I had a wonderful opportunity to make some pixel art for this Welcome Home update!! Huge thanks to Clown for having me, I hope these brought at least 1% more joy to your peepers than the site already has 🙏
Tumblr already has a personalization algorithm it’s called my beloved mutuals who have great taste and only wish to psychologically damage me sometimes
I watched the live with the CEO, here is the tl;dr
The good news:
Chronological dash is here to stay! Whether you have to toggle it weekly or new users default to “For you” was not elaborated on but at least that’s confirmed.
Custom themes are here to stay! Once again, may be buried for all I know but, for sure will remain an option.
Search updates are in the works!!!!
The neutral news:
Tumblr is seriously in the red financially and needs more support, Ad-free for example is not widely used
They would not comment on the suggestion to bring back NSFW behind a paywall (which we all know would get them a boatload of money)
They’re possibly going to add a donation system like Ao3 and Wikipedia.
They would “rather not” sell data to make up the costs
Most of staff are pre-2010 tumblr users including the CEO who joined in 2007, so they do actually use the site and have for a long time
The bad news:
Condensed reblogs/removing duplicate reblogs is going forward. The reason cited was to meet “certain expectations” of users coming from other social media, which isn’t good.
Disability features (specifically turning off flashing ads for epileptics) was met with a request to purchase Ad-free@zingring clarified that they are looking into it but suggested Ad-free as more of a stopgap until something is put in place
Overall it was more chill than I expected, @photomatt and @zingring seem to be far more in tune with the userbase than u/spez.
I’ve been reading facts on Wikipedia again, and i’m overcome with the need to terrify non-Americans with the most underrated Terrifying American Thing: TORNADOES
Due to a quirk of mountain and ocean placement, the east-central United States has a higher number of tornadoes (particularly exceptionally strong tornadoes) than any other place on Earth.
And they’re so fucking scary oh my God
Reasons tornadoes are So Fucking Scary:
they can form really suddenly and move really fast, so you have like a few minutes of warning when one happens
their behavior is arbitrary and unpredictable. They can obliterate your house and leave your neighbor’s house untouched
the most powerful tornadoes are so strong that it’s nearly impossible to even measure them because measuring equipment is straight up obliterated in those conditions, but they’ve been known to exceed 480 km/h wind speeds.
like with F5 tornadoes you’ll see a lot of stuff about trucks, SUVs, furniture, appliances from homes like refrigerators etc being “lost/missing” and you may think to yourself “how does something that large just get ‘lost’ surely there’s a better description of what happened”
and well. the above article does provide the 'better’ description. And it’s “granulated.”
As in, “debris from many of the obliterated homes was finely granulated.”
As a born and bred Alabamian, reading this is very funny when you’re so desensitized to them that when you’re woken up at 3 am by the sirens theres a very good chance you’ll be like “if its my time its my time” and go right tf back to sleep
I mean I’ve been there but I contain multitudes okay
Tornados can put a 4x4 through concrete but also that siren going off right when my muffins come out of the oven is annoyingly inconvenient…
(｡･ω･｡)
