uncannyforest.com blog

Unfortunately, ideas which look "bipartisan" tend to fall into one three camps:

This is actually a really hard problem, which is the real reason it hasn't been solved yet.

While most voters on both sides would agree on a solution, there are powerful interests fighting it. There's probably bipartisan support in congress against fixing it.

Problems with bipartisan solutions that just need the attention of people in power.

Reading through the examples in the article, 80% were in the first two categories. Only the last category is really useful as a potential to get anything done as easily as the article made it sound.

On the left and the right, sure. But it has far from unanimous support.

A large portion of the voting constituency are homeowners who want to keep the illusion that owning a home is some kind of exceedingly wise financial investment that never goes down.

Maybe there's a complicated way we could have it both ways, but at the macro level, at the level of the easiest levers for government to push, housing is either expensive or cheap—either we make homeowners happy or the large percent of Americans who struggle to afford housing. Between the two, government has been prioritizing homeowners for decades now, and I see no reason that'll change for a long time.

Got a UI in place and some sound effects in! Be aware, the cows are a bit loud compared to everything else. Don't turn up the volume TOO loud.

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

If you relate to that "gen z girlie," please reframe it differently to maximize your hiring chances:

So by now most of you have probably heard that my account was suddenly terminated (aka banned) on Saturday afternoon. I’m back now, and since I had to do some digging into this on my own, I figured I’d make a post for others to reference. 

How to tell if you’ve been wrongfully terminated

You will find yourself suddenly locked out of your account. For me, I had just made a post when I got kicked to the login screen. My password wouldn’t work, so I tried to reset it, at which point I got this screen:

Now, if Tumblr legitimately terminated your account - meaning, you broke a rule and they banned you for it - they should send you an email telling you why. So, immediately check your email. If you don’t get anything, it was probably a glitch. These happen shockingly often, so there’s a whole process to it. 

How to get your account back

First, submit a support ticket. Tumblr’s support email does NOT work, you MUST go through their site. Select ‘Terminated account’. Write a POLITE message explaining the situation. Describe what you were doing when you suddenly got kicked off, and state that to the best of your knowledge, you haven’t broken any rules, or that if you did, you would be willing to delete the offending posts. Include your url and email.

Check your email. You should immediately get an automatic message saying they’re looking into the problem. If you don’t that means that Tumblr marked your email as spam (because they banned you). If you need to, resend the ticket using a different email address at the bottom. Explain that your account email doesn’t seem to be going through and that’s why you’re using a different one. 

Wait. Tumblr Support’s hours of operation are 9-5 EST, Monday through Friday. If, like me, you submitted your ticket on a weekend, you may be in for a wait. If you don’t get a response within 24 hours, DO NOT SEND ANOTHER TICKET, but instead reply to the email they sent you. I’ve seen it advised that you should send another ticket only if the problem isn’t fixed within the week. 

Check you url often. Tumblr will likely never respond to your email letting you know what happened or that you’ve been reinstated. Check your url every so often, and if it finally loads as your blog (instead of the ‘There’s nothing here’ screen) you are free to log back in. 

Okay, so, in the years since writing this guide, I’ve both seen some discussion as well as made my own observations that lead me to believe this is not just a glitch with Tumblr’s code.

More likely, if you’re reading this because you got termed, your blog was caught up in a bot dragnet.

Tumblr, like all social media, has bots. And Tumblr also does regular bot purges. It’s strikingly clear to me when these purges happen, because this post will gain a ton of notes in the span of a day. Occasionally, but not always, this will happen shortly after I notice an influx of bot followers.

That means that, for most people experiencing this problem, you are doing something that triggers Tumblr’s automated bot removal process. I cannot say what it is. Social media tends to keep their bot removal criteria vague, so that people scripting bots can’t evade capture.

Which sucks for the innocent human bloggers caught up in the purges, but it also means that if you can get someone to double check your blog, you should be reinstated pretty swiftly.