#zr transcript

[zrtranscripts]

Season 10, Mission 4: Can't Stop the Boss

Not My Apocalypse

~

[van creaks]

BRENT VALMONT: Alright, Five. Let’s hash this out. I really hate to show my temper, but you’ve left me no choice. Are you sitting comfortably in the back of that van? Got your Valmont headset tight? Good, because I know you’ll want to hear who I’ve got speaking next.

[tape recorder clicks]

SAM YAO: Five? Five, it’s me. It’s Sam. It’s going to be okay, Five. Everything’s going to be alright.

[tape recorder clicks]

BRENT VALMONT: Spoiler alert: it’s not.

[tape recorder clicks]

SAM YAO: Valmont said I have to tape this message. I... I don’t know how long it’s been since Tunisia. He showed me the footage of your last run to the Maghreb border. Oh, you were so fast, leaving the whole Red Scorpion Army behind! They never would have caught you... if he hadn’t have been waiting in that boat. Amelia always said we shouldn’t trust him. Of all the ways to find out she was right.

Valmont says he’s got a mission for you, Five. He showed me the brief. It’s just a simple item grab. I don’t have every detail, but nobody’s about, nobody gets hurt... and what they’ll do to you if you refuse... I think you have to do it, Five. Just this once, I think you have to do his run.

[tape recorder clicks]

BRENT VALMONT: I know you miss him, Five. I can see it on your face. Those Valmont headcams work both ways! So I’ll make this really simple for you. You turned down all my other jobs. The assassination in Bolivia, the firebombing in Berlin! But this one’s non-negotiable. Get it done within the hour or Sam loses a thumb.

[van door slides open]

Back of the trucks’ cracking open. Look at all that daylight spilling in! I know I’ve got you fighting mad, so let’s channel that rage! Down the ramp, full speed ahead, just follow the street, straight along the cobbles, under the big stone arches. Don’t think of it as helping me. Think of it as saving him. Here, I’ll even let Sam play you out!

[tape recorder clicks]

SAM YAO: It’ll be okay, Five. I know it will. Remember what Janine’s always saying? When things are at their darkest, a runner strikes a match. You keep the hope. No matter what, you keep that flame alive. And promise me, the first chance you get, promise me you’ll run.

~

[birds coo, wings flap]

BRENT VALMONT: Mind the pigeons, Five! But take in the sights! Italy, the Vatican, St Peter’s Square itself. Look at those grand colonnades on either side, the great Egyptian spire in the middle. Though the basilica’s looking a bit dowdy, isn’t it, the way the dome’s collapsed in? Head straight for its entrance, past the burned-out popemobile. It’s through those great big pillars where the tourists used to queue.

It’s been hard on landmarks, Five, the end of the world. The Eiffel Tower, Washington DC, poor old Red Square. Not exactly sitting pretty since Van Ark’s Armageddon did the renovators in. Oh, I know. I told you the apocalypse was mine. I didn’t mean it literally. It was Sigrid’s passion project, Van Arks’ silly plague. [sighs] He was such a stupid genius, wasn’t he? Took the blame for the disease to please that humorless wife of his. Invented immortality, but he couldn’t get the hang of spin.

ANNIE knew what they were planning, Five, long before it happened. I had her watching Sigrid, Van Ark, Moonchild, too. You don’t become a billionaire without probing your rivals. We caught their little scheme to end the world, and yes, I could have stopped it, it’s true, but I know a bargain when I see one. The whole world on fire sale! I’m not the one made the end, but I like to think I’m who it’s for.

[door clatters open] This is a grand old entrance, isn’t it? That distant gilded ceiling, the sunswept marble floor. All those saintly statues watching with white eyes. [building creaks] Careful! Sidestep to your left. The ceiling isn’t stable. Some of it’s coming down.

You, me, mortal peril! It’s just like the old times, eh? Admit it, I was quite the charmer, running with your Abel crew. You were all so wonderfully obliging. I always needed Sigrid gone, and V-types can be a pain, but I never lied about it being a good time, Five. As far as handy decoys go, your lot were the best.

See that body, beneath the fallen pillar? That’s Valmont Runner Sixty-Four. Last one in before you. I warned her that this mission was a risk, but still, she volunteered! It’s amazing, the loyalty people give you in a post-apocalyptic world. So much for so little. You dig them out of burning rubble, offer them beans and a bed, and suddenly their life is yours. I used to run orphanages on the same principle. Shame my finest runner’s busy on assignment. She’d have at least survived the masonry, unlike poor old Sixty-Four.

I know what you’re thinking, Five. How many have gone in ahead of you? Oh, I’ve lost count! There’s something I need in that city, something hard to find, but you’ve got an advantage. You’ve seen it before. We just need to be careful, with all that panacea in your blood. My doctors have been draining what, a pint of plasma at a time over the last few months? That’s plenty of samples. Your body’s a little panacea factory now, thanks to that injection you stole! But we’ve got big ambitions. Things will go much smoother if they can harvest a whole lot more!

[building creaks] Better get a move on, Five! That building really doesn’t like my people. The ceiling almost sounds upset! Turn right at the papal altar, take the tour guide passage to the Sistine Chapel. And ignore the fallen runners up ahead. There’s no point dwelling on them, Five. There’s no profit counting the dead.

~

BRENT VALMONT: Look up at the ceiling, Five! Soak that culture in. The Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s masterpiece! All those gorgeous frescoes painted on the walls. Saints, sinners, serpents. And Adam, on the ceiling, about to high five God! [sighs] I was planning to steal this, but ANNIE says it wouldn’t survive the airlift. [sighs] Follow the frescoes down the corridor, the one with all the maps. Try to find an open window. You need to get outside.

Moonchild used to say my collections were “bad karma,” that it was wrong to try to cage the world. This, from Lady Mind Control. She reminded me of my mother, Five. Ghastly, hippy-drippy woman. Stole my father’s fortune, frittered it on “charity.” Said the world was full of wonders, but not a single one was ours! A thing’s not beautiful until you own it, that’s the dirty, ugly truth. Knowing something might be taken is a spoiling blemish. I used to tell Amelia that. Maybe when I take her world, she’ll learn.

It’s hard to find people who understand, Five. I wake up every morning with this screaming hunger in my heart, the torture of ambition. No matter what I have, no matter who I own, I know I can do better. It’s like an engine in my belly. I know I can own more!

There, an open window. Climb out to the courtyard, quick! Have you heard much lately from that Moonchild in your head? I bet you haven’t. Maybe my panacea killed her. Maybe she’s finally dead. The Cortile del Belvedere A pope once paraded his elephant here. That’s my kind of style! Just parked cars and a broken fountain now. See that big beige building over there? That’s the Vatican library with the Apostolic Archives next door. Those archives hold the secret storeroom of the Catholic church, and what we want’s inside.

[laughs] I know what you’re hoping, Legs. You think my wife will come and save you, Amelia and the rest. But the truth is, they’re not even in the game. I’ve got decoys with your shirt on from Peru to Paraguay, corpses with your DNA slung into shallow graves. I’ve got moles in the Maghreb, spies in the UK. I’ve got Amelia spun in circles, always looking the wrong way.

Sigrid, Van Ark, Moonchild, they were all small fry. Couldn’t even keep their Armageddon to a timetable. ANNIE didn’t expect their gray plague to get loose so soon. I wasn’t quite ready to put the Ministry straight down. But I was miles ahead in stockpiling, and I’ve had eons to prep since. I knocked down half the satellites, razed the global village. No more cheap communications, no calling distant ears for help. The market should be nice and manageable, survivors stuck in isolated pockets. I’ve got bases like Red Scorpion all over the world, allies in armies you’ve never heard. I know what happened to the last aircraft carrier, why zombies scream on roads. I am a one-man superpower. Your friends don’t have a chance!

Uh-oh! Zombie priests crawling out of the cars, and those look like Swiss Guards lurching from the buildings, the elite protectors of the Vatican with feathered caps and halberds high. Well, that one’s got halberd sticking through his chest, but what can you expect from zoms? They’re closing in behind you, still guarding the library even in death. There’s a car crashed through the archive wall. That’s your way inside. Get into that building, then down to the basement. Do not let them catch you! Go!

~

BRENT VALMONT: That’s it, Five. Keep going straight. They call this part of the archive the Bunker, where the most precious texts are kept. Frankly, I’m disappointed. I expected flaming torches, spotlights, demons dancing around the Holy Grail, not just endless dusty bookshelves. [zombie growls] Careful, there are zombies crushed together between some of those shelves. Stay clear of the books. Their arms are clawing out between them.

Do you know what the worst part of this church is, Five? It’s that it isn’t dead. There’s a whole new pope in Istanbul readying teams to nab these treasures, and they’re not the only holdouts. There are still rabbis, and imams, Buddhist monks, Mormons, Quakers, Sikhs. People who believe in gods, or hope, or just each other, joining hands to cope. Little groups like Abel brightening the dark.

It makes me so damn angry! It’s... not the apocalypse I bought! I wanted Mad Max, the Walking Dead, the first bit of The Road! Ruins, misery, hopeless dread, and I’d swoop in with my hoarded cans and lift the peons up, have them rebuild in my image, grateful for the helping hand. ANNIE predicted overwhelming collapse, once the dust settled. You were supposed to get nuked offing Sigrids or implode like Sage. Those Last Riders had the right idea, until they turned V-type. But no, you had to flourish, didn’t you? All over the world. The groups that defy the odds. The Maghreb, Arcadia, Abel, Vashisht. That galling, glowing 1% like aniseed in the stew!

There, see that staircase behind the red cordon with a vault door in the bottom? That’s the hidden heart of this bunker. A room that’s not on any maps. If there were demons locked away, that’s where they’d be. It’s time for the big drum roll, Five. The reveal of why you’re here. Remember your trip to Moore Island, the [red god] and the cult? Amelia never let me read the Edda, but the church has another copy hidden in their vault. Moonchild stole a partial transcript before they upped security. My runners don’t know what it looks like, but you’ve seen it before.

[zombies moan] Damn! Coming up the stairs, are those - red robes and pointy hats. Oh no, lots of zombie cardinals, and they’re in your way. The others are closing in behind you, too. Swiss Guards, priests, tourists in backpacks. There’s no going back. Forward is your only shot. Those are halberds lying on the floor. The guards must have made a stand here. Quickly, pick one up. [metal clinks] You’re going to have to rush them straight down to the vault. I can hack the door with ANNIE. That blade looks blunt, but you can at least push them back. Move it, Five, get down the stairs! Not sure what a zombie bite will do with all those Valmont patents in your blood. Don’t let the cardinals grab you. Run!

~

[door clatters open]

BRENT VALMONT: Now this is more like it! Big, oblong chamber full of sealed glass cases. Ancient scrolls, mysterious parchments. No sign of the Holy Grail, but I bet it’s around here somewhere. Find my Edda, Five. You don’t have much time.

[alarm blares]

This room is pumped full of an inert gas to preserve the relics. We don’t have the proper codes. I can’t hold it open long. See those dead runners on the floor? They all thought they’d find my prize, and they all died choking anyway. Funny thing, Five. None of them blamed me. Now that’s lasting ownership, the kind that leaves them dying but still feeling the love.

Aha, you’ve spotted something. The big tome on the plinth. Smash the casing and grab it! Use that halberd, now! [glass breaks, alarm beeps, zombies growl] Those zoms are pouring in behind you, they’re blocking the way out. There’s another vault door straight ahead, right across the archive. Move it, Five, and hold the Edda tight! If you die of oxygen deprivation, Sam’s the one I’m sending in there next. Speed up, before the door snaps shut. Run!

~

[birds caw, wings flap]

BRENT VALMONT: You did it, Legs! You’re clear of the archive and clear of the Vatican, footloose on the streets of Rome. And you’ve got my Edda. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, you could destroy it, tear it up and run, but what would happen to poor Sam, and Janine, and Peter, too? That’s right.

[engine rumbles] My truck’s approaching. Drop the halberd, get inside. [metal clinks, van door slides open] There you go, Five. Straight into the back. I’ll see you get a raise for this. That means extra cushions in your cell!

