Spiral Of Happiness

One of my favorite things is how clingy Marcille was when Falin first woke up

I haven’t done anything for 4 hours but watch whatever cartoon loads up next so anyways there’s a whole episode of american dad bout klaus the fish dating an ancient malevolent wraith

alright so he was super in love with her but he found out she’s just bound to whoever holds this cursed artifact he bought and therefore she never had any agency in their relationship, which he didn’t know because all she could do is shriek and he was inferring whatever he wanted to hear. He shatters the item to set her free and she tries to kill everyone but now that he can talk to her for real he finds out what she’s really into is baseball trivia so they go on a baseball road trip as platonic friends and that’s how the episode ends

what the fuck are they feeding the falin and marcille fan artists. why are they painting the sistine chapel every time. they're going crazy style. those freaks. i love them so much.

what a lovely pair of posts

Sound up

I was discussing the incident mentioned later in this piece with my wife yesterday and I saw another post by someone earlier doing something mentioned in here and I'm finally going to say something about it.

There is a serious problem in leftist spaces, especially online, especially on Tumblr, when it comes to language.

The way people are expected to speak just to even enter these spaces is incredibly complex, to the point of being outright hostile to those who haven’t already spent time in them. And it’s not just newcomers; people who have important things to say, people speaking from lived experiences, people who don’t have English as a first language but still deserve to be heard, are constantly talked down to or even pushed out entirely for not using the "right" words.

This gets even worse when you factor in how often new terms are coined in English, and then people are shamed for not immediately knowing or using them.

I saw someone reblog their own post saying something like, "I know for a fact more than half of y’all didn’t understand a fucking word I said here."

And honestly? That stuck with me, because yeah, I’ve felt that before. Not because I don’t value critical thinking! because I absolutely do! I just made a post on that too! but because so many of these posts are written in a way that makes them Functionally Inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t already have the right background knowledge. And at a certain point, if you actually want your words to have an impact, if you actually want to create meaningful change, then you’re going to have to accept some things:

2. People will not always know the exact terminology you personally prefer they use when engaging in discourse.

3. Dismissing or attacking people for how they say something, instead of engaging with what they’re saying, is actively harmful.

And more than that, if you genuinely want people to understand and engage with the things you’re talking about, especially people who don’t speak English as a first language, especially people without access to higher education, especially people who don’t even know where to begin when it comes to self-education (because yes, that is a skill that has to be taught) then you are going to have to be the one to adjust sometimes. You are going to have to let people say things imperfectly. You are going to have to take a step back and engage with the message rather than just the words being used to express it.

One of the experiences that made me realize that I, as a non-native English speaker, was not welcome in Tumblr leftist spaces was when I spoke about real-life oppression I had experienced. I left one word out of my post, a word which honestly, was not even important when talking about an incident that had Happened To Me, not theory, not hypotheticals or any what-ifs of oppression, a story, a story about something that happened to me.

And because of that, people sat in a Discord server, picking apart my words, accusing me of awful things, and then came into my askbox throwing jargon and buzzwords I’d never even heard before, then got mad at me for being frustrated that this was happening.

Think about that. People who are directly impacted by oppression are being pushed out of spaces meant to discuss it because the way they speak doesn’t conform to certain expectations. That is not justice. That is not solidarity. That is not progress.

There is a fundamental disconnect here between theory and praxis. Ironically so many of you do not know what praxis is, because most of you engage with a lot of theory, and not a lot of praxis, you use the word praxis a lot, but, ironically, you have no idea what it means.

{to put my money where my mouth is, it means Doing Something, in the simplest possible terms}

In theory, leftist spaces should be accessible. They should be places where people can speak openly about their experiences, learn from each other, and work toward meaningful change. But in practice? There’s a gatekeeping of language so intense that many people, particularly those who are marginalized in ways beyond just their political beliefs, are outright excluded.

And this is something I need people to sit with: The assumption that the "right" language is easy to learn, or that anyone who doesn’t use it is being willfully ignorant, is an inherently privileged stance. Knowing where to find information, how to process it, and how to integrate new terminology into your vocabulary is a skill that is largely tied to education. Having the time to engage with leftist literature and theory, to stay up-to-date on every new term that gets introduced, is also a privilege. And the fact that so many people refuse to acknowledge this, that they expect perfect articulation from everyone, regardless of background, and punish those who don’t measure up, is a huge problem.

Worse still, the same people who act as gatekeepers of this language often fail to communicate their ideas in a way that is accessible at all.

This doesn’t mean that complex ideas should never be discussed. It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t strive for accuracy in their language. But it does mean that if your goal is to educate, if your goal is to spread awareness, if your goal is to help people understand and join the movement, if your goal is to engage with fellow oppressed people, then you have a responsibility to meet people where they are. You have a responsibility to make your language understandable.

Because if people can’t even process what you’re saying, then what’s the fucking point?

And before anyone says, "Well, people should put in the effort to learn!" Let me make something very clear: They do.

People who are new to leftist spaces, or who are coming in from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, are often trying their best to engage. They are listening, they are learning, they are processing. But if the response to every mistake, every slightly off phrasing, every unfamiliarity with a new term, is immediate hostility,

or even if it's just 'hey I see you're sharing a personal moment, but can you change your language to make me, personally, more comfortable with you discussing your oppression?' then you’re not teaching.

