As I tend to during manic episodes I completely reevaluated my life and I started making plans on how to overhaul every aspect of that. Because that goes extremely well for me every time it happens (looking directly into the camera)

But I'm only stuck in this loop because I do want change and only have what feels like the energy to exact it when I'm manic because I drink a norbillion cups of coffee and sleep for 3 hours at a time. This time though I've tried to wrangle myself into making plans and writing them down in the most achievable ways. And accept that I'm not going to be perfect at every step but it's important to keep taking steps. Unironically I think it was this webpage that helped me feel like I had a handle on that. I think it has more to do with a new skill and seeing how it developed and also other people saw it too.

It's difficult to change when you get stuck in the same dull motions but I stay silly.

Thinking of change, Tumblr's staff is being cut down and it's not looking bleak yet, but things are changing. From the sound of it, there's just gonna be a skeleton crew running the place, cleaning the lights on, sweeping up bots. But with fewer people, the problems will possibly pile up. The lingering problems and bitter taste on the tongue of the userbase will probably drive site traffic down. I've been feeling a little mixed about it. So has my dashboard. Automattic fumbled the bag I think, because there was a point in time when the site culture was coming around about staff. We were seeing changes we liked, for a while at least. But I also think the game was rigged from the start. Automattic went in with a plan to make Tumblr make more money. It makes sense why, Tumblr was a money sink. We celebrated how much less money Yahoo sold Tumblr for compared to how much it spent to buy it. The average Tumblr user has never been that welcoming of monetization. In recent years, the average Tumblr user has also become jaded about the recent turns of social media platforms; how they are all homogenizing to look like Twitter and have short video like TikTok.

Well, Automattic needed Tumblr to be more profitable. At first this was smaller things like adding post plus, which while that went over horribly, wasn't actually that bad of an idea for a website that claims to care about creators. It was a feature where a user could make paywalled posts and someone could subscribe to their blog much like a patreon page and see those posts. Not the worst. That feature was replaced (at least I'm pretty sure it's not still around since afaik it got very little use) with the ability to tip. A one-time payment method more like Ko-Fi (though, Ko-Fi does subscriptions now). Then they added TumblrMart (which started out as a storefront for physical merch but later gained badges which are an on-site feature) and Blaze. The original merch from Tumblr wasn't great (they didn't even have shoelaces) but it's been vastly changed since (looking at it today i recognized nearly none of the products but all the the memes) and some people still bought the original releases. Blaze saw a lot more use, it maybe still does but adblockers actually stop blazed posts from appearing so I never see them. The newest addition to monetization on Tumblr is domains. Yes Tumblr's last shot at making money was trying to get people to buy domains from them. I don't know when the change happened, but at some point Tumblr no longer gave new users a url like [username].tumblr.com which came with a customizable page and a culture of coders making themes for people to use (tumblr also sold its own themes but I've never looked into how much use any of these got) and instead new users are give a url that is "tumblr.com/[username]" and no longer have a full page to customize. Itstead its more like a desktop version of the mobile page. Another thing tumblr users came to dislike about every website trying to be the same, the fact that more emphasis is placed on the mobile experience so desktop gets a version of that and it sucks. (Me? I'm the opposite. This shit does not look good on mobile.)

And that's just the profits side of things. Under Automattic's management, Tumblr was changed in the same homogenizing way so much of coorporate Internet is. Without Dashboard Unfucker it looks and acts like a worse Twitter. Tumblr had so much of its unique elements gutted in an attempt to be more like its competition and the userbase protested every step of the way. Only once did I see the backlash to A B testing actually result in a feature not being rolled out (the removal of icons next to posts on your dash. I remember when the icons didn't scroll with the post and people loved when that was added. It became a trademark of identification. iirc the intention was to integrate the icon into the header of the post, by the url. which would make it look more like a twitter feed. this works on twitter because it was designed to. its shorter post format means the icon is there repeatedly with each tweet in a thread. tumblrs formatting and post size are completely different and people like to know who is reblogging the posts they see. the icon is your buddy). It's kind of wild to me that that is the change that didn't go forward. Because Dashboard Unfucker dropped the moment people started getting Twitter lite layout (exaggeration, i'm not sure of the timeline because i was not part of the testing group that got it first thus didn't need it until the update was finalized for everyone). More troubling than dislike of the modern internet, has been the transphobic handling of post moderation. While I do believe that some posts about transness or trans women and trans fems (because it does skew that way) became flagged via targetted reporting from TERFs, it's hard to ignore how much more frequently posts mentioning trans women became marked as mature and left that way upon alleged rereview by a human. The exact same post could be made but one has the additional mention of trans women and one doesn't and suddenly only one of those posts is mature. Its like when Youtube rolled out a new moderation feature and people clowned on it and called YouTube out on it repeatedly showing how it was biased to mark anything even vaguely hinting at queerness as mature. The same video twice but in the last second of one of them there's a rainbow flag and now that's mature type beat. I try not to get into the conspiracy thought of how there must be a TERF in staff but I will say there's hypocrite. Queerest place on the internet (but we sure as hell don't stand up for any trans women) 🙄🙄

