Saturday, December 08, 2018

Tumbl Down

I am a purty-pitcher-chasin’ fool, so data-harvesters like Tumblr are a natural draw. And honestly, if Tumblr’s draconian new user guidelines prevent me from tripping into yet another joyless snakepit of porn gifs I’ll be grateful.

However . . .

Those guidelines are worse than absurd. “No female-presenting nipples” is enough to gut content from a beloved site like The Bristol Board, whose curator posts terrific comic book art. And it doesn’t stop there — not by a long shot.
Seriously?
My post title is stolen from Warren Ellis, whose wisdom — and experience — on these matters penetrates. His opening gambit: “I’m a syndicator. I stopped wanting to silo original collections of words in other people’s systems a long time ago.”

Gulp. Where I come from, when a guy like me reads words like that, we say he feels convicted. Actions to be determined . . .

Anyway, shout-out to The Bristol Board fella, who has introduced me to a great deal of super-fabulous stuff — most recently ‘Cave Girls of the Lost World,’ by Richard Sala.
More here, including female-presenting nipples! — check it out while you can.

P.S. TBB-guy, if you’re reading this — if you have a code-writing buddy, you can rig a personal silo like Ellis’s quite inexpensively. And if you don’t have a code-writing buddy, please drop me a note — I’d be honoured to set you up.

5 comments:

pdb said...

I’ve resisted clicking over to Ellis and The Bristol Board, both, to avoid getting sucked in. Am still resisting! (Pointlessly, probably, since I seemed to get sucked in elsewhere with stuff that is arguably Ellis- and/or TBB-surrogate material.) Have just pulled up your posts touching Ellis, though, following occasion yesterday to look him up.

Taking the present re-read of this post, incidentally, as occasion to get around to learning a little about WordPress’s recent acquisition of Tumblr.

pdb said...

Re. Tumblr and more, Mullenweg has interesting things to say in this not over-long interview:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisition-matt-mullenweg-ceo-automattic-wordpress-verizon-changes-vergecast

Whisky Prajer said...

"Ellis" -- speaking of digital nomads... he retired "Morning Computer" some weeks back. His newsletter is still a thing though, and I believe he's put up a modest feed-loop somewhere, but I'm not sure where.

Ironically I recently installed the Tumblr application on my tablet. After one day I was ready to uninstall and delete account, but it meant firing up the Big Box and working with Tumblr via ISP, so lazy me I just left the app alone. Now I kinda like it. I post nothing and only follow five others, mostly comic book art collections, so I am not exactly a "power user."

Mullenweg is indeed interesting. I have great reservations about WordPress (their coding has been a mess from right out of the gate), but I'll be curious to see how they integrate Tumblr. Thanks for the link!

pdb said...

As with most things, I’m a late WP-adopter. Still experience moments of surprise on noticing how much it’s sucked me in (for somebody who is definitely not a real code guy, I can get pretty deep into the guts of your standard WP install these days) without my every having properly gotten to know its story or to be involved in the ‘community.’ Anyway, certainly like that somehow, in spite of all that FB and Google can do, it remains a player.

Whisky Prajer said...

Two words: "moveable type." Someone whispered those to me early in this blog, and I've paid for my arrogant dismissal ever since.