This is a tumblr that got me through high school, was somewhat forgotten during college, and then revisited during COVID-19 lockdown. I cope with fandoms and fanfictions. I hunger for memes and the sweet sweet release from existential dread.
Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.
Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.
Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.
You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.
As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.
Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.
This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.
A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.
As we now know, Tumblr is $30 million dollars in debt. Oops. Tumblr has announced some major (and unpopular) changes to the site in their attempt to get back above water. The alternative is that Tumblr ceases to exist. But maybe we can change that…
How:
There are 327 million unique tumblr visits per month, and almost 500 million active accounts. If 10 million unique users (or less, if we bought more than one) bought or gifted Crabs from the Tumblr store, we could knock out Tumblr’s debt easily. Buy crabs!
When:
July 29, 2023 is Crab Day, running through August 5 (for anyone who can’t log on that day) as Crab Week!
Who:
Everyone!! If you truly can’t afford to participate with a $3 crab, (or other item from the shop) post crab memes!
Time for Tumblr users to rise again and surprise everyone…
it obviously makes sense, but one of my friend’s kids is going into swim class, and all the parents got an email today going, “when little ones are scared, they cling on to instructors. PLEASE trim their nails.”
i don’t know why that’s so funny to me, but just. the idea of this poor, scratched swim instructor having to make sure to email before each class as a reminder to please declaw the children SENT me.
When I taught swim lessons I remember trying to delicately ask parents not to cover their child in shea/coconut/olive oil before lessons.
“I understand your skincare regimen and wanting to protect their tender baby flesh from the pool chemicals, but COULD YOU NOT OIL YOUR CHILD LIKE A GREASED PIG before tossing them in the POOL? Thanks EVER so much!”
yes that’s how bourgeois media tries to trick workers into being against strikes. Any delays are solely due to United Parcels Service incorporated not properly paying their workers.
By not negotiating, the company - hand-in-hand with the bourgeois media trying to make that the sob story - are actually holding medical equipment for ransom.
If you’re concerned about medical equipment maybe UPS should stop forcing its preload to go faster than it is safe, leaving open packages all over the place because they say that slows us down, loading tractor trailers not only to the ceiling but to the point where you can’t even open them because they’re that packed in. UPS is causing this shit, not Teamsters, not the employees.
UPS has never respected things like medical equipment and your packages. They don’t care, it’s all the bottom line.
This is what the company thinks of everyone’s packages, these are all from average days. This is what the Teamsters want to prevent by making kig conditions materially better for us.
I was quite literally told to stop repairing and taping open boxes by a manager because when you stop unloading a trailer for even ten seconds it “hurts production”.
Tumblr already has a personalization algorithm it’s called my beloved mutuals who have great taste and only wish to psychologically damage me sometimes
“Today work is tied less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work.”
I feel like we’ve lost something linguistically with the rise of professional subtitles for everything because they just adapt jokes and idioms into their nearest English equivalent and lose cultural context. I miss watching anime in 2002 with subs by some guy who was just really passionate about japanese and would fill half the screen with an in-depth breakdown of why a pun works. I’m serious I want that again.
i know we’ve been saying this about every new shitty update but i feel like removing reblog chains could really be the thing to kill this site. like that is literally the main thing that makes tumblr unique
truly the only reason you still see tumblr posts reposted constantly on other sites which claim tumblr to be “dead” is because of our unique form of collaborative posting. also you would not only be taking away what makes the site unique but also the main form of socialization between the users which yknow. some could say is the basis for your whole fucking social media website
why’d this get 100 notes in an hour on a wednesday morning damn 😭 we’re real fucking annoyed about this huh
People have been wondering what has to come next after the wizardblogging and clownblogging and whatever and my pitch is medieval monks. Like we can all pretend to be tonsured.
#some of us do not have to pretend #fuck it real face #ffvii
1st age elf npc who gets excited hearing about a new feanorian war crime because they know maglors gonna feel bad about it and drop the track of the century
ALT
