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The mix of being the embodiment of what most people think of when they hear the word "aromantic" and being a somewhat niche type of asexual sure leads to me feeling like the odd one out among most other aces because I actually fully understand the physical appeal of sex but only the physical act itself and the emotional side of it is completely alien to me. I cannot wrap my head around the idea that getting someone off is a form of intimacy. Do not add anything like "I'm the complete opposite of this" I already know

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We’re absolutely delighted to announce that our zine has been translated into Mandarin! This translation means a lot to us, being Chinese ourselves. You can even get an exclusive first look at the original Chinese characters of our names ;)

Many thanks to the translator, Yo-Ling, whom you can find at https://yolingwrites.com/

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pg 2 (full zine at tinyurl.com/aromanticmanifesto)

‘the here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there… Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.’

- josé esteban muñoz, cruising utopia

‘I want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance… I want a world where our worth isn’t linked to our desireability, our security to our monogamy, our family to our biology.’

- alok vaid-menon

(image: alok vaid-menon by eloy cruz del prado)

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influencers don’t get it. sure you can stage beautiful pictures of your beautiful self in your beautiful house in expensive workout gear without ever going to the gym. take a mirror selfie that isn’t actually a mirror selfie. it’s you holding your phone with another camera on a timer. get your 500k instalikes. sell tea that makes us shit. vitamin supplements we piss out. you will never have the impact of a girl blogger with 10 likes on a post about the strawberries she got on sale at the grocery store today. i love when social media is a diary. i love you mundane expression. i love you pictures of pets i love you casual selfies i love you weird lighting. i love you diary entries. i love you alive girl

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since i should probably keep saying this over and over, like 75% of americans are deficient in magnesium due to economical diets, processed food, and "advances" in third wave farming making food bigger but NOT more nutritious due to a variety of breeding and soil factors, im not gonna bother citing this shit just look it up on the www, its not hard to find.

but symptoms of magnesium deficiency include but are not limited to depression, lethargy, anxiety, disordered sleep, etc. and also if you smoke weed or drink alcohol or do basically any drug that makes you feel good, adderall, meth, etc etc that shit will deplete your magnesium also.

in blind studys magnesium supplementation is actually one of the most effective cures to depression... since so many people are deficient in it

so unless you have the luxury of eating huge amounts of nuts, leafy greens, and fruit, then buy some "magnesium glycinate" and take that shit, start with 200mg-250mg, you can take more, probably up to 500mg at a time, or take that amount divided in one day, like if you take a bunch at once it might make you very sleepy, make sure to AVOID "magnesium oxide" as it is the most common form of magnesium and it will not help with these symptoms because the bio availability is very low (itll help digestion but not much else), magnesium advertised with "max bioavailability" is usually good too, but if you arent sure, just get "magnesium glycinate"

this should be the first thing you try for depression, since its the least consequential to address a vitamin/mineral deficiency than it is to go on some nasty pills the doc will immediately hock at you with laundry list of side effects. and now im not a Licensed Doctor, but i care about you a lot more than most doctors these days will, do your own research before taking supplements people tell you to online, but seriously, give this one a try

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In order to stop the culture of faking orgasms, we need to stop the culture of shaming others for their sexual experiences.

Can’t get your partner off on the first try? Cool. You can still be thoughtful and make them feel good.

Can get your partner off within 30 seconds? Awesome, good for you both, don’t let it get to your head.

Can make someone cum in less than 5, but for others, it’s a process that takes an hour? That’s alright, everyone’s different. 

Does it take you 30 minutes to cum? That’s okay, you’re not broken, you’re not a failure.

Does it take you 10 seconds to cum? That’s great, you’re not a slut, you’re not overly sensitive or dirty. 

Can’t cum without toys/vibrators? That’s awesome, that’s a valid part of sexual play!

Can only cum with loving, vanilla sex? That’s perfectly normal, and you will find lots of great partners to experience that with!

Can’t orgasm at all? THAT’S ALSO COOL. It’s not a bad thing, you can still enjoy sex TONNES just like others.

Orgasms are NOT the defining characteristic of your sexual prowess. They are great, they’re lovely when they happen, but for the love of science, stop bringing them up higher than they need to be. 

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A brief summary of how user engagement is tracked on Tumblr, for the newcomer:

When you like or reblog a post, that counts as user engagement for the person you liked or reblogged from, and shows up in their notifications.  

If the person you liked or reblogged a post from wasn’t the original poster (i.e., you’re liking or reblogging a reblog), it also counts as user engagement for the original poster, and shows up in their notifications as well.  

This means that user engagement from your likes and reblogs can potential accrue to two different people, the original poster and the person you liked or reblogged from.  

Consequently, you cannot “steal” user engagement from someone by reblogging their post.  

