chongoblog:

chongoblog:

hey guys

GUESS WHAT

cyle:

catgifsinthesenate:

staff:

Hello longtime bloggers, post deleters, tag connoisseurs. Customizable featured tags are here.

Until now, suggested tags were automatically generated when a user searched your blog via the new blog view, or from the blog archive. However, over time this list of tags may have diverged from your blog’s real interests. This isn’t always practical, especially for blogs that have been around for a while, with tags from deleted posts still showing up. Now, you can set your top tags to whatever you want them to be in your Popular Tags and Blog Archive Page. #Squop, #glongo, #plip? All acceptable.

Why this change?

This feature has been widelyrequested. We understand that you have all grown with Tumblr over the years, and your interests will have probably changed, too. Some of you find the presence of old tags in your top tags list uncomfortable; for some, they interfere with the sense of order on your blogs. Others are simply excited about new customization options.

Cool—how do I use featured tags?

On web: Head to the account icon in the top-right corner of your dash, and select “Edit Appearance” from the drop-down menu for the blog you want to add featured tags to. Click on the pen icon next to “Featured Tags” to add up to 10 tags of choice. These will now appear in your popular tags in the blog view and be listed in your archive.

Featured tags will be available to everyone on the web from today, April 19. We’re also currently working on a rollout to iOS and Android.

Any questions? Drop us a line on@wiporSupport, and keep an eye out for the mobile rollout on@changes.

Staff coming through and actually making good changes? We love to see it

apolloendymion:

assdevourer:

i cannot stress enough that because of how social media and communications platforms work, if you put something out into the world people will 1) see it 2) react to it and maybe even 3) reply publicly. unless it is a private journal or such, you should accept that if you put something out there that is inherently divisive, you will receive comments that may make you unhappy.

if you blaze a post (force randos to see it) intended for an inherently niche audience (fanfiction consumers), that’s one thing. appending “minors dni” to what should be a perfectly innocuous post while also fucking blazing it (again, forcing randos to see it, including minors), will get you made fun of. doubly so if this leads people to look at your fanfics, and quadruply so if said fanfics are omegaverse stories about real people

posts that replicate the feeling of seeing a massive plume of black smoke coming from somewhere on the far horizon

professionalwritingnerd:

teachingtales:

three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat:

whateverthebeeswant:

three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat:

draculasdaughter:

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

Listen, this is serious.

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?

Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.

Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.

Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid

mayakern:

mayakern:

saw a thing recently about how callin ppl “y’all” and “folks” is becoming cringe. buddy you can pry those terms of address from my cold dead hands, they’re the only thing keeping me from calling everyone “honeybee”

at least if i die on this hill i’ll go to y’allhalla

i’m so grateful to be having a peaceful time in my own private secluded cove of this tropical beach sitting in the clear water and occasionally watching incredible and completely inconceivable byproducts from the hitherto unperceived deep, dark depths float by

winchestersingerautorepair:

brothersskeleton:

trickstertime:

aflo:

*opens the oven after preheating to 400*

This is Margaret when she opens that email

there’s a lot happening right here

adulthoodisokay:

staff:

Introducing: Reblog Controls

This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill—we are rolling out reblog controls across web and iOS, starting today. 

How does it work?

When drafting a post, select the settings cog in the top right corner of your post editor. From here, you can choose one of two options.

• “Anyone (on Tumblr)” means just that.
• “No one” means that your post cannot be reblogged by anyone, ever.

Why?

Your wish is our command. Many of you have told us this feature would give you a welcome sense of safety. If you block someone after the post was made, don’t worry—they still can’t reblog it. This change gives you control over your own posts, and so will improve your posting experience. Ultimately, better posting means a better Tumblr. And finally, don’t worry, Android users. The feature will follow on your platform soon.

That’s all, folks. Happy reblogging!

Any questions? Drop us a line on @wiporSupport, and keep an eye out for the mobile rollout on@changes.

fynnkaterin:

Somehow it feels like tumblr is accidentally the perfect social media site, because none of the things that I love about it make sense as features the way we use them. Tags are for organization, but we also use them to have our little thoughts in without raising them to the status of main text. The queue makes sense for keeping a steady stream of Content going if you’re trying to Build a Social Media Presence, but really we use it just to bank posts we want to reblog without flooding everyone else’s dash. You can’t see how many followers anyone else has, which I just have to assume was an oversight because it flies in the face of everything about social media, and it’s great because you can never quantify anyone’s Influence so everyone’s essentially on the same level. There’s no way they planned for giffing to become such a Thing, because before tumblr, gifs were practically relics of the early internet days, a novelty, usually kind of tacky, and now they’ve become a sort of folk art form. You can reblog an entire conversation, not just a single post, so there’s a whole genre of humor that exists here that can’t really propagate like that on any other social platform. Honestly this website is just a little freak of nature that cannot possibly have been intended, and that’s why no media company has been able to figure out what to do with it, because it makes no sense within the larger social media ecosystem. I love it.

hbbisenieks:

prismatic-bell:

solitarelee:

elenorasweet:

rileyjaydennis:

obaewankenope:

sanerontheinside:

willowgrovecreates:

sussexbound:

prismatic-bell:

atomicairspace:

copperbooms:

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool!

Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this dailywithout any sort of breathing space because there’s millionsof us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesomeokay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild. 

I’m sorry, I WHAT?!

this is why tumblr is the best “social” platform