#Engin

[engin-program]

Welcome to the ENGin Program!

What is the ENGin Program?

The ENGin Program is a non-profit organization geared towards helping young Ukrainians gain English skills. The organization also aims to establish cross-cultural connections between Ukrainians and people in other countries across the globe. Through English fluency and culture literacy, ENGin wants to connect Ukraine to the world.

How does the program work?

ENGin pairs young Ukrainians with English-speaking volunteers. In weekly virtual sessions, these Ukrainians practice their English and share and learn from different cultures. These sessions are free of charge and available to Ukrainians age 9-35.

How does ENGin support Ukraine during the war?

When the war is over, Ukraine will need to rebuild itself from the ground up. This rebuilding can only happen through investment from foreign companies and international organizations. But for this to be possible, more Ukrainians need to learn to communicate confidently in English. And, in a time when Russia is trying to isolate Ukraine from the rest of the world, it's more important than ever for Ukrainians to connect with people worldwide.

By giving free English lessons through people of countless different backgrounds, ENGin hopes to create a generation of English-fluent, culturally competent young Ukrainians to rebuild their homeland.

Does the ENGin Program work?

The numbers speak for themselves!

As of 2022, ENGin has served 16,350 Ukrainians. In the next five years, the program hopes to reach its goal of 100,000 students.

93% of ENGin students see significant progress within three months of enrollment. As for the volunteers, 95% of them are happy with their student match!

How do I get involved with ENGin?

It's easy! Just go to the volunteer tab on our home page. Becoming a volunteer is an incredibly easy process. ENGin only has three requirements for applicants:

Must be fluent in English.

Must be 13 or older.

Must be able to commit to at least one hour of sessions per week. If you want to volunteer more hours, we can accommodate that!

Volunteer today and make a difference in a young Ukrainian's life!

[mrsoulstice]

🎤👨🏾‍🍳

[noovva]

Engin Akyürek as Tahir Lekesiz | Adım Farah 💥

[fernrisulfr]

Welcome to Anoria

Now that we’re off the Nobody Maps we’re getting into some more personal territory. A long time ago I created an entire homebrew world and campaign that to date I have never run save for a single one-shot meant just to make sure I could balance encounters properly. (The jury is still out. They merked half the fights, and the other half almost saw someone die.). Below are labelled and unlabelled versions of the continental map. Welcome, to Anoria. (I did consider re-naming it Anor.)

[imamhatiptekiateisthocaa]

[brightlotusmoon]

[breakingjustxn]

well i mean, not wrong // credits: @screamingemonight on Instagram

[serialunaliver]

[cemeterything]

sore throats might be the stupidest response to illness i've ever experienced. oh you want to eat? drink?? breathe air??? TEN THOUSAND KNIVES ATTACK

[mo-mode]

I know it’s controversial but I think Annabeth geeking out over the Hephaestus contraptions was adorable

[staff]

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[engin-program]

🎶 Embark on a musical journey through Ukraine's vibrant soundscape! 🇺🇦 From pulsating electronic beats, to soul-stirring melodies, Ukrainian music is an eclectic blend that resonates with audiences worldwide. 🌍 Here are six modern Ukrainian musicians who deserve a prime spot on your playlist. Scroll through pictures 👉

Immerse yourself in the diverse sounds of Ukraine and let these talented artists transport you to a world of musical brilliance!🎶✨

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

as newspapers today dont tend to hire children, a modern day Tintin would run a clickbait YouTube channel, except the clickbait is 100% real every single time

he starts off as an irritating conservative pundit at 14, meets Chang then leaves the think tank paying him and launches his own independent channel and blows up shortly after. Chang helps with video editing and managing his socials and they often chat on video calls between adventures. Haddock, his foster dad, has absolutely no knowledge of his earlier videos.

[noovva]

Engin Akyürek as Tahir Lekesiz | Adım Farah 💥

[nasa]

Nora AlMatrooshi

Nora AlMatrooshi, the first Emirati woman astronaut, worked as a piping engineer before becoming an astronaut candidate for the United Arab Emirates. https://mbrsc.ae/team/nora/

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[hexenmond]

gushing about Friday's Engin concert

So I was on the fence about going to this concert for weeks, but long story short, I'm SO GLAD I WENT! 😍

Engin are a German-Turkish band hailing from Mannheim, which isn't very far from where I live, and on Friday they were playing in Reutlingen, which REALLY isn't far. And they were freakin' fantastic! This video snippet is the solo part of "Stillgelegte Tränen" (roughly translatable as "discontinued tears"), and I hope it shows at least a little just what a wonderful live act they are.

So yeah, I came home from that experience with the clear intention to really go out to concerts more (and maybe the theatre) from now on. I hadn't been in ages, and that's a mistake! It was so lovely to spend some two hours dancing and swaying, watching and listening to three fabulous musicians really rock it, and also I was super proud whenever I caught a Turkish word I understood.

Something that struck me at the beginning when the drums started playing – I don't think I've ever heard a drumset sound so, hm, musical. I mean drums usually file as percussion, and their sound to me is closer in range to "noise" than to "melody". But the sound of these drums sure had a sort of full-bodied, richly tonal quality that I found amazing.

In contrast, the bass started out more hard and metallic (the bassist was playing with a pick most of the time) – however, both sounds changed during the concert and during later songs the bass was much more mellow (also played without a pick for a bit). I'm not sure how much of that was influenced by the sound technician, but I believe it entirely possible that these three fabulous musicians just have that range of tone.

Oh and the lyrics! Much of Engin's original songs are in German, but they did play a lot of Turkish songs as well, and I don't know how many of those were traditional or covers and how many were their own. I did love all of them and the singer gave a little context for many of the songs which was lovely, and like I said, I was so proud of myself whenever I understood a word. And I should add that I didn't understand half of the lyrics in German either! (too fast, too much music going on, lyrics too out of context to catch it all) Their song lyrics generally lean towards poetry, which I personally love but isn't always easy to understand when you hear it for the first time.

There was one song that was about growing up in between between languages, between cultures, between homes, something I can relate to a bit because of my half English heritage (I had a few teenage years where I was totally out of sorts and wishing I'd grown up on the British isles instead of Germany). It's not entirely the same of course. My ear caught four words – "blond genug für Sympathie" ("blond enough for sympathy"), and I thought, oh wow. White passing privilege and on the flip side, never being fully at home and welcome anywhere, in four simple words.

Anyway! You know, I woke up on Saturday morning at around half past four, my mind racing with the whole experience and I lay awake thinking about what I was going to write until about six, when I fell asleep again 😄 and now it's Sunday evening and my brain has shut up a little. But I'm still writing this because a) I want the world to know about this wonderful band, and b) I want to get back into the practice of writing regularly. I have this five part, long form fanfiction that I WILL finish!

So here's some links for all of you who are interested in super danceable tunes, multicultural music and lyrics, and/or absolutely rocking sound:

Engin's website (in German only, sorry, but you can just click on the videos)

my absolute favourite song in German: Echt ("genuine")

my absolute favourite song in Turkish: Gurbet ("foreign place", very melancholic)