This is one of the very few areas where Tumblr is actually functions more reasonably than other social media platforms.  

Note that this is only true if you use Tumblr’s built-in reblogging function. If you save someone else’s content to your local device and append it to a new post, you effectively become the original poster from that point on.  

This means that on Tumblr, “reblogging” and “reposting” are two different things; if you see someone complaining about “reposting”, this is not the same as reblogging.  

Commenting when reblogging does not affect any of this – unlike, say, Twitter, where quote-retweeting causes user engagement to accrue to the quote-retweet and not to the original tweet – and you can and should do so freely.  

However, every Tumblr user can see who exactly you reblogged a post from, which functions as a soft disincentive against making inane comments; if you make a dumb comment on a reblog, people who see your reblog may “back up” one step in the reblog chain to reblog a version of the post without your comment.  

Nobody understands tags, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that how tags work changes periodically and without warning.  

Tags are a divine mystery.

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The New Tumblrite’s Guide To The Modern Hellsite

(Or: So You’re New In Town, Here’s What You Need To Know)

This post aims to be a guide for the new user to help them understand the tumblr culture. Don’t worry, new user—we’ll have you blogging like a native in no time!

I’m putting the rest of this post under what’s known as a “readmore” (because you have to click to read more, and it says so), which had a few benefits and drawbacks. It prevents the post from being extremely long on people’s dashboards, and any edits will be consistent across all versions because it will link to the post on my own blog, but because it’s on my blog, it will break if I ever change my url (barring an update that changes or has changed this—it can be hard to keep up with the actual mechanics of the site sometimes)

Table of Contents:

1. First Steps — what you should do immediately on making your blog

2. Reblogs — the most important part of using tumblr

2a. Reposting vs Reblogging — yes, these are different

3. Likes — what they are and aren’t for

4. Asks, Replies, and Reblogging With Comment — the different ways of engaging with other users

5. Tags — how to use them like a true tumblrina

6. The Prev Tags Schism — how and why to peer review properly, whether or not you use “prev tags”

7. Blockable Offenses — a list of things not to do

8. Best Practices — various tips and/or tricks to get the most out of your tumblr experience

1: First Steps

So you’ve just created a tumblr! Welcome! I’m sure you want to follow some people, but let’s take a moment to get things in order first. You wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a bot and get blocked, right?

The very first thing you’ll want to do is customize your blog. Start with an avatar—lots of people use picrew, or screenshots/edits of their favorite characters. DON’T use a photo of yourself! This is what we call “Bot Behavior”—bots often use pictures of random people, so any real person icon not immediately recognizable as a celebrity is a red flag; if you want to put yourself in your icon, the picrew route or other artwork communicates that a real person put some effort into creating the blog.

You’ll also probably want to give your blog a title, a header image, and a bio. Don’t give out identifying information in your bio! A first name for people to refer to you is fine, but lots of people use fake names or go by their URL (or a shortening of it). You don’t need to give your age, and you definitely shouldn’t be giving your exact location. One of the main draws of tumblr is anonymity, and you always have the opportunity to give specific people more information, but you never have the opportunity to take information away from people.

Next, feel free to go through the settings to do things like turning off things like “best stuff first” so that your dashboard is always in chronological order, turn on sensitive content, and disable showing your likes and what blogs you follow, if you don’t want people to be able to see that. Most people don’t display those, and it can be seen as Bot Behavior if you do, but not to the extent that an un-customized blog is.

Speaking of, make sure your URL isn’t just four words smashed together—that seems to be the current trend for bots, so you’re likely to get autoblocked.

Finally, start following AND REBLOGGING. Reblogging will be covered more in depth in the next section, but it really is the MOST important part of using tumblr! If you enjoy a post, reblog it! Likes serve a different purpose, and blogs without any posts or reblogs are HUGE red flags for Bot Behavior, especially if they follow more than a few blogs.

2: Reblogs

Reblogging! The most important feature of tumblr! You would think it would be posting but actually? Not so much. Reblogging will be the main thing you do on tumblr, and you’ll probably be doing a lot of it.

Okay, so here’s the deal: tumblr does not (and hopefully never will) have an omnipresent algorithm that governs what you do and do not see. Instead you see 1) the things that the people you follow post and reblog, in chronological order, and 2) recommended posts, unless you turn then off. Recommended posts come from either tags you follow (more on that later) or occasionally tumblr will try a “based on your likes” system that doesn’t work and everybody turns off. Oh, and there’s featured posts but that’s a thing tumblr the corporation is specifically posting/boosting for everyone to see, it’s not algorithmically generated for you specifically based on your usage of the site.

THIS MEANS!! If you are not reblogging, you are not contributing to the tumblr ecosystem!! People who follow you will ONLY get something from that IF you are reblogging and/or posting original content!!

