"Tumblr was founded by David Karp and launched in New York City, in February of 2007... It was built to be a simple, social blogging platform..."

"Users could design their own home pages; post text, images, gifs, or videos; and follow a feed of others doing the same.... In 2013, when Tumblr had seventy-three million accounts, Yahoo acquired it for more than a billion dollars. But, in 2016, the company did a writedown of seven hundred and twelve million dollars... [In 2019] Automattic, the commercial arm of the content-management system WordPress, acquired the site for a reported three million dollars. It was easy to assume that Tumblr was dead.... It’s one of the few social networks where users can still publish entries that resemble blog posts. The Tumblr users I spoke to, both new and returning, cited a few unfashionable aspects that keep them using the platform. Tumblr’s main feed doesn’t shuffle posts algorithmically based on what it determines might appeal to a user. It’s 'a good, old chronological river'... 'It’s the periphery of the internet; nothing important is happening there.'... What makes Tumblr obsolete, for the moment, are the same things that lend it an enduring appeal. The fact that it maintains a following should remind us that we use social-media services by choice; no platform or feature is an inevitability. As Karina Tipismana, the student, told me, 'People say stuff like, "I wish we could still use Tumblr." It’s there, it’s there!'"

From "How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete/The social-media platform’s status as a relic of the Internet has attracted prodigal users as well as new ones" by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).

Tumblr predates the places that are not obsolete — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. The point here is that the obsoleteness is what's so good. If there's nostalgia for blogs, if there's something inherently appealing in blogs that is lost in these other places, let's remember not only Tumblr, but also Blogger, which has been around since 1999.

I thought I was getting into blogging late when I began this blog 18 years ago. Blogger had already existed for 5 years. I didn't want to miss out on blogging entirely, though part of me thought, it's too late. And I remember when Tumblr was the new thing, 3 years later. I remember all the others — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok — when they were new. But I'm still here with the old, still blogging old school. I don't need to look back to the time when blogging was blogging, like it's something quaint, from simpler times. 

I've stuck to the discipline, daily blogging, absolutely no skipped days in 18 years. I've got to make the announcement every year, and it's that day again, my bloggiversary. I'm not stopping now. And thanks to everyone of you. If you've got this far, you haven't stopped reading.

Sometimes the best inclusion is done by exclusion.

I'm trying to read this column "The Day Free Speech Died at Harvard Law School":

In late 2014, during my second year at Harvard Law School, a student group called Students For Inclusion created a blog entitled Socratic Shortcomings. Its commitment, we are told, is to “[foster] productive and contextualized conversations on matters related to race, gender and class.” The site allows students—and anyone really—to post anonymously about events at Harvard Law School.

The site quickly picked up steam, as students gravitated toward a safe and faceless forum, where they could voice their displeasure. For a short while it appeared that the site might encourage open dialogue and actually inspire change.

However, soon thereafter, students began to complain about submissions vanishing into thin air. The moderators, we eventually learned, were selectively publishing submissions and denying others without further explanation. It seems that the Students For Inclusion only wished to include some students....

Isn't this a case for: Get your own damned blog?

The blog is moderated. It doesn't "allow" "anyone" to post there. You can see how it's operated. That's what it is. It's a blog that takes anonymous submissions and has a point of view or a set of points of view that it publishes. Here's the submission page as it looks right now. It "reserve[s] the right to maintain this blog" as "a safe space." There are moderators, and they have standards. They have a vision of the place and they mean to preserve their speech by excluding those who interfere with their idea of the place. That's not anti-free speech. Free speech didn't die.

It's not like Twitter kicking Robert Stacy McCain out of Twitter (which is discussed in the column) because Socratic Shortcomings is on Tumblr and nothing prevents the voices excluded from Socratic Shortcomings from setting up another Tumblr account and inviting submissions and putting them all up without moderation or moderating them to put up exactly whatever they think is excluded from Socratic Shortcomings — the shortcomings of Socratic Shortcomings. Start something like that of your own and you may gain some appreciation for the speech that is furthered by selectivity.

Subtraction is part of creation....



What you don't say is part of what you say. Speech doesn't "die" by editing. It lives. Ask the reader. And get your own damned blog.

What were you wearing when you were catcalled?

A question answered. 

IN THE COMMENTS: FullMoon observes that the word "catcall" means: "1: a loud or raucous cry made especially to express disapproval (as at a sports event) 2: a derisive remark."

He continues:

Most of the verbal ejaculations in the original video were of a down to earth, complimentary vein.