The apocalypse hasn’t gone as planned, it’s true. But I’ve had a fix brewing for years. You pushed up my timeline with that scramble through Tunisia. I was worried we might not pull it off, but now I’ve got the panacea and the Edda. I’m all set for the apocalypse, take two.

The panacea, Five, that’s my little joke. You see, it is a cure, of sorts. The cure for all my ills. Soon, I won’t have any rivals. The whole world will be my orphanage. Amelia, Abel, and the rest, they’ll be swept away, or transformed, replaced by broken, helpless, loving people. Like Adam on the ceiling, Five. They’ll all be looking up... to me.

~

#zombies run #zrs10 #s10m4 #can't stop the boss #zr transcript #zrs10 spoilers

[xccentriktigress]

Below the cut is a clean verbatim transcript of the StaffCon2023 “Live With the CEO” stream. Featuring the CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg [@photomatt], and the Tumblr COO, Zandy Ring [@zingring].

Built from the videos by @secondbeatsongs [x] and @chainswordcs [x]. Additional thanks to my fellow archivists, @eiimblr, @sharksfood, and @fokron.

The stream was about an hour, so there's a lot of dialogue. There are timestamps next to the questions and important statements if you want to skim. 

A true verbatim transcript is available by request.

[archive 1]|[archive 2]

PhotoMatt: This is Zandy Ring. Zandy’s the Chief Operating Officer of Tumblr and I’m the CEO of Automattic. We’re here, trying out this experiment where we’ll do a live broadcast and take questions from users and talk about it.  And I'm here in the room, actually. This is like the, kinda first ever, in a really long time since… What year was the last big Tumblr meet-up?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PhotoMatt: 2018? *chuckle* Yeah.

ZingRing: Yeah.

PhotoMatt: So, since 2018. So, basically in five years, the first time the vast majority of the Tumblr team is together and so you got a lot of us here in this room. And so pretty much everything there is to know about Tumblr is known in this room. *laugh* So, hopefully, we can answer pretty much anything. Any questions coming in so far?

ZingRing: We have some questions from earlier, and one of the big questions has been one that we just did during our trial run which was uh-

PhotoMatt: I can try this one, the one- what was that, FantastiCait?

ZingRing: Ok, great

[1:08] PhotoMatt: Says, “Why are we making changes right after people left Reddit and Twitter because of their changes?”

PM: *chuckles* I totally get why change is scary. *chuckle* Right? But also if things don’t change, if services don’t evolve I’m certain it’ll die. 

ZR: Right.

PM: Now, if we change it, we could mess it up or we could make it better. The good news is that as we change things we’re listening to users, we’re looking at usage, we’re learning. And so we’re learning by doing.

[1:42] PM: Says, “Are you planning any drastic changes to come?”

PM: I mean, kind of? You know. A hundred and something people working on Tumblr *laughs* that’s their job *chuckles* is to change it and make it better. You know, we try to make changes that you all ask for, we try to do changes we think you'll like and we get it right sometimes we get it wrong sometimes, but we just always learn.

ZR: Thank you for the pizza.

PM: Thank you for the piz- ? Oh yeah. Nice *chuckles*

[2:08] PM: “We asked for a better search function.”

PM: Yeah. I agree.

ZR: That’s being worked on.

PM: Search is being worked on, right?

ZR: Yup.

PM: Actually, who is working on Search here?

ZR: There they are.

PM: Okay, we got two people here *laughs* How’s it going?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PM: It’s going well.

ZR: It’s going good.

PM: Is there anything that’s launching soon that we could preview for folks?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PM: Oh, oh yeah. Getting reblogs in search. Ought to be a pretty big one.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: But a good way, if you have ideas for Search, a great thing to do is post it to your Tumblr. *chuckles. Send us a link. We'll check it out. You know, we definitely read a lot of that stuff, and we share it in our Slack channel and things like that. So, we’re always reading Tumblr and listening to users. 

ZR: Yeah. It’s a great job, we just get to use Tumblr all day long. 

[3:09] PM: “Have you seen the 44 thousand note poll about the algorithm changes?”

PM: Yes. *laughs* I don’t know what it’s about though because we haven’t really changed anything. *laughs*

ZR: Yeah, we’re not getting rid of the chronological feed.

PM: Yeah, chronological feed will always be an option for people. So just, tell your friends. *chuckles* Because there seems to be a lot of misinformation. There’s things people get mad at us that we do and there’s things people get mad at us that we’re actually not doing. *chuckles* And have no plans to do, so figure that out.

PM: How many people do we have on the stream so far? Kind of curious.

[3:52] PM: “Allow us to snooze Tumblr Live indefinitely.”

PM: But then you wouldn’t be here right now.

ZR: Hmm *chuckles*

[3:57] PM: “Can we add stories to our blogs like Instagram?”

PM: Yeah. And we actually developed a story feature over on the WordPress side of things, Jetpack side. I was kinda wondering why we did it there instead of on Tumblr. *chuckles* It does seem to be like a social primitive that users expect from different networks. So yeah, would love to support something like Stories. It’s not currently on the roadmap though, so, I should be *indistinct*

ZR: We have a question that I think already scrolled by. It’s actually from one of the people we talked to yesterday when we did our trial run.  BirdRhetorics.

[4:32] ZR: “How do you know that Tumblr is hard to use as discussed in the product direction post?”

ZR: *to Matt* How do we know Tumblr is hard to use?

PM: Oh! *laughs*

ZR: Because it is. It’s something that is-

PM: Thank you for the crab *laughs*

ZR: Oh! *laughs* Thank you. 

ZR: We talk with a lot of users and we talk with users that have returned, people who left the site. The reason they’re leaving the site is because they couldn’t find the communities they wanted. They couldn’t figure out Search, they don’t understand trying to follow people or blogs so that their following feed actually will fill up with great stuff. So we’re just trying to make that process much easier for them so that they can have the experience that long-time users have as well.

ZR: I love these crabs. 

*laughter*

[5:28] ZR: Thank you Tumblr for giving me crabs.

*laughter*

[5:33] PM: Someone says, “Would you make Live more accessible? I would stream my art but I can’t.”

PM: We’re trying to. We’ve got the OBS stuff now and you can do it from desktop. 

PM: I saw kind of a bug report there go by. Did anyone catch that? Something about links to audio posts? Did someone see that go by? Do we know what this bug is?

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: What was that?

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Oh, no no no. This was about links to audio posts or something. He just reposted it? Oh, go to the bottom maybe. He just reposted- 

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: I don’t know if I understand that one. Who was that? Tyote? If you could do a post about that and just tag Staff in it. And tag PhotoMatt *chuckles* as well, we’ll take a look at that.

PM: Oh yeah, we should say our Tumblr usernames by the way.

ZR: We should.

PM: I’m PhotoMatt. P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T

ZR: I am ZingRing. Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G

PM: Cool.

[6:46] PM: Someone says “If you don’t like Tumblr Live, click around on people. Find people you vibe with”

PM: I agree. 

[6:51] ZR: We have one here. “Is Tumblr Live gonna be going international?”

ZR: Yeah, that’s part of our plan. We just recently put into place some of the steps we need in order to roll it out in other countries so…more people will be able to have access to it if they want.

[7:11] PM: Someone says “Does Tumblr Live support OBS?”

PM: Yes, it does.

ZR: Yes, it does.

PM: Woohoo.

[7:15] ZR: Here's one. “Will you be fixing the fact that you can't zoom in on images?” Who can answer that? *inaudible, off-screen* It's already fixed.

7:32 PM: What platform’s the chip on? 

[7:38] *off-screen staff member* Sorry they're probably talking about the new Lightbox feature where some zoom capabilities were different and they should now be able to pinch to zoom, tap to zoom, just as they're used to. It just rolled out, so update the app. 

PM: Awesome, so if you update your app, hopefully, zoom might be working. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: And definitely run your app updates. I do it every morning, it's the first thing I do.

ZR: *chuckles*

PM: Like, I look at how I slept on WHOOP, because obviously, I don't know how I slept, I just woke up. Then I update my apps. Ah, these are going by kind of fast.

[8:12] PM: “Will there be a filter to determine bot Lives from real users”

PM: Yeah, hopefully, there's no bots. So the moderation team should pick that up if there's bots.

[8:24] PM: “Could you say why 18+ content is not allowed on the site when it does so well on other platforms?”

PM: Actually, since November of last year, we updated our guidelines so a lot more artistic presentations of the human form are allowed now. So, check out the updated guidelines. They’re a lot more in line with other services 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: It's still not everything, so there's definitely other sites if you want a particular type of more hardcore content. That's probably still going to be on Twitter or Reddit or PornHub or whatever but yeah. Because Tumblr, we want to be about art and artists and stuff like for Arts. More artistic stuff, we definitely want to allow that. 

[9:08]ZR: Yep. Here's one. “Is it difficult to handle a lot of incoming users, such as the ones from Reddit or Twitter?”

ZR: No, because we don't get huge influxes. People have this perception that we have massive growth right now and we really don't.  So we welcome everyone with open arms. I think the thing that we need to do is improve our onboarding experience so that those new users find traction right away which is part of what that very long core product post on Staff was talking about but no. That is not an issue we currently face. What a great problem to have. 

PM: By the way, I do want to recognize there was the penguin person who said Tumblr staff are heroes so…

ZR: Aw.

PM: Yay. Thank you. 

ZR: *to audience* That’s you all.

*Applause*

[10:02] PM: One thing I hope you all get from this, who are watching. One, we want to correct some misinformation. For example, chronological feed is staying. It's not going away. And two, also just show that, like, there's real people behind the screen, building Tumblr, with families and feelings and dreams and ambitions and all sorts of things. 

PM: And so yeah. We're trying to do more stuff in public. It's been a little challenging because a lot of it's getting misinterpreted and stuff, but we're just gonna keep trying to make things more public. We even just open-sourced our stream builder so like, how the main feed gets built. So hopefully we can open-source a lot more in the future. We want to engage with the developer community, third-party people doing things around Tumblr, and yeah, make it better and better.

ZR: I haven't been saying usernames as I've read some of the questions that are being sent to me from the feed so I'm really sorry about that. I'm gonna try to say the usernames.

[11:01] ZR: Tyote said “Could a grid view for the dashboard be implemented on desktop Tumblr like the search page has? I have all this extra screen space.”

ZR: We are doing some experiments with the different *chuckles* Better resourced, I guess, view of the dashboard that looks pretty great which I guess is not out to users yet. But more to come there for sure.

PM: Let's see, how many people do we have now? I can't see the number.  

*off-screen* 302.

PM: 302, cool. Okay. 

[11:45] PM: “We need hardware-level encryption.”

PM: I don't know what that means *laughs* But, okay. *laughs* Maybe we need it too, wow.

[12:02] PM: “How do you intend to help users trust the Lives, if we are keeping them?”

PM: I'm not sure if I know what that means.

ZR: I think it's a question about feeling safe using Tumblr Live. Perhaps? With data? 

*chuckles at crab*

[12:23] PM: “Let's toggle off Live without a timer”

PM: Well, Live is…we're trying it out. *laughs* And in theory, this could be something that- You know, when people send gifts, we get a portion of that revenue and so it's something we're trying to help make Tumblr sustainable and allow us to invest more into the site. For, you know, getting servers, making things faster, having staff to fix bugs.

[12:51] PM: By the way, I want to address another thing that people always say whenever we do a post.

[12:56] PM: I forget what the username was but they said “Ban the Nazis.”

PM: *chuckles* Yeah. Nazi-like hate speech is definitely against the terms of service so if you see a Nazi tell us *chuckles* and we'll ban it. The Trust and Safety team on Tumblr has done a really monumental effort over the past few years to clean things up quite a bit. There is some backlog, always, but like yeah. Please report sites if you see hate speech or anything that would be against our terms of service. Which I think literal Nazism is. *chuckles*

ZR: Yeah.

[13:36] ZR: Yep, we got another question about the algorithm style Post Feed so probably bears repeating that we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. It will be its own tab, so do not worry about that. 

[13: 57] ZR: Then we had another one about moderation, more transparent. And I've seen another question about this previously, too. Posts that should be fine under the new policies are still being tagged. That's from Yansie.

ZR: Yeah, and that shouldn't be happening. But humans do make mistakes so we try to fix them. It does take time, we do have a backlog, so bear with us. Stick with us, we'll try to do right by everybody. 

[14:27] PM: There's a question being asked a lot about LGBT content being flagged? 

PM: Yeah, Tumblr is super pro-LGBT. I think it's actually like 25 or 30 percent of our user base. So if there's a mistake in the flagging… You know, again, this is humans. So, definitely mistakes are made. Please let us know, specifically, and have to take a look at it. I wonder what the flag could have been there. 

ZR: Not sure. 

PM: Yeah.

[15:02] PM: So people are asking to mute Tumblr Live permanently. 

PM: How much would you pay for that? *chuckles* Maybe-

*laughter*

PM: Maybe we'll make it an upgrade. Twenty dollars? Fifty dollars? Like, make me an offer. We might launch that in the Tumblr mods.

*more laughter*

PM: Okay, we got 25 there. 

ZR: Going once…

PM: 500, wow! We could definitely make it giftable too. You can gift people. *chuckles* It's like an auction. 500 going once, going twice, yeah, wow.

[15:38] PM: They say “Pay streamers” 

PM: Streamers can get paid actually, yeah. So, you can make money by streaming on Tumblr Live. So, that's part of the reason we were excited to try out this feature. Yeah, we launched Post Plus and other things. We're very interested in things that can get creators paid. In fact, even as we initially acquired Tumblr and during the turnaround, we actually prioritized the features that got users paid above the features that just got us paid.

[16:06] PM: Let’s see “Why can't we take usernames from older inactive accounts?” 

PM: Anyone have an answer there? *silence* Sometimes we recycle usernames. 

ZR: Yeah, there is a process to recycle usernames. We just need a request or we don't know that you're trying to use that username.

PM: You're “going to request Karen.” Okay, good luck.

 *Laughter*

[16:40] PM: “Let Live direct stream from OBS.” 

PM:  OBS is supported for Live so maybe- Do we just need to like-? 

ZR: On web.

PM: On web. Yes, so you can use OBS. Again hopefully, this system gets a lot more people knowing what actually is the reality.

[17:00] PM: “Why is Live stuck in portrait mode?” 

PM:  I think that's just how it's designed. It's a portrait experience, right? 

ZR: Yeah, that's right.

[17:15] PM: “You can only use OBS for your virtual webcam on the web, not directly.” 

PM: Does anyone know about that? Yes.

*Gary, offscreen* OBS can set up a virtual webcam but then you tell Live to use that webcam. But… the better way to do it through OBS is through using RTMP which I think- *indistinct* 

PM: Yeah, so this is Gary. He was saying RTMP would be better and I think that's on the roadmap. 

Gary: I think it's on the roadmap. Somebody who works on Live would perhaps know better when it's coming but they're working on it. 

PM: Cool, and in the meantime, use the virtual webcam feature.

17:51 

PM: You want the pretty-haired lady on screen, all right. That’s you, Zandy.

*Applause, Laughter*

ZR: Thank you. Thank you. Oh my God, I love it, I love flowers. Thank you.

PM: And you do have great hair. 

ZR: Yeah I do. 

PM: Thank you for the compliments. Thank you.

ZR: I didn't mean to say ‘I do,’ I meant to say ‘thank you.’ Here's a good one from VampSprite.

[18:26] “Can you make merch like a normal company?” 

ZR: No, because we're not.

*Matt laughs*

ZR: We can make merch like Tumblr.

PM: I think we're definitely leaning into the weird, 

ZR: Yeah. For sure. 

PM: We're trying to be even weirder than we have been.

ZR: Let's see, uh… 

[18:44] PM: People are saying “Can we keep custom themes?” 

PM: Yes, custom themes are staying, so don't worry about that.

[18:53] PM: Someone's saying “Don't touch the chronological dashboard” so we'll just say it again, chronological will always be an option for y'all.

ZR: Yep.

PM: Yeah.

[19:05] ZR: Here's one, StormBlessed-Fool “It seems really difficult to appeal staff decisions such as shadowbans, content removal, etcetera. Can that be improved?” 

ZR: Yeah, definitely. We are working really hard to make sure that people's content is not removed if it's not violative but we do make mistakes and we have a backlog so it takes us a while, sometimes, to realize that we have made a mistake. That's on us and we're getting better. We have a really amazing Trust and Safety team that's been working really, really hard over the last couple of years to operationalize and improve and make this a better place for Tumblr users so bear with us. I am sorry.

[19:52] PM: I don't know who Peggy is. *laughs* I guess a lot of people don't like- Peggy seems very polarizing but we don't know who she is or who they are. It's a spam account? “Peg is a troll. It keeps coming back on here on Live.” Oh. 

ZR: Oh. 

PM: Well I bet we can fix that. 

ZR: I bet we could fix that. 

PM: *chuckles* Watch out, Peggy.

*Laughter*

PM: By the way, I think I'm gonna just move my chair closer to yours then they don't have to pan the camera as much. 

ZR: Okay 

PM: The pretty-haired lady can be in everything.

ZR: Ooh

[20:33] ZR: “Mind if I ask” This is from WarriorPrincess666 which is a really great username “Mind if I ask why the group chat room was deleted two years ago?” 

ZR: And you all have really great usernames. I am sorry for singling one person out.

PM: Just own it, that's a cool username.

ZR: It's a good username.  I do not remember why we unwound- 

PM: Because no one was using it. *chuckles* I think we had really high expectations for that feature and it was used a lot less. We do try to deprecate things that aren't used a lot to just, like lower the technical debt so… Yeah, now we're both in there. 

ZR: Hooray

PM: High five.

ZR: We moved a chair. 

PM: We moved a chair. 

ZR: We can move mountains.

PM: *chuckles* Yeah. So, one thing about products and code is that every bit of code you have kind of requires maintenance and updating and, you know, sometimes things break. Or interacts in different ways. So the more complex the code base is, the harder it is to maintain. We're not great about this but- Yeah, streamlining the product you know… Someone always uses something but if something's used by just a really really really small percentage we sometimes streamline it. But I think Group is really the only thing we've done that for in a while, right? 

ZR: Mm-hmm.

PM: Can y'all think of anything else we've turned off or gotten rid of? Mostly we add things. 

ZR: Yeah 

PM: That's why the Tumblr code base is so big.

ZR: And complex.

[22:06] ZR: Re-bee-key asked about merch. “Is there any way Tumblr could team up with more artists? I'm sure people would be more open to buying merch.” 

ZR: Yeah, absolutely, and not everybody knows about this but we have this program called Creatrs. There's no O at the end, it's T-R-S at the end, Creatrs. That is where we look to artists within the Tumblr Community when brands want to work with us. We try to find people within our own Community who would like to work directly with that brand, get their work out there, build a relationship, and then we try to foster that connection. So, that is a program that not very many people know about and it's been kind of small running over the last couple years, and we want to build it back up and connect artists with brands, those who want to work with them. So, definitely want to amplify the artists on our site in ways that will work for them.

PM: Yeah. People are asking about search and we addressed that a little bit earlier. We do have some folks working on search and there's fixes coming. 

[23:23] PM: There was someone named Anon that's, you know, saying that we're missing LGB tags or something like that so could someone message Anon? Like, DM them? Raise your hand if you could do that.

PM: Yes? Okay, over there? Thank you. 

ZR: Thanks, Josh. 

PM: Thanks, Josh. So Josh is gonna reach out to Anon and we'll try to get some more details there so we can yeah see what's going on. 

ZR: That- that might be coming from the Humans account. It may, just so you know. 

PM: Maybe also message TittyInfinity *chuckles* who's also reporting this. I can't believe you all just got me to say that. *laughs* I hope my mom’s not watching.

ZR: Here’s one from WormPool. Another very good username.

[24:14] “How much is coming in the way of future monetization and how will it affect the average user.”

ZR:  Well, we must monetize Tumblr in some way. We have to either get to revenue neutral, where we make enough to just pay for itself. It would be nice if it made money but we're gonna do what we need to do. We don't want to do things like sell user data or make the site unusable with tons and tons of ads. So, we're going to keep experimenting with different ways to provide value to users. Matt mentioned earlier that we're trying to do more in terms of getting artists paid on the site, like Post Plus. And you know, you can give people gifts through Tumblr Live if you like what they're doing with it. So we're trying to do more things that sort of fall into that area where we can have a revenue share sort of thing. But we're also doing merch and we're selling domains. We have an ad-free subscription, we sell badges, other digital goods. We'll kind of look at everything but there's some rivers we just won't cross because we don't agree with them.

PM: And, to be honest, it has been a little tricky. A lot of the upgrades we launched, just not as many people have subscribed as we were hoping to.

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: Like, we thought the no-ads upgrade, which is 30 bucks per year, would do pretty well but how many subscribers do we have for no-ads?

*offscreen* Almost 25 thousand.

PM: About 25 thousand so when you think of the millions of people that use Tumblr only 25 thousand buying the upgrade is pretty low. You can buy it for yourself, you can gift it to people. That definitely helps. To be transparent about the financial gap I think maybe David knows this. Like, what's our current- What would get us to break even? It's like 20, 25 million or-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things.

ZR: Yeah, we've got one here that I really like.

[27:12] Somebody write it down, from VForVincente. “Re: merch. Make socks that come in trios instead of pairs.” 

*audience enthusiasm*

ZR: Let's do that.

PM: *laughs* Triple socks. Oh, that is- that's an idea. 

ZR: It is. It is an idea.

*off-screen* It’s a backup sock.

PM: It's a backup sock. 

ZR: It’s a backup, you always lose one.

[27:38] Anonymous asked, “Any plans for next April the 1st?” 

ZR: Yes, but we won't know until, like, February.

PM: *chuckles* Someone registered PhotoMattsMom and said “I heard what you said.” That's funny. Y'all are funny. I can't believe you just created an account. Thank you for helping our registration numbers.

[28:01] ZR: *chuckles* Well, people are asking if the Live stream can be recorded. 

ZR: You actually can't do that, they're totally ephemeral. That might be something that we can work on in the future but it actually isn't even possible for us right now. We don't store them they're just- 

PM: Are we recording this one though? No? So this is- yeah. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: This is ephemeral.

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: So it's just for y’all. Just for the 500-ish people here. Whoa, what's that say? Boujee? 

ZR: Oh.

PM: Ooh. Bling bling. 

ZR: *chuckles* That’s a weird gift to give. 

PM: We probably just should have had someone record this on their phone or something *chuckles* Next time. This was just an experiment. Well, we might do this again.

[28:54] ZR: ArialErendeair asked “Is your plan to remain as open about future decisions that you're making for the Tumblr experience so we can provide feedback?”

ZR: Yeah, we do, we want to work in public a lot more. The core strategy post that went out yesterday is a step in that direction. In retrospect, we see how we could have improved on that messaging so it wasn't terrifying to everybody. Because we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. And could have made it a little bit more, like, punchy and maybe short. But, yeah, we're gonna try to keep doing this and do it more in public because Tumblr only exists because of the users. That's it, so we want to be in this journey with you.

PM: Yeah. Please tell your friends that chronological feed will always be an option. So yes, a lot of people- Oh thank you for the kiss there *Matt smooch sound*

ZR: I think it was for me. 

PM: Oh. *laughs* Yeah, probably.

[30:03] PM: “How much are we paying the boys that come here and post emojis?” 

PM: Nothing. 

ZR: No.

PM: Unless they use Post Plus or something. Then they can get paid.

[30:14] ZR: DimensionalAbyss. I'm really sorry for butchering all these “How long is this going on? Please do a sleep stream.”

ZR: Absolutely not.

*laughter*

PM: What's a sleep stream?

ZR: It sounds like you stream yourself sleeping. 

PM: Huh.

ZR: You can do it. I'm not doing it. 

PM: I actually talk a lot in my sleep. That would be weird. 

[30: 38] ZR: I'm not gonna choose this one just for the username but IntergalacticBoner asked “Any plans to expand the Help Desk? It can take more than a week to get a response from support.”

ZR: We are working all of the time to improve our processes. We have an amazing customer support team. We have amazing folks from within Automattic that help us with public support so we are trying to cut those SLAs down. An SLA is a Service Level Agreement. That's like what we promise to users as a response time. So we try to cut those response times down as much as we can. A week does seem like a long time. We can improve on that. Yeah, thank you IntergalacticBoner.

[31:34] PM: “Can we keep reblogs as they are and not condense them?” 

PM: We're gonna just do some experiments with the different reblog formats and everything like that. I know that sounds scary but we also use Tumblr so if it doesn't work we'll roll it back or try something new. Everything's always a process, everything's always an experiment. Yay, Pride. 

ZR: Yay.

[32:02] ZR: Trydianth asks “I buy the ad-free subscription. Can that also include other options like turning off features not like” which I think is ‘that I don't like.’

PM: Maybe, yeah. I mean, one thing that's tricky is when you add options for things it can add a lot of complexity to the app but, if you notice, a lot of the things that we've launched, we have given toggles for settings for so, in general, we're trying to be the most sort of user-controllable social network out there. And just, if we can, yeah. We'll keep trying that but, like we said, our previous approach is not working. *chuckles* I mean that Tumblr’s growth isn't where we want it to be and the revenue is not, you know. Like I said, we're 30 million below where the revenue needs to be so that's why we're trying different things to see what works.

ZR: Mm-hmm.

[32:58] ZR: “Re: Custom domains.” This is from transientURL “Do we expect to be able to host a Tumblr blog on the same domain as non-Tumblr site content?”

ZR: Salty. 

*Matt chuckles*

ZR:  I'm not sure I'm parsing that question.

PM:  Can you embed a Tumblr blog and something with other stuff probably? Or maybe it's custom domains um-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Second-level domains? What would be a second-level domain? Like a sub- like a subdomain? *indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Like blog dot M-A dot T-V or something? Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, definitely domain features are something we're working on and investing in. 

ZR: Mm-hmm.

 PM: It’s probably gonna be paid. Just so you all know. 

ZR: Mm-hmm.

PM: We charge for domain mapping everything on WordPress dot com and I think we have like 300 thousand map domains so we definitely think that's going to be a good revenue stream.

[34:09] PM: “Tumblr Live is banned in Europe” 

PM: It's actually not banned in Europe. We just haven't launched support in Europe yet so it's not banned that's misinformation 

ZR: Yeah. And to be clear we collect the absolute minimum amount of information. We collect birth date, because you need to be over 18. And location, so that we know if you're in the US or not. And I think that's it. That's the only thing that we collect in terms of Live. We let you stream from the back camera so you never have to show your face. All the streams are ephemeral, so we don't save them. There's a lot that we try to do in the best possible way for our users' safety and health rather than just collect tons of things that get stored or that we might have to delete or be worried about.

PM: Whoa. Eagle thing, cool 

PM: Very patriotic.

ZR: It's very something. 

[35:18] PM: Someone’s asked why we need location.

PM: Zandy just said it. We need location because right now it's restricted to the United States so we need the location to tell between the United States.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: But hopefully that should be broader in the future. Also, sometimes that data that we collect helps us fight spammers and bots so that's another reason you sort of have some of that. 

[35:43] ZR: WormPool, repeat question asker. “Would there be a way to directly donate occasionally, similar to AO3 or Wikipedia, rather than buy merch?” 

ZR: We have talked about this, yeah. I thought for a while we couldn't legally because we're not a non-profit but we can, legally. So that's an option that we may look into in the future.

PM: In the meantime though, like buy the no-ads upgrade, yeah. Probably a good one.

ZR: And you can, if you really like the ads, you can turn off the no-ads upgrade 

PM: Yeah. 

ZR: After you buy it.

PM: That's how much we believe in user control, you can buy the no-ads upgrade and then turn the ads back on. Or you could just turn Blaze post on, which I really like.  So I have the no ads upgrade but I actually turn ads on because I want to test them. *chuckles* Make sure they're good.

[36:36] ZR: Here's another one that's interesting. This is transientURL again “I've seen a lot of people worrying that, like Reddit, Tumblr has external investor pressure to monetize. Want to refute or talk about that?”

PM: Yeah, of course, we have investors. We’re a company and if we didn't have investors we wouldn't be able to spend 30 million a year *chuckles* on Tumblr. It's not just about the investors though. When we work on something we want to see the returns on it, and we want to make sure it's sustainable so that we can make sure that Tumblr’s around for many years to come. So, that's really our main focus.

[37:19] ZR: Mm-hmm. ShadowGirl7, this is one for our ads team “Can you please not have ads be super vibrant? It's really an eyesore for epileptics like me especially when there's no way to stop it” So take note, yeah. 

PM: And maybe buy the no-ads upgrade. *chuckles* Because then you won't see them at all.

ZR: Or ask someone to gift you. 

[37:40] PM: A lot of people are asking about multiple dashboards. And I do think account switching, which I guess would give you multiple dashboards, different following, being able to do actions with different accounts is definitely pretty high on my personal list for things I'd love to see Tumblr support. Pretty big feature, pretty complicated. But yeah. We just need to bite the elephant there. Was that a metaphor? Maybe I just made that up. 

ZR: I don't think you should bite an elephant.

PM: *laughs* Would they notice?

ZR: Probably not.

[38:13] ZR: Oh, FeetAreUnderrated asked, “How large is the Tumblr staff?”

ZR: We have nearly everybody here with us this week and we have 192 people here this week so it's about 200. That's it, yeah. 

PM: Yeah, that's a much better answer. I was going to say, you know, it ranges from extra small to extra extra large. 

ZR: *laughs* You literally posted, like, yesterday about how many people we have. 

PM: Yeah. Oh, that's true. Yeah, wow. Yeah, so I think we have 192 people here together in person, which is pretty exciting.  For 59 percent of the people that are here, they've never been to a large meet-up like this so it's our first time getting to see each other. 

For those who don't know, Automattic, which is the parent company of Tumblr, and Tumblr are fully distributed so people work from wherever they are in the world. And we mostly coordinate online. But getting together a few times a year is really key to sort of working, knowing each other better, developing our culture, making plans, learning from each other.

You can actually be hired at Automattic with never actually talking to someone. Actually who here was hired purely on text? *chuckles* Yeah, so that's a good chunk. It was like about a quarter of the audience was just chatting on text. 

ZR: Mm-hmm

PM: Which is pretty interesting and I actually did kind of the first thousand final interviews. We called them MattChats. But then we were hiring a lot of people and I became a *indistinct* so I had to stop doing that. 

Although, I had an idea the other day actually inspired by a donut shed I had for… missing the name but who was it? Well, he was telling me that, I guess he read about the MattChat and he was really disappointed he didn't get one. So I thought that for existing Automatticians we put up something in announcements. You could leave an emoji if you want to MattChat. *laughs* Don't worry, doesn't actually- *chuckles* You're already hired, so it doesn't change that. But I thought we could do two options. It could just be, like, more of a donut where we just hang out and, um. Or if you want a classic-style text one, I still have all the questions I ask and everything. I kind of had a little bit of a format. I would vary it but I had some sort of standard questions I like to ask people.

One of my favorites was ‘If you could require all of Automattic to read a single book what would that be?’ And they got so many different answers and I actually used it to read a bunch. So the books that people would recommend, I would often check out, and really led me down some really interesting things I never would have read otherwise. That's how I read the ‘Bhagavad Gita.’ There was a sort of an interpretation called ‘My Gita,’ which I really learned a lot from that. And, so yeah. It's been kind of a fun thing. It's always been on my to-do to, like, actually collate all the answers. There were some common ones. What was it ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ was a really common one. Who's that guy, the author? David Allen or something or- 

ZR: Yeah.

PM: Covey. Yeah, Stephen Covey.

[41:54] ZR: Here's a question. JasmineFlowers or maybe Yasmin Flowers “Are all of you new to Tumblr?” 

ZR: No. 

PM: No, I was actually a super early Tumblr user.

ZR: Yeah, we have a lot of people here in the audience, that you can't see, who have been users of Tumblr for as long as there's been a Tumblr. 

PM: Yeah. Can someone look up my user ID, actually? I'm kind of curious. David, of course, is user id1 *chuckles*

ZR: Right. 

PM: David Karp, the illustrious founder of Tumblr, yeah. 

*offscreen* Today it's five.

PM: My user number is five?

*indistinct, offscreen*

PM: Yeah, yeah, my WordPress user ID is five. 

ZR: That makes more sense. 

PM: I think Danica is number one. But yeah, look me up in the Tumblr panel. 

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: What was that? 

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: So I was the 2007th user of Tumblr. *chuckles*

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Oh year 2007. 72078. Yeah, so seventy-two thousand. Yeah, so one of the first that was definitely pretty early. Because Tumblr launched in 2007, right? Yeah. Actually, interesting fact. Tumblr used to have a blog on WordPress. Which I thought was pretty cool for its first X number of years. Even though Tumblr and WordPress used to be competitors, we always had a lot of respect for each other. I always took a lot of inspiration from Tumblr and I'm really glad to be able to work on it now.

[43:33] ZR: There's one addressed directly to you. UnadulteratedPenguinCreation says, “Hey Matt do you read fanfiction?”

PM: Oh no. Sorry. Sometimes, I've been linked things and I'll browse it and sometimes there's memes and I'm always trying to figure out what they are. You know I only get so much time to read books so I definitely have a pretty huge backlog. Right now I'm reading Alain de Botton’s uh ‘School of Life’ which is really nice. Probably next I'm gonna read the next book in the ‘Silo’ series, Hugh Howey’s. 

ZR: I read fanfiction, not that anyone asked me. 

PM: Any favorites? Anything you want to suggest? 

ZR: No. No, I'm not gonna suggest anything. That is for me, on my time 

[44:37] ZR: From Maiosx “What is the best blog on Tumblr?”

ZR: Oh, there's so many good ones. 

PM: I really like @everythingfox. 

ZR: Oh yeah, that's so cute. 

PM: Yeah, cute animals. 

ZR: Yep. 

PM: I don't know if it's the best one but yeah. I actually would love to have, like, folders or ways I could have different lists of things I follow because my feed is a little schizo. It definitely bounces around a lot and I do really appreciate some new features. Like, ‘Things You Might Have Missed’ or other things because I would find I would actually miss a post from my friends who might only post once every week or two or something and so I really appreciated that I-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Sorry, what was that? How much money am I willing to pay for not missing my-? Well, 30 million so far *laughs* per year. Paying a lot for it. *chuckles*

[45:33] ZR: We've been getting a question here that's surfaced “Can we talk about the reblog chain thing?” “Can the removal of reblog chains be an optional feature rather than a permanent one?” 

ZR: We made some changes to the reblog chain so that things were more consistent across all platforms and would work more like you would expect them to work. Unless you have used Tumblr for a really long time. So, everything we do is an experiment. We try things, we see how well they work, functionally, if people actually will use them. And then we make changes and adjustments and some you can see right away and some you can't see right away. Some we have to put on the shelf and revisit later, as other priorities come up. But any change that we make, I wouldn't consider 100 percent set in stone. Except that we are not getting rid of the chronological feed. As a reminder. 

PM: I'm gonna actually open Tumblr. I'm kind of curious what the banner looks like for this. Live with the Tumblr CEO, cool. Oh, joining stream. 

ZR: Uh-oh

PM: Inception

[47:03] ZR: LMFAO said, “Do you see streaming to become the main part of Tumblr going forward?”

ZR: I don't know, it's another experiment. If it was insanely popular and people were doing really cool things with it very consistently at a high quality, sure. But it doesn't have high usage right now so it's probably just gonna be something that we continue to play with and experiment with until it either clicks or we go a different way.

PM: By the way, I saw someone said I casually used a slur.  Was that schizo? 

ZR: Oh, I bet it was.

PM: I apologize, I mess up sometimes. So I won’t do that again. 