If you like something, reblog it! That’s the only way you have of sharing it with other people and getting more eyes on it. Likes do not work for this. Likes are something else entirely.

When you reblog a post, here is what happens:

1) the original poster sees in their activity that it was reblogged by you, and anything you said on the post itself or in the tags

2) the person you reblogged it from sees in their activity that it was reblogged by you, and anything you said on the post itself or in the tags

3) it shows up on your blog and on your followers’ dashboards, with anything you added to the post itself or in the tags

4) anybody who looks at the notes of the post can see that you reblogged it, your addition to the post if any, and your tags if any, but it’s really hard to find someone specific in here on big posts and these things aren’t always in the same place as each other

5) the number of notes on the post increments by one

When you reblog a post (or when it is reblogged from you), comments on the post itself stay attached to the post, but tags do not. We’ll get more into when and when not to Reblog With Comment in section 4, but for now it’s enough to know how reblogs work.

Oh, and of you see someone tag a post with something like “dnr” or “do not reblog” then you SHOULD NOT reblog it! Sometimes people post things that they don’t want to go beyond their immediate followers, like vent posts or unfinished art they don’t want overshadowing the finished piece.

Finally, don’t worry about the age of a post when you reblog it, or if you’ve reblogged it before. Tumblr has lots of “classic posts” or “always reblog” posts from years and years ago that are still circulating, and that’s fine! The culture here encourages reblogging older posts, and there’s no limit on the number of times you can reblog a post. Many of the more recent popular memes have originated from posts that were made years ago, and only got popular after they’d been around for a while!

2a: Reposting vs Reblogging

Reblogging is very very good, but reposting is very very bad. What’s the difference?

When you reblog a post, you are using tumblr’s built in functionality to give somebody else’s post more visibility.

Reposting, by contrast, is when you take somebody else’s post and create a new post on your own blog using that content. Saving an artist’s work and creating a new post so that it originated on your blog is reposting, as is taking a screenshot of a text post and making a new post using that.

If you repost an artist’s work, for example, people can’t find that artist very easily, and the artist doesn’t see the user engagement from their post. If you reblog their posts instead, you help that artist build a following, and you still get to have cool art on your blog. Win-win.

Reposting also includes posting things from one website onto another—stealing from an artist’s twitter for your tumblr, or from their tumblr for your twitted.

Most of my reposting examples are about artists because that’s the field that is most commonly reposted, especially without credit.

It’s bad, it sucks, nobody likes reposters. Just use the reblog button instead.

You’ll see some posts where tweets or reddit posts are reposted, but even those should include usernames and links to the page they were taken from, and do not represent the work as their own. It’s still iffy, though—you’re getting notes off of somebody else’s funny thought or idea or story.

Generally, pointing and laughing at a twitter user’s incredibly bad take is accepted, in which case usernames are usually blocked out to prevent harassment.

3: Likes

Likes mean almost nothing here. People use them in a couple of different ways, but they’re far, FAR less significant than reblogs. Liking a post can mean that you enjoyed it, or that you wanted to look at it later (by going through your Liked Posts), or that you wanted to remind yourself that you’ve already seen it when it inevitably pops up on your dash again in two months. It can be a way of silently sending emotional support on somebody’s vent post, or indicating that you’re interested in hearing more when somebody says “3 likes and I’ll post about this thing”. What Likes AREN’T is a way to show a post to anybody else.

When you Like a post, here is what happens:

1) the original poster can see in their activity that you liked the post

2) if you clicked Like on somebody else’s reblog of that post, they can also see it

3) the number of notes on the post increments by one

Unlike reblogs, Liking is a binary state: either a post is Liked by you, or it isn’t, meaning that a Like can only ever add one note to a post. In contrast, every time you reblog a post it adds another note to that post, AND it puts it in front of other people who can then like and reblog it.

Finally, reblogged posts can be searched for on your blog using the search function (questionably useful) or by going through an organizational tag (very useful), while Liked posts are not (to my knowledge) something you can search through—you’d have to scroll manually with no filtering system.

As you can see, reblogs are superior to likes in almost every situation, unless the post is something the person would not want reblogged.

4: Asks, Replies, and Reblogging with Comment

Now, there are several ways to interact with other tumblr user, and they’re each good for different things.

The first is Asks. Tumblr users can control whether or not people are allowed to send them asks, and whether or not people are allowed to do so anonymously. Do not be an asshole. Do not be the reason someone has to turn off anon or close their askbox.

Asks are the most acceptable and widely used form of direct communication on tumblr, for several reasons. First, if somebody’s askbox is open, it is implied that they are willing to receive an ask. Second, asks can be answered publicly or privately, if you have not sent anonymously, giving the recipient maximum control over how they respond, if they choose to do so. Third, asks don’t create a conversation the way a direct message does, so if you say something and they never respond, it isn’t hanging there in the message thread like a neon sign proclaiming your shame the next time you go to message them. Unless they never deleted it out of their askbox. Usually that’s their shame, though—a lot of people simply forget to answer asks until it’s been long enough that they feel awkward about it.

When you send an ask, the recipient will receive a notification to check their inbox, at which point they will see your url, message, and the option to respond. If they respond, and you did not message them anonymously, YOU will receive a notification on your activity page that they did so, although the notification won’t link directly to their response if they answered publically, only to their blog.

Only “main” blogs (the first one you create, as opposed to “side” blogs on the same account) can send asks, but any blog can receive and respond to asks, publicly or privately.

Next are Replies. THIS ONE IS IMPORTANT. YOU WILL ALMOST NEVER USE REPLIES. IF YOU ARE USING REPLIES ALL THE TIME, STOP USING REPLIES. There IS a time for replies but they are a sometimes tool.

When you reply to a post, here is what happens:

1) the original poster receives a notification in their activity that you replied, and a partial view of what the reply is, but must go to the post and search through the notes to find the whole thing, which can be difficult to find on a large post

2) if you are replying to a reblog of the post, the reblogger also receives the notification and also has to go to the post and hunt for the reply, same as above

3) if either of them have email notifications on for replies, you are blowing their emails up constantly. Each reply sends a separate, unthreaded email notification, if they have those enabled. Although at the very least the email contains the full reply

4) the only other people who see replies are people specifically looking in the notes of the post—your followers do not see them and they do not show up on the dashboard or attach to a specific reblog chain.

5) if you are reblogging to an addition to the post, nobody will be able to tell because, again, replies do not attach to a specific reblog chain. They’re just loose in the notes. Sometimes people will @ mention each other in the notes to have a conversation but this is very inefficient and, again, absolutely blows up the notifications of the original poster and also the person who reblogged the version you are replying to.

Replies do have a function, but it’s very limited in scope:

1) when you want to send something directly to the original poster, usually because they’ve asked a question that you are responding to or you are attempting to start a conversation about the specific subject of the post. DO THIS ON THE ORIGINAL POST, and don’t bother on massive posts with lots of notes

2) if you are replying to the person who reblogged the post but sending them an ask or DM isn’t a viable option for some reason

Also, keep in mind that for someone who is not the OP or reblogger, you need to @ mention them—if someone replies to your post starting a conversation, you should reply to them by going to your own post, start with “@[their url]” and select them so that they receive a notification, and then type your message. This ensures that only the people who need to be notified get notified.

Oh, and if you see a post that says “tag yourself”, DON’T reply to it! It says tag for a reason—that goes in the tags of your reblog! It’s a way to talk about yourself to your followers, not something for you to send directly to the original poster or the person who put it on your dashboard.

99% of the time, though, you’ll either be talking in the tags or reblogging with comment.

Speaking of which, Reblogging with Comment! This is like regular reblogging, but you’re also adding your own words to the post. Most of the time, you’ll add anything you have to say to the tags, where it will need to pass peer review, but if you feel passionately about something or feel like you have something to add, you can.

Before you do, though, you should know that 1) people can and will go to the person you reblogged from and reblog it from them instead if they don’t like your addition (this is a feature and not a bug), 2) both the original poster and the person you reblogged from will see your addition, and 3) this is best done sparingly. Use your best judgement as to whether you really want to bypass the peer review process and add something, and don’t forget that tumblr is a pvp enabled zone.

If you reblog with comment, you will not get notifications on that post unless it is reblogged or liked from you. This means that you will have no idea when or if your addition goes viral until you see it on your dashboard. It also means you don’t have to deal with any of the notifications unless somebody @ mentions you. This is, honestly, the ideal way to go viral if you’re going to do it, because the notifications on a viral post are a fucking nightmare and everybody hates it. That said, don’t try to go viral. There’s literally no benefit to going viral on this site, tumblr clout isn’t real, there are no sponsorships and you cannot try to sell anything without being torn apart like a cartoon cow by a school of cartoon piranhas. It will take seconds and there won’t even be bones left. Some people make it work but it’s almost always something that happens to them instead of being on purpose.

Also, at least some and probably many of the back-and-forth posts you see are staged by people who know each other, and you’ll generally have better luck if you’re adding on to the posts of people you at least kind of know, either as mutuals or through sending asks and reblogging with tags.

5: Tags

Tags!!! Tags are great. Tags are your best fucking friend on this hellsite and they serve a couple of purposes:

First and foremost, we use them not as intended but as a way of adding to a post in a quiet, less intrusive way. If reblogging with comment is shouting from the rooftops, tagging is chatting with your friends. Tags used to be only visible when directly viewing your reblog of a post, but then tumblr updated so that the original poster and the person you reblogged from can see them in their activity page, and people can look at them on the notes. Nevertheless, they remain the most polite and unobtrusive way to comment on something. You can also put a frankly ridiculous number of tags on a post, which is great.