"Nice ass" and "I could eat that all day and nighttime, too" are not derisive or expressions of disapproval. Quite the opposite, in my neighborhood.

Good point! That is how I remember the meaning of the word "catcall," now that you mentions it. I don't know what dictionary FullMoon looked at, but I go to the OED, where I see that originally a catcall was "A squeaking instrument, or kind of whistle, used esp. in play-houses to express impatience or disapprobation." (1660  S. Pepys Diary 7 Mar. (1970) I. 80,  "I..called on Adam Chard and bought a Catt-call there; it cost me two groats.") Then it became "The sound made by this instrument or an imitation with the voice; a shrill screaming whistle." (1817  M. Edgeworth Harrington & Ormond I. vii. 144  "Shrill catcalls in the gallery, had begun to contend with the music in the orchestra.")

But there's a "Draft addition" from December 2006:

orig. U.S. A whistle, cry, or suggestive comment intended to express sexual attraction or admiration (but usually regarded as an annoyance), typically made by a man to a female passer-by.

The examples go back to 1956:

1956   Charleroi (Pa.) Mail 4 Apr. 7/1   The catcalls and approving whistles brought her back to the present and she stood in the center aisle and gave them a gay smile.
1982   Chicago Sun-Times 25 Nov. 7/1   Karen Downs, an attractive woman who was sick of the catcalls she received every time she set foot outside her house.
1993   R. Shilts Conduct Unbecoming iv. xxxiii. 317   Women recruits found themselves the object of catcalls when they walked by the mens's barracks... ‘Hey babe, you want to get lucky?’ the male Marines called.
2001   R. Peffer Virgin Islands (Lonely Planet) 46/1   Women find themselves most vulnerable to harassment when they're working out. If you are jogging..along public thoroughfares, you must prepare yourself to get whistles, catcalls, clapping and the like from local men.

BONUS: Joseph Addison's essay No. 361 from The Spectator, dated Thursday, April 24, 1712. is all about the cat-call:

"You can go on the Tumblr of any young person in the world and see people marketing themselves."

"Everyone my age is like that now. We’re all hyperaware of how we’re being seen."

Said Lorde, the big pop star, who's only 17, asked about "self-constructing her persona."

CNN is annoying me.

I want to blog 2 things from the "town hall" show Hillary Clinton did on CNN yesterday. I need the transcript. I google "hillary town hall transcript" and the first hit is:

CNN Town Hall: Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices - CNN.com
www.cnn.com/hillarytownhall/ CNN
CNN Town Hall: Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices. ... CNN TV · HLN · Transcripts · About us · Full Site · Feedback. © 2014 Cable News Network, Inc. A Time Warner ...

That ought to work, right? Wrong. I get to a page with practically nothing on it but this:



I need Plan B for finding the transcript, and Hillary's continual waving is mesmerizing in the most irritating possible way. It's not as though she's saying "Hi, Ann." It's "Hi Tumblr." I guess CNN thinks that's hip and cool, because all the kids these day use Tumblr, but the inane emptiness of it all is making me feel that CNN has no decent idea of how to be a compelling, serious news site. Hillary is doing a town hall to explain her way past Benghazi and on to the presidency. "Hi Tumblr" is no better an explanation than "What difference at this point does it make?"

But maybe CNN and Hillary's people — they must be in on it, because they have control, right? — think a breezier, younger Hillary is necessary and these social media things must be done these days for that certain sector of the electorate, those people who feel their way to the voting booth, those people who pushed The Likeable One past her in 2008.

Eventually, I scroll to the bottom of what is a long page, and absolutely the last thing on the page, in tiny, faint print is "transcripts," which I click on and get to a page that begins with a calendar where I can click on yesterday's date and go to a page with a list where I find "CNN Town Hall - Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices" and click through, at last to the page with the transcript.

Hi, Transcript.

I'm going to do 2 more posts, covering 2 things that — as I watched last night — I made a mental note to blog this morning. I think these are things that no one has noticed yet and that you'll find striking once I've pointed them out.

ADDED: I'm finding this post very hard to proofread because I have to view it in HTML mode to keep Hillary from waving at me distractingly.

"This is the inspiring story of Hafid from Dubai, the douchebag who stole my phone."

"He forgot to switch off the camera upload function, that's why we will enjoy a deep insight into his life. Start below."

(More here.)

5 reasons why Yahoo will ruin Tumblr...

... and the argument to the contrary.

At the Karloff Café...

... Boris Karloff seems strangely familiar.

(Via Michael Stipe's Tumblr, via this NYT article about Tumblr.)

ADDED: For reference: