garlic flowers & wild roses

Choke. Just think about it, seriously. Think about what choking is and imagine speaking while it’s happening. That would fuckin’ hurt, man.

Hiss. Look, it’s just not possible, okay? No matter how “evil” you want your character to seem.

Snarl. Animals snarls. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast snarls. The Hulk snarls. You know who doesn’t snarl? PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING.

Shriek. Come on, 99% of the time, “shriek” is not the word you want.Let’s face it: if you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, your reader gets the picture. Don’t bring to mind banshees and screaming toddlers.

Hiss is a low, threatening whisper. Raw, guttural, vicious. It is NOT a literal hiss like an animal, it is a tone of voice that serves the same function. Someone will hiss that they’re going to cut your throat- a message from one person to the other.

Snarl is the same kind of thing. Not literal, it’s a tone of voice that serves the same function. It’s raw and gutteral like a hiss, but more savage than vicious. It’s loud, it’s showy, it’s intimidating. It’s very alpha male, big man, look at how fucking dangerous I am. I’ll take ALL of you on. Even if they’re snarling at one person in particular, nobody better back them up or they’re gonna get fucked up too.

Shriek. Come on, seriously? We’ve all heard people shriek either in fear or outrage. High pitched, loud, out of control, feminine. Men can shriek, but it’s funny and emasculating. Think angry italian women throwing pots and pans or ladies on tables who just saw a mouse.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

Tumblr had a porn ban but we've found our ways around it. I was one of the ones who was so offended by the censorship that I left.

But Tumblr shares(d) certain strengths with other social media pages, which brings it a unique design.

Meta had The Feed, which is what brought it success in the first place. You could follow certain people you knew and you'd see their posts in chronological order, which defined it. The sense of community and familiarity, the chance to stay up to date with people you actually know. But the enshittification of Meta has decayed that into being force fed ads that are disgustingly irrelevant and suggested posts that clog up what used to be your feed. Meta doesn't care about this ruining the user experience because the user is not their customer.

Tumblr still has a reasonable feed that you can view in reverse chronological order.

Twitter's strength was that it gave you a feed with access to people you wouldn't otherwise have access to, even without necessarily following them. Posts would be brought to you by people you did follow. Their enshittification ensured you'd see more and more content that isn't relevant to you - and ads. Plus it became the haven for the dregs of humanity when 4chan had its containment breach.

On Tumblr, people you follow will bring you fresh content, but the ads aren't trying to mimic that and can still work with an ad blocker.

TikTok gives you the pinnacle of algorithmic feed, but it's almost impossible to actually have a sense of community. On TikTok, users are the product, and if you don't sell well you will be punished. The enshittification of TikTok incentivizes it's userbase into being extreme to gain the most attention, but the censorship infantalizes us at the same time, so the easiest way to be extreme is to simply lie about what your life is like. It's turned active tiktokers into people who have to publicly act like sociopaths, which is an unpleasant way to live for someone who is not a sociopath.

On Tumblr, your follower count does not define your experience. In fact, being 'Tumblr famous' is nearly unanimously joked about as a bad thing. You get to keep your dignity and don't have to worry about whoring your image out for relevance. Bonus: you can still say fuck and suicide.

Reddit's strength has always been it's anonymity, but there's literally no good way to find individuals you like in your community and foster relationships with them. Even if you follow someone's profile, you're not getting anything out of it. You have to do the work to keep up with them. Plus, it's becoming more and more censored. It's been a slow death, but the canary signaling Reddit's impending death was banning subs that allowed you to examine and challenge your experience. The content used to be authentic and available. Their enshittification makes it feel more like a warehouse of mediocrity now.

Tumblr allows you to stay reasonably anonymous but still connect to people on your wavelength, to learn and discourse and express your opinion without backlash from the platform.