Noting for the record that after jokingly going on for a time about being the oldest person on tumblr I subsequently found several who are older. The oldest I’ve ever come across is @fvfarm, who has not posted in a few years, but who was still going strong at the age of 94 the last time I had an update.
@dduane is active, and according to Wikipedia is 69, with a birthday coming up in May, which makes her just a few months less than 10 whole years older than me.
But that aside…
My earliest memory is of being driven by my mom past a preschool that she told me I would begin attending in a few days. I would have been 3 or 4 at the time, which would put it somewhere around 1965 or 1966.
had a dream last night that the new tumblr discourse was whether or not people deserved their urls and people were getting callouts and anon hate like “I can’t believe you have x in your url when I never see you actually post about them it’s pretty messed up that you’re taking that url away from other people who actually deserve it :/”
This was genuine discourse in 2012 you guys need to remember your history
Every1 on tumblr w some one word url ends up being racist or a scammer or something.
Someone gets popular bc they had a url like “Star” or “ocean” :^) and 2 weeks later there’s like 5 callouts for this guy for saying slurs and using a pyramid scheme to deal cocaine and setting up a fake gofundme so they could buy hentai or something
@lies is the most problematic member of the one word url squad.
Being a list of habits I’ve acquired on this website
After a cut, b/c I’ve no idea how long it will be but prob. too long.
If I haven’t seen the show or movie or read the book or whatever I’m unlikely to like or (especially) to reblog. But if I do I’ll usually cop to not having seen it in the tags.
I, a dude, try not to amplify stereotypically dude things. By that I mean, overtly sexist stuff that objectifies women or is coded male-gaze-y. I realize not all of Tumblr is this way, but the parts of it I hang out in tend to be feminist, and I appreciate that and want to help it stay that way. I feel odd mentioning it, b/c it sounds like I expect a cookie or something. I don’t. I’m just glad to have the chance to exist in this space and learn from my betters.
I’ve mentioned this before: I try not to (exactly) repeat myself, in the sense that once I’ve reblogged a post I’m not allowed to reblog it again (which I can keep track of b/c I always like if I reblog, so if the heart is filled in I know I’ve seen the post before, and probably already reblogged it). Exceptions: Things that have acquired new content (e.g., compelling commentary); things I love enough that after a year or two has gone by and I see it again I can’t help myself.
I usually, but not always, keep up with my dash. It depends how obsessive I’m being and if I have deadlines IRL that get in the way. I do always keep up with my notifications. Since I leave a lot of replies (thank you Tumblr for bringing that back) it bugs me to think that by not keeping up with my dash I could miss a mutual replying to a reply. But if you reblog something and add to it or if you @ me, hoo boy you can rest assured I will see it within a few hours if I’m awake.
I’m bad at tagging. I’ll tag for droll (or at least dad-humorous) commentary, and I try to use a consistent tag when I fall off the deep end with some fandom that I suspect followers might not want to have take over their dash, so you can use Tumblr Savior (does that still exist?) or XKit or whatever the current hotness is for filtering out stuff you don’t want to see.
I try not to be creepy. One of my known failure modes is getting caught up in something and wanting to share it, and thinking the people I’m following and interacting with are as excited as I am about the chance to squee collectively about whatever it is I’m excited about. And since one of the ways I do that is to geekishly obsess over tiny details, it sometimes happens that I blow right past normal amounts of that and make people think uh, who is this person and what is their problem? I think I’ve become somewhat better about that, but it’s something I work on.
I think about the stuff I see in my dash, about the people behind it, a lot. I read the tags. I build mental profiles (probably wildly inaccurate ones) of the people I follow. When you mention troubles in your life I fret about it, about what I can and should say, about how and whether I can be helpful. I know it’s weird and parasocial. But I think of the people I follow as a kind of community. Yes; it doesn’t work the same as a community in physical space. There are limits and barriers (though also a weird kind of adjacency) that don’t exist with offline friendships. But whatever the relationship we have is, it’s real for me.
I guess I could update the profile to say more. It used to say more.
If you’re willing to dig back far enough there’s actually a fair amount of biographical material in the blog. I like to joke that I have an extensive online biography in the form of tumblr tags. It’s not a very good joke. Dad humor.
I’m older than roughly 85% of tumblr’s users, and am possessed of all major forms of privilege (straight/white/cis/male), so there’s that. As mentioned above, I’m a dad, twice over. Both of them are nominally adult at this point. I’ve been married to the same woman since I was 21. I had no business lucking into a marriage that would last 33 years (and counting), but you know; better to be lucky than good.
In terms of things about me that I *don’t* often mention here, let’s see… I work as a software engineer. I’m an atheist, but try not to be a dick about it. I’m prone to bouts of melancholy and awkward embarrassment.
I was tagged by @teddybearofdeath. Thank you for feeding my vanity! :-)
Last movie you watched:Arrival. It is the bomb diggety. You should go see it. Everyone should go see it.
