Top 23 of 2023
Have you been aching to get your hot little hands on 52 weeks of data around original posts, likes, reblogs, and searches, all weighted and ranked and tied up into categories with a nice little bow on top? Well, today’s your day! It should come as no surprise that Artists on Tumblr reign supreme: from stunning traditional art, jaw-dropping digital art, fanart, sculptures, textile art—you name it, basically—this year’s list shows that Tumblr truly is the home for art and artists. Thank you, Artists on Tumblr, for enriching our dashboards day after day.
Rounding out the top three, we have two iconic shows: Good Omens is live-action, and The Owl House is animated, but both have a heck of a love story at their core. The second season of Good Omens blessed us with not one but two ineffably exquisite ships, while the final season of The Owl House broke and then healed fans’ hearts in equal measure. Thanks, @danaterrace! Actually, come to think of it, the Good Omens finale kinda did the same in reverse. Thanks to you, too, @neil-gaiman! We can’t wait for season 3.
Speaking of heartbreak and healing, Our Flag Means Death’s second season offered both in droves. The entire cast gave stellar performances, and fans couldn’t have been happier to see the kinds of representation the show displayed. Last year’s #1 topic, Stranger Things, may have dropped a bit, but trust us, you wouldn’t know it from the amount of meta, fanart, and fics in the tag. And did you hear about the live-action adaptations of both The Last of Us and One Piece? They were a preeeetty big deal this year, too. Check ‘em out if you haven’t yet (lol, of course you have). And we’d be remiss not to mention the hugely dedicated fans, fanartists, and fic writers devoting their time to all things Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Y’all deserve a little pizza, as a treat.
2023 was also a year for blockbuster movies, which of course hasn’t escaped anybody’s notice here on Tumblr. Barbie smashed box offices worldwide and left us reeling with every re-watch. How can one describe Greta Gerwig’s pink-filled opus? It certainly is one of the movies of all time. Meanwhile, with its incredible animation and soundtrack, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse introduced us to a whole new multiverse of Spider-People, opening the portal to a veritable flood of incredible OCs. And then, of course, we got a fresh perspective on an old classic when cinephiles introduced Martin Scorscese’s cinematic masterpiece, Goncharov (1973), to a new generation of film aficionados who resoundingly agree that it is, in fact, the greatest mafia movie ever made. We’re so glad this underrated film finally got the acclaim it has long deserved.
In the realms of gaming and tech, the long-anticipated Baldur’s Gate 3 has basically become everyone’s new favorite D&D/dating sim combination. Of course, the Pokémon franchise, games, shows, and Hatsune Miku collabs remain perennial favorites. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, sorry, we mean of course X, made waves across the internet. Similarly, the Reddit blackout drove Redditors to new venues, and Tumblr users welcomed the folks from r/196 with open arms—we’re huge fans of your memes, y’all, and you fit right in. Welcome, we’re glad you enjoy the chaos. Here’s a fun fact: if we included post metadata in Year in Review rankings, #polls, introduced in January of 2023, would have been the #5 topic on Tumblr this year. Phenomenal.
And, oh right. Taylor Swift had kind of a big year, what with the albums, the epic global tour, and the movie and stuff. Fantastic work, @taylorswift, the Swifties on Tumblr thank you for everything.
This is Tumblr’s Year in Review.
Artists on Tumblr
Good Omens
The Owl House
Barbie
Pokémon
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Critical Role
Goncharov
Taylor Swift
Genshin Impact
Stranger Things
The Last of Us
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Elon Musk
196
Star Wars
Our Flag Means Death
Crowley | Good Omens
LGBTQ
Cottagecore
Baldur's Gate 3
One Piece
Aziraphale | Good Omens
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Measure 110, or the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
So if y'all aren't local to Oregon, you may not have heard that the Oregon state legislature just voted to -- essentially -- gut Measure 110, the ballot measure which decriminalized all drug possession and use in the state. It turned all drug use into a citation instead, and the citation and fine could be waived by completing a health screening. The entire point of Measure 110 was replacing jail with health care and services to help people instead, and while I could probably write a very long side post on the imperfections of that approach, it was at the very least a move in the right direction after decades of the pathetic failure and absolutely racist mess that is the "War on Drugs."
You may hear this pointed to in coming years as a reason why we have to just throw people into jail for using drugs, because Measure 110 failed. And like... it did fail, kinda. Sorta. It failed in that it did not manage to fix everything immediately, and it created some new issues while also exposing older issues more sharply.
It also saved the state $40 million in court costs prosecuting low-level drug offenses, kept thousands of people whose literal only crime was putting a substance into the body of a consenting adult (themselves) out of jail, put at least one addiction services center in every county in the state, invested $300 million in addiction services, and an awful lot more. See the end of this post for more reading.
But where it failed, it failed because it wasn't supported. Police and advocacy groups both asked for specific tickets for this new class of offenses which had the phone number to call to go through the health screening and the information about how going through that health screening would make the ticket go away printed on it prominently - lawmakers declined to fund this. Governor Kotek budgeted $50K to train officers on how to handle these new citations and how to direct people to the treatment and housing supports, but lawmakers thought that training officers on this new law at all was a waste of money. Money moved extremely slowly out to the supports that were supposed to come into play to help people obtain treatment or get access to harm-reduction strategies. People freaked the fuck out about clean-needle outreach, fentanyl testing strip distribution, Narcan training, and other harm-reduction strategies.
And at the end of the day, Measure 110 gets called a failure because it wasn't a silver bullet. Never mind that thousands of people are not sitting in jail right now for basically no fucking reason. Never mind that people have gotten treatment, harm has been reduced, overdoses have been prevented...
So, yeah. You'll probably start hearing this trotted out as proof that, well, we triiiied decriminalizing drugs, but look what happened in Portland! Well, what happened in Oregon is that we got set up to fail, and still didn't fail, just didn't totally succeed.
Measure 110 highlights, quoted directly from Prison Policy Initiative:
The Oregon Health Authority reported a 298% increase in people seeking screening for substance use disorders.
More than 370,000 naloxone doses have been distributed since 2022, and community organizations report more than 7,500 opioid overdose reversals since 2020.
Although overdose rates have increased around the country as more fentanyl has entered the drug supply, Oregon’s increase in overdoses has been similar to other states’ and actually less than neighboring Washington’s. A peer-reviewed study comparing overdose rates in Oregon with the rest of the country after the law went into effect found no link between Measure 110 and increased overdose rates.
There is no evidence that drug use rates in Oregon have increased. A cross-sectional survey of people who use drugs across eight counties in Oregon found that most had been using drugs for years; only 1.5% reported having started after Measure 110 went into effect.
There has been no increase in 911 calls in Oregon cities after Measure 110.
Measure 110 saves Oregonians millions. Oregon is expected to save $37 million between 2023-2025 if Measure 110 continues. This is because it costs up to $35,217 to arrest, adjudicate, incarcerate, and supervise a person taken into custody for a drug misdemeanor — and upwards of $60,000 for a felony. In contrast, treatment costs an average of $9,000 per person. The money saved by Measure 110 goes directly to state funding for addiction and recovery services.
There is no evidence that Measure 110 was associated with a rise in crime. In fact, crime in Oregon was 14% lower in 2023 than it was in 2020.
Further reading/sources:
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