#tumblr leaves a bad taste in my mouth

[cherrysnax]

I blocked that badjokesbhjeff account for being fucking weird about Palestinians like 5 months ago and guess whose being blazed onto my tl

[ven-of-oath]

I love trans headcannons as much as the next person but there are times where it circles a little to close to being homophobic

[wonder-worker]

people really do not know what they're talking about when it comes to Elizabeth Woodville's social status, huh?

[crimeronan]

oh god i can't make the death note poll unrebloggable so i'm about to deal with a week of idiot leftists smugly saying "billionaires aren't people" in my notes like they're doing something interesting. i get that i started this by disrespecting the sanctity of human life in the first place but can you all please just fucking admit that empathy is a social construct that you turn off at will and that you don't give a fuck about billionaires as people because you've chosen not to give a fuck that theyre people. They Are Still People. sincerely a sociopath who actually thinks about this stuff. unlike Some Fucking Tumblr Users, Apparently,

[visionkept]

Ok besties, I think I have had enough. I'm gonna be asking if all romantic k*zscr content can PLEASE BE TAGGED or else I'll unfollow. I kinda have it enough in Twitter seeing all the hate comments coming from such fans and their content, especially those mocking Tomo's portrayal / actions. Tumblr is my safe space and I want to keep it that way 😔.

[thekimspoblog]

thats it Mouthwashing you're going in the filtered tags

[lesbianlenas]

i have not been able to talk for 4 days do u know what this has done to me….there is nothing i love more in this world than talking……everything has been taken from me

[biracy]

Cannot find my older post about it (tbh I didn't try very hard) but honestly I am so tired of people trying to pretend like there's any sort of consistency to "cis women getting a nose job is evil and NOT feminist. However all transsexual surgery is Holy Holy Holy". It's truly not surprising how often people end up reblogging from like, actual tradcaths about "modern women ruining their natural feminine beauty" or whatever. I've said this all before so I don't wanna repeat myself but obviously this does not mean "you cannot critique what drives people (cis or trans) to get 'plastic surgery'" or "women's choices exist in a vacuum" (although I would roll back some of the extreme performative hatred for women who make The Bad Not Feminist Choices), but it DOES mean "stop pretending like there's any sort of actual distinction between Cis Plastic Surgery (bad) and Trans 'Gender-Affirming' Surgery (good) that does not fully rely on the medicalization of being transgender" and it ALSO means "stop pretending to care about bodily autonomy when what you really mean is 'people can do things with their bodies I think are cool and good, but not things that I don't like. Those things should literally be banned, that's how we will save women'"

[cator99]

The Owl House anon, I just sent my ask because you sound like someone who watched Steven Universe, back in the day. I thought you might be watching TOH then

another one of those "damn the hate mail game on this website is insane" moments

[aelaer]

Every now and then someone I follow reblogs something incredibly stupid or ignorant on this website and I'm reminded that its userbase is definitely not more learned or educated than other social media sites. Those posts are usually just easier to filter out.

[r--g--b]

"why are they importing influencers to tumblr" because they signed contracts with either one or multiple PR companies to promote their clients. its also probably why you wont see it leave for a while, since they'll have to wait for the contracts to run out.

[hurristuff]

It's fine and cool to personally find something lame but honestly I'm tired of the punchlines to a lot of posts being just making fun of people for liking something ultimately harmless. Maybe I just live under a rock but I genuinely have never had anyone be annoying enough about music and shows I don't care about for me to ever find it funny. It's such a nonissue it just feels really mean, people are just reinventing cringe and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth

[flecks-of-stardust]

people who unironically hate pebbles and are willing to hurt him for the sake of making him suffer will always confuse me

[ghwosty]

I have the day off tomorrow

I should really sit down and work on my neocities site

I also need to jump back into my self-guided coding lessons I was doing so I can do fancier more complicated stuff with the site

[unladielike]

    Vivian nods away in agreement for to her, having a considerable amount of burgers without any soda didn't seem like something that's really heard of... and yeah, perhaps there were way better palate cleansers to be had than carbonated drinks, but as this was a food truck and not a restaurant, the selection of beverages they could realistically order would understandably be a bit limited.

    "Welp, I wouldn't go as far as to say I necessarily understand 'everything', per say, but yeah, once you manage to live through twenty one years on this planet, you start discovering some pretty basic stuff... like, for instance, how the human body gets thirsty if you consume salty snacks yet do not occasionally bring yourself to drink water throughout regular intervals," Vivian states. Granted, most would consider that to be 'common sense', but as per usual, she frames it more like an academic study than redundant knowledge nobody would truly bother disputing.

    Either way, it doesn't take long for her bespectacled gaze to soon settle on the drinks menu, which was situated to the right side corner of the food truck... and to her delight, Coke was listed as one of the drinks that were available to order, causing her to clasp both hands together.

    "Ooh, what do you know?! They do indeed have Coke! No Fanta to be seen, though... then again, at least we aren't forced to choose Pepsi, which is the mid alternative to Coke," Vivian pipes up. Of course, after the final customer leaves, she'll then finally pull out her wallet before turning to Mizumachi. "Alright, so to summarize super quickly... we want ten teriyaki cheese burgers with two cokes?" Vivian repeats in order to ensure they were on the same page.

[水]

“Bia is so smart! I love it!”

Who knew there was such a place so close by? He hadn’t found the place yet, and who knew how long it would’ve taken before he found it. The food truck  now had a new fan who was bound to visit pretty often any time homesickness struck him- which was surprisingly often if he was left alone with his thoughts.

