RatCreature's Journal

Why is there an annoying, pixelated, pooping horse on my Tumblr dashboard? It is not even April 1st yet. How can I make it go away? Why is Tumblr doing these things?

Tumblr forcibly logged me out, and refuses to let me log in via a webbrowser unless I change my password. Though it doesn't seem to have any problem to let me log into my account via the Android app.

Admittedly I haven't changed my password in a while, but still this is obnoxious behavior, in particular since they did not bother to sent me an email or such to explain or alert me to anything.

Tumblr seems to freeze Firefox fairly often on my computer, e.g. I scroll down my dashboard and then suddenly the page (and all of Firefox actually, like I can't switch tabs) becomes unresponsive for a little while before scrolling resumes. At first I thought it might be some unfortunate side effect of XKit or an XKit extension, because the filtering that applies to my dashboard (like removing the sponsored stuff, and blocking some tags), and that used to slow things down on my old laptop sometimes, but this effect also happens sometimes when I have just a single Tumblr post open and scroll down that.

Do others have this problem? It is starting to really annoy me. It never happens on any other website besides Tumblr.

Is there a way to get rid of that annoying "answertime" thing that shows at the top of your dashboard now? I usually don't even know these people (presumably famous ones?) that are asked questions. I couldn't find an option or extension in xkit.

Looking at the Worst Room Tumblr just now (a blog that posts photos of horrible rooms and small "apartments" for rent in NYC at outrageous prices) makes me feel so much better about my place.

Also, of course I knew that fictional depictions of supposedly crappy NYC apartments in tv series and such always make them vastly larger than they would be in reality (perhaps because you couldn't actually fit a professional camera larger than an iPhone, the person operating it, and a person being filmed into an actual crappy NYC apartment from the looks of these photos so you'd probably have to stage them and leave one wall out that you don't see or something), but these are just astoundingly awful. Like, many seem to be either windowless closets rented as bedroom for several hundred dollars or some sort of crawlspaces repurposed for sleeping in, that are too low to stand or even sit.

Is it just me, or did the posting interface get even more baffling? Admittedly on the list of their idiosyncratic interface choices this change doesn't rank very high, but why do they have to rearrange things all the time? I'm not one of those people who like to move their furniture around weekly.

Is anyone else having problems with Tumblr's queue? Mine for jamesmcavoywithsloths failed to post yesterday, and today it failed again. I'd ask on Tumblr, but it's not like people can reply there easily...

I just reloaded my Tumblr dashboard and they moved all the things around without warning. It's quite disorienting.

So I've read about the English Wikipedia being blacked out today to protest that internet legislation, and wanted to see how it looks, but I can see it like always? So do they only black it out in the US? I'm confused.

Unrelated, I was totally right about the formula "McAvoy + sloths = insta-popularity".

First, how hard it is to follow a simple discussion with more than two participants. (I know, not what Tumblr is built for, but people still use it for that.) I mean, even if you ignore the unfortunate formatting, that makes it so hard to attribute what is quote and who said what, as soon as a conversation branches, you are never going to see all threads in a single of the reblogs, and if you go to the notes of the original post you can see all the responses and reblogs (i.e. the "A reblogged from B and added" bits) but there they are cut off and shortened, so you have to click and end up with a gazillion tabs to read one post with three comment threads. It's maddening. Unless there is some other reading method I missed to find and display responses? *nurses futile hope*

Second, a more subjective dissonance for me, is how Tumblr is one of the places where publicly celebrating popularity numbers is done by some (on dA it also happens, there with page view milestones mostly). I mean, from what I can tell you can't see the follower numbers like you can on LJ-clone platforms as default with friend-of/subscriber lists, so maybe that's why some people make posts going "yay over 4000 followers!" or the like instead. But of course only the ridiculously popular people do this as far as I can tell, and I can't help feeling kind of crushed in comparison. Though perhaps I wouldn't take notice so much if on Tumblr you weren't seeing "reblog/like" numbers all the time, that draw attention to the audience size constantly, even without extra action.

Which on the one hand I know is silly, because it's not like without these kinds of follower-numbers squee posts I would be unaware that someone else is very popular and has cool content, but still. I mean, with the LJ/DW model that moment of comparison is there whenever you subscribe, but you become aware of a range of numbers, and also then it fades somewhat from awareness for me. However on Tumblr you (or at least I) mostly notice the really popular numbers. For example I'm hardly going to celebrate my next Tumblr milestone which would be if ever the number of followers inched up to a round ten instead of currently eight. And I assume most other people with non-popular Tumblrs feel the same, so the impression gets distorted.

It's of course a completely irrational response to feel bad to have less audience than cool Tumblr X, but at the same time not even do anything to attract more people. If I wanted non-embarrassing follower milestone posts to happen, I would probably need to switch my topics from "mostly crappy doodles" to something with popularity potential, like say "James McAvoy with baby sloths" or something (as a side note, does that already exist? it should, I'd probably follow that), and post consistently and do all the other things that make a Tumblr attractive.

Is there some kind of customization for Tumblr (greasemonkey script, custom css or such) that would allow you to collapse certain image posts so you would not have to see them on your dashboard?

It turns out that while Tumblr allows you to put a "/" in your tags, it still gives you a 404 error when you click on a tag of that type. WTF? That is just broken.

I thought I had seen the most ill-suited posting venue for fanfic when I encountered fans posting stories to deviantArt, but that has now been surpassed by far: Why on earth would anyone put a ficlet in the tag field in Tumblr?!? And not a five word story or the like either, but something that's abut 350 words accompanying a GIF? I mean, you can post text with a picture, why not do that? Is there a reason to make it a tag? It's actually not a bad Erik/Charles ficlet or gif, but omg the formatting...

And connected to this another Tumblr question: the post I linked above to illustrate is a reblog of the story in the erikandcharles Tumblr, because the original post you get to when clicking that reblog has apparently been deleted. So if others reblog your posts/pictures on Tumblr the reblog posts remain, and you can't delete your content? What about edits, i.e. say I posted a sketch to Tumblr, it gets reblogged by someone, then I notice that the hand of the character has the thumb on the wrong side or a similar error (don't laugh, that has happened to me with pictures) and edit my post with an upload of a corrected version. Will the correction propagate through the reblogs? Obviously there are pros/cons either way, i.e. if it does affect the reblogs you can do effective corrections, however because the nature of Tumblrs it would also open an easy way to abuse/spam or rickrolling, in that someone could post something attractive and pretty, wait a bit, then edit to shock image or the like. So would you have to live with wrongly thumbed hands forever when posting to Tumblr?

It's no secret that I'm not fond of Tumblr. It's hard to talk there, so you can't get or give comments only "reblogs" and "likes" (unless there is some external Disqus thingie set up), and if artists don't provide art themselves for reblogging (so you can click-through), art and photos seem to be posted there without attribution more often than not.

However, I have been name-squatting there since 2007, and with the uptick in fannish use I thought, okay, maybe I'll try it out as a reader. So I log in, then go to a fanartist's Tumblr that I'd come across in a rec, go there and want to subscribe to the Tumblr. Where do I click?? I did manage to subscribe by doing a c&p on the name, and then going to my dashboard, then going to the "follow" page and entering it manually, but surely with the supposedly "easy to use" appeal of the thing there has to be a simpler method?