inside you, young transmasculine person, is a voice that will tell you not to like certain things because they're For Girls. that is the voice of the devil, and you must never listen to it.

the world is so beautiful you can eat rice here

RB for the largest sample size this site has ever seen

hi everyone. does anybody else miss something they can never return to. anyone else being swallowed whole by grief. anyone else clinging to love as a life preserver

tumblr users love to say "we don't censor things here like on Twitter" and then type things like "r3ylo" and "jk r*wling"

if you say "and then this fucking r3ylo-" that implies that "reylo" was the bad word in that sentence

tiktokers do it because they have to, we do it because it's mean ☺️

Okay I know this was mostly a joke but I just feel the need to point out - this didn't start out as being mean, it started - and largely continues - as the opposite.

For a long time, tumblr had tags and no other search function. You wanted to find a post that wasn't tagged, you had to go to Google and type in your query and add "site:tumblr.com" and hope for the best.

As it is now, that method is STILL better than our native search function most of the time, but the quality of tumblr's native search function isn't really what's important here, what's relevant is how they implemented it.

See, the search bar in the upper left corner of the site - you used to type in something there, and it would take you to posts tagged with whatever you searched. Then, one day, they quietly rolled out an update that instead brought you to a search page that pulled up nearly every post that even mentioned your search term.

This...did not mesh well with the site culture.

Because, see, we had an etiquette guideline - do not post your negativity in the public tags. Why? Because people go into the public tags to find content about things they LIKE. Posting hate in a public tag was basically seen as being a raging dramamongering pissbaby troll LOOKING to start a fight over petty nonsense.

So imagine, suddenly, you log in one day, and someone's sending you anons angry about you allegedly posting hate in the tags, when you have NEVER done so. You use what you THINK is the tag search function to prove it, and - what the hell? Your UNTAGGED post about how annoyed you are with your notp...is appearing there???

So people started censoring things like that. Usually not because we all think the thing we're complaining about is profane (though sometimes it does get a giggle to think of it as such), but to keep it from showing up when people are searching for what they love and to prevent pointless drama. To avoid looking like some asshole troll going onto a fan forum specifically for The Blorbo Show and making a thread entitled "THE BLORBO SHOW SUXXX AND YOU ALL SUCK FOR LIKING IT!!"

And now it's just part of our site culture, for both peacekeeping reasons and petty glee.

The more you know.

On tiktok, you censor for the algorithm. On Tumblr, you censor for the users.

libby app guide

aka how to support libraries and get books and audiobooks for free without pirating them.

disclaimer: this is so easy. it is also really fun.

one: download the libby app. you'll open it and it'll ask you to add a library.

two: get a library card. don't have one? good news, it's really easy and i am saying this as the laziest person on earth. it varies what you need to have to get a card library to library but almost all libraries will let you get one online. i have a card for my home town and for the town i moved to. sometimes you only need an email address, sometimes you need an area code. to get mine it took me about 5 minutes of lying on the couch aimlessly tapping on my phone. follow your heart. you can get cards for places you don't currently live. i will leave the ethics of that up to you but it's probably better than pirating and either way you're creating traffic for libraries which is what they need to exist.

three: add your card. you can add multiple cards for multiple libraries. you need the number. i have never had libby fail to recognize a valid account.

four: search for your book! some will be ready to borrow right away. others have an estimated delivery time. libby will always pick the one that's the fastest from the options available at all the libraries you have cards at. you can borrow audiobooks and ebooks. libby will send you a notification when you're book is ready to borrow. in my experience it's a lot faster than the estimate. if you aren't ready to read it, you can ask to be skipped over in line so you keep your place at the front but let someone else read it first.

five: read it!!! kindle is the most common way to do this. you can go to your loan and click read with kindle. it'll download it to all your devices where you have kindle. as long as you have the loan, it'll act like your book. when the loan ends, if the device is connected to the internet, it'll automatically be returned. it will save all your notes and highlights. (if you disconnect your device from the internet, it won't return the book. weewoo.)

anyway in case anyone else has been wondering about it, i really love it. is a nice surprise to see what i'm going to get and it's cut my reading costs down big time! it's also neat because i get to synch my books between devices unlike downloading books through cough cough other means. good luck!

Reblogging again to say that you do not need Kindle, the app or the device, to read ebooks on Libby!! You can read any book you borrow WITHIN the Libby app, and you can change the font and dark/light mode for accessibility too.

please be aware the libby app does NOT let you read or listen offline so the app itself is unusable for me for actual reading unfortunately! you guys who have access to the internet steadily can use it but be aware. you can't use it on a plane, for example, but if you download to kindle you can.

You should actually be able to use libby app offline (for those allergic to kindle like I am lmao). You just have to change your download permissions in settings. The web browser version of libby is online only though.

Go to Settings > Change Download Rules > toggle to “Everything” (and recommended to “Download only on Wi-fi” if you are worried about your data)

Then Settings > Read Books With… > Libby, so that it downloads to the correct app. You should be able to change your preferences on the main page by clicking the cloud icon to see where you’ve downloaded it too.

