thischristianguy

Fastball Special?

-Cut, establishing shot of Jerry’s apartment, bass riff.-

GEORGE: He/him, Jerry!

JERRY: No, they just him’d you?

GEORGE: HE. HIM! I gave them a BUFFET, and they went for plain white bread. Genders as far as the eye could see! Something with an X in it!

JERRY: No pronouns?

GEORGE: No pronouns.

JERRY: No-nouns?

GEORGE: No-nouns.

JERRY: Alright, well, if that’s what you want…

GEORGE: Oh, it is! I’m living the pronoun-free life, starting now. The buffet is CLOSED, Jerry. From here on out I am George and only George!

-George storms out of the apartment and into the hallway. Enter Elaine, baffled and unaware of the conversation that just took place.-

ELAINE: What’s his problem?

or, things I wish I’d known when I joined:

I know there are a lot of other how-to posts out there, but with new folks joining all the time (hello, new friends!), here is my short list of “how to tumblr” – things that took me a while to learn and that I wish I’d known when I started two and a half years ago.  Here we go…

1. Download x-kit.  X-kit is a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox that will save your life. It makes this ridiculous website useable and allows you to do all sorts of things.  A few of the big ones are:

Wrap tags for easier reading.  People often ramble in their tags, either about fandom or about personal things, and having all tags appear in a block of text with a post is much easier than trying to scroll across.

Add tracked tags to your sidebar so you can see as soon as a new post with that tag is posted. This is helpful for communicating with people and for keeping up with fandom; for example, I have fleurdeneuf and nine x rose tracked so I know when someone has tagged me in a post or if a new Nine x Rose fic has appeared.

Blacklist tags for things you don’t want to see on your dash.  If you follow people who have different interests than you, you can block posts about things that you don’t care about to keep your dash cleaner and more manageable.  Blacklisting a tag is also useful if a certain topic might trigger you.

Save sent posts to an outbox!  (This only works on the computer you’re using, so if you send messages at the library or at work, you won’t see them in your outbox on your personal computer, and vice versa.)

2. Open your ask box.  Tumblr doesn’t do this automatically, so if you want people to be able to send you messages (“asks”), you need to go into your settings and open your ask box.  You can also choose whether you want people to be able to send you messages anonymously. I’ve always had anon turned off, but it can be useful if you have shy followers or if people want to message you when they aren’t logged in.

3. Tag your posts.  Tag your posts.  Tag your posts.  Tagging is good etiquette for a few reasons:

If you create original posts (fic, art, gifs, even just publishing an ask), tumblr tracks the first five tags.  This is how people (whether they follow you or not) will find your posts.  With that in mind, the first five tags should include important info, like ship (ficandchips), pairing (nine x rose, ten x rose, etc.), and any groups or people you might want to notify of the post (the person you’re answering in an ask or tagging in a meme, the group you want to see your new fic, etc.).  Tags six through twenty will appear in the new catch-all search feature, but not in the tag tracking system that most people use.  So in general, tags six and above are good for rambling, your own blog’s organization, and your followers’ dashes.

Tagging is also important when reblogging posts.  Reblogged posts’ tags don’t track in the search engine, but they’re still useful because they allow you to keep your blog organized for your own purposes, and they also help the people you follow (the same rules as for original posts’ tags six and above).  Your followers can find your posts on a topic (for a doozy of an example, see my Christopher Eccleston tag), and also block posts that they don’t care about or that would bother them (see the note on x-kit Blacklist above).

Tag your hate.  It’s generally accepted practice on tumblr for a specific character or ship tag to be for posts that are positive.  For example, ninth doctor is the Ninth Doctor tag, and that’s where you post Nine things, and where you go if you want to find Nine things.  Nothing negative about Nine should be in that tag.  On the other hand, if you don’t like a character or a ship (or a showrunner…), tag it with “anti” first (for example, anti moffat).  

4. Start a queue.  This isn’t mandatory, of course, but if you post a lot, it’s nice to spread your posts out over the course of a day rather than spamming your followers with a bunch of posts all at once.  My queue is typically set to 15 posts per day, but you can set yours anywhere from 1 to 50.  This is also why people use special queue tags, to distinguish between posts queued in advance from those posted in real time.

5. Keep your commentary in the tags.  If you really like someone’s post, your opinions usually belong in your tags.  You can ramble and flail as much as you want there.  If you add a comment to someone’s post, that comment is going to appear on the post of anyone who reblogs it from you, and anyone who reblogs it from them, and so on, which clutters a post and the OP’s notes.  If your comment isn’t vital to the post, it belongs in the tags.  There are exceptions to this rule, of course; if you’re having a conversation with someone, for example, or if you want to @ mention a friend to make sure they see a post. But by and large, feedback such as “This is awesome!” or “LOL” does not need to be attached to a post forever and should be kept to the tags.

6. Don’t repost.  Reposting is when you copy someone’s original post and paste it into a new post of your own.  It is stealing from the OP and it is generally a ploy to get lots of notes. Don’t do it.

