Follow, follow the Sun / And which way the wind blows / When this day is done 🎶 Today, April 8, 2024, the last total solar eclipse until 2045 crossed North America.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
Get dazzled by the true spectrum of solar beauty. From fiery reds to cool blues, explore the vibrant hues of the Sun in a mesmerizing color order. The images used to make this gradient come from our Solar Dynamics Observatory. Taken in a variety of wavelengths, they give scientists a wealth of data about the Sun. Don't miss the total solar eclipse crossing North America on April 8, 2024. (It's the last one for 20 years!) Set a reminder to watch with us.
Ohio Total Solar Eclipse
Which path should he choose?
The path of the warrior, the path of the scholar, or the path of the artist?
he should wander away and have a picnic while he thinks about what path to choose
Great idea! But where should he have the picnic?
Under the tree, or under the old fort?
By the sea, so he can enjoy the sound of the waves
A lovely choice!
Should he build a sandcastle to pass the time? Or perhaps go fishing?
Perhaps he could collect shells he finds interesting
Sounds fun!
Which shell should he pick up?
This one
That's not a shell, it's a tiny earpiece.
Should he listen to music? Or to the mysterious pre-recorded message?
He should give it back to the crab in the largest shell, they thought they had lost their wave-pod and are grateful he found it!
The crab wants to give a gift in return.
Should he accept the gift of power, or the gift of knowledge?
the gift of friendship :)
Friendship acquired!
Should they celebrate with pizza or ice cream?
The crab friend cannot eat either of those! Let's split a nice seaweed salad instead. :)
So many options!
Should they get tossed salad, wiggly salad, or spiky salad?
Seasar salad
Nothing beats getting it straight from the source
Should they use scissors or claws to cut the seaweed?
What about that sword in the first panel?
The circle is complete.
Through choices, friendship, and salad, he found his way to the path of the warrior. But he won't walk it alone.
Their path is just beginning, but this story is over.
Thank you to everyone who participated!
For a while now folks have asked us for better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. We’re listening, and at Labs we’ve been looking into fulfilling that need, Tumblr style.
Introducing Communities, a new place to connect with others on Tumblr:
Here in Labs, we’re working on big ideas that could transform how Tumblr is used, while keeping that Tumblr vibe alive. You can see one of those ideas above. We’re calling it “Communities”, a new dedicated space on Tumblr for people to share and discuss all the content they love. Communities can cover topics like your favorite show, artist, movie, video game, your school, your board game group, friend group, big or small, whatever you want.
Each Community has their own semi-private safer space away from the regular dashboard where you can interact with other Tumblr users who share the same interests and passions as you. There are moderators and members (you!), rules, and privacy settings. Each community has its own feed of posts from members, separate from your Following and For You feeds. Interactions within community spaces stay there and replies will work more like a traditional comment section. Folks will be able to reblog posts into a community, but not out — at least not yet.
We’re very excited for you to try it, and help define the best path forward. What we have is a prototype to help us validate the idea, but there’s still plenty of questions that need answering. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be reaching out to people across Tumblr, and the internet at large, to try our prototype. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll iterate on the idea to see what resonates best with all of you on Tumblr.
If this sounds interesting, please like, reblog, or reply to this post, and we’ll invite you to beta test this feature when we roll it out to a wider Tumblr audience, as a little perk for following the Labs blog.
Stay tuned for more!
Some Crow doodles 💙
Chocolatine, not pain au chocolat.
Hello again, Labs here with a recap of our test of Collections! We introduced this prototype back in September and then handed the feature to a handful of volunteers sourced from the notes on that post. Thank you again to all volunteers!
We got so much useful feedback, and wanted to share some of that here, and reveal some next steps we’re taking. There are a couple of big projects cooking in Labs, and Collections has taken a backseat lately, but it is important to us to not leave y’all hanging. We very much want to build things with you here.
Our goal with the volunteer-based super-early phase of Collections was to see if those volunteers actually use the feature, watch what they come up with, and check whether anybody they invite to Tumblr signs up and becomes a regular user of the site. Turns out, nobody did sign up — it’s not as useful of an onboarding strategy as we thought it could be.
However, one piece of feedback we got is that Collections make great custom feeds, which people on Tumblr have been asking for a lot over the years. We hear you loud and clear: you want to supplement the standard Following / For You experience with more intentional control over feed content. That’s really important to us.
With that in mind, for those in the prototype, we’ve moved the Collections list to the left sidebar / mobile navigation as an expandable area like Account, for quick access. We like this better than putting them in the dashboard tab bar, but it’s still something we’re mulling over:
We also heard the need for more filtering options beyond just blogs and tags. What about only including a blog’s posts that use a certain tag, or excluding posts using a certain tag? Or list tags with a boolean AND operator (“posts tagged [tag] and [other tag]”), not just the OR operator we’re using now for sourcing tagged posts. Lots of ideas on how to further customize what shows up in the feed, and better define what the feed is “for”.
There were other fun, tangential bits of feedback, too, like the desire to make these Collections a collaborative feature, so that more than one person can help build a Collection. There were also several usability issues that came to the forefront, which we’ve addressed. And there were some well-articulated thoughts and questions about etiquette, such as how to seek a blog’s “permission” to be included in a Collection – that’s something we care a lot about, to help prevent this kind of feature from being a source of abuse.
