It was the summer before my twenty-first birthday, just after I’d moved into the two bedroom townhouse off of campus my father was paying for out of guilt. It had linoleum floors I covered in threadbare carpet squares I’d purchased from a stranger off of Craigslist who was renovating their new barren nest. The curtains in the kitchen I had sewn using a Singer Heavy Duty I’d salvaged from Goodwill. The sand colored, corduroy sofa and matching loveseat I’d found on the curb four blocks from my new digs. I dragged those fuckers all four blocks and up five cement steps into my living room.

This was the summer before the alcoholism, before the stillbirths, before my middle sister became the middle sister and went off the deep end. It was the summer I ate so much fast food in my rusted out ‘88 Oldsmobile that the steering wheel shined with grease. It was the summer before my foray into full service sex work for myself, and just eight months prior to meeting a man twenty-five years my senior who would teach me that sometimes you can’t love the hurt out of a person no matter how hard you try.

There was a soft, rotting wooden privacy fence enclosing the six-foot-by-six-foot red brick patio outside the front door. I’d strung a clothesline up that ran from one diagonal to the other. When the Iowa heat wasn’t too wet it saved me money on drying my laundry at the campus laundromat. I’d sit out on my plastic lawn chair I’d stolen from a woman’s backyard one night while intoxicated and drink my morning coffee. Even my coffee pot and cups weren’t new, all necessities I’d collected from Goodwill, right down to my spoons, forks, and knives. Nothing I had was mine.

This was the summer after Kansas, and phone sex with strangers. It was the summer I spent $500 on a pair of cowboy boots from Texas and sent my bank account into the red for the first time. It was the summer before my last black eye after I poured his gas station scotch down the kitchen drain. It was the summer before Grandma Evelyn’s stroke that sent her and grandpa into moving back to Nebraska to be closer to family. It was the summer before 2a.m. calls to domestic violence hotlines with blood hot in my mouth. It was the summer I took in all of the things that weren’t mine and I made them mine.

The porcelain bathtub in the townhouse was so shallow but I took every chance I could to soak in it with a Starbucks drink I’d scrape change together to buy. For the first time in forever I wondered if I was on the cusp of freedom each morning when I sat out front on my stolen lawn chair having my coffee. Maybe my father’s guilt was wearing on him for having been absent since birth yet demanding excellence in scholastic performance. It wasn’t freedom though. I found out not long into getting the keys to the place that it was a strategic move to further hold something over me.

The debate on whether or not Tumblr is a community-based blog or a social networking site has been an ongoing argument for years since Tumblr was introduced to the internet. While you can certainly create blog posts and share images like any other blogging site, such as Blogger and WordPress. On the other hand, Tumblr also has the capabilities of creating connections with other users, similar to social networking sites like Twitter whereby users on Tumblr are able to follow and “re-blog” posts shared by the original creator.

What is Tumblr Anyway?

To describe Tumblr is perhaps best summed up the Vice President of Shopgifter as a microblogging service and social network where users have the ability to create custom blogs and upload multimedia files to be shared, as well as texts as a blog post where users can easily place their comments or re-post (Stringfellow, 2013). Furthermore, the experience that Tumblr provides as a microblogging/social network service despite its surrounding confusion keeps bringing in more attention from other platforms to join with communities that share similar interests regarding current events and fandoms based on different shows, music bands, and so forth.

Why Do People Go For Tumblr?

At a personal opinion, I’ve always thought that Tumblr was a great place to dwell into especially when you have an interest at hand. Users from all around the world contributed to different Tumblr communities with multimedia images and moving GIFs that easily touched the point of “relatable-ness”. The pressure to develop and keep an audience in Tumblr is lacking compared to other blogging sites, which makes the blogging environment on Tumblr much more relaxed where expectations are not entirely focused to be met (Tumblr is Not What You Think, 2013). Mainly, what I’ve intriguing about the communities on Tumblr is their passion when it comes to advocating their beliefs and rights where issues still lay still on common human rights. For example, the users who join the LGBT community on Tumblr are engaged in a widely positive aspect where users believe they have the freedom to be who they are and what they identify as on the platform.

The Prominent Downside of Tumblr

However, even as a social networking/microblogging site with much more freedom for expression compared to other sites, Tumblr itself has deemed some content to be unsafe. A media purge was conducted in December of 2018 to remove all pornography and any sexually explicit themed media off the site which resulted in enraging the community within. Because of this ban, approximate 30 percent of users have fled Tumblr (Liao, 2019).

Even with these events unfolding, I still believe that Tumblr can still be a space where users can share their love for certain types of groups of media, where currently, can be shared and viewed at a much safer space compared to other blogs and social networking site.

References

Stringfellow, A 2013, The Great Tumblr Debate: Blogging Platform Or Social Network?, American Express, Viewed 28 March 2019, <https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-insights/articles/the-great-tumblr-debate-blogging-platform-or-social-network/>

Tumblr is Not What You Think 2013, Tech Crunch, Viewed 28 March 2019, <https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-think/>

Our next Pride coord is the shiny version of Pokemon #15 Beedrill repping the Aromantic flag

[IMAGE ID: three rectangular flags with five evenly-sized stripes each. they all have these top two stripe colors: dull yellow-green, and warm green. the first flag's bottom three stripes are as follows: dull light purple, light brown, and warm dark brown. the second flag's bottom three stripes are as follows: dull yellow, dull green, and dark yellow-brown. the third flag's bottom three stripes are as follows: deep purple, deep dark purple, and black. END ID.]

buribugentyp: a gender connected to being both aligned with the buried from the magnus archives, and the bug type from pokemon!

corrupbugentyp: a gender connected to being both aligned with the corruption from the magnus archives, and the bug type from pokemon!

darkbugentyp: a gender connected to being both aligned with the dark from the magnus archives, and the bug type from pokemon!

based on @/neopronouns' castypect genders!

why the fuck is it so much population around shit like this but there are millions upon millions of people on Tumblr they get zero of anything

no hard no popularity no comments they get fucking nothing why the fuck are there millions upon millions upon millions of people on this God damn app and they get literally zero attention essentially you have hundreds of millions of people on this motherfucking app that are shadowbanned ? ? ?