#tumblr's mobile app really screwed up the post formatting

[abundanceofpixels]

After pondering how to use these two, I realized how much I enjoyed writing about them. Just plan and simple writing.

I’ve created a sideblog, simsandstories where these drabbles/fics will be posted, so not to bother you guys with my writing (although not to toot my own horn, but I do have a literal writing degree).

Anyway, the first fic is up now! Check it out if you want, It’s a sweet one!

[ READ LESSONS FROM THE HEART: A MALAHKI & ZACK DRABBLE ]

[lololollywrites]

thoughts about being 29 on the internet that i just had in the shower...

...and had to write down. they were all basically just about how f**king - NEW. and surreal. the internet, its capabilities, and its fandoms can still be to me sometimes. i feel like i forget this a lot. but when i think about it, i can easily recall my wonder at discovering that it all existed in waves of smaller finds. and because i know there are others like me, i thought i’d share some of my own experiences. because honestly, i’ve had fewer years on tumblr and sites like it than some people much younger than me. i’m catching up and enjoying it.

firstly, i know i’m old to some of you, but i’m not really old. not really. i’m still a millennial, screwed over by student loans and old white men and viewed as part of the technological generation. i’m a phd student, and because i’m always on a college campus, i’ve been mistaken as a freshman. a few times. but it’s been fascinating to witness actual freshman and other college students and consider just how different things are for them and honestly? i’m sort of jealous. 

because...

i can remember when i first discovered that fanfiction existed. i was in third period tech skills as a junior in high school - 16 years old - and got a little off-topic and searched for spoilers for a new supernatural episode. this was in 2005 and the show had just come out (yes i still watch, i can’t escape).

and what did i find? somehow? fanfiction.net. i was, no exaggeration, shocked. i sat and read a full-length chaptered fic in episodic format. my mouth was hanging open. i saw thousands more fics in hundreds of fandoms and suddenly felt less strange for envisioning full-scale episode re-imaginings in my head as i laid in bed, dissatisfied with what i had just watched. (btw, i watched new supernatural episodes the sunday after they used to originally air on the wb on thursdays, at my mom’s house where i had my own room and own tiny tv, because no one at my dad’s house wanted to watch and streaming episodes wasn’t something i could even imagine. plus i didn’t have internet at my dad’s house. i know.)

not only that, but i was impressed as hell. here was me, not even aware that you could somehow upload your own text to the internet, and people were not simply writing polished stories in private but posting them somewhere that allowed for chapters. that allowed for people all over the world to read their words. that categorized everything into a huge virtual library. and, most incredibly to me, that allowed for reviews from people around the world.

i couldn’t believe that this new world was open to me. that people would be so generous as to offer amazing stories to me to read FOR FREE. that i had a limitless supply of content to read and review. i barely had functioning internet at home, so i had been sheltered. i told the people sitting next to me in class about it and encouraged them to check it out, mostly to blank stares. i may have even told the teacher, but no one cared. i didn’t understand. who wouldn’t be interested? i told my dad and my sister about it when i got home from school. i was mind-blown.

months in and many reads and written reviews later, i wrote my first fic. it was for smallville. 6 chapters, with updates every few days, that received 14 reviews in total. i read them all multiple times. i showed my sister. i checked the story stats every half hour. i cried. i wrote on the family computer secretly in the evening when most of my family had gone upstairs, because i was about half a year away from owning my first laptop. i wrote more stories sporadically for about 6 years, gradually getting better, but also gradually becoming more stressed and aware of negativity, online arguments, and the embarrassment and shame i suddenly felt about having an online presence. i found a supernatural forum at tv.com (the forums sadly no longer exist), learned about fandom, and immersed myself in posting and being part of a community that i thought understood me more than my friends. like a secret life.

during my first year of college, in 2007, i was in a friend’s dorm when he asked everyone if we wanted to watch an episode of scrubs. i laughed. surely he was joking. “how can we just watch an episode? it’s not on now and you don’t have the dvds.” i literally didn’t consider that there may have been a way. he excitedly told us that he had found some website that had episodes just... pre-uploaded. and that you could just click. i didn’t believe him. the stress of having to be at the tv at a certain time each week for fear of missing an episode entirely and forever was just part of being a fan, right? buying the tv guide and checking listings was necessary. but he found the episode. and clicked. it only took a few full minutes to load and there it was. again, i was astounded. this memory is so shockingly clear to me. it changed how i spent much of my free time, for one. just that moment.

sometime during this first year of college, i was home for break and came across a video on youtube, this new website i had started to use. it reminded me of ebaum’s world, which my friend would show me at her house sometimes because her computer was faster than mine. it was called “cat soup”, and by two guys that called themselves smosh. it had more views than i could comprehend - probably not much more than 5 digits, but still. they were just two kids i could have gone to school with who could create a funny video and get famous. again, i was shocked. mind-blown.

i showed my sister, my mom, and all my friends. they appreciated it a bit more than the fanfiction, but no one seemed to grasp how incredible and revolutionary it was. they all liked “shoes”, with the kelly persona by liam kyle sullivan (we still quote it today), probably because its budget and effects made it a bit more familiarly professional and it appeared less homemade (though it definitely was). but i couldn’t forget smosh. i was so impressed by them. i watched more videos and eventually found communitychannel and jenna marbles and eviliguana and shane dawson. i even found fan edits for my faves, buffy (maybe i saw one of phil’s, lol) and supernatural and smallville, and tried making my own. i freaked in 2009 or so when fred reached a million subscribers. a million. i couldn’t wrap my head around that. again, i told my sister and friends, expecting them to see the enormity of something so crazy happening, and they just... didn’t.

back in 2008, after watching “stick it” again, i recalled the name of a gymnast my cousin used to always talk about when we were kids - from the 1996 olympics - and looked her up on youtube. i realized that all gymnastics competitions imaginable had been uploaded. again - not to be repetitive - but i was shocked. there’s no better word. i gave myself a thorough education on the sport, traveling through time. i am still so grateful that i was able to do that.

sometime in 2009, my friends started pestering me to create a facebook account. i was a junior in college. 20 years old already. it sounded weird - pictures of me online? why? but i gave into pressure and made one. my mom had never allowed us to make a myspace; we were a bit young, and she hated the idea (now, she’s on facebook more than i am). around the same time i got my fanciest phone yet - an LG Env3. i figured out that it could access the internet and that i could use songs to create ringtones. again, sufficiently mind-blown. considering my first cell phone had been a flip phone with no camera that i shared with my sister during emergencies when i was 13, i felt that technology was coming along fast. 

smart phones were foreign to me for a long long time, until recently actually. i thought they were unnecessary for quite a while. i don’t even remember what phones i had at the end of college and through grad school, but i’m pretty sure they consisted of a series of cheap pay-as-you-go phones from walmart. in 2013, i went to china for a year to teach. i got a cheap phone there and used it for about 7 months. one day, a friend of mine gave me his old htc smartphone because he was getting a new one. i didn’t know how to use it, but i played one app on repeat before class and snapped some low-quality photos. after that, i almost immediately went to indonesia for another 9 months to teach high school (2014-2015). the htc phone died very quickly, so i used the nokia brick phone given to me by the organization. it was fine. i had never even used my old smartphone to access the internet, aside from wechat, thanks to china’s internet blocks. it wasn’t until i got home, in the summer of 2015, that i finally got an iphone. it was a huge deal and a big learning curve. it was also around this time that i found dan and phil and tumblr. i only got my macbook two years ago and finally think i have some things figured out.

so i may be old in some ways and remember floppy disks and the card catalog and using encyclopedias to write my middle school papers and huge computers with black screens and green text that displayed math problems in elementary school. i may be able to remember the sound of ancient, huge printers that used reams of paper with perforated, tearable strips down each side. i may remember aol red, dial-up, and not being able to connect if someone was on the phone. but i can also remember watching technology evolve in front of me, discovering fandom and the huge world of content and friendship that lay ahead. and when people try to say i’m too old to like dan and phil, i remind them that dan and phil can also remember. we’re the same age. i relate to them and their stories. to phil’s buffy obsession. to dan’s love of smosh. i’ve only had about 10 fully-cognizant years here on the internet, and only a couple in the world of tumblr and iphones and mobile apps. i’m young in those ways. and i look young enough that strangers sometimes think i’m a teenager. 

that’s laughable to me in some ways, because i’ve lived so much since my teen years. so much has happened. but in others, i don’t feel much different. there’s no age where you just feel grown up. that your interests vanish. that things suddenly seem childish and dumb. yes, i cringe about some things i wrote or did back then and i think i’ve matured, but my interests are all still relatively similar and i can finally explore them in ways that i just couldn’t before.

i hope that this has made sense. and i hope that some can relate.

[headoverjojo]

Please ignore this if this was a stylistic choice, but I noticed that the paragraphs and sentences of your posts seem to appear broken up on mobile as if you pressed enter in the middle of certain sentences. I'm not sure if this is going on, but I do know that if you write in word or evernote and transfer it to Tumblr, that tumblr screws with the formatting to where you have to check for extra line breaks.