Another piece of feedback we heard repeatedly is the desire for Collections of posts. This is not really what we intended with what we built, but it’s not too far afield either. We totally agree that having better, easier ways of collecting and curating individual posts would be useful, so we’re going to investigate that as a separate project.
With all of this in mind, we’ve split the work on Collections into two separate tracks:
Stay tuned here on the Labs blog for updates on when/if we’ll be moving these Collections tracks of work to more people on Tumblr. (If you are one of the volunteers who helped us with Collections, you’ll still have access to it for the time being!)
Thanks for reading! And please reach out to us via Support, the replies here, or your reblogs, if you have any more feedback, as always.
This just in: A man in France has reportedly gotten his hand trapped in a bread mixer
Witnesses report he is in pain
My girlfriend when she sees me playing Baldur's Gate 3
I think one of the biggest obstacles to getting a social media platform off the ground in 2023 is that big sites like Twitter and YouTube have created an expectation that registering an account should automatically come with effectively unlimited storage and bandwidth for whatever media you care to post, which creates a hard entry barrier for any platform without major financial backing. Like, we can wax rhapsodic about early 2000s forum culture all we like, but one of the main unwritten rules that allowed smaller forums to survive was never turning image hosting on for free accounts – either you made people figure out their own solutions for hosting images, or you charged a fee. If you were lucky, a forum with free registration might have let you host a banner for your signature on their servers, but that was it! Unless someone manages to convince large numbers of folks that a text-only social media platform is worth participating in, I'm not sure there's any good way forward for smaller outfits at this point.
‘Thoth and the Chief Magician’, 1925. Evelyn Pau
I love tumblr. I fucking love tumblr. Where else am I going to find shit like this
Just blacklisted a couple fandoms, just cause I wasn't interested, and got to thinking about how much I genuinely unironically fucking love this website. I've never been on any other platform that gives me this degree of control over what I see - by letting me control who I follow, giving me block abilities, letting me make a list of tags that don't interest me, and more. Yes, some changes that have been made didn't suit me, but I'm sure they suited some percentage of the user base or prospective user base, or else they wouldn't have been made. Even the new dash only took a few days to get used to, and to me the change is a net neutral. Yeah, the tumblr live icon at the bottom is irritating, and I wish the NEW would go away, but I appreciate the snooze for 30 days and again, a layout change can be gotten used to pretty quick.
And then I got to thinking about how many people here seem to virulently hate this website, and it honestly makes me sad. Every time a change is made, some number of folks go off the deep end, screaming how much they hate it, abusing staff, saying they'll leave, harassing other users who say they like it or don't mind it. It's gotten to the point that I'm genuinely afraid to make a post about liking Tumblr, like it's A Cool Kid (tm) marker to ~hate it~ and some bizarre form of virtue signaling to complain about it as loudly as possible every time there's a change. Then there's the HOW DARE THEY ASK FOR MONEY as if websites...don't need money to run...and again abuse piled on other users "don't you have better ways to spend your money shouldn't you support charity blah blah blah" and like. Look. This is a service I use and appreciate. Services need money to exist because capitalism. And I hate capitalism as much as it's possible to hate anything but I'm stuck living with it, so yes, I will vote for something I enjoy using and want to continue using with my dollars, while also trying to support other causes I believe in, and getting myself some cute things and sugary desserts to stave off the morbs, and buying my kids the things they want, and, and, and.
And then the newest thing unrolls, and a quarter of the userbase flips out THIS WEBSITE IS THE WORST I'LL NEVER GIVE IT MONEY STAFF GO DIAF IF THIS ISNT UNDONE IM LEAVING FOR REAL
And buddy. If you're saying that.
Real talk.
Why the FUCK would they want you to stay? What possible reason have you given them to accommodate you? Your data takes up server space, you refuse to chip in a penny to support the service, you're threatening their employees... if this was a fucking Denny's they'd have called the fucking cops on you, "yeah I agree that ACAB but you threatened the maitre d with a butter knife and refused to pay for your meal after eating and told the waiter to 'kys' so you didn't leave us much choice..."
Basically.
I love Tumblr.
But ngl, sometimes I hate the people here.
(Not as much as I hate capitalism and cops, but y'know.)
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Artist: warakami vaporwave
Once again it was Hack Week (more than just a day!) at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on scratching a personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Day in March made it all the way to production: redesigning how direct messaging looks on Tumblr! Pretty cool!
Here are some of the projects that got made for this most recent Hack Week in September. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…
Maybe this will look familiar to you, but we love this idea of being able to organize Tumblr feeds into many “columns” side-by-side, creating a very dense but lively view of Tumblr. Lenny, Kelly, and Paul hacked this together, and we’re pretty excited to see where it’ll go. Each column can be a different feed on Tumblr, like For You, Following, your Activity, a specific blog, a search, Trending, even a Collection, so many possibilities!
Meanwhile, a separate team of @autoplanes, Katie, @lex, Shaun, and Eve dug into the idea of selling digital and physical goods through blogs on Tumblr, leveraging our sibling platform WooCommerce! Blogs could put whatever they’d like for sale here, and have a dedicated space for it. We know there are so many amazing artists and artisans here who could use this to more easily sell their creations on Tumblr!
This one is a golden oldie, it keeps coming back hack day after hack day, and each time it gets even better. Santi and Maxime hacked together some example avatar “frames” and “hats” that folks on Tumblr could purchase for their blog. Maybe eventually people could create these and sell them or gift them to each other!
As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!