Libby also has a feature called Notify Me--if you search for a book and Libby can find it in their database but it's not available to borrow from your library, hit Notify Me. Not only will you be notified if the book becomes available, but your library will be notified that there is A Reader who is looking for this book, so that they can buy it if that's possible for them--without you having to make a direct request!

You can also change your preferences so you only see results in the medium you want so you only see audiobooks if that is what you use Libby for (like me) or to exclude audio if you only want eBooks

audiobooks are SO expensive, and i listen to them almost every night. libby has saved me thousands of dollars by now, no joke. support your local library. if you’re not american, you can still try to apply for a library card at the brooklyn library!

The best filter on Libby is actually the “available now” one. So if you have a longer wait than expected, but you’re somewhere that has internet, you can get a book to read (or listen to) RIGHT THEN. That has saved me a few times.

today reddit bumped off third party apps, Elon decided you can only read 600 twitter posts a day(!?), and YouTube is banning adblockers

tumblr, held together by hope and spit, presumed dead by many, really is one of the last decent media sites left standing

We have GOT to stop being assholes to people with receding and balding hairlines. There's not a single person that it can't affect. It affects trans men, particularly on hormones, it affects trans women, particularly those not on hormones, it affects people with endocrine issues, something that's becoming more prevalent and common, and it can affect people without a particular cause, including cis women. It's a normal part of being human and we NEED to stop dehumanizing and humiliating ppl for it

My bf started losing his hair in his early 20s and the effect it's had on him is devastating.

He's an actor and he was dropped by his agent after he stopped hiding his hair loss. The roles he was cast in narrowed and shifted from more heroic characters to villains, and eventually he became so miserable about it that he stopped going to auditions altogether.

He used to enjoy dyeing his hair bright colours, and he lost that means of self expression. It alienated him from his own appearance, which knocked him back in coming out and exploring his queerness. The way he talks about it often feels dysmorphic. He says shaving makes him feel like he's "rotting" - like he's "scraping the mold off [his] head".

I've seen drunk people and teenagers yell at him in the street and mock his baldness. I've seen people come up to him and slap his head or touch it without asking for permission. I've witnessed this behaviour from other trans people and women who I know would absolutely kick off if he took such a degrading or entitled attitude towards a part of their body, but seem to think it's OK to do it to him.

Since going bald people perceive him as more masculine. He feels people are more suspicious of him. Women are less likely to approach him. Folks are quicker to put him in a box or misread his behaviour as aggressive or threatening, when the reality is that he's neurodivergent and can't conform to rigid social norms.

Baldness is a heavily gendered characteristic. If someone is conventionally masculine enough and/or is protected by other intersecting powers and privileges (eg wealth) then baldness can reinforce their maleness and the harm to their social standing is minimised. But if their performance of maleness is complicated by something like queerness or disability, it creates a dissonance. They have what is perceived as a hypermasculine trait standing in sharp contrast with their refusal/failure to perform normative, idealised masculinity.

And that's how baldness is typically read - as failure. Especially when it exists outside of wealthy, successful, heterosexual masculinity but tbh even there too - just look at all the jokes about Jeff Bezos' baldness or Elon Musk getting hair plugs. It's similar to insulting Trump over his weight. Like yeah fuck those guys but all you're really doing is revealing to the fat and bald people in your life that you think their bodies are deserving of mockery.

And God help you if you're a bald woman. All women with receding hairlines are at a huge risk from transmisogyny.

Sorry for the essay. Baldness is absolutely a body neutrality issue. It's an ageism issue, and a trans issue, and I WISH there was a broader recognition of this.

I cant fix him bc im insane too

i am the very model of a modern gay millennial
i have a tumblr blog and a prescription for estradiol
i've problems economic, psychological, and medical
and sympathies political which border on heretical

you need to get it out of your mind that psychosomatic illness is just “making up symptoms” when it’s actually much more like your body is being actively poisoned by chemicals released from your brain

if you’re so stressed that you’re puking your guts up every morning, are unable to eat or keep anything down, you can’t look at light without feeling infinitely worse and feel exhausted and in pain all the time (or whatever your particular stress induced symptom set is) you’re not just feeling like that because you’ve willed it into being. your body is begging for relief from the constant barrage of stress hormones and it requires the fundamental source of stress to go away, not just distracting yourself from the symptoms

just because the root is psychological doesn’t mean the result isn’t an entirely physical process.

The fact that there's an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.

So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.

So like... It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.

But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.

But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.

Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.

I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it's one of my most treasured books.

on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads "OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS" a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.

The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.

I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it's wonderful, it is my heart and soul.

at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel "wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?"

no thoughts. just ballister boldheart's big dumb beautiful eyes

This is your reminder that a lot of public libraries actually have little summer reading programs for kids AND adults!

We even have PRIZES for when you finish filling up your sheet with stickers! 

Support your local library. There may even be a sticker for you at the end 🌟