#it’s like. ironic references to early tumblr culture that nobody gets just me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

donnerpartyofone · 7 years

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I started this blog in July of 2010. I had some reservations about being too old or uncool or something for Tumblr--things that were not untrue, but that I had to accept didn't matter. I had not made almost any use of Facebook or Myspace or even Friendster, so I had no point of reference for how or why to use anything like this; I wasn't even really aware of LiveJournal. I'm not sure now what I wanted at the time, Tumblr just seemed generically "cool" and "fun" to me. I remember not having even the most basic idea of how it worked; I would flounderingly post images I had downloaded a while ago and fumble at some reference for where I got them originally, instead of figuring out how to search someone's archive and reblog them. I was actually pretty well mentally prepared for the platform though, even if it took me a little while to realize it; for many years I had been making these intense clutter drawings out of swipes from pulp comics, old board games, product mascots, movie posters, etc. This kind of non-verbal, hieroglyphic-like composite of a one's personal and cultural DNA is really the main achievement of most Tumblrs I think. I remember repeating this idea to someone once I got a handle on it, and having that person snear at me for being a hipster; similarly, after my blog started to pick up some modest steam, my then-boyfriend would ask me snottily what the point was, and when I just explained different ways in which I enjoyed Tumblr as a creative outlet, he seemed to get angrier and angrier. I eventually realized he wanted me to reveal a magical way in which the platform could make you rich and famous, and it was infuriating to him that that wasn't my focus. Ironically, at that time I was pissing off a lot of people who were very concerned about being Tumblr famous--or simply receiving due credit for their hard work. In the service of making my clutter drawings, or a digital equivalent in the form of my dumb little blog, I had been doing relentless google searches for vhs boxes and stuff, which I'd chop into fetishistic details and post. I didn't even notice that a lot of these came from bloggers making their own scans; once in a while one would come out of the woodwork to ask me what the fuck I was doing, and I'd credit them on an ad hoc basis, being so out of touch that I had no idea that this was a major ongoing issue on Tumblr at large. I never went right to someone's blog to download their images and deliberately pass them off as my own, and I still don't understand what that means to people who do that. Eventually I stopped posting that kind of thing anyway, having moved on to just using the blog to compulsively "express myself". The surprising number of anonymous questions and trolling that I received (and by which I am still flattered) really got me there, increasing my feeling that the best use of my blog was just dashing off personal bullshit that I found hilarious or repulsive or both. It's funny, usually I find it very upsetting to reflect on past me from any angle, but not on Tumblr. I cringe a little bit when I see old selfies, where I'm clearly trying hard to look cute, but not too much. Nobody cares, and at times I even looked sorta good.The best thing about Tumblr is that I've only ever done it for myself, which I think helped me develop more of a sense of self, however pathetic that sounds. I felt alone in an incredibly exciting way, like I was hosting my own Late Show, and I had had a good night whenever I succeeded at really cracking myself the fuck up. Amazingly, even though I suffered a lot in the early years from someone's abuse and my subsequent fear that my only options in life were abuse or isolation, there's actually not that much evidence of that in my archives. I was always here to have a good time on my own terms. Actually, by the time I met the man I'm going to marry, I had carved out such a monolithic identity for myself in my imagination, somewhere between Johnny Carson and Beetlejuice, that it was very awkward to decide to introduce the fact that, yes, I have a real life, I'm in a relationship, I have established a normalizing social institution in my home. But, of course, pretending to be ONLY a freaky loner with a dumb blog was not as important as acknowledging one of the top human beings in my entire life. At the same time, the climate on Tumblr seems to have changed a lot, from being this comically alienated alley of cyberspace, to being sort of a score board for everybody's moral standards and social conscience, and an operating theater in which you may be vivisected in a hunt for your slightest, most subconscious philosophical discrepancies. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing all of the time; at the moment, Tumblr is becoming an important grassroots channel for information transfer, and honestly, I'm a better person for a lot of it. I can think back to just a few months ago at a time, regularly, and notice bigoted thoughts and behaviors that I've managed to correct because I'm exposed to more different kinds of people and different news sources, all at once on my dash. It's not the beginning and end of everything, but it can be a great way for myopic narcissists like me to start getting better. However, I have to admit to missing how purely chaotic this place used to be, as I remember it anyway. At least I can still dig back into my archive for something stupid that happened five years ago, and in the process of rummaging around, think to myself with satisfaction, "Damn, my blog used to be fucking FUNNY."

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