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wish i had a bit going where whenever i said “the prophecy” like three of my friends would repeat “the prophecy” in different tones while squinting into the distance and rubbing their chins like sages deep in thought. i would also do this for them, im a team player
okay, so, be me, 27 years old at the time, an adult by any definition in the world
be me at the los angeles zoo, one of my very favorite places in the world, because i love animals. i am immedietly 8 years old when presented with a little creature. i can’t help it.
okay, wait, go back. we must establish two things for this to hit right
first:
the year before, i’d gone to the san diego zoo with my aunt and grandma and! they let you feed giraffes there!!
how wonderful a world and how wonderful a life, where for $10 I can hand feed a giant creature three crispy biscuits. i go “i am feeding the giraffes right now” and go in line to buy the biscuits and return moments later triumphant, 3 biscuits in my grasp
“oh good!” my grandmother says, “one for each of us!”
“yes,” i say, despondent, “one for each of us.”
i wanted to feed all three to the giraffes myself but since i am an actual adult and not a child i do not say this and share the biscuits
second:
my friend group echoes. a lot
someone tells a story and ends it with “and that’s what happened!” and the rest of us will repeat “and that’s what happened!”
often in unison. and it’s constant, all the time, even to little stuff. often said in the tone of “they don’t even have dental”
ok, so we’re back at the los angeles zoo. they have opened the giraffe feeding
i am not going to be thwarted again
my two friends (K and M) get in line to feed them and i go to buy the biscuits. i return with nine biscuits because i am going to give the giraffes three biscuits myself and i do not want to hear a word of protest. i am being fair. i am being equitable. i am sharing. no one can judge me
“wow!” says K. “that’s a lot of biscuits!”
“the cult provides,” i say generously, handing over their share, because what is a friend group if not a small cult
and then, automatically, in unison, like they have so many times before and thinking nothing of what exactly they’re saying, M and K reply, “the cult provides”
two different people in line turn to stare at us while we all blink at each other and then M nervously shouts, “we are definitely not in a cult!” which sounds like something someone who is in a cult might say
and ever since it’s been a running bit where one person says “the cult ____” and everyone echoes it as seriously as possible, no matter where we are or who we’re around
which is to say, OP, that you could be living the dream if your friends weren’t cowards
smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud
this is gonna make me sound very Old Man Yells At Cloud but i just hate how many things in my life assume i will always have access to a quick, reliable internet connection and almost cease to function without it. Obviously certain things Have To Have An Internet Connection, but i want to be able to listen to music if my service is bad. i want to still watch movies if Netflix is down. i want to have a working map when i can’t get a cell signal. nearly every tech product these days bears the fingerprint of the extremely internet-rich places they are developed, high rent offices in Seattle, San Francisco, etc.. I think often the idea of the internet not being available is so remote to them it doesn’t even factor in to development. i remember when the Xbox One was debuted and Microsoft was almost mockingly like “if you don’t have reliable fast internet, then don’t bother buying this”, and there was such backlash they completely went back on so much of that. But now that attitude is just the tech norm.
It’s a unique type of frustration when you agree that a character is deeply flawed but other people keep missing what’s actually wrong with them and assigning them new flaws that they don’t even have it’s like free my man he did none of that. He did a bunch of other shit tho.
The new sidebar crowds out the dashboard content and the bright blue popup notifications (now at the side AND top) and create-post bar pull your eyes in different directions. There is no space for the eye to rest on anymore - it’s all noise. The end result is that everything flattens - there’s no focal point anymore.
It’s also pretty overwhelming - even for someone like me - so I can’t imagine it would be very user-friendly to someone who was photosensitive or struggled with visual overload (especially when paired with the high-contrast ‘true blue’ default site palette and animated icons for the changes-on-tumblr/staff-picks/trending buttons).
2. The activity pop-up now covers dashboard content
This is really bad from a usability standpoint. In the old layout the activity pop-up used to drop down over the recommended blogs sidebar. Now it actively gets in the way of looking at core content. The dash is why we are here, burying it like this is baffling.
The search bar now drops down over the recommended blogs banner instead, but where the old design had non-critical space on each side of the dashboard to visually allow both features to pop in, this new layout is way worse for efficiency. And for what? Having a rarely-used former drop-down menu now permanently active? The old banner with quick-links for the key use-features (notes, messages, askbox) made much more design sense.
