Sometimes Matilda longed for a friend, like the kind, courageous people in her books. It occurred to her that such talking dragons and princesses with hair long enough to climb… such people might only exist in story books. But she was about to discover she had a strength… a strength she wasn’t even aware of.
Somehow it feels like tumblr is accidentally the perfect social media site, because none of the things that I love about it make sense as features the way we use them. Tags are for organization, but we also use them to have our little thoughts in without raising them to the status of main text. The queue makes sense for keeping a steady stream of Content going if you’re trying to Build a Social Media Presence, but really we use it just to bank posts we want to reblog without flooding everyone else’s dash. You can’t see how many followers anyone else has, which I just have to assume was an oversight because it flies in the face of everything about social media, and it’s great because you can never quantify anyone’s Influence so everyone’s essentially on the same level. There’s no way they planned for giffing to become such a Thing, because before tumblr, gifs were practically relics of the early internet days, a novelty, usually kind of tacky, and now they’ve become a sort of folk art form. You can reblog an entire conversation, not just a single post, so there’s a whole genre of humor that exists here that can’t really propagate like that on any other social platform. Honestly this website is just a little freak of nature that cannot possibly have been intended, and that’s why no media company has been able to figure out what to do with it, because it makes no sense within the larger social media ecosystem. I love it.
Here are the lighthouses of Europe. The map is even better than it might seem at first glance: the colors are the real colors, the patterns are the real patterns, and the size of the dots is the distance at which each light is visible.
Gentle Mother, font of mercy, Save our sons from war, we pray. Stay the swords and stay the arrows, Let them know a better day. Gentle Mother, strength of women, Help our daughters through this fray. Soothe the wrath and tame the fury, Teach us all a kinder way. Gentle Mother, font of mercy, Save our sons from war, we pray. Stay the swords and stay the arrows, Let them know a better day.
In a fun bit of synchronicity, today I specifically set out to try to see greater scaups. They’re pretty rare around here, and for various reasons I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with them for years. I’ve tended to see them only when a better birder was on hand to point out the differences between the lots of lessers we routinely get and the much smaller number of greaters that are sometimes sprinkled amongst them. But that sort of sloth will not cut it when the competition has displaced me from the top ranks of the county-year listers, so this morning I set out to see if I could pick out the couple of female greaters that have been hanging out with the lesser flock on UCSB’s campus lagoon.
If you love ads, then this post is not for you. If you love Tumblr but hate ads and want the one to continue without having to endure the other, then this post is literally for you. Hello, you.
As of today, you can set up ad-free browsing on your personal desktop computer, from anywhere in the world, and then enjoy the same effervescent Tumblr you know and love (yes, including mobile) without the interruption of ads. Scroll away.
Some caveats:
It’s $4.99 for a month of pure, unadulterated nonsense.
If you like a discount, you can get 33% off (that’s four months for free) at $39.99 for a whole year. Imagine.
This is opt-in. You don’t have to do this. We won’t make you.
How do you opt in?
Easy! Just go to your Account Settings on desktop and hit “Go Ad-Free.” From there, you can choose to pay monthly or yearly:
And that’s it! You’ll be able to enjoy your favorite blogs and posts without any pesky ads getting in the way.
That’s all for now, Tumblr. Back to your blorbos.
I know people will bitch about this but look, they have to make money and this is SO MUCH BETTER THAN POST+
Among other things the me of the past would have loved about this is being able to not see intrusive ads for horror movies for the low, low price of $4.99/month.
I would almost certainly have whined about having to pay it. But I would have paid.