Last song you listened to: “Open Your Eyes” by School of Seven Bells. I’ve been listening to SVIIB pretty much nonstop for the last few weeks. I think it’s helping.
Last show you watched: The Crown (Netflix). I’m halfway through. It’s a love thing.
Last book you read: I’m currently in the middle of several. 1) The Truelove (US title; it apparently is Clarissa Oakes elsewhere), the 15th book in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. 2) Thunder Below! by Eugene Fluckey, a mostly true (one likes to think) account of his time in command of the USS Barb, a World War II submarine. 3) Life Traces of the Georgia Coast by icnhnologist Anthony J. Martin.
Last thing you ate: Two soft chicken tacos with pico de gallo salsa from The Spot. Yum.
If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be: There are so many cool places! Um, I’ll say at anchor in a snug cove in a sailboat I get to pick with rain drumming on the deck and no leaks at all around the cabin ports.
When would you time travel to: Any time at all? For reals? I’d probably want to see dinosaurs.
First thing you would do with lottery money: Hire an investment advisor.
Character you would hang with for a day: Precious Ramotswe.
I work as a back-end web developer/programmer for a smallish startup-type company. It’s a pretty wonderful job.
What is a big goal you’re working towards (or have already achieved)?
At one point I had the goal of writing a book and having it published. I succeeded in that, and I’m happy with the result, though the book was not a success in the sense I hoped it would be while I was writing it.
I’d like to write a second book, this one fiction (the first was nonfiction). I’ve completed a first draft, but about half of it is crap. I’m currently working on the second draft, trying to improve the crap/non-crap ratio. We’ll see how that goes.
Another goal I have is helping the coastal community I live in better understand and plan for sea level rise. That one is tricky. The research and planning part is fairly straightforward, but the “getting people to understand and act on that understanding” part is harder, at least for an introvert like me.
What is your aesthetic?
I like nature.
Do you collect anything?
Lately, Pokémon. Also: knowledge about new-to-me things. Previous new-to-me things I’ve obsessed about long enough to acquire a decent collection of trivial knowledge: Bird identification, competitive sailing, the use of computers as a communication device, (some) movies, (some) music, (some) literature, (some) art.
What is a topic you’re always up to talk about?
The ecology of coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) and its insect associates.
What is a pet peeve of yours?
Incurious people who let an ideological framework blind them to important truths – especially if the ideological framework is one I share, and extra-especially if the person in question is me.
Good advice to give?
Do the dishes right away. It takes exactly as long as if you wait, but you aren’t living with a sinkful of dirty dishes in the meantime.
Recommend three songs.
Radiohead’s song “Silent Spring” (which became “The Numbers” on the album). I really love that first live performance in Paris:
It’s a funny thing, but I actually haven’t been around as long as it appears (at least, not on tumblr). Getting the ‘lies’ tumblr URL was just dumb luck. Someone must have dumped it or had it taken away or something at just the right time such that it was available when I joined the site. It was the first name I tried. Weird, huh?
Owning the lies.com domain name, though: that took getting up pretty early in the morning, so to speak. But these days I mostly just use that as a place to archive my tumblr content against the day yahoo decides they want it all back.
Also kind of funny to me: kids used to bug me all the time to ask if I’d give them the lies tumblr URL. But they’ve stopped doing that. I think they’ve found better things to covet. Good for them.
It’s a funny thing, but I actually haven’t been around as long as it appears (at least, not on tumblr). Getting the ‘lies’ tumblr URL was just dumb luck. Someone must have dumped it or had it taken away or something at just the right time such that it was available when I joined the site. It was the first name I tried. Weird, huh?
Owning the lies.com domain name, though: that took getting up pretty early in the morning, so to speak. But these days I mostly just use that as a place to archive my tumblr content against the day yahoo decides they want it all back.
Also kind of funny to me: kids used to bug me all the time to ask if I’d give them the lies tumblr URL. But they’ve stopped doing that. I think they’ve found better things to covet. Good for them.
So, courtesy of my big sister, here’s a photo of me from (I think) somewhere around 9th grade, or about midway through my 4 years of non-haircutting. I was dressed up for a wedding; dig that 70′s vibe.
My hair has always grown pretty fast, and I’m pretty sure it ended up at least a few inches longer than this, but it may be that my “waist-long” comment was hyperbole. I remember that by the end if I leaned my head back it could reach my belt, at least, but that might be considered cheating.
Anyway. There it is. Apologies for Trumpian narcissism.
There are two or three that I know of. (Along with being haircut-averse I also was fairly photo-averse during that period.) I just took a quick look on facebook (which seems to be the place that weird old family photos show up tagged with my identity) but no luck.
If I can easily find a physical one I’ll scan and post. Probability isn’t high; I keep my autobiography in the form of tumblr tags mostly because of how disorganized I am in the physical realm.
