@kitkat-of-doom / kitkat-of-doom.tumblr.com

23 | mostly anime and random shit | please talk to me about your ocs through my inbox I love hearing about them | art tag: kit draws

That a major social media platform that's been around for two decades going down without proper archiving would represent a greater loss of human culture than any library that's ever burned is undeniably true, but it's also a very funny observation to make about Tumblr in particular.

tumblr has been brute-force archived by archive.org so many times, i really cannot believe there aren't a thousand complete copies of the whole site scattered around already.

library of alexandia can't say the same. imagine if anybody had tried to mob-rush the doors of that library to brute-force-copy its contents before it burned to the ground.

you will get up & you will make that to do list & you will be realistic about your limits & you will take it easy but steady & you will eat good food & you will get things done & you will move your body & you will do things that make you happy & you will limit your screen time & you will be the thing that saves you

Random bee behavior fact for those who wish to read, just because I feel like it and because it’s late and I’m stalling on sleeping:

Bumblebees may seem like passive, cuddly, and docile creatures, but they won’t hesitate to defend themselves if they feel as if their warnings aren’t being read or taken seriously.

I.e. the photo and diagram below, when a bee feels threatened they will raise one or more of their legs into the air, signaling to whatever or whomever may be bothering them as a message essentiality saying: “hey, back off, too close!”

species pictured: bombus pascuorum, bombus impatiens

If their defensive posture goes unnoticed or ignored, they may be pushed into defending themselves by stinging (which is also a stressful experience for not only one such as yourself, but also for the bee.) If you ever find yourself getting close to a bumblebee while taking pictures, walking close to them, or just admiring them, remember this posture! If a bee does this, it is simply asking you to take a step back as it feels it is being threatened.

Now you can understand and use this knowledge to your advantage if you ever come across one in the future. (Of course, because it’s very hard not to anthropomorphize animals, I do have to admit that they do look pretty cute when doing it. Just remember to respect them though!)

Whoever wrote that Vanguard message did so with shaking hands, between sobs & swigs of bourbon straight from the bottle.

They're right, though. Now is exactly the wrong time to make dramatic investment moves. Everybody's shit is doing the same thing; unless you need your retirement money in the next twelve months or whatever, you're better off leaving it alone and waiting for the eventual correction. Like, this is not a comforting lie, this is good advice!

Adultier adult here, having had to talk to my retirement management people earlier this week. (I hate it. It's useless. But I told them to divest me from anything that holds TSLA in the portfolio/fund because Elon is an asshole and the company's financials are shit.)

This week has caused about three percent (3%) of my 401(k) to vanish.

And that's okay.

I can't touch that money without a tax penalty (or emergency) until the 2030's. It's not paying for cat food or keeping my electricity on. This is a privilege not everyone enjoys (yet).

If you're in a position to have any kind of investments, don't do anything rash and/or bananas with important chunks of money. (My financial guy gave me this advice, too. I specifically asked about cashing out the whole fucking thing.)

TUMBLR'S AGING USERBASE

to be perfectly honest. i don't care if it is cheesy or cliched or idealistic. i like stories where the core of it is about kindness, the warmth we can offer others and the gentleness we receive in return. maybe the moral of the story IS love triumphs. it better fucking be

It's not just to have a "do over" that doesn't involve the original cast, it's to cut them out of the royalties. Literally the entire point is to make sure all the money made by Harry Potter goes to transphobes or people willing to work with transphobes.

If you watch it, you are supporting bigotry, hate, and oppression. That's just objective reality. All for a story that you probably have already seen in movie and book form.

There's people in the notes saying they're going to watch it anyway, and you know, I understand how you can start feeling so burned out and numb from the world that it may feel too hard to avoid things that will give you a little immediate relief in some way in order to avoid the long-term impact of funding these things.

But. If you can't bring yourself to avoid watching it, you better at least fucking pirate it.

FYI, Rowling posted this today. She is actively queerphobic, do not support this project in anyway.

I know that this was a foundational thing for so many people. I was one of them. Without Harry Potter, I probably wouldn't be the person I am today.

If you're thinking about watching this anyway because you feel all that nostalgia: It's time to grow up. It's time to move on.

Don't even hate watch it. Make it fail.

It is the easiest thing ever to simply not do anything.

Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.

I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.

And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷

for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.

In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).

To use it:

  1. download and install python 2.7
  2. download tumblr-utils
  3. create an application on tumblr to get an api key
  4. extract the tumblr-utils zip and open the tumblr_backup.py file in notepad
  5. search for "API" and paste in your OAuth consumer key
  6. then go back to the folder where you extracted tumblr-utils and choose open folder in terminal / command prompt, or type cmd.exe in the address bar while inside the folder

now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type "py -2 .\tumblr_backup.py [your options] [your blog name]" and hit enter. Example:

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down

i have already personally backed up all of my tumblr posts but this is a good reminder for everyone else

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