7. If you reblog an ask meme from someone, it’s polite to participate in their meme.  This isn’t an official rule, but it is a personal preference and a friendly rule of thumb.

8. Tumblr is buggy.  Seriously.  TUMBLR IS BUGGY.  There will be times when you @ mention someone in a post, and it won’t work. There will be times when someone tags you and it won’t show up in your tracked tag.  There will be times when you send someone an ask and will never get a response because tumblr ate the ask instead of sending it to them.  These things happen to everyone.  Roll with it and try again.

Link to British Library Flickr

Link to Album View (shown above)

Selected Links by Subject:

From Open Culture:

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.

Let’s bypass the customary, surface-level industry platitudes and confront an absolute, data-backed truth known to every serious long-box excavator and Bronze Age purist: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko may have given Peter Parker his radioactive birthright, but it was a nineteen-year-old kid from Brooklyn named Gerry Conway who actually dragged Spider-Man kicking, screaming, and bleeding into the modern world.

With the recent passing of Gerry Conway, the comic book community lost more than just a legendary writer; we lost the singular creative engine that proved superhero narratives could possess permanent emotional consequences. If you track the DNA of every major multi-million-dollar Spider-Man film, television adaptation, or video game narrative produced over the last twenty years, you won't just find Stan’s playful, silver-tongued dialogue or Ditko’s claustrophobic, existential angst. You will find the raw, uncompromising, street-level infrastructure built brick-by-brick by Conway during his historic 1972–1975 run on The Amazing Spider-Man.

COLLECTOR'S ESSENTIAL EDITION

Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: The Death of Gwen Stacy

Own the history-making Bronze Age run written by teenage Gerry Conway. This volume collects ASM #105-123, featuring the permanent death of Gwen Stacy, the brutal fall of Norman Osborn, and the baseline architecture of modern comic book storytelling.

👉 Click here to secure your copy on Amazon

To call Conway the single biggest writer since Stan Lee to contribute to the Spider-Man mythos isn’t hyperbolic fandom—it’s an immutable canon fact. When Conway inherited the flagship title from Stan Lee with The Amazing Spider-Man #111 in 1972, he wasn't just a fresh voice; he was a teenager tasked with steering the industry's most lucrative property. What he did next didn't just alter the trajectory of the wall-crawler; it permanently shattered the silver-age illusion of safety.

The Midnight Snap That Changed Everything

Any serious evaluation of Conway’s architectural brilliance must begin on the Brooklyn Bridge—or, to be painfully pedantic for the sake of strict panel accuracy, the Willis Avenue Bridge as depicted by Gil Kane, despite the text declaring it the former. In June of 1973, The Amazing Spider-Man #121 landed on spinner racks across the globe, and with it, the medium's innocence died.

Before Conway took the typewriter, the unwritten law of the superhero genre was absolute: the hero wins, the villain is foiled, and the romantic interest remains safely secured in the status quo until the next month's issue. By making the executive, agonizing choice to plunge Gwen Stacy off that bridge and have Peter’s own web-line deliver the fatal whiplash—indicated by that infamous, sickening “SNAP” sound effect next to her neck—Conway did something unprecedented. He injected genuine mortality into the universe.

For collectors who possess crisp, well-preserved copies of #121 and #122 in their mylar sleeves, reading those books back-to-back isn't just an exercise in nostalgia; it’s a masterclass in structural pacing. Look at how Conway handles the immediate aftermath in The Amazing Spider-Man #122. Peter Parker isn't trading lighthearted quips with the Green Goblin. He is consumed by an unadulterated, vengeful fury that pushes him to the absolute precipice of murder. When Norman Osborn is ultimately impaled by his own remote-controlled glider, Conway isn't just wrapping up a plotline; he is concluding the Silver Age of comics and inaugurating the grit, realism, and moral complexity of the Bronze Age.

Without Conway’s courage to break the main protagonist’s heart permanently, we do not get the emotional depth of the Ultimate Spider-Man runs, we do not get the dramatic weight of the modern cinematic universes, and we certainly do not get a Peter Parker who feels like a real human being wrestling with real, unfixable grief.

The Birth of the Ultimate Counterweight: The Punisher

As if redefining the emotional stakes of the Marvel Universe wasn't enough, Conway chose the very next year to introduce a character who would fundamentally challenge the moral philosophy of the entire superhero genre. In The Amazing Spider-Man #129 (February 1974), readers were introduced to Frank Castle, better known as The Punisher.

Co-created alongside the visual geniuses John Romita Sr. and Ross Andru, Frank Castle was originally conceived by Conway as a secondary antagonist—a misguided assassin with a rigid, albeit deeply warped, moral code, manipulated by the Jackal into hunting Spider-Man. But look closely at the narrative economy Conway uses in that single debut issue. The Punisher wasn't a mustache-twirling villain; he was a highly trained, deeply traumatized military veteran fighting an entirely different kind of war.

