how i use tumblr
lies:
this is weirdly idiosyncratic, and unlikely to be interesting to anyone but me.
adding a cut for sanity.
I find this fascinating. Also like you, I find it interesting how many parts of your own user tendencies you find embarrassing. I think that may just be the nature of social media – there’s a function on Facebook that allows you to view your ‘only me’ activity feed which includes what you search for, which a Buzzfeed article dubbed ‘The Most Terrifying Button on Facebook’. The idea being that if our Facebook profiles are the pristine curated versions of ourselves, the ‘only me’ button is the twisted portrait of Dorian Grey we keep locked up somewhere in our internet histories. I think by dissecting your own Tumblr user habits, you’ve found the Tumblr equivalent to that Facebook function.
Also the term ‘followee’ is kind of interesting, because it took me a while to realize that meant that they were someone you followed, rather than a follower of you. Probably because typically in language a followee would be a leader, not a user. Linguistics!
And yay for headcanons about tumblr friends! My favorite post you’ve ever posted (though I do enjoy a lot of what you post) was one in which someone asked if you would post a photo of them on your blog, and then you politely asked them to take a look at the other things on your blog and take that into consideration. And then the result was one with photoshopped birds and boats. I’m not 100% sure how that’s related to the subject of headcanons, but I think of that photo when I think of you.
I’m really quite interested in how other people use Tumblr now – I kind of wish it was a YouTuber ‘tag’ like the ‘what’s in my bag’ and ‘draw my life’ tags.
As to how I personally use Tumblr:
Um,
And lies if you’re reading this, I’m quite interested in what your headcanon is for me, if you have one. :)
“if you’re reading this” — yeah, just possibly.
My headcanon is that you’re a world-builder.
Someone who can imagine into existence a living, moving, breathing image of human existence that is honest and true and beautiful, like a dream just before waking, one that feels warm and sweet and perfect, that makes you wish you could make time spin the other way, fall back asleep, because the waking world is noisy and confusing and unsatisfying by comparison. But even as you try to hold onto the dream it slips away, like water through spread fingers, and it’s gone.
You know what that feels like.
So what you do is this: You build a version of that dream, here, in the real world, with obsessive attention and infinite care, with sweat and hunger and sacrifice. And you’re so good at it that at some point the dream comes to life, becomes Real, and then for a few precious moments I get to be a little boy sitting wide-eyed before a birthday-party magician, and it’s warm and sweet and perfect.
So you do that, and it’s wonderful. But there’s something else you’ve done, for me in particular, and in the context of the embarrassed confession that the original post turned into, I feel like I owe it to you to mention it.
I suspect it comes from the same place, the same urge to make the world a better, more beautiful place that your other stories come from. It probably was just a little thing for you, just a momentary impulse, a small gift, but one that I appreciate.
You told me your own headcanon, that you and your Shipwrecked buddies talk about me as your “Tumblr dad”. It gave me a place in your fandom, made me someone special, valued for the very characteristic that, in a less-generous view, could have been used to paint me as someone other, apart, vaguely creepy and inappropriate.
Of all the worlds you’ve built for me to inhabit, and all the other worlds you’ll surely build in the future, I think that’s the one that will always mean the most to me.
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