Hello, anon!First of all, thank you for letting me know it! Second, no, it’s absolutely not intentional and yes, I write on Word on little breaks I have during the day (so I can’t write a full post directly on Tumblr) but hell, Tumblr really screws everything up, eh?I don’t know why on your mobile app my posts are screwd up, since from mine and from other friends’ are alright (there was a problem with the dialogues, but now I use just “…” and it seems to be alright). Anyway, I’d like to fix it, if possible!Does anyone know how -or if- I could do it? (Just don’t “write straight on Tumblr” because I really don’t have time)

[meowthiroth-moved]

shit tumblr needs to get sorted out:

•the fact that despite having Best Stuff First turned off since the MOMENT it dropped, I STILL have my mobile dash rearranged all the fucking time. Seriously?? Why is every social media site nowadays steering away from simple, organized reverse-chronological order?

•Not being able to access blog pages from the mobile app unless the blog posts a link to them. Doubly so if you’re on an Android device because apparently said blog links don’t even work on Android- they just dump you onto the main page of the blog and tell you to go fuck yourself.

•the fact that notifications and asks get eaten ALL THE DAMN TIME. I don’t understand why this keeps happening. It’s literally SUCH a simple thing to accomplish.

•the recommended posts. there’s no way to turn them off without xkit on desktop, and if you’re on mobile then you’re REALLY screwed. if I wanted content from these people on my dash I’d just follow them.

•repeating posts. This seems to only happen when viewing specific blogs on mobile (specifically iOS idk if any other mobile versions do it) but for some reason tumblr will just keep spitting the same 2 or 3 posts out to cover up a bunch of other posts on the blog’s feed when it doesn’t load fast enough. The actual posts underneath won’t load but if you go in the notes, they’ll pertain to THAT post and not to the one that got pasted over it which is super confusing. This also causes you to miss out on content because you can’t see the real post unless you back out and reload the page.

•the gradients on mobile look dumb please just bring back the grey boxes

•the fact that pornbots and n.a.zi//s and all sorts of hateful people and bullies are allowed to run amok on this hellsite but posts about LGBTQ+ are autoflagged as NSFW.

•in that same category, safe mode once filtered out a cute gif I made of my pet betta fish as NSFW but didn’t stop NSFW fanart and, like, real actual dick pics from popping up on my dash.

•according to one of my friends it apparently takes tumblr staff an average of about 3 months to take down a blog that’s been reported for harassment EVEN IF THEY’RE DOING IT PUBLICLY FOR EVERYONE TO SEE.

•there’s an option for blogs to flag themselves as 18+ only so people on safe mode don’t see them but minors/people on safe mode don’t get an option to prevent 18+ blogs from seeing/accessing their blogs?? Idk it’s kind of a dumb idea tbh but I just feel like this might help out with the pornbot problem

•you can no longer block specific anons on mobile for some weird reason?? you used to be able to and you still can on desktop seriously what gives

•despite the text post overhaul on mobile not too long ago, any post that ISN’T specifically a text post doesn’t get access to the same text formatting options and you’re stuck having to edit HTML again if you want them.

•still can’t tag asks on mobile unless you go back after the ask is posted?? seriously why is this so difficult of a thing to add??

•icons inserted in text posts get blown up super huge on mobile even if they’re only supposed to be like 150x150px or smaller.

•if a post originating from an ask gets long, you can’t use that x in the corner to cut it on mobile because it just... doesn’t show up. even though it does on desktop.

•no option to hide comments/replies from posts. Seriously even deviantart lets you do this and that site feels like it was coded in the goddamn dark ages.

•tumblr’s official filtering system only blocks posts that are TAGGED with certain words, but if a post mentions that certain word within and isn’t tagged with it, it’s still able to go through.

•no option to turn off notifications on specific posts so if you make a post that blows up out of nowhere then you’ll suddenly be spammed with an ungodly amount of shit in your activity feed

•still does that thing on mobile where it pops up the (1) icon above the message icon whenever you get a note REGARDLESS of if it’s actually a message or not, which STILL freaks me out when I check tumblr mobile and see a big number like (17) above the icon because it always makes me think I missed a bunch of messages

•no way to opt out of those stupid livestream posts that pop up at the top of your dash

•no way to block ads from certain advertisers you don’t wanna see which is really obnoxious when you’re like me and get pissed off about shitty unoriginal Pokémon ripoff ios games being shoved in your face every 20 seconds (looking at YOU battlecamp 😒)

•just the mere fact that this site’s coding is apparently so fragile and unstable that changing or adding ONE little thing can cause entirely unrelated things to break immediately (like how best stuff first actually broke the notifications when it first dropped and they kept getting eaten kinda like how they’ve been again lately). seriously, what did they stick this site together with? scotch tape, chewing gum and boogers??

[rhetoricalrogue]

Ugh

Okay, so using the Pages app on my phone to write is great because I'm actually writing again, but sucks because all the formatting doesn't transfer over to Tumblr when I want to post and my HTML tags get screwed up. Hopefully switching over to my laptop to edit (which really defeats the purpose of writing on mobile) will fix things.