the midnight post

moonbeam, you uncultured

fireball-brained wizard.

Even when they changed it to Tumblr Premium and doubled the price, I wasn’t upset—Blaze had proven to be one of the best ways to make friends with fellow dancers, so the monthly perk was extremely useful.

Unfortunately, about six months ago Tumblr started actively censoring my pole dance videos—I could still post them, but they’d get tagged with a mature content filter, despite containing no nudity or sexuality. I appealed a couple of them, only to be told flat out that they qualified as mature content, and thus could no longer be Blazed. This was incredibly frustrating, especially given the bevy of unfiltered mature content on this site. After some consideration, I let my subscription lapse; I’d rather lost my enthusiasm for supporting the new owners, in much the same way that they’d lost enthusiasm for improving the website.

I’m not precisely surprised at how all this went down; I’ve been on the Internet long enough to see this cycle multiple times. Still, I guess I was hoping tumblr, as infamously atypical a social network as it is, would be the exception to the Law of Inevitable Enshittification. As it is, I’m discovering abruptly just how many of those platform improvements were primarily made in the service of serving up more expensive ads: when I first subscribed, ads here were largely static images, often with cryptic captions that were unclear as to what they were selling. Now I’m seeing Instagram-style slickly produced video ads for predatory prediction markets, or AI slop generators, or bizarre mobile games. (Ironically, the very slickness of production makes them ridiculously easy to spot—I suspect most of them are made for Instagram and thus stand out from the tumblr userbase’s more lo-fi, homegrown aesthetic.) At least we know their targeting algorithm is just as awful as ever.

Part 0 // Part 1 // Next

Let’s call this part 1 of my petition to get Teen Wolf an animated series ;)

Part 0 was a test of concept. But I’m not sure what these are, they’re like a combination between storyboard, beat board, color script, and comic? I just wanted to do a color study and write a fanfic and this seemed like the easiest route 🤷‍♀️ I don’t have a name for the fic yet but I’ll let y’all know when I do.

anyway we like pacing around together and ranting in the attic but sometimes instead of pacing one of us will just hang on the pole and spin, and the other person will watch on the beanbag, which makes for these really goofy conversations where the person on the bag will say something that gets the other persons goat, such as, hypothetically, that xylophones do not belong in rock music, and then the other person will go on a tirade about this, but they'll actually only be facing the Hot Take Speaker half of the time, what because of the pole, so the response will sound something like

I can't believe

you would even suggest such

a stupid opinion. You've

been to a Danny Elfman

concert! How can you

have heard Oingo Boingo

live and say with a straight face

that they alone do not justify

rock and roll xylophones

and then that person will continue until they get too dizzy, then they'll get off the pole, and by unspoken agreement, the person on the bag will get up and trade places with them to deliver their rebuttal while also spinning and it just creates this sort of crazy strip-court lawyers debating absolute nonsense for no reason kind of vibe that frankly just really does it for us.