By dropping a lethal, uncompromising vigilante directly into Spider-Man’s brightly colored world, Conway established a brilliant narrative counterweight. Peter Parker represents the absolute pinnacle of individual responsibility, self-restraint, and the sanctity of life. Frank Castle represents the cold, systematic failure of the institutional justice system—a man who looked at the revolving door of supervillain prisons and decided that a body count was the only logical solution.

The Punisher exploded out of the pages of Spider-Man to become one of the most culturally dominant icons in comic book history, anchoring multiple solo series, prestige graphic novels, and live-action adaptations. Yet, his structural purpose within the Spider-verse remains Conway’s true stroke of genius: Castle exists to test Peter's resolve, proving that even when confronted with an unforgiving world, Spider-Man must never cross the line into executioner.

COLLECTOR'S ESSENTIAL EDITION

Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: The Death of Gwen Stacy

Own the history-making Bronze Age run written by teenage Gerry Conway. This volume collects ASM #105-123, featuring the permanent death of Gwen Stacy, the brutal fall of Norman Osborn, and the baseline architecture of modern comic book storytelling.

👉 Click here to secure your copy on Amazon

The Genesis of the Clone Saga and the Expanding Lore

To truly appreciate the breadth of Conway’s run, one must look at how he continually sowed seeds that future creators would harvest for decades. In The Amazing Spider-Man #149, Conway introduced the original Clone Saga. While the 1990s iteration of this storyline would notoriously spin out of control due to editorial excess, Conway’s original mid-70s arc was a concise, deeply psychological exploration of Peter Parker's identity crisis.

By introducing Miles Warren (The Jackal) and tasking him with cloning both Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker, Conway wasn't merely looking for a sci-fi gimmick. He was forcing Peter to literally confront the ghosts of his past and wrestle with his own uniqueness. This single storyline laid the foundational lore that birthed Ben Reilly, Kaine, and the entire high-concept sci-fi underpinnings of modern Spider-verse events.

Furthermore, Conway’s world-building expanded the Spider-Man rogues' gallery with characters that brought a distinct, grounded menace. When he returned to the character in the late 1980s across The Spectacular Spider-Man and Web of Spider-Man, he introduced Lonnie Lincoln, the cold, ruthless albino mob enforcer known as Tombstone. Unlike the sci-fi eccentricities of Doc Ock or Mysterio, Tombstone brought an old-school, terrifying street-level gangster energy back to New York City, demonstrating that Conway understood the criminal underworld just as deeply as he understood the cosmos.

The Case for Final, Unconditional Recognition

For too long, casual observers of comic book history have attributed the totality of Spider-Man's greatness to the foundational Lee/Ditko era, viewing subsequent writers as mere caretakers of a pre-established house. But a house is only as good as its structural integrity when the storm hits. Gerry Conway was the architect who took a brilliant, youthful concept and ensured it could mature, evolve, and survive across generations.

He wrote human beings, not archetypes. He understood that Peter Parker’s perpetual struggle to pay his rent on time, his complicated romantic transitions from the tragic memory of Gwen to the grounded reality of Mary Jane Watson, and his internal crises of faith were what made him the most relatable character in fiction. Conway gave Spider-Man his scars—and it is those very scars that make the character beautiful.

If your shelves are currently lacking the definitive collections of this era, you are missing the literal blueprint of modern Marvel. Do not let these stories sit locked away exclusively in historical retrospectives or high-end CGC slabs. Seek out the trade paperbacks, open the pages, and immerse yourself in the work of a nineteen-year-old kid who looked at Stan Lee’s greatest creation and had the absolute audacity, genius, and vision to make it immortal.

COLLECTOR'S ESSENTIAL EDITION

Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: The Death of Gwen Stacy

Own the history-making Bronze Age run written by teenage Gerry Conway. This volume collects ASM #105-123, featuring the permanent death of Gwen Stacy, the brutal fall of Norman Osborn, and the baseline architecture of modern comic book storytelling.

But Elmo, after cheerfully surrendering his old toys, sees that the children who swapped toys with him are playing with his toys “wrong”! They’re imagining entirely different make believe scenarios! They’re pretending the football is a dinosaur egg instead of a rocket ship! Aaahhhhh!!!! And this is so distressing to poor Elmo that he does the unthinkable: He does swapsies-backsies and takes all his toys back!

This being Sesame Street, he learns that you can’t control how other people play pretend, but you can join in if you want to! And if you don’t want to, that’s ok, you can just play pretend your own way by yourself or with someone else who wants to play that way too. You can still be friends with people who play pretend differently than you (and aren’t being mean/harmful/etc, do not bad-faith-read this 🤨).

But then one night they wake up in the middle of the night because something is in their closet. And the door starts to creak open so Stitch tackles whoever (whatever) is in there. They fall back into the closet, the door slams shut… and when Lilo runs over and opens it there’s nothing but an empty closet.

Then Boo tells Lilo all about this weird thing that happened to her when she was a kid, and how no one ever believed her but she knows it was real. 

This is what Disney should be doing

Expanding their universes

Ok now that Doctor Who is on hiatus (welcome wilderness 2) I'm just going to pretend my Doctor Who girlies are canon