ZR: Thank you.

PM: Thank you for pointing that out to me.

[47:50] PM: “Are there any LGBT people or neurodivergent folks helping make decisions”

PM: Oh yeah *laughs* We have a ton.

ZR: Yeah.

[48:02] ZR: The-Trans-Fiendling. “Are you going to fix your algorithms so they don't disproportionately target trans users to flag them as mature?” 

ZR: We will check into it, make sure that isn’t happening. Or, if it is, that we’ll make changes.  We definitely do not want to marginalize trans people, push them off the site, make them feel like this is not the place for them. That's not what Tumblr is about so wherever we have screwed up we'll try to fix it and make sure that perception matches reality as well.

[48:50] PM: “It's basically a stockholder update, it's not going to be entertaining.” 

PM: Huh, that's funny.

[49:00] PM: So, I saw someone ask an interesting question. Sorry, I missed the username, but “How do we balance attracting new users versus supporting features that other social network sites support?”

PM: This is actually a really interesting product to design because I do think that there is an expectation. Like, obviously y’all probably also have or have used Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snap, all the other social networks. And I do think there is an expectation around certain things, like maybe messaging or following, liking, whatever that we need to support. Tumblr has always been sort of on the forefront of innovating, actually, for social networks. So a lot of things that we launched first are later adopted by other social networks. So, I think that's just kind of how technology works, right? Sometimes, we come up with a cool new idea and other people copy us. Sometimes, other people come up with cool ideas, and we can be inspired by that. Maybe we implement it like they did or maybe we riff on it and sort of do our own take on it. It's part of the fun.

[50:05] PM: “What's your favorite XKit feature?” 

PM:  Do we have April here, actually? 

*off-screen* No.

ZR: No. 

PM: No? Aw, she couldn’t make it. Yeah, April, one of the XKit-  there's multiple versions of XKit, right? Which one does she do? I forget the name but, yeah, actually one of the developers of XKit now works on Tumblr. So I think that's pretty cool.

[50:30] ZR: HomemadeMonsterPants, killing it. “What's the best method of sending feedback?” 

ZR: If you have an actual like you found a bug or something is broken, which is the same as a bug, uh send a ticket to Support. If there's things that you just want to give us feedback on you can ping our Work in Progress, WIP group. There's our Humans- @humans blog. You can send me stuff, you can send Matt stuff.  When I get stuff that's particularly hateful, I do ignore it. So, if you have a point you really want to make, try not to skew too heavily into how much you hate me personally, and then I'll try to address it publicly. 

PM: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, is that the saying?

ZR: That's- I don't know why you want to catch flies at all.

PM: “Can you remind us of your usernames?” Sure PhotoMatt P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T 

ZR: And I'm ZingRing, Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G

[51: 47] ZR: LiveThrowaway, “Have you considered improving the way you orient new users to Tumblr's unique features.” 

ZR: Yes, that's something we want to do. We want to keep what's special about Tumblr and what makes it so great, enhance those things. Which is not code for making Tumblr like every other social media site. Enhance those things, but also make it super easy and obvious for new users to get going really quickly with the communities that they care about and the content they care about.

[52:20] PM: Someone said why we're focusing on new users versus existing users? 

PM: We focus on both. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: Retention is just as important as new user acquisition. Anyone will tell you that.

ZR: Yeah. Yeah, we look at churn, we look at how many users are coming back, you know, at two days, three days, seven days, thirty days. We want the experience to be really good for both those groups, including the people who have been here with us since the very beginning. I don't think that improving things for new users is mutually exclusive. Like, we can make things good for existing users too, and improve that experience as well. Or give them more options to enjoy Tumblr the way that they would like to.

[53:07] PM: “…be a badge for people who've been here for a certain amount of time?” 

PM: Yeah, I think we'll definitely do badges for tenure. I think that's pretty cool.

ZR: Actually I think that's, well…

PM: What's that? 

ZR: More to come. 

PM: More to come, yeah. Excited for more badges, yeah.

[53:23] PM: “Are custom themes staying around?” 

PM: Yes, they are. Chronological feeds and custom themes are staying around. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. *chuckles*

[53:35] ZR: Karennnnn said, three, four Ns at the end of that “I would like to have music play in the background of my blog, kind of like Myspace.” 

ZR: Right on.

PM: You can do that on a custom theme, right? If you do some HTML, you could autoplay some music.

*offscreen* Yes

ZR: Yes. 

PM: Yeah.

[53:58] ZR: WolvesAndVisions, “Have you all considered going to conventions to advertise in the host booths?” 

ZR: We have.

PM: Yeah, weren’t we just-? Didn’t we do one?

ZR: We were just somewhere. We were at Vidcon. I think we’re going to ComicCon

PM: Ooh.

ZR: New York ComicCon, we'll be there. 

PM: Nice, I saw some thumbs up over there. Yeah.

ZR: Our amazing team. 

PM: You “would love to host a Tumblr con?” Cool, I'll go to it. 

ZR: Yeah, what's your address? *Laughter* We'll be right there.

PM: I do want to do more events in our office space in New York City. Yeah, try to host happy hours, Tumblr meet and greets. There's also a really cool coffee shop downstairs called Cafe Lyria and I think that I want to do some sort of integration with them. Or, like, if you've posted to your Tumblr the past day you get a 10 percent discount or something. 

[54:54] ZR: SpectralVulture asks “Where is the ball pit?” 

ZR: You can't see it, it's in a room just off stage that way. 

PM: Oh, really? It was on stage a minute ago. It's kind of small though. It was kind of a-

ZR: It was a nod. It's a nod to a ball pit. 

PM: It was a nod to the ball pit, yeah. I think Gary might be getting it. Someone maybe hold the door for him.

[55:18] ZR: Catboy-Dysphoria. “Are there any changes being considered for side blogs? Ideas for improving them or just changes.”

ZR: We know that side blogs and that whole experience is really uneven and not that great so that is something we would like to improve. Make them more like first-class citizens on the site rather than-

PM: You asked for it. Tada!

ZR: There it is. 

*Applause, laughter*

PM: That's a ball bucket. Yeah, it honestly is. Maybe I can juggle. 

ZR: This is making me very uncomfortable. 

PM: Not so much. Sorry, we're not real entertainers. We just make software. 

ZR: Yeah, we are not good at this. 

PM: We should also show them the Tumblr blankets. Can someone grab me one of those or hold it up? We have some super cool swag just for people who are here at the meet-up. They're out? There's some in here. But I don't wanna- then the balls might fall down. Anyone have a spare blanket on them? No. We'll get one. 

ZR: Oh there's some, if you look at the #staffcon2023 tag, some people have posted their blankets that they got here.  We're at time, but I want to do one more. 

PM: Sure, yeah, and then we'll wrap it up there. By the way, thank you everyone for joining. Oh gosh, I guess we're up to 765 now. Wow, so cool. 

[56:56] ZR: That is really cool. It's a streamer, Tumblr Live question from Tyote. Sorry if I'm saying it wrong. “Could it ever be possible for streamers to share one Tumblr Live instance to collaborate?”

ZR: Maybe not the way you're thinking. I'm not sure. We do have an option for two streamers to be on screen at the same time so that does exist. If that's what you're looking for, yes, we have that. And, if you're thinking of something else, then you might need to send in a more detailed request. 

PM: Cool, well thank you all. Also, thank you for all these gifts. 

ZR: Yeah, they’re very fun.

PM: Okay wow, UFOs now.

ZR: Yeah

PM: Was that a- wow! We just abducted a fox or something. 

ZR: More crabs. 

PM: *chuckles*

ZR: *gasps* Oh

PM: A turkey- 

ZR: That's dark. 

PM: -In the oven *laughs* I guess it’s escaping, yeah.

ZR: Yay, I like that one.

PM: Thank you all for joining. This was an experiment.

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: We might do it again, I don't know. We’ll see. We'll talk about it afterward. What do you all think? Should we do one of these again?

*applause*

ZR: Alright, sounds good.

PM: And also, we'll figure out how to record it so we can post it for people who couldn’t be here and other things that are-

ZR: Not in this country 

PM: Cool, yeah. Thank you all for using Tumblr. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for being passionate about it. Thank you for the feedback and we will do our darndest to make the best possible product for y'all. 

ZR: Yeah. Keep caring.

PM: Alright, bye-bye.

*applause*

#staffcon2023 #tumblr live q&a #live with the tumblr ceo #zingring #photomatt #staffcon #automattic #transcription #tumblr history #tumblr archive #tumblr live ceo q&a #signal boost #everythingfox #humans of tumblr #chronological #hellsite #tumblr related #creatr #crab day #xkit #wordpress #reddit migration #twitter migration #long post #links in post #tumblr staff #reblog chains #tumblr update #tumblr features #staff

[tmorganart]

The ZR-1 was too expensive to succeed — but too good to ignore  | Jason Cammisa Revelations | Ep. 16 [Image transcript:] Jason Cammisa sits beside a Corvette ZR-1 “Also, its radiator was angled back 15 degrees. This was good for cooling, but it helped the Corvette team reach another one of their targets, which was minimizing frontal cross-section... for radar. See, a typical car can be seen by a radar gun at 3,000 ft, but not the C4. Its body is made out of plastic, and the first thing the radar would encounter was the radiator. Angling the radiator backwards meant that a cop couldn’t see your feloniously-speeding ass in one of these until just 1,500 ft away. And that kind of design target is why American car companies RULE!” [End]

#cars #corvette #chevy #chevrolet #what is an american equivalent for the word madlads?

[gallifreystands]

Hi hello I’m reading Zombies, Run! fanfic (whats new this week 😂) and it’s been a good way of reminding myself what happened in seasons one and two, and early three. Because it’s been like what. Three years? Since I finished the core missions of season 2? So if I’m reading a fic I’ll pop over to the wiki and reread mission transcripts to refresh my memory? And 🥺 **ZR end of Season 2 and season 3 spoilers**

I’m rereading what happened in S3M5 Walk of Life. And I do remember running that one and crying my eyes out, like right before the pandemic started by actually. And as I’m rereading it I was struck by “My boys loved my banana pancakes. I remember them begging me to make them on school mornings. “Just one each! It’ll be quick!” They were weekend treats, I told them. And all the more special for that! Afterwards, I wish I’d made them every day. But you can’t go back.”

I started making weekend treat breakfasts early on during the pandemic and wasn’t sure where I picked up the habit. They’re not *just* for weekends if I have time during the week, but typically every Saturday and Sunday I’ll make a sweet breakfast as a treat. And it was definitely subconsciously because of this I guarantee you 😭 Fucking hell I did not expect to be crying over Sara Smith today and yet here we are 🙃

#zrs3 spoilers #zrs2 spoilers #zombies run #zr #sara smith #lmao I love how I dodn’t use this app really for like a year and have returned totally hyperfixated on zombies run #hope yall don’t mind #if you do you can blacklist zombies run tag!

[guinevere01]

from anothergoddamystery: i probably said that in a too-inflammatory way (bad habit) but yeah that info is from a live session with the tumblr employees

[37:19] ZR: Mm-hmm. ShadowGirl7, this is one for our ads team “Can you please not have ads be super vibrant? It's really an eyesore for epileptics like me especially when there's no way to stop it” So take note, yeah. 

PM: And maybe buy the no-ads upgrade. *chuckles* Because then you won't see them at all.

ZR: Or ask someone to gift you.

so it’s not Awful awful (maybe the ads team will work on it!) but. i dont like it. transcript excerpt taken from https://www.tumblr.com/xccentriktigress/723243214098841600/below-the-cut-is-a-clean-verbatim-transcript-of?source=share

Thank you!

#yeah that's still not great

[runbookzombie]

Zombies Run S3M27 Blue

I am in Seattle for work and I managed to run this mission after today's meeting. I have been so busy the last few days preparing for this trip. It's good to be back in Seattle, though. The last time I was here was in the early 00s.

Spoilers after the picture below:

This is an AI-generated image of a drunk-looking woman surrounded by blue flowers.

Are the blue flowers like zombie catnip?