The jock laughs at the comment that the food truck wasn’t going anywhere. It wouldn’t sprout legs and run away—but it had wheels, didn’t it? Couldn’t it drive off?

“Yeah! A Teriyaki cheese burger sounds great!”

Sometimes, he’d go into restaurants and find that the food was very different compared to his expectations, but if going by the smell alone, he was sure that he was going to like the burgers here. He normally wasn’t that picky when it came to food anyways, but still! It was a kind of betrayal for someone who craved familiar tastes to walk into a restaurant and walk out of it confused over what he’d actually eaten. He learned the hard way that many ‘fusion’ places weren’t… the best. Guess not every fusion was stellar and epic. Sorry Goku and Vegeta.

“You really understand everything, huh? You’re right! If you’re going to be eating a lot of burgers anyways, ya gotta drink something that pairs well with it. Coke is the best! Fanta is also good, though.”

If you were going to be eating your fill of burgers, was there really any real difference if you chose to drink soda over water? The difference was minor at that point, so there was no point in picking straws. Water was his preferred drink for regular hours, but if he was doing rigorous exercise, then he would reach for sports drinks to replenish his electrolytes. Soda was for whenever he was treating himself to some junk food. Might as well go big or go home (and eat healthier).

[vexwerewolf]

Should I read homestuck

tl;dr: no

actual answer: yes, but with some extremely important caveats.

Firstly, because Adobe shitcanned Flash, you can now no longer experience Homestuck in the form it was intended upon release... unless you download the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. This act of unbelievable, nay, saintly generosity by Homestuck's most dedicated fans allows you to experience Homestuck as it was intended - as close as is humanly possible.

"As close as is humanly possible" is the key phrase here. One indelible part of the original Homestuck experience was UPDATE! Homestuck would sometimes go weeks or even months (and later, years) between updates. I wasn't on Tumblr back in the day, but at the peak of Homestuck, even if you knew nothing else about it, you'd know when an update dropped because Tumblr's net traffic would increase something like three to fourfold. People would go apeshit bananas about whatever new revelations the Huss would drop on us.

You also need to realise that Homestuck is a product of its time and while its takes on sexuality and gender identity was pretty progressive (for its time), Huss did use the r-slur a bunch.

While we're on the subject of the author, Andrew Hussie (of whom my current understanding is that they have not changed name but go by they/them nowadays) is, in the most diplomatic possible terms, a very unique person. They are, at times, a visionary storyteller with genuinely fascinating ideas. At other times, they come off as kinda spiteful towards their readers.

Without meaning to dip into spoilers, some story beats seem (in my opinion) almost intentionally calculated to upset, irritate or mock certain fans. It never rises to the sheer vicious contempt that Steven Moffat had towards Sherlock's fanbase, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I go back.

Additionally, and this is where a sort of birds-eye-view spoiler is unavoidable, the story suffers from the Game of Thrones pitfall of repeatedly increasing its own complexity by adding new plot threads without resolving existing ones, eventually leading to fatigue on the part of both the reader and the author. The arcs of a lot of characters just straight up get abandoned, while a couple of characters take an unnecessarily large amount of screen time.

There's one character in particular that the author openly states within the narrative (the author exists within the world of the story. It's... a whole thing) that they favour, and whose behaviour the story is warped to accommodate. You'll know exactly who I'm talking about almost the moment they show up.

Another reason I say that it's not really possible to read Homestuck as it was originally intended is because a lot of the shit that happens in it fits into the zeitgeist of the internet at the time any individual update was written. There's a whole section in the late middle third that is inextricably and very specifically tied to how it was like to use Tumblr in 2012.

Additionally, a lot of things have soured with time. There was the whole Hiveswap debacle (it was first announced in 2012. We got the first act in 2017. We got the second act in 2020. We do not even know if the third act will ever come out.). There were the legal threats. There were the Epilogues and Homestuck 2, which were... how do I put this? Not universally liked. There's been nearly a decade of discourse since Homestuck ended, and a lot of things haven't grown better with age.

All of that being said.

You should read it.

I cannot express to you just how big an impact Homestuck has had on internet culture. Even people who claim to hate Homestuck unconsciously use slang that it invented. Its unique ideas on storytelling, character design and narrative chronology have, in both subtle and unsubtle ways, changed the way millennials and Gen Z tell stories.

A lot of people were inspired to tell stories because of Homestuck - one example I always give to Lancer players is that Kill Six Billion Demons started as a comic on the MSPA forums (before it was homestuck.com, it was MS Paint Adventures), so Homestuck is in an indirect but demonstrable way responsible for the existence of Lancer. The sunglasses that Gideon Nav from the Locked Tomb wears have been explicitly stated by Tamsyn Muir to be Dave Strider's. Toby Fox made music for Homestuck, and worked on large parts of Undertale while living in Andrew Hussie's basement.

We also know someone in the Bluey creative team is a Homestuck, because...

There are subtle but direct references in Bojack Horseman, Hazbin Hotel, Steven Universe, Adventure Time - and those are just the ones that it's easy to prove! In a more general sense, I think there's a lot of cartoon series, movies, games, etc. that would either be very different or wouldn't exist if Homestuck hadn't happened.

It's certainly influenced my work.

I think, being very cautious to manage your expectations, that you should read Homestuck. At the very least, a lot of things people say on Tumblr will start to make, if not sense, a different kind of nonsense.