Second, tags can AND SHOULD be used for organizational and filtering purposes. Many people tag for things like fandoms, characters, common trigger/content warnings, and safety concerns.

When you use tags for organizational and filtering purposes, is important that you spell them correctly and use a consistent tag; if you spell a tag incorrectly, it will be useless for searching and tumblr’s filtering won’t catch it. If you use inconsistent versions of it, you won’t be able to find things easily, and people will have a harder time knowing what to filter.

For example! If you want to have a way to find all your posts about (for example) power rangers, you would go to the tags portion of the reblog window and type something like “power rangers,” (the comma is what closes the tag, so it would then look like “#power rangers”). Then, to find all the posts with that tag, you would go to “[your url].tumblr.com/tagged/power rangers” (yes, with the space—tumblr used to use dashes instead of spaces but it can now recognize spaces in tags and your URL bar should autofill the correct symbol. Unless it tries to google search, in which case you need to put the actual symbol, which is something like %20 I think? So it would be “/tagged/power%20rangers”. But that’s way more difficult and easy to fuck up than just putting a space).

Tag filtering allows tumblr to see a tag and automatically hide the post from you, with an option to open it anyway. If you absolutely HATED power rangers, you could filter the tag “#power rangers” and any post tagged with that would show up saying it was hidden because it contained the tag #power rangers, and that you can click to open it if you want. A lot of people use this to avoid spoilers for things.

If you tag something as “#power ranger” instead, it WILL NOT show up when you go to your power rangers tag, because you forgot the S, and it WILL NOT be filtered for anyone who blocked #power rangers, for the same reason!

Because of this IT IS VITAL THAT YOU DO NOT CENSOR CONTENT OR TRIGGER WARNING TAGS. If someone is trying to avoid triggering content, and you use a bunch of random asterisks and slashes to censor it, their filter will not pick it up. You will be doing the OPPOSITE of keeping your followers safe and providing a comfortable space.

Censoring tags is usually done with the purpose of “keeping hate out of the tags”—ie, if I am saying something negative about power rangers, I might write it as “p*wer r*ngers” instead to prevent tumblr’s search function from serving my post to people looking for power rangers content. When doing this, censor in both the content of the post and the tags, and it’s still good to be consistent in your method of censorship.

Tumblr does have a search function—you can search for tags, and will find posts that are tagged with the tag you’ve searched for. You can also “follow” a tag, which will make tumblr periodically put posts from that tag on your dashboard as recommended posts. DO NOT TRY TO GAME THE SYSTEM BY USING A BUNCH OF UNRELATED TAGS. That’s a fast track to being blocked not just for Bot Behavior but also because it’s annoying. There’s no real algorithm to game, here—just keep blogging and people will either decide they like your content and follow you or they don’t and they won’t.

Speaking of Bot Behavior and how to avoid it, talking in the tags is the absolute best way to let people know you’re a human. Bots can use tags, but they use them like bots, not like humans—talk away in the tags and it’ll be clear you’re a real person.

Finally, I mentioned “peer review” earlier. “Peer review” is a term we use for a phenomenon similar to “stealing tags”, which is actually a GOOD thing. If your follower or the original poster reads and enjoys your tags, they may choose to copy and paste them into a reblog with comment (or use a screenshot, although that isn’t as screen-reader friendly). When doing this, it is common courtesy to append “(via @[the tagger’s url])” so that people can easily tell who wrote the tags.

If you enjoy the tags but don’t want to add them as a comment (especially if you want to reply to them), you can “steal” them instead. When stealing tags, it’s important to let people know they aren’t yours! a quick “#these tags ->” before and “<-[comment goes here]” after are my go to (you can make the arrows by using a < or > combined with a -). This gives credit to the person who made the tags, rather than looking like you’re trying to pass off their jokes/ideas as your own.

Speaking of peer review and stealing tags, that brings me to our next section:

6: The Prev Tags Schism

Okay, here’s the deal. Some people, when reblogging, will simply tag “prev tags” as a clue for their followers to go to the previous reblog and look at that poster’s tags. I can understand the draw—it’s low effort, it’s unobtrusive, and it gives credit to the tagger.

On the other hand, tags can be edited or deleted, which means the thing you’re endorsing may be changed or even outright gone when your followers go to check what you’re talking about. It also tends to create “chains” where someone will have to go through many, many posts to find the tags being talked about, and often the chain will be broken by a deleted post, rendering the referenced tags either gone or unreachable. In addition, you have to scroll to the top of a post to go to the previous reblog, which is annoying on longer posts.

