#have at!

[headspacedad]

hey new tumblr users

Welcome!

So - you’re starting to settle in to your new tumblr home but the landscape is still pretty wild and you’re not sure entirely what’s going on outside your window.  Since my first post about reblogs kind of blew up a bit and it had a couple of questions showing up in the comments, I figured I’d make another post in case that helps anyone.

Today let’s talk about communicating.

no, no, come back here.  It’s gonna be okay.  This is something you only have to do if you want to.

You can go your entire tumblr existence just reblogging posts and enjoying the people you’re following.  That’s cool.  But I see a lot of new arrivals want to be interactive too and that makes sense considering this is a social media site.  In fact, tumblr can be VERY social given half the chance.  This post here puts it wonderfully.

So, you’re on tumblr.  You’ve picked out an icon for your blog.  You’re reblogging posts you enjoy (sharing the cool rocks you found with the people hanging with you) and you’re ready to get a bit more interactive.  Its kind of daunting though because tumblr seems to have a lot of ways to interact and some unspoken rules on how to do it.  Let’s break this down.

First and easiest is to respond to posts.  You see something you want to comment on, an interesting post about sharing rocks for example.  There are three ways you can interact directly with the post.  

1.  When you hit ‘reblog’ there’s a spot for you to add comments (gifs, etc) of your own.  This is great for things you don’t mind everyone and their cousin getting to see.  A quip, adding a fact, telling a related story, politely disagreeing or providing another viewpoint, bouncing off their idea and expanding with one of your own, adding to the story idea they’ve presented, throwing in a relevant gif,  etc.  This is the space for things you don’t mind the entirety of tumblr getting to read.  You’ll notice a lot of posts are chained comments like this with multiple people contributing to the post by the time it reaches you.  There really isn’t any rule about not doing this but general consensus is to make it, somehow, apply to the original post and to not be a butt about whatever your reply is going to be.  Someone posting about fighting depression by making themselves stop and enjoy the way roses smell probably doesn’t need you replying by talking about how rotten roses are and how life is pain, highness.  Start a new post of your own if you want to express that.

2. tags!  Tags are the #tags part of a post when you hit reblog.  A lot of people use these for their original purpose, which is to *cough* make it easier to find things using tumblr’s search engine (tumblr’s search engine is pretty wack).  Still, tags are sometimes useful.  They can, theoretically, help you or people on your blog look up posts quickly.  They can help people doing a general search of tumblr tags find posts on subjects they’re interested in.  I regularly search ‘bunblr’ for instance (highly recommended).  BUT tags have a secondary use that a lot of people have adopted as well.  Tags can be used for a kind of ‘aside conversation’.  This is where you can write comments when you don’t necessarily want to add them to the body of the reblogged post.  It isn’t meant to be shared with tumblr as a whole.  It’s for the people following you.  Sometimes one of your followers will paste your tags to the post itself and you’ll see comments like ‘how could you leave these in the tags?!’  That’s a good thing and usually means you hit a cord but most of the time tags are just for aside conversations and not derailing the post itself.

3.  Reply.  That little speech bubble at the bottom of a post?  Click on that and you get the little ‘reply’ section.  Here’s where you interact with the original poster (OP) directly.  You can ask a question, add a short story, give encouragement, etc.  There’s a character limit on it so you can’t get crazy verbose but its a good way to add a short bit to a post and - hopefully - get a reply from the poster.  Be aware though, people like me are pretty forgetful and don’t always check their notifications.  That little lightning mark at the top of my dash is always at 99+ and pretty roundly ignored on the daily.  Still, other people can also read the reply part and sometimes you’ll get entire discussions in there as people respond.

Be aware that all three of these methods are viewable to everyone.  Anyone who sees the post can click on the notes and the tags, comments and replys will pop up for them.  These aren’t for private conversations.  They’re three ways to interact with posts publicly.

Private communication will be for another post.  So - you ready to test it out?  Use this post as your free trial and get some social interaction practice going on!  Once you’re comfortable you can branch out and there you go.  Social times for everyone (that wants it)!

[bitletsanddrabbles]

Random Prompt List

Five days before the end of NANOWRIMO I decided to start a random prompt list. I figured if I did ten a day, I would have fifty when I was done and I could post them for people to use as they saw fit - inspiration, challenges to friends, text on memes....whatever.

I was 100% successful except for the part where I forgot to post then when I was finished. Oops. Rectifying that now! Now, clearly these are rather Downton Abbey themed, but most of them are vague enough to apply to any fandom you like and even where there are names, those can be swapped out, so if you feel something you like for, say, Star Trek or something, don’t feel like it’s off limits. Go for it. If people are having fun, success has been had.

-

1. "If Mrs. Patmore murders you, I'm telling the jury it was suicide."

2. "Let the numbers be off! I'm not sitting at the same table as that man!"

3. "Oh bother."

