Everything is Fantastic

tumblr, which is held together with duct tape and madness, run by three raccoons in blood stained Yahoo! hats and a handful of crabs, its only discernible source of income the sale of shoelaces from an inside joke so inside no one knows the original source anymore and fake blue checkmarks... that website still lives on

Someone said, "I need a way to know other people of the outernet have Tumblr so let's do a thing."

And then they created the stolen presidential shoelace saying.

It's demo text from earlier Tumblr years. In order to make a post, you used to be taken to an entirely seperate webpage from the dashboard. This webpage would be different depending on what type of post you made. Each text/input box on each post page had different demo text, the same kind as the faded text you'll see when you go to send an ask or submit a post to someone's blog now. You couldn't actually copy and paste it, it was just in the bg until you started typing.

The chat type post (which used to be completely separate from text posts) had the demo text along the lines of:

Person 1: I like your shoelaces

Person 2: Thanks, I stole them from the president.

Someone joked we should start using this as code to find others who had tumblrs, because although tumblr has basically been the lifeblood of widespread memes only really rivaled by Vine and Tiktok in later years, it wasn't NEARLY as well known back circa 2014 as it is now. Plus, it was seen as weird to have a tumblr, because you were either an Aesthetic Hipster Blogger or a Weird Fandom Blogger, and it was a whole thing. We were all mostly teens around then so it was fun to have a "secret language" we could use to subtly communicate with, because it was super embarrassing to just go up to someone and ask if they had a tumblr.

Kid one the bus next to me whose backpack starts moving and it turns out he's got three chickens and a painted turtle he caught in there? This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been catching small game and transporting it home in whatever they had since we invented bags to put chickens and turtles in.

I traded him three king-size snickers bars I had on me for the turtle because I vaguely remembered that many freshwater turtles were toxic to eat (incorrectly, as it turns out, but this was when I still had a Nokia Brick that lived a blissful, internet-free existence), and didn't want him accidentally poisoning his family, but didn't want to just. Steal his hard-won turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been cautious about poisons, looking out for strangers kids and bartering shit since before we were technically humans, probably.

Having acquired a turtle, I now needed to transport the turtle to the on-campus pond that effectively served as an Invasive Freshwater Turtle Containment Zone, but did not have a bag that could adequately contain him so I had to sit the rest of that bus ride, at the station and all through the next bus ride holding the turtle like the world's angriest hamburger. Multiple people were curious about and delighted with the turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans love an animal, especially one that is capable of appearing grumpy, and hands are for holding things.

By the time I got back to Campus, the anthropology and child psychology building that the Invasive Turtle Containment Pond was in had closed, so I had to figure out how to climb the tree over the wall and get down off the roof while holding The World's Angriest And Sharpest Hamburger. I eventually ended up having to briefly shove the turtle into by bra to get up to the initial branch and off the roof without breaking an ankle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans are, as a species, a bunch of barely-evolved arboreal frugivores and really good at Tree Physics, and I don't know a single titty-having bitch out there that hasn't used their bra as Emergency Pockets at least once, if not daily.

I released the turtle into the Turtle Containment Pond and then had to solve the problem of getting back OUT of the locked building, but Nokia Brick never loses a signal or drops a call (including that time I accidentally dropped it off a 13-story building in the middle of a call to my parents and the damn thing BOUNCED but kept the line open. I miss that phone every day.) and while campus security has been carefully trained to not let people IN to places without proper ID and a call to someone inside, they assume that if you got locked in somewhere, that you got in by legitimate means and not Lemur Shenanigans, so i just called them, apologized that I'd been working late with headphones on and didn't realize I'd been locked in. This is Perfectly Normal, people have been lying to cops since laws were invented, and will continue to do so because all cops are bastards.

Me, a millennial, after a decade of destroying golf, mayonnaise and diamonds: