MY FAVORITE DAY

Neil!!!

Artificial Intelligence?

More like Fartificial Insemelligence.

Who up for

I really needed to see this right now. Thank you.

rule.

So hyped for this

Hello, Tumblr. Tumblr here. We’re launching live streaming on Tumblr, and we’re calling it…well, Tumblr Live.

Tumblr Live brings streaming directly to the dashboard, meaning your Tumblr audience and your streaming audience can converge. What’s that, you say? Synergy? Beautiful.

Initially, we’re rolling Tumblr Live out to the US only via our Android and iOS apps. Desktop and international streaming and viewing will follow in time.

Here’s how it works:

The little 🎥 at the bottom of your dashboard in your mobile app will take you to a Tumblr Live tab, where you’ll be able to scroll through streams that are live at that time—indicated by a green dot. (Your search bar is still there! It now lives in the top right corner of your screen.)

As long as you keep it clean, you can stream anything that takes your fancy by tapping the “Go Live!” button—ducks in the park, the wonky snowman you built, your cursed cross stitch, etc.

Streaming works with both front and back cameras, so if you’re camera-shy, you can stream without showing your face. 

You can bestow bouncer status upon your most trusted and loyal viewers, which means they can help you moderate your stream for any nasties while you’re live.

You can tap on any live avatar to jump into their stream—whether you follow that blog or not.

You can send little gifts to the streamer during their stream if you’re enjoying what they’re up to.

You can collect your favorite streamers in a special tab for later.

And that’s it for now. Just imagine! Gaming live streams! Book clubs! Live fungi feed! D’n’D campaigns! Artist live draws! Shark facts! GRWMs! Cosplay and con casts! Knitting hour! Photography tutorials! Storytime! Plant parenting tips! Living room concerts! Furby workshop! Museum tours! Crabs! (just crabs!) 

It’s a whole new ball pit out there. We’re so excited to see what you come up with.

Happy deletion day

RIP Tumblr Live, you wont be missed

good riddance live

In 1982, quite by accident, a zookeeper at Izu Shaboten Zoo in Shizuoka Prefecture discovered that capybaras absolutely loved soaking in hot water, and the practice of providing them an onsen, or traditional Japanese hot spring, was born. Source Massimo; video @yu_haradakei.

I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

İ love silly cars