4. "Downton's been a convalescence home and a movie studio. Why not this?"

5. "Where are we going to get a spare butler at this time of night?"

6. "There's not enough wine in the wine cellar for this."

7. "For the last time, put that back where you found it."

8. "Just don't tell the police. Or Carson."

9. "There is a God!"

10. "Help me with this and you can keep your job."

11. "I'd bet a year's wages it was Lady Mary."

12. "Don't you dare try to blame this on the dog!"

13. "Just think, we're getting paid to do this."

14. "Well, this situation calls for tea. And possibly a bludgeoning instrument of some sort."

15. "That's a grand idea. Why don't we simply teach the dog to carry a tray?"

16. "Did she give in gracefully, or do you need help burying the body?"

17. "Just imagine if we were American and buying nine Worth dresses per season."

18. "It could be worse, just don't ask me how."

19. "Are you certain this is a good idea?"

20. "How many bets Mrs. Patmore quits over this one?"

21. "What sort of mad suggestion are you going to make next? We get a cat?"

22. "Reading? Heavens, don't hurt yourself."

23. "You've not touched your food. Are you dying?"

24. "Try the blue one instead."

25. "That's hideous. Buy it."

26. "I hate arm garters. Why can't they just make shirts that fit?"

27. "Knife? Oh no, I slipped and cut myself on a collar."

28. "I'm not shaving in the dark, I'd be lucky if I slit my throat!"

29. "Oh, well, thank you Sweeny Todd."

30. "As if you'd survive reading anything less than Milton. A penny dreadful would finish you off!"

31. "You weren't a son either, so we're both failures."

32. "Oh dear, my actions had consequences. Blub blub."

33. "What's it like to have parents who care about you?"

34. "You want it so badly? Here. Enjoy."

35. "What do you mean she's run away to join the circus?"

36. "Well the surprise worked..."

37. "You're lucky I love you."

38. "That is not where that goes!"

39. "Dare I ask what happened to your dress?"

40. "Oh don't do that, it would make a mess of the roses."

41. "Dukes don't just vanish, unfortunately."

42. "I'm not paid enough to care about that."

43. "Now that the wireless is catching on, you should try and do something in that field. You have the face for it."

44. "Are you going to sell me into slavery if I ask for more?"

45. "If you want me to love you more then stop screaming when I have a headache."

46. "Oh don't do that! You'll hurt yourself."

47. "Oh go for it, I won't tattle."

48. "I was just committing the unholy sin of enjoying life for a few seconds."

49. "Would it kill you to smile? Wait, never mind, of course it would."

50. "Does anyone in this house happen to have some spare sanity?"

[genderfluid-druid]

hurr hurr I'm a human body hurr hurr I'm gonna solve all my problems using mucus

[alocalfrog]

Can you imagine suing Boeing and coming home to find Boeing's faulty plane parts washed up in your backyard?

[faeriekit]

"This fic was ai generated—" Cool, so lemme block you real quick

[mayhemchicken-artblog]

in the hour or so it took me to draw this op turned reblogs off

EDIT: reblogs are STAYING OFF. op was right and correct and i have never regretted making a post as much as this one. if you want to reblog my art you can reblog something else from my blog. or commission me, lord knows i deserve financial compensation for the nightmare this post has put me through

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

its so brave that you have such a 2012-coded url in this 2024 world

would you call a bear brave for standing in a new construction suburb or would you recognize the unfamiliar world they built around him

[girlstressed]

can’t stop smiling in inappropriate situations

[pirateprincessjess]

When I was a kid my family pretended to get raptured so I would think I was left behind on earth while they all went to heaven.

I was like 8 years old and my sister and mom had gotten really into the Left Behind novels (bible fan fic about the rapture). In the books when the rapture happened the clothes that people were wearing when they got raptured were left behind in neatly folded piles.

One day when I was getting home from school my family decided that they would leave piles of neatly folded clothes around the house, and then hide in the basement.

The intended effect was that I would get home and see the clothes then, think that my family had been raptured and that I wasn’t good enough to get into heaven… or something?

The problem was that I had never read these books, and didn’t really think about the rapture very often. There was no reason that I would see some laundry on the floor and think “The rapture happened and I’ve been abandoned by God! I’ll never see my family again!! Oh nooo!!!!”

I just sat down and watched cartoons and eventually my family got bored and revealed that they were all hiding in the basement.

It’s a good thing I didn’t understand the joke, otherwise that shit would have been traumatic.

[bookslutskye]

so i recently got top surgery and this was on my discharge papers after a mild complication

[theredtours]

why yes I AM making boop gifs from screen recording

[snakesinsocks2005]

Pin for survivors

[amygdalae]

he can infodump so deep inside me I'll have trivia running down my leg

[elbiotipo]

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

[prismatoxic]

dadchuck is everything to me

[sunbentshadows]

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.