatment of m/f ships vs their treatment of gay ships is to do a very obviously intentional sonknux ship tease in the next twitter takeover and then never bring up shipping ever again. go on. do it cowards.