I don't think Tumblr is closing in the short term. They'll let the skeleton crew run it for a while, it'll be cheaper on Automattic without as much staff maybe?, but the end times are more real than ever. Its at that stage some MMOs get to. The glory days are long gone (well before Automattic got involved in Tumblr's case) but there's a core base of users that are extremely dedicated and set up their own servers to keep the game going or the game is sold off to a company that basically just keeps the lights on for the people who are that dedicated? That's where Tumblr is now.

The death knell has tolled for Tumblr for years, slowly approaching. This is its last. Tumblr will trundle on, but she is sunseting.

I have no transition other than my train of thought changing and I want to stop thinking about the downfall of Tumblr. I beat Starfield like a week ago. It was pretty good as far as Bethesda games go. The dialog actually had me laughing and connecting to characters. Their companions have for sure improved since they slimmed down their numbers and gave them dedicated quests over Skyrim's method. Or worse Oblivion's. I won't name the game in the room that shares an IP and did that with companions years before Fallout 4 was a twinkle in Todd Howard's eyes but you know. I've really only completed the main quest and some small side quests but no other factions. Sorry for not joining the police as if it's my fault

I might write up a review for it, but I took like zero notes while playing outside of some incidental things I sent to discord friends. First impression were that it was fun. The main quest definitely takes its time to get rolling but once it really kicks off I found it hard to not keep going save for when I would do some extremely autistic level grinding in the form of doing no quests but the radiant ones on the constellation mission board and scanning dozens of planets. I flat out did not use the outpost building (settlement building became the most ignored feature for me in fallout 4 as well. its just not really the kind of gameplay i seek) and barely touched the ship builder (i only ever upgraded my ships which didn't involve me adding an parts. not even a scan jammer in my first universe). Bethesda has done a good job making another shooter with cool set pieces. I found the generation of planets to be lacking, especially after flipping through the art book and seeing the beautifully rendered imaginings of worlds that I have yet to see really brought to life. But there are cool set pieces, I've taken a number of photos of pretty locations, but they are kind of cherry picked. I said I liked the dialog earlier but I wanna take a more detailed look at the overall writing in my next playthrough because bits of good dialog can flavor a mind more positively to the writing as a whole. I mean who doesn't adore the writing of Oblivion even at its weakest? (admittedly the way Oblivion is in general helps with the fond feelings.) I have had some issues with, points where I think its lacking. I plan on doing another play through eventually and taking more notes since I was mostly just experiencing the game the first time.

In all my thinking and trying to structure my life a bit, there's a lot of things I've found myself wanting to do. Like talk about video games. Less review and more just talk about my experiences, maybe recommend games. I bought the Games for Gaza bundle on itch.io because some of them stood out to me and I'm a little tempted to talk about them also. Peace and love in indie creation. Another thing that's on my mind is almost always on my mind in times like these. How much I do not stand up to the test of regular jobs. Not built for it. Masking as much as my previous jobs requires fucking kills me. It's like the masking I did at school but I can't bite any of these people and I still want to kill myself (I'm fine btw) not to mention the physical toll it takes. Streaming is something I come to often and making videos "for" youtube (in quotes because i have no alligiance to youtube and would abandon ship in a heartbeat). It's the allure of being able to support myself on something that feels more in my control. It's the green light in the distance. At the end of the day I like creating and I like chilling.

I wanna try more things. I wanna fail at more things in ways that don't matter. I wanna create and I wanna chill.

If you ever thought that these blog posts would be made with a clear sense of direction or a single train of thought (or with multiple that are transitioned between) I'm not even sorry you should've guessed I wasn't that kind fag.