It is so difficult to visualize ZR characters' conversations during a run. For instance, I only realized that Paula's demeanor was affected by the flowers after I read the transcript. I just thought she fell and hit her head or something.

I might have also missed the part where Dr. Lobatse explained the effects of the flowers. I also missed the hints that Paula and Sam were annoyed at Dr. Lobatse showing up to join the run.

Then Paula also made those comments about how Sam and Maxine are alike, and all the sweet talk about wolves, rubies, and open hearts. I am very confused and still trying to wrap my head around it.

I really need to pay more attention to the audio.

#zrs3 spoilers #paula cohen #sam yao #runner five #runner 5 #Doctor Lobatse #kefilwe lobatse

[kotegeqano]

Bel canto pre3 transfer manuel mode d'emploi

  BEL CANTO PRE3 TRANSFER MANUEL MODE D'EMPLOI >>DOWNLOAD vk.cc/c7jKeU

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                    samedi 24 avril 1926, La Presse est un grand quotidien montréalais publié depuis 1884. L'influence des journalistes de La Presse s'étend aujourd'hui au-delà du lectorat du journal et plusieurs d'entre eux sont invités à commenter l'actualité dans d'autres médias.Montréal :[La presse],1884-2017 Full text of "Le manuel des artistes et des amateurs, ou, Dictionnaire historique et mythologique des emblêmes, allégories, énigmes, devises, attributs & symboles, relativement au costûme, aux mœurs, aux usages & aux cérémonies : contenant tous les caractères distinctifs & l'explication de chaque sujèt naturel ou moral, sacré ou profane, historique ou fabuleux, dont on peut faire Due to a planned power outage on Friday, 1/14, between 8am-1pm PST, some services may be impacted. Toutes les entreprises du canton Vaud avec ROtriées par nom. Auprès d'un seul et même prestataire Grâce à monetas. Materia actuosa. Antiquité, Age classique, Lumières Mélanges en l'honneur d'Olivier Bloch Recueillis par Miguel Bemtez, Antony MeKenna, Gianni Paganini et Jean Salem. HONORÉ CHAMPION PARIS C H A M P IO N -V A R IA Collection dirigée p a r Jean Bessière 38. MATERIA ACTUOSA A N T IQ U IT É , Â G E C L A SSIQ U E , L U M IÈ R E S M ÉLANGES E N L'H O N N E U R D 'O L IV IE R B L O 805841 ano 491339 dia 315390 governo 315018 país 309352 vez 280214 presidente 268302 tempo 236445 parte 224982 pessoa 221560 empresa 211094 caso 198492 mês 185659 trabalho 185208 homem 182536 conto 181512 grupo 175696 forma 174017 milhão 171259 vida 170446 casa 162991 % 162903 problema 161678 ponto 161644 coisa 161246 cidade 156816 lado 155627 hora 146129 obra 145268 ministro 144852 D'aprs ces parallles, on peut donc essayer pour le punique bel le sens de demande , perception , qui s'accorde en dfinitive avec l'interprtation traditionnelle ( tarif )4. On remarquera en passant que dj Jean-Hoftijzer, DISO, p. 40, avaient postul la mme racine pour le b e a t [i] du Poenulus, v. 941 (contra, M. Sznycer, Les passages puniques en transcription latine dans le Poenulus de Plaute Due to a planned power outage on Friday, 1/14, between 8am-1pm PST, some services may be impacted. de P , xX . \ s Zr la e ' a Í que 9; en ^ et b l D le Ǘ à Ƥ des z y les ~ d C e K un "ڨ el , - v e o di du Nc se 1 - del Y los { ?

, , , , .

[planelong]

Keywe trophy guide

#Keywe trophy guide code

#Keywe trophy guide series

There is an online mode, though I did not try it out. I played the game locally with my wife for hours on end for review. Though the game is only two players there is a ton of fun to have. KeyWe exudes a fun-filled appeal for families. Within each level there are new objectives like popping bubble wrap, racing on top of a Cassowarie while delivering the mail, keeping the water level from rising with an octopus tank, and more. These games offer a departure from the main correspondence and shipping style main game. On top of the main levels, there are Overtime shift minigames you can take on. Each item helps you customize your Kiwis look from chef & top hats, aviator glasses, a snorkel, a snowman head, and more. Some items are hidden behind clear states of the various seasons: Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring or by finding hidden items within certain locations. You will need to play each level many times to gain enough stamps and unlock everything. Stamps can be turned in to customize your Kiwi with new facewear, hats, skis, backwear, and hairstyles. The higher your rating the more stamps you get. Each level has time to beat in a Bronze, Silver, and Gold rating. If you have ever played Overcooked, Tools Up!, or Moving Out you will be familiar with the gameplay hook of KeyWe. Depending on the level you are in, you may need to use all of the buttons which can be quite frantic when up against the timer.Ĭooperative games like KeyWe require communication and teamwork. Your main buttons of X, Y, and A allow you to peck, butt-slam, and jump respectively. ZR allows you to dash Jeff and Debra which can be helpful to move quickly around the level or jump with a dash to reach a far away platform. With ZL you can chirp your Kiwi which can be used to signal mail read to be sent, plead for Cassowaries to stop fighting, and play the Tuba in one of the levels. You control either Jeff or Debra with the left-control stick moving your bird around the level.

#Keywe trophy guide code

Each package has a place it needs to be delivered to requiring a four-digit code and either North or South designation. On the Shipping Floor, you will need to read a letter with clues on how an item should ship via Urgent, Heavy, Fragile, and Perishable stickers. The Transcription Room tasks you with sending letters by using ‘ransom note’ like pieces of the words together onto a notepad and placing them in a Cassowarie’s pack as mail. Variations on the map include overgrown vines and Kiwi-eating plants, a change of letters using code, and more. At the Telegraph Desk work together with your partner to type up messages using an elaborate keyboard machine. Upon taking on the job the postmaster general will assign you a variety of tasks from writing and sending letters, shipping packages, loading up crates, and more.Įach level in KeyWe has a different game mechanic to it. You play as either Jeff or Debra, two Kiwi birds replying to a job listing to work at the local post office. If you are looking for a creative game with a unique cast of characters, look no further than KeyWe. In this installment, we’re covering KeyWe by developer Stonewheat & Sons.

#Keywe trophy guide series

Welcome to EXPlay, (Explain & Play)the review series where we care not for scores but tell it how it is when it comes to every game we get our hands on, whilst also taking the time to include some lengthy gameplay, to give you the reader, the chance to shape your own impressions and views whilst watching and reading. By jonathanober EXPlay, KeyWe, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, review, Sold Out, Stonewheat & Sons

#Keywe trophy guide

[iklees]

The last Cato / Matilde Asensi

Diep onder het Vaticaan leidt Zr Ottavia Salina de paleografische afdeling van de Archieven. Als een geheim genootschap overal ter wereld relieken met stukken van het Ware Kruis steelt, moet zij samen met een archeoloog en een kapitein van de Zwitserse Garde een manuscript onderzoeken op mogelijke aanwijzingen. Het manuscript brengt ze op het spoor van een intitiatie-rite, waarvan ze hopen dat het hen uiteindelijk naar het hart van de sekte -- en de resten van het Ware Kruis -- zal voeren. De opdrachten die ze moeten voltooien zijn vereisen al hun inzet en uithoudingsvermogen, en onderweg wordt Ottavia ook gedwongen om na te denken over de keuzes in haar leven en de realiteit van haar afkomst.

“Utica! Cato of Utica!” I cried. “The old man is Cato of Utica!” “Finally! That was what I wanted you to figure out!” explained Glauser-Röist. “Cato of Utica, who is the namesake for the archimandrites of the Staurofilakes brotherhood, is the guardian of Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Don’t you think that means something? As you know, the Divine Comedy is composed of three parts: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each one was published separately. Observe the coincidences in the text by the last Cato and Dante’s text in Purgatory.” He turned pages back and forth, and searched my desk for the transcript of the last folio of the Iyasus Codex. “In line eighty-two, Virgil says to Cato, ‘Allow us to go through your seven realms,’ so that Dante should purge himself of the seven deadly sins, one in each circle or cornice of the mountain of Purgatory: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust,” he enumerated. Then he grabbed up the copy of the folio and read: “The expiation of the Seven Deadly Sins will take place in the seven cities that boast the terrible distinction of being known to practice them perversely: Rome, for its pride; Ravenna, for its envy; Jerusalem, for its wrath; Athens, for its sloth; Constantinople, for its greed; Alexandria for its gluttony; and Antioch, for its lust. In each of these cities, as if it were an earthly purgatory, they will suffer their faults in order to enter in the secret place we Staurofilakes will call the earthly paradise.”

Dan Brown-achtig, maar dan beter. En met een vrouw als verteller en in (één van) de hoofdrol(len). Bij dit soort boeken moet je zo nu en dan een oogje dichtknijpen met betrekking tot de logica, maar over het algemeen zit dit behoorlijk solide in elkaar. De ontknoping is ongebruikelijk, maar wel weer logisch. Blijkbaar is er een tweede deel verschenen, Cato's Return. Eens kijken of ik dat ergens kan vinden.

Maart 2023: Tweede deel ook gelezen!

#Matilde Asensi

[orderjackalope]

For fifteen years the United States Navy invested heavily in rigid airships… only to lose the majority of their fleet to tragic accidents. This week join us for the sad tales of the ZR-2, the USS Shenandoah, the USS Akron, and the USS Macon and learn why we can't have nice things.

Transcript, sources, links and more at https://order-of-the-jackalope.com/air-crash-museum/

Key sources for this episode include Thomas H. Flaherty's THE EPIC OF FLIGHT: THE GIANT AIRSHIPS; C.E. Rosendahl's UP SHIP!; and contemporary newspaper reports.

Presented by #13 (Dave White) Artist. Lover. Social Media Unfluencer. Acknowledged authority on lucrative bogs. Dave White is all this and more. But most days he's a web developer, graphic designer, and cartoonist. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, his two cats, and his crippling obsession with strange trivia.

Discord: https://discord.gg/Mbap3UQyCB Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/orderjackalope/ Instagram: https://instagram.com/orderjackalope Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/orderjackalope Tumblr: https://orderjackalope.tumblr.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/orderjackalope Email: [email protected]

Part of the That's Not Canon Productions podcast network.

#zeppelin #airship #USS Shenandoah #USS Macon #USS Akron #Youtube

[goodplace-janet]

question for the zrs9m13 transcript:

in clip 3, Peter’s trying to get Janine to talk about her feelings, and he says this:

PETER LYNNE: And um, Bakari might remind us of certain things, people. [Or nerves], maybe.

the bold part in brackets is what i’m hearing, but if anyone has an alternate suggestion, please let me know. i’m doubting myself because... this sentence doesn’t really make any sense to me? bakari might remind us of nerves?? or maybe we’re feeling nervous, is that what he’s trying to say? so idk. would appreciate some guidance. thanks so much in advance!!

#zrs9 spoilers #zr transcripts #talk tag #update: i'm gonna post it as is #if you have suggestions please let me know! #i'll correct it and credit you

[zrtranscripts]

Season 10, Mission 8: Jailhouse Rock

Prison Break

~

ERNIE VAN ARK: Careful, Ranger Five. Keep to the ruin of the church. That’s Valmont’s correctional facility ahead, a former resort on the island of Tabarca. It appears he’s swapped the swimming pool for a 20-foot perimeter wall with turrets every meter. The patrol of guard makes its changing shifts by the gate. I know it’s difficult being back near your kin. Janine is there, I’m sure of it. Getting her out won’t be easy, Five, but no matter what, remember, we’ll be there for you.

PETER LYNNE: Oh, for the love of – did you have to call this one Five? There’s plenty of numbers out there that aren’t dear and absent friends, you know.

ERNIE VAN ARK: Runner Five is heroic, efficient, devoted, brave. Who better as an icon for the escaped experiments of Red Scorpion Base?

PETER LYNNE: Brilliant! I’ve gone from Valmont’s drugged-up lab rat to joining his posse of lost toys! He’s going to find out I’m free any time now, Ranger. We have got to get Janine out before he does!

ERNIE VAN ARK: I wish we could be with you, Five, but only Valmont mechs can enter that building. I’m getting your shoulder cam live and clear. We’ll be monitoring from the boat. Funny... A prison of that size. What does Valmont need it for? He can’t have that many enemies he wants kept alive. Sorry. That’s him, I think. My other self.

PETER LYNNE: I’m telling you, Ranger, you ought to sleep with one eye open. One of these days you’re going to wake up to find he’s stripping you for parts! Oh, the shift change is done. The old patrol’s gone inside. The new one’s walking the perimeter.

ERNIE VAN ARK: They’re out of sight. See the gatehouse, Ranger? The bunker built into the wall with turrets either side? This is your chance to slip inside before that patrol comes back around. Quick march, like you belong. Fast as you can, Five. Go!

~

ERNIE VAN ARK: Gosh, those turrets bracketing the gatehouse door are big. There’s a scanner on the lefthand one, Five. Press your eye to it. The mechs here are old Model 4s. I used to see them on Red Scorpion. I’ve tweaked your transponder to match. You’re clear. You can get inside.

[door creaks]

PETER LYNNE: Not exactly plush, is it? Like a big, bare closet. Just a work station cycling images of the prison.

ERNIE VAN ARK: Not even any chairs for the rangers on duty! And Valmont let them get rusty, too. Barbaric. Better hurry, Five. There’s a guard watching the far monitor, but they haven’t noticed you yet. Plug the cable from your left forearm into the nearest console. The rangers here are networked with the prison. It was similar on Red Scorpion Base. I can use you as a relay to hack the system.

PETER LYNNE: The other mech’s looked your way. That’s a really big gun arm she’s raising. Ernie, hurry up!

ERNIE VAN ARK: Got it! I’ve sent a signal to all the guards, triggering their diagnostic protocols. They’ll be offline for a short while, cycling self checks. According to the database, DeLuca’s in cell 44 on the far side of the prison. Five, you can take the stairwell behind the gatehouse up. That was an extremely messy hack. The guards won’t be offline for long. And they’re going to be very, very angry when they wake up. Run!

~

PETER LYNNE: God, Valmont made this place a proper Cell Block H, didn’t he? And not even the Freak to liven things up. Corridor after corridor of cold, gray cells with murky portholes on the doors. I don’t see any prisoners so far, just lots of ugly stains. Ugh. I thought my prison was hell. This one might be even worse.

ERNIE VAN ARK: She wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. I put that tracker on the USB stick in Tunisia. I’m the one who got you captured. The old me didn’t make that choice. This was all my fault.

Peter, the others said... You know about guilt. Do you ever... see something beautiful, like a bird or a sunset or this island, and then worry that you maybe don’t deserve it because of what you’ve done?

PETER LYNNE: No. No. I told you in Murcia when you tried to toast those marshmallows. I am not playing therapist with the ghost of Ernest Van Ark! Christ, you were easier as an evil boss! There! That’s her, cell 44. Break the door down, Five, now! [metal slams] It’s... It’s just... An empty cell and a wire cot. [exhales] Ernie? She isn’t here.

ERNIE VAN ARK: Wait. Look. There’s a loose breeze block behind the cot. Five, see if you can pry it all the way out.

PETER LYNNE: A hidey-hole with a snapped off spoon inside. I can see there’s something carved into the stone in the hole. It’s a... is that a... [laughs] It’s a flow chart. A branch plan. Janine told me they help with organizing thoughts in times of extreme stress.

ERNIE VAN ARK: She’s noting the guard patterns, getting floor plans. She’s working out an escape. Oh, Peter, these branches all link to your name. She was planning to find you.

PETER LYNNE: Valmont was threatening to torture her already. If he caught her planning an escape...

ERNIE VAN ARK: She must be in serious trouble. Five, the interrogation wing is on the bottom level. Take the spiral stairs ahead down. There’s a warden’s office in that wing. It has line of sight to anywhere they might have taken her. Freezing the rangers may have bought her some reprieve, but they’ll probably blame her for us shutting time down. We’ve got to get her out of here. Hurry, Five!

~

PETER LYNNE: There, Five! The iron door at the bottom of the stairs, it’s marked Warden. Kick it down!

[door slams open]

ERNIE VAN ARK: Lots of monitors in there, showing all the interrogation rooms. Look for Janine, Five. Hold on. The way Sam used to describe Abel. That room looks like his comms shack, only filled with extra recording equipment. Are those film cameras?

PETER LYNNE: Yep. That room’s got a Maghreb flag pinned up. That one’s got the stars and stripes. They look like... film sets? What is Valmont doing here?

ERNIE VAN ARK: Five, something’s moving in the vent above you. Look out!

[JANINE DE LUCA shouts]

PETER LYNNE: It’s Janine! She just dropped out of the vent! Careful, Ranger, she’s on your back. Jenny, can you hear me?

JANINE DE LUCA: First sever the optic relays, then the cranial wires!

ERNIE VAN ARK: She’s ripping Five’s external cables out. Hold on, I’m routing us through Five’s speakers.

PETER LYNNE: Janine! Janine! It’s me, it’s Peter! It’s okay. The ranger is with me.

JANINE DE LUCA: Peter? No. Enough recordings, enough simulations, enough making me hear him in distress or Mr. Yao in fear. If you think feelings will stop me, you are very much mistaken!

PETER LYNNE: Janine, it’s me, it’s really, uh – Suffolk tequila! Remember? Number 77 on your bucket list, you wanted to be spontaneous with me! Spent two days planning it. We drank a bottle of tequila from the Suffolk enclave on your farmhouse roof. I sang Fernando! Badly! But we danced, and you fell and sprained your wrist. I don’t think Maxine believed it was a training exercise. It’s really me. I came to rescue you.

JANINE DE LUCA: Peter? No. You should not be on this island.

[alarm blares]

ERNIE VAN ARK: That sounds like a problem.

JANINE DE LUCA: Mr. Van Ark. I wouldn’t have expected you to be involved in this. The other rangers appear to be shut down. If this was your doing, it was very, very rash. Valmont boasted of the security here when I first arrived. If the guards are inactive for more than a short time, the prison will start a purge. All captives will be executed.

I spent months planning a covert escape by the vents, one that wouldn’t raise the alarm! When the rangers shut down, I was forced to expedite my exfiltration in a far from optimal way. We must evacuate the prison. I’m taking command of this rescue operation, effective immediately. Ranger, follow me. According to that screen, the other prisoners are in this wing. Open every cell door that we pass. There’s no time to lose. Down the corridor, past the guard stations. Move!

~

ERNIE VAN ARK: One more cell ahead, Five. From seeing their databases, the last with a prisoner inside. The rest are all trailing behind you and Janine.

[door slams open]

CAPTAIN : Qu’est-ce que c’est? Qu’est qu’il ce pass?

JANINE DE LUCA: It’s a prison break, Captain. Follow me. To freedom!

ERNIE VAN ARK: Wait a minute. I recognize that man. Captain Blaise [Canard, a French sailor who joined the Maghreb. He caused a lot of trouble for Red Scorpion Base before his ship went down. Some of these prisoners must be his crew.

JANINE DE LUCA: Valmont tried to force me to record tapes for Abel, implicating the Maghreb in my capture. I checked the warden’s office during my escape. He’s trying to do the same to other prisoners here, trying to make the Maghreb believe Abel is holding their sailors ransom. This is no mere prison. It’s a factory for disinformation and false flags!

[jingle over intercom]

PETER LYNNE: Oh, that sounds like a Valmont announcement.

BRENT VALMONT: Attention, prisoners! If you’re hearing this, my guards haven’t regained control in the allotted window. Janine, I bet it’s you, you scamp! Well, don’t worry. As the vet said to the vicar, I’ve got a fix for that. My techs developed a painless gas for quelling prison riots! This isn’t it. This one makes your lungs pop and your eardrums melt. Don’t worry, I’ll have your remains stuffed and sent to Peter. What an end for star-crossed lovers, eh? The exits are all sealed. Enjoy your tomb, Janine. It’s been a wheeze!

JANINE DE LUCA: Mr. Van Ark, gas is pouring from the air vents. We could use an exit plan!

ERNIE VAN ARK: I... I don’t know. I thought turning off the rangers was clever. If I had another week, I could have shut the whole system down, but we were in a hurry. I’ve done it again. I’ve doomed you all. I’m sorry.

PETER LYNNE: Ernie! Van Ark, you little megalomaniac, focus! You never felt guilt when you were killing millions. Why start now? They need ideas, not brooding. That’s my turf! What about Five’s arm cannon, is it powerful enough to break through the walls?

ERNIE VAN ARK: It isn’t. Unless... Peter, you’re a genius. The rangers are as deserving of rescue as anyone. The gas will kill them, too. But they might also be our only hope. Janine, Five, there’s a vehicle bay down the corridor. It has poorer ventilation, the gas will take a while to build there. Smash through the doors, Five, and try to hold your breath. Hurry, go!

~

JANINE DE LUCA: [coughs] Mr. Van Ark, we’ve reached the vehicle bay. The door’s sealed behind electrified shutters. The bay is empty save for many frozen guards.

ERNIE VAN ARK: The rangers are all networked, Five, remember? If you use your cable to plug into the nearest one, I can grant you admin privileges. I can route the network through you. You’ll have control of every ranger here, enough to shoot your way out. But the neural strain will be extreme. You won’t be able to take more than a few minutes, maybe not even that. Are you sure, Five?

JANINE DE LUCA: Under the circumstances, Mr. Van Ark, we have no alternative. Your ranger is plugging in.

ERNIE VAN ARK: I’m configuring the network, Five. Linking you to all the other mechs, waking them up, giving you control... now. [Ranger Five screams] Five? Are you all right? If you can still hear me, raise your right arm. It worked! All the mechs in the building are raising their arms! Five, if you can bear the strain, point your gun arm at the nearest wall. Let them follow suit, and fire!

[heavy gunfire]

PETER LYNNE: That did it! And the wall’s coming down. Roof’s starting to give out, too.

JANINE DE LUCA: Thank you, Ranger. Now lead the prisoners into the courtyard before the ceiling collapses. We must get clear of the gas. Through the wall, run!

~

ERNIE VAN ARK: You and Janine are almost across the prison courtyard, Five. Peter and I are waiting past the gates. I’m so sorry, I know this must be agonizing, but if you can manage one more volley, blast the outer wall down.

[heavy gunfire]

Five, thank God you made it out! I’ve set your network to shut down. The other rangers should be going back to sleep any second now. Oh gosh, you fused half your circuits. That gun arm won’t be firing anytime soon. Still, look at all these prisoners you’ve freed!

JANINE DE LUCA: Mr. Van Ark, that was quite the rescue plan.

PETER LYNNE: [clears throat] It, uh... wasn’t all him, you know. God. Jenny, come here.

JANINE DE LUCA: Peter, you’re shaking.

PETER LYNNE: Oh, that’s just some uh, drug withdrawal and a spot of joy. I, um... I didn’t think I would see you again.

JANINE DE LUCA: I had no intention, Peter, of letting that be true. You and Mr. Van Ark are a surprisingly effective team.

ERNIE VAN ARK: We’ve had our ups and downs, but I suppose we’re both immortal. We’ve got eternity to work on it.

PETER LYNNE: Under absolutely no circumstances! He’s been worse than torture, Jenny, really.

ERNIE VAN ARK: Janine, it’s my fault you were captured. I promise, I will make up for it. I only wish we’d got more of the rangers out, but at least we’ve rescued most. If I study their software, I think I can work out a shutdown hack that accounts for Valmont traps. And there’s a yacht beached along the shore we can use to send the prisoners home. Now you’re free. If anyone can give us an edge against Valmont, it’s you.

PETER LYNNE: After we get some rest somewhere far from that cell.

JANINE DE LUCA: Alas, that’s not an option, Peter. Valmont chose to gas his captives rather than use explosives. He likely means to count the bodies. When he finds I’m missing...

ERNIE VAN ARK: He’ll know to raise his game.

JANINE DE LUCA: Indeed. Whatever his plans, whatever he was using his prisoners to distract from, our escape only invites an escalation. We must seek to counter him. Whatever friends we have in danger, wherever Valmont has his sights, I fear things for everyone are about to get much worse.

~

#zombies run #zrs10 #s10m8 #jailhouse rock #zr transcript #zrs10 spoilers

[wubbelwubbwubb]

S2M33 | Athena - 5s Odyssey

SAM YAO: What’s that music, Five? Did you uh, steal a boombox from Van Ark? Does Van Ark own a boombox?

MAXINE MYERS: It’s coming from over there. See that island in the center of the lake? Yeah, it looks like there’s a fire burning. I think… I think someone’s having a party!

JANINE DE LUCA: In the middle of a zombie apocalypse?

SAM YAO: What better time?

#zombies run #runner five #runner 5 #abel township #zr #i know thats technically more a funny mission #but that part has creepy potential #also am I the only one that absolutely loves this mission? #i didn't read the title and was so slow to notice that it was about the literal odyssey #van ark owns a boombox I am sure of it #he probably plays the imperial march for himself #also a big thank you to zr transcripts #zr s3m33 #myzrart

[mrs-elijah-wood]

Zombies, Run! Aesthetic | Sara Smith

“That's the thing, Five. If you have a goal, and you really want it, you have to be prepared to do the thing that no one else will do. You have to take more trouble than anyone else would think possible.”

#zombies run #zr #sara smith #runner 8 #zr aesthetic #when i tell y’all i got REAL emo going through transcripts to find a good quote 😭😭

[enbeast]

hey yall I noticed that there don't appear to be any transcripts for A Study In Ichor, so I figured I'd type some up, please note I am literally just going off the audio and I might get some stuff wrong.

mission 1

:readmore:

CLIP ONE

Workhouse Owner (WO): RUN FASTER, WORKER FIVE, THAT TREADMILL WON'T TURN ITSELF. As you can see, Master Yao, our workhouse not only provides food and shelter for three hundred inmates but makes a healthy profit too. For example, Worker Five has been running on one of Cubbad's “treadmills” for a mere twelve hours today and has already milled five hundred pounds of flour. Got the odd nail in it but it's good enough for the Rutherhive slums [laughs]

Sam Yao (SY): Twelve hours? Without a break?

WO: The alternative of life on the streets is an excellent motivator. And with your investment we will be able to build even more machinery, maybe even increase rations to three bowls of gruel a day.

SY: I want to use my inheritance for good, and if I'm honest, I have some concerns about your worker's wellbeing.

WO: Oooh I seee~ Yes, I suppose it is rather fashionable nowadays to worry about unfortunates, but I assure you Master Yao, once you've had to make your way in the world, like myself or your uncle, a fine man, you'll learn that revenue is the important thing, not how it's made.

(note, as Sam talks there approaching footsteps)

SY: Surely, there's a way to- OW!

WO: YOU THERE, IN THE CAP, watch where you're going, you just ran into a potential investor. Where's your worker number?

Pick pocket (PP): (in a stilted cockney accent) Sorry, Guv'ner.

SY: No, no, it's fine, I was in the way.

WO: It is not fine. Young lady, break time isn't for another three hours. Get back to work. (retreating footsteps from PP) I'm dreadfully sorry, Master Yao, this workhouse is full of ingrates.

SY: My watch! It's gone, the chain's been snapped...

WO: That worker stole it, she's a pickpocket! Worker Five get off that treadmill and chase after her DON'T COME BACK WITHOUT THAT WATCH!

SY: Uh, I'll come with you, Worker Five, I don't want to make a fuss, but that watch is important to me. Come on, let's run.

CLIP TWO:

SY: Hey, mind your step, Worker Five, I've heard about this, rows of people crushing animal bones to make fertiliser. Ugh, the smell is awful. Pickpocket just ran out into the street, we've got to follow her! Five, I hope you don't mind if I call you Five, through that door! (sound of door opening) There! I see her, she's heading towards the Temm's tunnel, it goes under the river from here to Whopee, an engineering marvel- a-apparently, my uncle's an engineer, he's building an underground railway. I try to keep up with the industry but... It doesn't come naturally... I mean, I-I know the tunnel was built using Bruno Cockren's tunnelling shield but I still barely understand what that even is, I don't ac-ARGH! Oh! (gasping) Five! If you hadn't pulled me aside that horse and cart would have run me over! Ugh, I-I'm sorry, I should have been paying attention, but well I-I don't often get to talk to anyone who isn't my uncle, or someone who's interested in my inheritance... Not that I need all that money, of course. I just want to be sure it's going to help people, it's what my parents would have wanted. That's why the watch is so important to me, it was the last thing they ever gave me before they died. Reminds me of what's important. If, if it was any other watch, I'd... just have let that pickpocket keep it, I'm sure she needs it more than I do... Ah, she's just hopped the barrier at the Temm's tunnel, it's in that round red brick building the entrance shaft is underneath, come on, Five, let's experience this engineering marvel first-hand, quickly, before we lose her!

CLIP THREE

SY: Ah, this tunnel is incredible, can you believe we're RUNNING under the Temms, makes me feel a bit funny... Mind you, we're here now that it's safe, uh, some of the people that built it died in the flood... Oh! Maybe I should spend my inheritance on something that'll make projects like this safer for workers, what do you reckon Five? Oh, Oh no... The pickpocket's already climbing the stairs! Ah- she's getting away! (panting) Whopping's all alleys, if she slips down a back street, we'll never find her! Up the stairs! Run!

CLIP FOUR

SY: (panting) And we're out of the tunnel, the pickpocket just ducked down that alley, after her. (Running sounds) Uh, we've got you cornered, now please. Give me my watch back.

Amelia Spens, formerly known as the Pickpocket (AS): Oh, I don't think so. Lads! (sounds of several sets of footsteps closing in) You're surrounded.

SY: Five, it's a gang of pickpockets.

AS: I'd have been happy with just the watch, but since you followed me, allow me to introduce the Abel Street Gang, they're all over the rooftops and they've all got knives.

SY: Please, don't hurt us, Five here has nothing to do with this!

AS: There'll be no need for bloodshed as long as you both give me all the money you're carrying.

SY: Five doesn't have anything, but, uh, (mumbling, followed by the sound of a heavy bag of coins hitting the ground) That's all of mine.

AS: W-he-hell, aren't we the wealthy one.

SY: I-I've got more! Lots more! And I'll give it to you, I promise, just please return the watch. It's my most treasured possession.

AS: I see! Not an especially experienced negotiator, are you. Hmm, let's take a look at this watch, see what's so special about it. Hmm, pearl face, silver plating, and... an engraving...

SY: It's uh... it's Chinese, those are my parent's names, and that's mine. Sam Yao.

AS: Y-you're not even going to try and make up an identity? What- (laughing) You're lucky I'm just a pickpocket and not someone REALLY nefarious, I- Helloo, what's this? (music starts playing)

SY: There's a tiny music box behind the face, that melody was special to them.

AS: Ooh, a bit twee if you ask me.

SY: So you'll give it back?

AS: I might have sold it back to you for a few sovereigns before you told me who you were, but as my luck would have it there just happens to be something that only you can do for me, Sam Yao. Your uncle's digging a railway underneath London, isn't he?

SY: H-how did you know that?

AS: I read the Society Pages, in my line of work one needs to know who's on course to inherit what fortune, and which Saloons they're likely to fall out of after one too many brandies.

SY: My fortunes from my parents, not my uncle.

AS: Yes, but you're his ward, or at least you were until you came of age recently, correct?

SY: Yes.

AS: There's something I want to show you. Follow me and keep up the pace. There are far more unsavoury types than me in Whopping and they'll take more than your watch. Run!

CLIP FIVE

SY: What's your name?

AS: I'm not telling you my real one, but you can call me Amelia.

SY: Uh, if you don't mind me saying, Amelia, you're quite well spoken for a pickpocket.

AS: Well, even an educated woman is not replete with options in this day and age. We might have a woman on the throne but I had to choose between penury, marriage to a seventy year old rector, or this.

SY: Well, it's not easy for me either, I'm lucky I have money because, well, being Chinese, people have misconceptions.

AS: Yes, you really should choose your friends wisely. Down this side street.

SY: Ugh, Mm. What IS that smell?

AS: Cover your mouths with your handkerchiefs, both of you.

SY: It's alright, Five, you can use mine.

AS: The smell is coming from that huge pipe, you see the emblem embossed on it?

SY: Ah! It's from my uncle's engineering company!

AS: That's right. The pipe is a ventilation shaft from his railway tunnel, now let's get away from it so we can breathe.

SY: (Gasping) Whoah, Oh that's better. What is going on down there?

AS: That's what I want you to find out.

WO (distant): MASTER YAO! WORKER FIVE!

SY: Ugh, it's the workhouse owner.

WO: (approaching footsteps) (panting) Master Yao, I followed you all the way from Rutherhive, one of my workers told me this woman is actually part of the Abel Street Gang! She only came to the workhouse to target you.

AS: This worker, was he a handsome fellow? Smarmy grin?

WO: That's right!

AS: Brent. (Sigh) That'll teach me to use former paramours as spies. Fine. (gun clicking) Hands up!

SY: Amelia! Don't shoot him!

AS: I'm not not aiming it at him, Sam, I'm aiming it at you.

WO: Steady on!

AS: Mr Workhouse Owner, unless you want future investors to know you got this one killed, I'd advise you to stop following us. Sam, Five, come with me or I'll shoot you both. Run!

CLIP SIX

AS: We lost the Workhouse owner, time to put this away (clicking sound)

SY: We would have come with you, Amelia, there was no need for the gun!

AS: Don't tell me how to take a hostage. Now listen carefully, for reasons that elude me, not everyone who falls on hard times opts for criminality, some people would honestly rather perform manual labour, and your uncle happens to be a proliferate employer of such eccentrics. I wouldn't care, except that many of his employees have family in the Abel Street Gang.

SY: I can ask my uncle to pay them more. But... He doesn't really listen to me. I'm Rather naive, apparently.

AS: Well, fortunately I have no need of your dreadful negotiating skills, I need you to solve an even stickier problem. Several of your uncle's workers have gone missing. Even though I've repeatedly explained to my gang that it's a waste of time caring about anything besides one's self, they're refusing to work until they learn what's happened to their loved ones. It's hurting my bottom line.

SY: That's awful... For the workers.

AS: Ahh, they're probably dead. If WE can barely breathe the noxious fumes near the ventilation shafts, what do you think it's like underground?

SY: I can't imagine! Those poor people... I'll stop what's happening, I promise, even if I have to spend every last penny of my inheritance.

AS: Do that and I'll give you your watch back.

SY: It's a deal.

AS: Mm, my favourite words. Righto, well, if that's settled then I'm off. There's a debutante ball this evening and I need to be in good time if I'm going to harvest some pearls. (retreating footsteps)

SY: There she goes. Look, Five, ah, I feel a bit awkward asking you this, but, would you maybe consider working with me? You were quick out there, really impressive, I've just moved into a house by myself and I could do with a hand. I promise it'll be a lot easier than the workhouse. I know it's been a funny old day, but for me it's actually been nice having someone to talk to. Talk at. Sorry, I know I go on a bit. But if you want to let's shake on it. You did save my life. Great! Now, I'm starving, how about some steak and oyster pie? Maybe we'll come up with some ideas about what happened to those missing workers over dinner., then tomorrow, we'll visit my uncle. Lord Earnest Van Ark.

#A study in ichor #ASII #zr #s2s #master yao #sam yao #worker five #amelia spens #transcript #ASII M1

[pldubrahs]

“That’s how I grew up thinking, too. Good people and bad people. You know what good people get? ... They get to die and get their eternal reward. That’s how I can tell I’m definitely not one yet.” peter lynne on GOD we gonna get you some self esteem and therapy

#*writes a modern au just so peter can go to therapy and overcome years of abuse* #writing zr fic means going through transcripts which means crying about peter and im sorry about that #zrs7 spoilers #zombies run #lydia talks about stuff #peter lynne