You’re just making sure only the people who already think and speak exactly like you get to stay in the room.

Your language, your terminology, your theory? none of it means anything if you can’t make it accessible to the people who actually need it. And it means nothing if you use it to Exclude rather than Include.

I was explaining online why it’s ridiculous to think that men who want to assault women in public toilets would fake being trans instead of just walking in. And a stranger joined in to say that I was exactly right AND the “transsexuals” are usually not interested in women anyway, so of course we should all leave them alone to pee.

If I told this well-meaning person off for using outdated terms, they would probably stop speaking out against bathroom bills! Using that term in 2025 suggests that this person doesn’t spend much time in trans-positive spaces online. They’re doing something hard. They spoke out in support of trans rights, in a public forum where their friends could see, using arguments that have a good chance of showing bigots that their fear isn’t sensible. Saying “actually, you’re hurting people by saying we should get to be safe with the Wrong Words” would be robbing ourselves of an awesome ally.

EVISCERATED

For those that don’t know, Brock’s mom and dad both bailed on their kids to go dreamchasing for a bit and he had to look after NINE siblings on his own

In other words,

SHOTS FIRED

Brock also just kind of left those same 9 siblings so he could travel the world with a 12 year old and his electric rat

Brock literally hung tight until his dad came home, gave said dad a stern shit-talking about how much of a worthless deadbeat he was to his face, refused to set one foot out of Pewter City until he was sure the dude would stay and take care of his damn kids, and then left to follow the dreams he was never allowed to follow because he was too busy cleaning up his parents goddamn mistakes.

But, like, go off, I guess.

If the one in the first pic is his mom, why does she look younger than him?

Because she’s not the one who had to raise 9 kids.

world heritage post

I think one of the most damaging ideologies towards children is the conviction that having children isn’t a calling but a moral obligation.

Not to be a crazy radical or anything, but children deserve to be deeply wanted by their parents.

Children shouldn’t be a “stage” in life that everyone is obligated to fulfill; childrearing is not for everyone. More importantly, children shouldn’t be state-enforced punishments for “irresponsible” sexual behavior.

Children are people with thoughts and feelings just like the rest of us. They are conscious of the way people treat them. And they can certainly tell when they are unwanted and/or resented.

[ID: tumblr tags. they are: #reblog #i also dont think its enough to want a child. i think you need to want a teenager and an adult too #my mom wanted a baby. when i was too old to pronounce spaghetti wrong and let her put me in church dresses she was done with me #my dad wanted a person. he wanted a baby a child a tween a teen and an adult #my dad wanted to watch a person happen. which was different. /end ID.]

Boosting all of the above signal.

tangled gave us so much, but mostly it gave us the beautiful and intense love of a horse and the man he is chasing in order to imprison

i personally believe that maximus was the former captain of the guard who was cursed into horse form pretty recently, and everyone’s having trouble adjusting to it.

like, he’s entitled to sick leave, he really ought to take a couple months to break the curse and come to terms with whatever the fuck just happened to him, but instead of embarking on a journey of self-discovery and healing he just keeps showing up to work. no one can get captain maximus to go on his fucking voyage of self actualization and fix the curse because he’s obsessed with catching flinn ryder. everyone really fucking hopes that when he finally catches this guy the curse might be broken anyway, but it isn’t.

he just keeps showing up to work. he glares at the stablehands until they saddle him up. everyone’s gone over the regulations a dozen times but there’s nothing there saying you’re not allowed to saddle and ride the captain of the guard if he makes you do it. his former second in command rides him around like ‘sir i really don’t know about this’ and he’s just like ‘are we going to catch some criminals or what.’

you can see in the movie that everyone in the royal guard defers to this horse. it’s absolutely because that’s their boss. and secondarily because now he’s two thousand pounds of percheron.

there is no evidence against this theory and you cannot prove me wrong.

Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.

I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.

And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷

for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.

In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).

To use it:

now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type pip install tumblr-backup, and then when it is installed type tumblr-backup --set-api-key [your oauth consumer key], and then finally tumblr-backup [your options] [your blog name], like so:

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down

I don't know anything about YuGiOh but "Overworked" is the greatest card art they've ever done

Yeah that’s good but check out the original OCG art:

Me checking my inbox on tumblr dot com

Transportation

Okay but I love pictures of animals carrying their babies in slightly precarious looking ways, and the baby looks mildly concerned or displeased

things i say that confuse and worry my coworkers:

I work in a blood bank, and constantly refer to blood types as flavors, such as “Oh, you need two units? What flavor is he?” And my older coworkers just look at me confused but my coworker that’s my age doesn’t miss a beat and responds “A Pos”

this is probably my favorite comment on this post so far

I use flavor for so many things, mostly when talking about scents.

I comment that documentation is “lying” to me. A colleague cautioned me to be a little more positive and not attribute to malace what could be a mistake etc. And I let him know “oh, I’m certain this is an honest mistake or typo by whoever wrote the document. But now the document itself is lying to me with malice aforethought.”

Oooo I want to join in!

They're making what

The murder prediction tool from the movie Don’t Make A Murder Prediction Tool (minority report)

I couldn’t wait until 4/13 to post ts 💔😭

you know the meme, bffs saying goodbye to each other