It also means that the activity pop-up gets now completely covered by the blog pop-up that opens when you click the notification, so double demerit there. 0/10.
3. It’s harder to navigate to the activity page, and the new page-stretch means you can’t see new notes without scrolling down
That first bit is kind of a nitpick but cramming the 'See everything’ link down at the bottom of a browser window isn’t a great navigation choice. (Again, the visual signifiers and eye-direction in this new design are incredibly poor.)
That the main activity page now requires you to scroll to even see the top note due to the new display ratio is really egregious. It makes another key site feature just slightly less convenient and accessible in a very irritating way. Bad choice.
4. The new ratio pushes the Radar and Main Sponsored slot completely off-screen
This one is directed the tumblr staff: that’s also a bad choice, guys. That’s your main ad-slot for people loading into Tumblr so hiding it is going to hurt both your ad-impressions and your ability to promote the ad-free option. The new layout ratio also means that the in-dash ads are going to be a lot more invasively screen-filling - and let’s be real most users will either add-block or leave before purchasing ad-free. I have no idea what the new layout is trying to achieve but if ad optimisation is the goal then this ain’t it, chief.
To be honest I cannot comprehend the rationale for this change. I guess it’s visually a bit more like Twitter… but that site iscurrently being demolished from the inside by poor management decisions so maybe it’s not the best aestheticto be aping.
Well then, what do?
Okay so, new dash bad. And so, in true Tumblr spirit: we complain. However, to get results we must deploy the art of kvetching productively.
If you want the old dash back (or at least, a better new-dash design that corrects some of these big weaknesses) what you should do is head over to https://www.tumblr.com/support and lodge a feedback ticket pointing out the problems. The more users who do that, the more likely you are to see an effective response.
Remember, tagging @staff and @support in posts won’t fix this. There’s no guarantee they’ll see it among the notes barrage.
Also: please don’t be rude or abusive when you lodge tickets. Whoever is manning those blogs and inboxes probably isn’t person who forced through this change. Save an intern, be polite.
Go forth in disgruntlement to keep this hellhole a hellhome.
I think if a studio exec says they want to force you to starve to death so you’ll be made to accept garbage wages, you should crush them in a hydraulic press incredibly slowly
Like the fact that rich people have gotten to the point where they think they can just be like “oh yeah I’m literally trying to kill you” without fear of repercussions is beyond infuriating. They need to know what it feels like to be beaten to death by hammers.
CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it’s part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions
if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators (i am not a fan of marvel. burn disney to the ground)
Getting inspired to write is actually really easy! All you need to do is be the busiest you’ve ever been in your entire life and as far away from a computer as humanly possible. Hope this helps 🥰
In the town where I grew up, there was a large statue in one of the parks, of a famous historical white colonizer. I’m not going to say who specifically, suffice it to say that it was someone who wasn’t worth memorializing for their deeds. And as you can imagine, this statue was a frequent target of vandalism, with paint or toilet paper or eggs on multiple occasions. Now, the local council was generally pretty lax when it came to repairing potholes or other public damage in the town, but every time, 24 hours after this particular statue was hit, the same person would always appear in a Hi-Vis vest, hat, mask and sunglasses, carrying a bucket of water, and wash it clean. They would do it as quickly as possible, but always made sure the face and the name carved at the bottom were generously scrubbed. This only encouraged people to do it again, and so it became a vicious cycle.
Within a year, the statue had sustained so much damage that it was unrecognizable and the lettering unreadable, so eventually the council came and took it down. Also apparently, the person in the Hi-Vis vest didn’t even work for the council. They were supposedly just some ‘good samaritan’ who cleaned it, often before the council even discovered it needed cleaning, so they just let them do it and ignored the problem. They didn’t bother putting the statue up again.
Much later, we found out that the anonymous 'samaritan’ had been deliberately washing the statue with a bucket of saltwater, which had dramatically corroded it, causing irreversible accumulative damage far worse than spray paint ever would have done. It’s even theorized that they were also often the one spray-painting it, just so that they had an excuse to come back after a day to wash it.
ALT
