Tumblr Staff: News!
Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.
Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to…
And for my part, I’m sorely disappointed. I’ll miss Tumblr when Yahoo’s ground it into dust through mismanagement.
UPDATE: Serious First World Problems
In the course of debating whether or not to quit Tumblr, I have discovered a crucial factor. You can use any RSS reader (I prefer Netvibes) to follow any Tumblr account by tacking /rss to the end of the URL for any account you follow. Badda-bing, it’s that simple.
In the Minus column: you can’t ♥ the posts you like. The people you follow not only lose a follower, they don’t know which posts you like best. Now what? Well, with enough people like me following posts but never sharing love, regular contributors will starve to death. This is my war of attrition against Yahoo, and if attritive wars weren’t so freakin’ effective, I wouldn’t rely on them.
Report: Yahoo Board Approves Tumblr Acquisition [BREAKING]
Yahoo’s board approved an acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion on Sunday, according to ‘The Wall Street Journal’.
Well, this thoroughly sucks. I mean, great for Tumblr because they get more money, but Yahoo is a tone-deaf, poorly run organization. I get the feeling they’re the stereotypical boardroom of tech-clueless patriarchs barking out brand names and Web phrases while insisting on their old model of doing business.
But what this means is that I have to decide whether I’m going to stay on Tumblr. I really, really hate Yahoo, they’ve posed nothing but problems for me, from all the spammers that followed me when they bought Geocities (and drove it into the ground) to all the tech support questions that went unanswered and unresolved. Now they think assimilating Tumblr will solve their problems.
I have several things to consider. This is a free service which costs me nothing (but when a service is free, you are the product). I have to look around at the accounts I’ve been following to see whether it’s impossible to follow them through other channels. But I just post stuff here for my amusement and few people are aware I’m here and doing anything. Very few. And quitting Tumblr would buy me a few more minutes each day, not that I’d do anything useful with those minutes.
So I have to think about this, but my reflex, my instinct is to present the middle finger to anything Yahoo says or does.
Biking around Art Crawl, checking at the breweries.
various - Seven Minutes
A couple fitness trainers have developed a “scientifically perfect” interval training routine. You work out for 30 seconds, with 10-second breaks, going through exercises in a specific order, working out as hard as you can and using only a chair and a wall.
I assembled a cheap little MP3 of twelve song clips to work out with, so during the breaks I can refer to the chart (in the article I linked to). As long as the song’s playing, you just work out as hard as you can.
Travel typewriter, out of its protective case. I think I saved it from an ignoble demise, snapping it up before it went to a garage sale. Don’t know where to get it tuned up/repaired, though.
Trying my hand at freehand sketches. I have poor discipline, but once in a while I get the urge to practice drawing. There are many things I wish I could render in illustration (mainly because they are too perverse to ask anyone else to do for me), but I don’t feel the restless urge to spend hours at this task, even though that’s the only way to improve.
Still, I have fun with sketches.
It seems I wrote up my manifesto as a small child. My mom saved this document and recently returned it to me. I’m struck by how prescient this was, when for most of my formative years I thought I’d be an artist. But I didn’t stick with that, and I’ve always been writing.
It came! It arrived! Just in time for… well, her birthday’s in two months, so let’s say that. The fine artist at Our Valued Customers was doing commissions, so I ordered one. Who’s this for?
My wife and I have a game: I ask her, “What is best in life?” and she gets the answer slightly wrong. It’s like playing movie trivia with a spambot: her response is mostly accurate but run through a thesaurus filter. Pictured is one of the best responses she’s provided.
I’m deeply grateful to Mr. Tim for his fine work. Rebecca is tickled beyond description and showing it off on Facebook. Cue: deep envy from across the nation.
“I’m a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality — dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers.”
— Dorothy Parker on “the women problem” of literature. (via explore-blog)
The inimitable Grant Snider strikes again, with the day jobs of famous poets – including Jack Kerouac (railroad worker), Charles Bukowski (mailman), Emily Dickinson (cat-keeper), and T. S. Eliot (bank clerk.)
Tane Tomoko - Broken Wings
Very intense and evocative. It’s beautiful to listen to the careful pronunciation and then the extra layer of stylistic performance. This is truly a unique piece.
We just stumbled upon these guys at the Raven Bar (Cork, Ireland), had no idea they were famous. This is Rattlesnake County, or pieces thereof: it’s the tradition in which various musicians show up and jam together, something I’d kinda like to see in my own city.
