Someone recently gave me a piece of advice regarding savings and bad jobs: always have enough in the bank so that you can, at a moment’s notice, walk into your terrible job and say “fuck you, I quit.” It’s not a recommendation to actually take that action, of course, only that you have enough money to do it if things become absolutely dire.
With that in mind, uh, Tumblr: fuck you, I quit, and I’m moving this site to Squarespace.
I started using Tumblr in 2008. I’ve been using this platform for seven years. That’s nearly a third of my life. You know the concept of brand loyalty? That’s what that is. Tumblr has gone from bad to worse to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, then throwing out the bathtub for good measure, because why the hell not, you’ve just thrown out your own offspring so you might as well commit to this terrible course of action.
Um.
This is all to say that I don’t like it here anymore. So much of this site is now geared toward something I’ll vaguely call “creators”, but I’m not including authors, or artists, or filmmakers in that description. It’s more suited for people creating glitch art, or GIFs of TV shows, or glorified Pinterest boards - which are all fine, but they are not me. I can count the number of people I follow who still keep straight-up blogs on this site on one hand, and god bless them, but this platform doesn’t belong to them.
I have 1,399 followers on here. My most popular post in the last month got 4 notes. There’s something hollow in seeing that disparity. I’d rather have a tiny but honest audience than a large level of casual disinterest.
All that said, posts will continue to appear here on Tumblr, if that’s your preferred method of consumption - they’ll look a little different, coming as they do from the new site, but there’s no harm in syndicating things here for those who might want to read it. Links to old posts, though, will point to the new site (where everything’s archived), and some extraneous stuff will go away.
The main thing is that I get to say goodbye to decisions like hiding blog controls from users, and awful boxed advertising, and recommendations for blogs that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. It feels great. I hope you check in every now and then.