Tumblr, you stoopit.

Category: dribblings

Tumblr.

What is it?

Where is the letter e?

How does it work?

Why is it here?

Scientists have been asking these questions for thousands of minutes. The truth is, we don’t know, and the possibility of never knowing the answers to these burning questions is a reality that we need to accept. The sooner we can stop asking smart questions and start posting adorable pictures of kittens doing hilarious things the better we’ll all be for it.

***

First things first, all conversations are paraphrased and mostly made up by me.

A couple of weeks ago my pal Laura pestered me into getting a Tumblr account. Before this she had been taking every opportunity to tell me about her Tumblr and things she had seen on Tumblr and she just wouldn’t shut the hell up about Tumblr and how much she had been enjoying it.
“You should get a Tumblr.”
“Is this like Pintrest? Because I don’t give a damn about recipes and kittehs and shit like that.”
“No, it’s not really like that. It’s like a blog, sorta.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but for the last 13 years I’ve been blogging. I’ve been blogging since before there was blogging. It’s called fleegan.com, have you visited it?”
“Is that the link you’ve been spamming my inbox with everyday for the last 13 years?”
“Yes.”
“Never been to it.”
“That’s fine. It’s just a site full of swear words and everything important that has ever happened to me that you’d need to know about.”
“ANYway. Tumblr is great… (blah blah blah)”
“Okay WHY do I need another blog?”
“Well, it’s smaller. And you can see stuff other people made or commented on and enjoy that.”
“You are not selling this at all.”
“So when can I come over and set up an account and show you this works?”
“How does Friday sound?”

So she came over to the house and set up a Tumblr account and I realize that makes it sound like I couldn’t set up an account on my own, but I totally could’ve done that without her help, okay? It’s just if she hadn’t come over and forced me at gunpoint to do it we all know I never would’ve signed up for something as stupid as Tumblr.

Also, it’s not like I didn’t know about Tumblr, it’s just that all the Tumblr sites that I kept up with were in a file folder I named BLOGS that is handily kept in my FAVORITES folder and is how I remembered to visit those sites. Also, all the Tumblr sites I was following were themed sites. So I DID think that Tumblr sites were theme-y in content. And I had no interest in starting a theme blog, unless is was about baseball players’ facial hair. Which had already been done and I didn’t want to step on any toes.

So BOOM I had a Tumblr.
“Okay, so this is your dashboard-”
“I KNOW WHAT A DASHBOARD IS. Don’t act like I’m 4, okay?”
“Maybe if you’d stop acting like a 4-”
“DON’T finish that.”
“So from here it shows you updates from the other Tumblr blogs you follow.”
“Okay. So how do I search for people’s Tumblr blogs to follow?”
“Well, it’s not really… you don’t search that way on Tumblr.”
“So if I wanted to add your Tumblr I’d seach damecatoe tumblr whatever in the search box?”
“No. If you’re searching like that you’d do better to google it.”
“So you’re telling me the search field is, what? For looks?”
“No, you can only search for Tags.”
“Tags?”
“Yes, tags are-”
“I HAVE BEEN INTERNETTING FOR 600 YEARS. I KNOW WHAT TAGS ARE.”
“Right, so you can search for tags.”
“And that’s IT?”
“Yes?”
“Why would I search for tags? WHO would set up a format where the only searchable thing would be TAGS? Is there a different search field somewhere else? A setting I could could change so that I could search through Tumblr LIKE AN ADULT ON THE INTERNET?”
“Yeah, no. It’s not really great in that way. What I do is find something I really like that someone has reblogged and then check out their Tumblr to see if I like their stuff and then maybe reblog something of theirs, or if  it’s a cool Tumblr then I’ll follow that person and their updates show up in my dashboard.”
“Everything you just said sounds terrible and inefficient.”
“It really is a bad format.”
“So why did I need this?”
“I think you’ll like it.”
“But also I don’t have a theme.”
“You just picked out a gray background.”
“No, like a theme blog. I don’t have time or an interest to blog about something that couldn’t be done on fleegan.com in the first place.”
“Not all Tumblrs are themed. Mine isn’t.”
“What’s yours about?”
“It’s not ABOUT anything. It’s stuff I make about SyFy Alice and things I find on the internet that I like.”
“Is this an elaborate prank?”
“No.”
“So following Tumblrs… I have some in my favorites folder.”
“Okay, lets’s add one.”
Minutes later….
“Great, now you follow me and two drag queens.”
“That sentence would never have existed before the internet.”

So after a week of wrestling with not being able to search for things like a normal person (only tags? COME ON.), I had added the Tumblrs that had been in my Favorites folder to my Tumblr account.  Then I GOOGLED some Tumblrs specifically looking for art stuff because right off the bat I figured out that Tumblr is a VERY visual medium, and that it is basically Twitter but with pictures. I realize you CAN tweet pictures but it’s small and dinky and noone clicks on those. So once I made the Tumblr = Twitter with pictures, I was set.

Since they FORCE you to search for only tags I figured out how to track the tags I like. So Now I’ve got about 2,000 tags tracking. That’s an approximation. Also a lie. I have 30 tags. Fine whatever. But I felt that maybe my Tumblr experience was too small. First of all, I’m not really contributing to Tumblr in that I don’t add anything original. Secondly, I was getting a bit bored by my 30+ tags that were mostly art related. I needed to expand my Tumblr to new and bigger things. So I called Laura.
BIG mistake.

“Hey, is this lauracatoe.com?”
“Yes, is this fleegan.com?”
“It sure is. I’ve got a Tumblr question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“So what are you tracking?”
“What?”
“Your tags? I’ve only 600 and I was wanting ideas for more.”
“OH. I don’t really Tumbl like that.”
“Yeah well, you Tumbl all the time, so what are you tracking?”
“I Tumbl things I see on the internet, like on Etsy that I like. And I follow a lot of Tumblr blogs and so I reblog that stuff too.”
“Yeah, but the tags are how you search for things… so you have no tags?”
“I have two tags.”
“You’ve been on Tumblr for MONTHS and you only have TWO TAGS? That is impossible.”
“I’m glad you’ve been enjoying Tumblr.”
“How does your brain even work?”
“So what kind of tags do you have?”
“Abstract, anamorphic, anagrams-”
“HAHAHAHAHA.”
“Should I go on? Bees, coins, geodesic domes-”
“I need you to take a screencap of your tags.”
“Okay fine. Wait. They won’t all fit on the page.”
“You are a delight.”
“And you need some tags, otherwise people will think you’re a teenager. Don’t you have ANY interests other than television programs and infographics?”
“How does-”
“-my brain work? No idea.”

So we (Laura and I) were kind of amazed at how different our Tumblr experience is compared to each other. So she wrote about it and I’ve now written about it. And to sum up:
Laura is a fangirl who follows lots of Tumblrs. She likes people and appreciates what they post.
I am a grouchy, old gay man who follows tags because I don’t give a shit about strangers’ blogs; I just want to see things I like because everything is all about me.

This is why Laura’s Tumblr looks nice and tidy and my Tumblr looks like a lunatic threw the internet against the wall.

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