🌳🌲🌳🌳🌲🌳🌳🌳🌲

Don't think I've seen them all together in one big video like this before

Tumblr Blaze is very good because tumblr correctly deduced that if they ran a real advertising service using targeted demographics we’d have burnt this site to the ground, but ALSO correctly deduced that we would be overjoyed to collectively pay large amounts of money to spread shitposts onto completely random dashes in a delighted flurry of slightly malicious mischief. You really do gotta hand it to em on this one, A+ problem solving.

Okay so I did some research, very basic research, on the user base of tumblr and how many of us there are.

There are at least 300 million unique visitors worldwide on this site. Over 500 million blogs.

Listen. Tumblr is $30 million in debt. This is Super easy for us to solve.

If each user gifts one blog crabs, which costs slightly over $3, that would be roughly $600 million at least. Far more than enough to get Tumblr out of the red zone.

If we want tumblr to stay afloat and not change something as integral about their operating system, we need to show them they can be profitable without reducing themselves to common social media sites. What we have here is special. It is different. We are the social media site people run to when theirs collapses and for good reason.

If we want this to work, we have to make it work. We can even make it into a game. Just how long can we outlast the other social media sites?

Guys.... I just had a GREAT idea.

‘velvet-drive’

Tumblr Hack Day, December 2021 Edition

It was Hack Day once again at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we grind everything to a halt and spend 24 hours working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. Here are some of the projects that got made for Hack Day! Some of these things you may end up seeing on the site…

Twitch Embeds

Wesley hacked together the ability to post Twitch streams to Tumblr! These can be live streams or clips.

Tumblr to Discord

@cyle put together a very simple webhook integration between Tumblr and Discord so you can send events about your blog to a Discord server:

Custom Tumblr logos on mobile

@mlu, @dakotairene, and friends hacked together the ability for us to put custom Tumblr logos in the mobile apps’ dashboard tab bar, like we do on the web!

Tumblr Time Machine

Lucila constructed an elaborate Tumblr Time Machine, so you can filter search results to a specific year:

Stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!

Our Parker Solar Probe Just Touched the Sun!

For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. Our Parker Solar Probe flew right through the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona. (That’s the part of the Sun that we can see during a total solar eclipse.)

This marks one great step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science! Landing on the Moon helped scientists better understand how it was formed. Now, touching the Sun will help scientists understand our star and how it influences worlds across the solar system.

Unlike Earth, the Sun doesn’t have a solid surface (it’s a giant ball of seething, boiling gases). But the Sun does have a superheated atmosphere. Heat and pressure push solar material away from the Sun. Eventually, some of that material escapes the pull of the Sun’s gravity and magnetism and becomes the solar wind, which gusts through the entire solar system.

But where exactly does the Sun’s atmosphere end and the solar wind begin? We’ve never known for sure. Until now!

In April 2021, Parker Solar Probe swooped near the Sun. It passed through a massive plume of solar material in the corona. This was like flying into the eye of a hurricane. That flow of solar stuff — usually a powerful stream of particles — hit the brakes and went into slow-motion.

For the first time, Parker Solar Probe found itself in a place where the Sun’s magnetism and gravity were strong enough to stop solar material from escaping. That told scientists Parker Solar Probe had passed the boundary: On one side, space filled with solar wind, on the other, the Sun’s atmosphere.

Parker Solar Probe’s proximity to the Sun has led to another big discovery: the origin of switchbacks, zig-zag-shaped magnetic kinks in the solar wind.

These bizarre shapes were first observed in the 1990s. Then, in 2019, Parker Solar Probe revealed they were much more common than scientists first realized. But they still had questions, like where the switchbacks come from and how the Sun makes them.

Recently, Parker Solar Probe dug up two important clues. First, switchbacks tend to have lots of helium, which scientists know comes from the solar surface. And they come in patches.

Those patches lined up just right with magnetic funnels that appear on the Sun’s surface. Matching these clues up like puzzle pieces, scientists realized switchbacks must come from near the surface of the Sun.

Figuring out where switchbacks come from and how they form will help scientists understand how the Sun produces the solar wind. And that could clue us into one of the Sun’s biggest mysteries: why the Sun’s atmosphere is much, much hotter than the surface below.

Parker Solar Probe will fly closer and closer to the Sun. Who knows what else we’ll discover?

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

@cyle is not actually human. Don't be fooled, people!

hello there!

humans is an official blog run by actual people who work at tumblr. we made this blog so that we can reply to y'all in the notes of various posts.

actual humans:

Cyle (@cyle, he/him)

i like cheeseburgers

James (@macmanx, he/him)

Happiness Engineer at Automattic, GIF-maker on Tumblr, Trumpet in Polyhedra, and general doer of things at place.

Jas (@jezzuminah, she/her)

Artist on Tumblr, and Walking Encyclopedia. I've screamed about Chinese history at McD for 5 hours before (feel free to ignore me if that happens)

Lucila (she/her)

I refused to eat cows in the 80s, before it was cool

Emily (@emilyfowler, she/her)

lied about my age to make my first tumblr account and now I work to make sure kids don't lie about their age to make their first tumblr accounts

Bea (@key, she/her)

i like building towns for cute animals for my silly mental health and hyperfixating on things i learned about on tumblr.

Cates (@adulthoodisokay, she/her)

Secret old and extremely online. If something's trending on Tumblr I probably know why.

Jess (@theinex, she/her)

I have a dog named Kirby who loves watching the Food Network (obvi Guy Fieri). If there’s something weird, wild, but most importantly fun, happening on this Hellsite (affectionate), I’m probably one of the wizards behind the curtain.

Rocco (@photosbyrocco, he/him)

i make a lot of buttons here on tumblr dot com

Caroline (she/her)

i'm here for kpop and memes

kat (@kat, they/she)

i use [tumblr].

Elena (@reallyserious, she/her)

Recovering single-subject-Tumblr creator.

Lindsay (she/her)

Some of my favorite things are immersive podcasts (Mission to Zyxx 🛸, Seincast), gaming in VR, and learning alongside my fellow humans.

Air show, Jamie Kripke

My cartoon for this week’s New Scientist magazine.