I’m not going to take a moral stance on the issue, but I will say that it’s a recent shift in behavior and that it is not tumblr native behavior—and you’re here to blog like a tumblr native, right?

I get the appeal. I’ve almost done it myself a couple of times. But I don’t, because if I have to sit through one more 10 minute session of going through a bunch of posts that just say “prev tags so true” until I reach a version tagged only with “hannibal” or some bullshit I’m going to lose my fucking mind. The post wasn’t even that good. It was not so true, besties.

Anyway you can use prev tags if you want, it’s your blog, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

But also it’s literally SO easy to just tap on the tag to copy it if you’re on mobile or copy/paste if you’re on desktop, it’s really, really, really not hard. I promise.

7: Blockable Offenses

Okay listen. People are probably going to block you. Don’t take it personally. However, this is a non-comprehensive list of things you can avoid to minimize being blocked, and things you might block people over. Some, but not all, of the things on this list also fall under Bot Behavior.

Blog suspiciously empty and un-customized

Only reblogs porn gifs

Says some absolute rude dumbass shit on your post, especially if it’s clear they have no reading comprehension

Annoying

Likes a media/character/ship you don’t like

Clearly an attempt at boosting a company’s search engine optimization

Clearly a multilevel marketing scheme

Clearly a cryptocurrency scam

Your mutual doesn’t like them for some reason

Constantly involved in drama and you don’t want to get dragged into it if they reblog your post

They like your favorite media/character/ship, but they’re doing it wrong and you hate seeing their shit ass takes

They reblog unmarked spoilers for something you’re trying not to see spoilers about

They don’t tag for triggers/content warnings and you need to not interact with them

They sent you a rude ask, with their url attached

They sent you a rude ask, anonymously (yes, you can block anonymous askers, but be careful because you can’t UNblock them)

You thought it would be funny

Their vibes are simply rancid

Their vibes are not rancid but you just have kind of a weird feeling about them like you don’t have proof but ehhhhh idk better safe than sorry

You have IRL beef, petty or otherwise

You know them IRL and you don’t have beef but you still want to keep your blog private from them

They stole your tags without crediting you or noting that they were copied

Literally any reason

So there you go! Some reasons you might block or get blocked by someone!

It’s also SUPER important to block bots—they feed off of your real-human-behavior legitimacy to appear more human and less like a bot to moderation systems, and if they get caught then YOUR blog could get flagged as a bot by association! When you block someone, it cuts their ability to interact with your blog, and means you don’t have to see anything they say either.

If, for some reason, you want to unblock someone, you can always go to your blocked tumblrs list in your settings and unblock them there.

8: Best Practices

This is a place for tips, tricks, and hashtag pro strats. Little things that will make you look and feel like a tumblr native in no time. Some of them will be repeats from earlier sections, put here in condensed form for easy reference.

Reblog things if you enjoy them

Customize your blog, and don’t use a default avatar or a photo of yourself

Talk in the tags, that’s what they’re there for

“Tag yourself” means IN THE TAGS OF A REBLOG, and NOT in a reply! It’s about sharing lore with your followers, not starting a conversation with the OP or the last person to reblog

People genuinely love it when you go through their blog and like and reblog a bunch of stuff all at once—it means you enjoy their blog!

Reblog, don’t repost.

Replies are a sometimes tool, don’t overuse them

Curate your space. Don’t follow people if you don’t like their blog. Block people who annoy you.

Nobody knows if you’ve seen a post or not; you can always scroll by without interacting with it

If you use the queue function, also use a special tag that you apply to queued posts (with the word queue somewhere in it) so that people know they’re queued

The apostrophe key on mobile and desktop read as different characters when you’re creating/searching a tag, it’s really annoying

If you use quotation marks in a tag, it puts whatever was in quotes at the very beginning of all of your tags, which is very confusing—use apostrophes instead (ie: say ‘thing’ instead of “thing”)

Find people whose takes you enjoy and then stay out of the search function, it’ll save you from a lot of aggravation

Don’t get involved in fandom drama, just stay in your lane

DO NOT POST PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION. Seriously, you do not want to get doxxed. It’s easier to track people down than you think.

If you copy somebody else’s tags, note that you’ve done so! Also, don’t use an extension that automatically copies people’s tags when you reblog from them. It’s a blockable offense.

I may or may not update this, but I’ll try and keep a “last updated on: [date]” tag if I do

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in response to the drastically changing climate and AI creeping further and further into every day life, i keep seeing people bringing up UBI - universal basic income. and i get the inclination to believe that UBI is a solution to the problem, but it's really like plastering over a gaping wound.

