I wonder when exactly it was that Star Trek stopped being perceived as light, fluffy, not-really-legitimate sci fi that ~housewives~ liked and started being seen as serious nerd business that girls had to keep their gross cooties off. 

Also when did the Beatles start to be remembered as rock legends rather than a silly boy band teenaged girls liked?

When men decided they liked them.

this is seriously exactly how it happened. Women were actually the first rock and roll ‘critics’ because they would write in to women’s papers and magazines to share and discuss what their kids were listening to when men still thought it was trashy teeny bopper music. once it became a lucrative, mainstream genre men shoved women out of the space. Men also tend to be gatekeepers once they move into formerly female spaces - early trek fandom was incredibly open and inclusive; women would set up fan get togethers in their own houses to discuss the show or invite the actors to visit before conventions became a thing, and then were huge in organizing the first conventions - but now the stereotype of a trekkie is a nerdy white dude who scoffs derisively at casual fans and newbies with his encyclopedic and pedantic knowledge of trek

I propose we call this “mentrification”

YES

MENTRIFICATION that’s genius

by the way every single man i’ve ever explained this to is completely boggled to hear about it. they genuinely don’t fucking know. they’re always like ‘okay name a field this happened in’ and you’re like ‘beer. writing novels. gynecology. computers.’ and they’re completely fucking distraught. men didn’t invent beer???? men didn’t invent everything? 

We can also witness the reverse happening, where women move into a space and suddenly it is deemed weak or unimportant. Some examples are teaching, nursing, and psychology.

…and any kind of clerical work.

I’ve been silent for too long and can no longer bear to keep this inside: @busybeerunningfree is a good person and deserves many good things.

Aaw, so cute!

thank you, opportunity 

I cannot tell you how many real tears I cried about Opportunity last month. 

Let’s just say that for a week I was a wreck anytime I heard or saw anything about it. So I’m just triggering my emotions all over again with this. 

Me: I’m not going to applaud men for basic courtesy

Chris Evans: 

Me: What a gentleman. No one has ever been as polite as Chris Evans. His mother raised such a respectable man. This is what we should all aspire to be. He deserves the world. There is nothing better than what he is doing right now. 

Tumblr is getting a facelift

Some time ago we took a long, hard look at how we stacked up to the recommendations outlined in the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. This is the initiative that sets standards for accessibility for people who may need assistance using the internet. It outlines steps to take and tools to use to create as seamless of an experience online as possible, whether you have auditory, visual, or neurological disabilities, are using a limited device, are on a slow connection with limited bandwidth, or…well, a whole bunch of other reasons.

The result of that long, hard look? Not great. We needed to make sure Tumblr was accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been making changes to do just that. Our inaccessible menus are more accessible, we fixed our poorly described elements, and increased overall readability. You can read more about all that in our most recent @javascript post about the mobile web.

Part of making Tumblr more accessible involved upping the color contrast in our UI, most notably on the dashboard and everywhere else that familiar blue touches. The light grays and muted blues had a contrast ratio of 2.02:1. What does that mean? Bad. It was bad, and we needed to do better by people with visual impairments.

Enter your new dashboard:

It looks…cleaner, doesn’t it? Like someone dusted off the poorly accessible bits. The blue is darker, the grays are lighter, all the buttons and icons are brighter with our new brand colors, and it has a contrast ratio of 7.87:1 What does that mean? Good! Very good.

The switch to your brand new, higher contrast, less dusty dashboard has been slowly rolling out this week. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll get it sometime in the next few days.

A note: We know that this color change on the dashboard negatively impacts the beautiful bluespace art so many of you have created over the past few years. Seeing these older posts lose the utilization of the dashboard—something that made them so special and unique to just Tumblr—is certainly not a great feeling. There’s no way around that. We hope, however, that this change only means newer, more bluespace art will be created, and that this time around it will be easier for everyone to experience.

Goodbye, #36465D. You’ve treated many of us well, but #001935 will treat every single one of us even better.  

I have to say, tumblr makes the oddest updates.