first-time life practitioner

NEIL BANGING OUT THE TUNES?

IDES OF MARCH?

OUT OF TOUCH THURSDAY???

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.

Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.

Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.

Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:

Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.

The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top

You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.

Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up

You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff

You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.

Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog

Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.

If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.

You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"

Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.

Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.

We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.

Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.

Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.

Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it

You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.

Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.

Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit

You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.

Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.

Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.

If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal

Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension

In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.

You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!

Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs

Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

In Honor of Indigenous Awareness Month here's a quick overview what my life has looked like being Indigenous

My parents didn't raise me Native, bc they were told that being white was better. So I didn't have much other than just the dreamcatchers on the walls and some stories my Grandma told me.

It wasn't until I had a dream about some ones funeral the night they passed in their sleep that Grandma told me it was bc of me being Native.

I didn't know what that was supposed to mean. I didn't know what that meant to me.

Flash forward a few years, I've had a couple dreams here and there but more-so I've been hungry. I'd been searching the internet, searching books, asking my grandma questions. Information, correct information at that, was hard to come by. But when I found the right sources, oh boy was there so much. Everything was so vibrant, everything felt familiar. It was more interesting than learning about the Greeks in class, any history lesson, any religion less, it was full and enticing and beautiful, but we never learned about it. Because the U.S. would rather let something this beautiful be swept under the rug rather than admitting to a genocide.

I'm more into my culture now. My family is more into my culture now. I'm learning my language. I've connected with new relatives.

I will never forget the day that my Grandma told me she was proud of me for making her and the family better.

I've been having more dreams. My spirit guide (a black indigenous man who when i first met offered my a drink at a bar) always warns me when something bad is about to happen, or I'm making the right choice about a big decision.

But I've been laughed at for my name. Nobody can say it right.

I cannot register for enrollment in the tribe, despite my Grandma being full blood. It just so happened that my Grandma's parents were from two separate tribes, and the Blood Quantum only takes one. Thats why I don't count, even tho I have that blood from my mother's side, and some extra from my Father, who is mostly yaqui but was adopted.

My relative said "you know what horses, dogs, and Indians all have in common"

The government requires them to have a pedigree

No white person ever knows what a blood quantum is. I have to explain it. It's current and active genocide.

Nobody knows about ICWA. I wrote my final paper on it. My professor gave me a personalized note saying that he thinks that I'm going to go places, and that was one of the best essays he got. He could feel my passion through the page. My people are dying.

When I said a Native prayer because I was showing off how much I had learned, a acquaintance started making nonsense noise at me, making fun of the way I sounded.

When I smudged at a Halloween Party because some people wanted me to help protect them for evil, some people started laughing that I was doing witch craft.

The first tag that pulls up when I search Native is "#Native Women"

I'm three times as likely to get sexually assaulted. Not by other Native people. By White people.

People don't say I look Native. But if you look for more than one second, that's wrong. I get pale in the winter but really dark in the summer, like a lot of Natives. My face is Native. I have my mother's cheekbones. I wear my weight like a every Native I've ever seen about my size. My hair is dark. My eyes squint when I smile. I was always told to take photos again and again bc I was blinking. I didn't know that was a Native thing. My Grandma said people don't think I'm Native because they're so stupid they'd only realize if I wore a beaded headband and a ribbon skirt.

I have to explain and ask teachers all the time if they know something they are showing in class is racists. Sometimes its a yes, and we'll talk about that, or a no, but can you talk about that. My brother who is 13 was never taught about what happened to the native people, and only knew because I told him. I've always have had to know, because nobody else does.

I left the church after the curtain was pulled back. My Grandma who is 70 was forced into a Catholic School when she was young. The priest raped the girls

I was told never to go to the reservation. My mom remembers it as poverty, going to the salvation army and picking up clothes. My grandma remembers it as the place where she was an alcoholic, and she's fought to stay sober for more than half her life now but that only started when she left. My Aunt remembers it as the place her mama got beat by her good for nothing White Ex Husband.

I have no representation. All the old shit is always racist. I'm used as a figure head at sports and as decorations, I'm not human to them.

Nobody admits the Genocide is currently happening.

My sister was pulled in without her permission to the front office with no warning to talk for morning announcements how's she just like the rest of the white kids despite being Native. They gave her a script. Then afterwords they had the audacity to ask for a photo of her in her childhood doing 'native things'. Mom laughed and said she should've told her she didn't have any photos because she was "just like them".

I realized school was never for me, because I was always learn better the Indian way.

Whenever I see a Native person in the wild, and they notice me, there is already a bond there. If I asked them for anything, to talk, for a ride, they would give it to me. If they did so, so would I. My native friends i met in college I adored like they were my cousins.

I've learned that despite me being raised white, I was actually raised Native. My parents give and give and give. They give to the community, their lives are dedicated to help people. That's the Native way. We bleed compassion, and if someone in my community needs my last 5 bucks, they'll get it because I know someone else in my community will help me to not starve, and when they are starving I'll help them too.

Specifically, my Sick List.

My spouse and I have a constant need for certain supplies to assist us in living, and there’s a great need for several items that we don’t have.

Even the smallest item on the list helps!

Thank you.

CURRENT BIGGEST NEEDS:

-ginger chews

-ACT gum/lozenges

-gatorade and protein shakes

-pill organizers