UBI seems like a good idea, offering a financial cushion for everyone, but it's missing the point. capitalism is structured so that it'll just absorb that money right back into itself. you give people more money without changing anything else, and the landlords, the banks, they'll just increase prices. this is not simplified thinking, it is a fact in practice today.

look at the military housing allowance in the US as an example of how this works today. you can ask anyone enlisted who is stationed abroad. more money is provided, but the rent goes up to match. you think UBI will be any different? if there's a way for a capitalist to profit from a social program, they will stop at no cost to find it and exploit it. the whole system is rigged that way on purpose.

and then what about the way we go about funding ubi? it's a nice thought to tie it to taxes from the rich and corporations, but let's be real here. we can't even get a living wage set as the minimum wage. the idea that the government would just 'give away' money to people not working? it's laughable. we're a reactive society, not proactive. it's not going to happen.

from Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations:

"RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock."

it's all about what we can afford to pay. you increase wages or implement UBI, the rent will just go up. that's how the system works, that's how landlords operate. that is how it has always worked and always will work.

what we need to realize is that if we have the power to build support for UBI, we might as well go for full blown socialism. it's going to be just as hard, but it'll actually change things. you could look at something like universal basic services, where actual needs like healthcare, education, housing, and food are met. not just giving people money and hoping the market will magically solve the problems. but the fact of the matter is that this is not profitable and that is the crux of the capitalist dilemma.

UBI is just allowing people to play the game of capitalism. it doesn't change the rules, doesn't challenge the underlying causes or the issues or the problems or inequities. people will find themselves back in the same hole that they crawled out of because the boot on their neck is keeping them there. the boot is capitalism.

[postmarkss]

it's time now. it's time to imagine the brightest future you can, and talk about it.

a future where people only work 8 hours a week and everyone's basic needs are met. a future where we are more connected to nature and eat seasonal, local produce. a future where you look out for your neighbours and they look out for you. a future where you actually know who your neighbours are. a future where everyone is just a lot more relaxed and able to do whatever they want to do - this 8 hour working week has given people their lives back and now they're able to make community events, work in community gardens, sing and dance and spend time with their kids, play whatever sport they want, travel, read, create art and music.

People are interacting with each other in good faith again because money as an ulterior motive has all but disappeared. Cus you see a few decades ago they made profits illegal. All money has to be put back into the company and CEOs can take home a salary only, no bonuses and it can't be more than 3x what the lowest paid employee makes. You can go to jail if your company is found to make profits, advertise on a large scale or pay its high ranking members more than what's allowed.

Jail still exists but mostly people go in for financial crimes (greed still exists); drugs are decriminalised and available to use safely. people are not as desperate now so there's been a massive reduction of violent and petty crime and most of the people who still do this are teenagers who get away with a slap on the wrist. police are not armed anymore and are heavily penalised if they abuse their power or hurt a civilian, and their role is more that of mediator, signposter (to community services, social services, and free and accessible healthcare including for mental health) and security. together with the former military they make up an "emergency task force" which are called upon in times of need and crisis, for floods, fires, other such disasters.

the stock market completely collapsed after profits were made illegal and people had to find other ways to figure out what a company was worth: such as how they treat their staff or how accessible their processes are. as a result of this, as well as more widespread disability thanks to Covid and an ageing population, accessibility is fucking incredible now. most places are accessible to the vast majority of disabled people even without them having to ask for a single thing. If they have to ask, accommodations are made quickly and without fuss and this is completely normal now. disabled people are more visible than ever in public life and this has led to a generally kinder, more tolerant public life.

Everything is slower now. Social media as we know it died decades ago and Internet 4.0 is efficient, will find you accurate answers and the websites you're looking for very easily and fast. there's monopoly laws restricting how large companies operate online. online ads are all but illegal - there's "phone book" esque pages where you can promote your business or service and that's allowed but not anywhere else. Lots of people are still annoying and some of them are still cruel but overall living together as humans has gotten so much more chill. We've tackled climate change and reversed much of it, now it's a global day of mourning whenever a species is found to be extinct through human intervention. these days used to happen much more frequently but it's very rare these days. Most everyone gets the day off and is encouraged to read about the lost species or hold themed funerals. Globally everything has gotten better - there's much more global equality now after a bunch of western/formerly colonising countries almost self destructed and then instead decided to own up for colonialism, pay reparations to a lot of countries in Africa Asia and Latin America, as well as indigenous nations of North America, Oceania, even in Europe. The USA doesn't exist anymore instead its a whole host of separate nations all managed by the native people whose land it is. The UK doesn't exist anymore. England is still sad about it but Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall are called Cymru, Alba, Eire and Kernow again and they've formed a Celtic Union for better collective bargaining power in the EU (which still exists, somehow. Its better now. England may still be out of the EU I'm not sure). Migration is common and foreigners are welcomed into any country with open arms.

I may try to write something about this. I have a vision for a future and it's so lovely. Here, on earth, with the starting point being now. We have a lot to work with and only a few changes could make such a difference. Demilitarisation, UBI and maximum working hours, greedy financial practices made illegal. Conservation and education on local plants and nature and food. Community building on every level. Giving people their lives back.

This is all extremely possible. If it were up to me, very little in society would be left unchanged but it would all be people friendly changes. changes that aim to support the poorest and most marginalised, changes that aim to punish greed and exploitation. It's a work in progress of course. But I have a vision for a better world and dammit if I'm not going to share it with you.

[postmarkss]

If you ever want to feel like you're Not Crazy™ go follow lesbian_herstory on ig. They post polls on their ig story and it's just a bunch of lesbians agreeing that the trans bs is getting out of hand

[postmarkss]

i'm seeing a lot of new ppl join tumblr who aren't making any spontaneous semi pathetic, oversharing personal textposts whatsoever and i just want to say you're doing it all wrong... this is not like instagram like meant to be some shiny highlight reel used to make u look good its supposed to be an incriminatingly revealing dark intimate look into your life & inner psyche while simultaneously no one knows who u are or gives a fuck... anyway hope this helps some of u get on the right track

[postmarkss]

guys im speaking on behalf of a lot of creators here but pls

MORE REBLOGS WITH TAGS AND COMMENTS = MORE CREATIONS BEING PUT OUT FOR YOU

its a win win situation… PLEASE reblog. esp with tags and comments!!!!!!!!!

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so, there's this really cool thing!! a thing happening or maybe a thing i saw. and i tell a friend abt it. and well, they don't have a big group of people to tell, but they tell their one other friend. and then that friend tells their sibling about it. and their sibling tells their bestie about it. and their bestie tells their boyfriend. and their boyfriend tells their buddies. and the buddies tell their partners. and one of those partners has a pretty decent following online so they tell all their followers. and now suddenly SO many people know about this thing !!!!!

but if my friend had thought, "eh what's the point in sharing this thing with anybody, i only have this one other friend who might care" well then, that stops this whole chain. that stops all these people from knowing about the cool thing !!!!

and that's how reblogs work. that's why they're important !! esp for creators !! that's how things get spread around and reach new people.

and this is not to disparage on likes! or say that everyone is obligated to reblog things! i love getting likes<3 likes are so nice and of course people can do what they want with their own blogs. but this is more abt addressing a site-wide mentality that has become more prevalent in recent years, i feel. where people are 1.) used to how other social media sites work, which is by mainly liking content and never sharing content because those other sites don't promote sharing and are powered by algorithms that will push content to you based on your likes. and 2.) the idea that if you don't have a large following then why bother reblogging ?

you might think, who will see this? i only have 5, 10, 100 followers. well, those people will see it !!!! and they may have more followers (or less, or the same). and then when they reblog it from you, more people will still see it!!

on tumblr you are the algorithm pushing content to your followers. revel in the awesomeness of that and share some cool stuff!

[postmarkss]

As an artist, the likes to reblog ratio is painful. And I know its stupid, but I've always felt like its like subtlety telling me, "I like your work, but its not quite good enough to be on my blog". PAINFUL lmao

BRO SAME

not just as an artist

any content creator feels like that. you write an analysis and pour a lot of feelings into it and edit it a hundred times bc you want it to be good. and suddenly you get so many likes, or people even replying to it…but nobody reblogs. well.

you draw something and you’re so proud of it, maybe you even think it’s your best creation so far…and then…2 reblogs, 50 likes. alright.

same with fic writer, etc.

AND ALSO CAN I JUST BITCH ABOUT getting only reblogs without tags??? i don’t know how to feel…our stuff is worth reblogging but…how do you feel about it? I was going for angsty vibes but you didn’t feel anything much if you didn’t add some tags to it right? what am I doing wrong?…idk man, for me personally tumblr is dying BECAUSE of this, not because of some ban or shit like that. content creators just…don’t feel like wasting time here, since it is just depressing posting stuff on tumblr.

anyway, i don’t know if it’s just me, but i just wanna say that I’m a lot more inclined to check and follow and interact with people who reblog AND tag their stuff. anyone else i don’t even consider when i look at my notification. bots are probably more talkative and supportive than most of the accounts here nowadays lol

[postmarkss]

this new reblog chart feature is FASCINATING and it is also highlighting how much people on this website fail gifmakers and other content creators. you NEED to start reblogging gifsets and art if you want this site to continue functioning and being a place content creators WANT to be on. look at this

there are almost NO reblog chains!! the majority of reblogs are directly from me, and then it just. ends. the like to reblog ratio is almost 1:4.

this is why posts die. this is why artists have left, this is why gifmakers are giving up. this is killing tumblr.

reblogging is the ENTIRE POINT of this website, and you can't just like something and move on and expect gif/editmakers and artists to continue putting in the effort to make content FOR YOU.

REBLOG. POSTS.