Arctic Light

Reading Tumblr's post on upcoming changes (kinda long and very vague in specifics, there's a reblog addition in which they claim nothing is changing in the core product but WE'LL SEE) made me think about changes to the general style of social media over the last decade or so, especially this part:

The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience.

[...] Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content.

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content.

I hadn't really thought about this before, but the whole experience of looking for things used to be the basic experience of getting on a new social media platform. You have to go find stuff - accounts to follow, tags to search. Ideally you can search without an account and just read the content on the site for a while before you get on, and you can spend lots of time lurking and searching before you join in, but *you* fill up your feed with the things that you want to see.

But this trend toward having the social media platform itself fill your feed/timeline/reading page with a ton of content it thinks you want rather than leaving it up to you to find things on your own is just ... I feel like it's actively antithetical to the social media experience I want to have. And it's recent, not the suggesting stuff per se (lots of sites do this in a sidebar, all the way back to the mid-2000s or earlier for places like Yahoo News) but the expectation that what's going to happen when you go on a social media site, you'll have a cascade of random crap thrown at you - that's new, it didn't used to be like that, it's completely ridiculous to say that it's the only experience users want when it's literally only the last few years that any site has done that.

In Tumblr's specific case, if they want to show off the contents of the site to new users, maybe they could try focusing on building a search function that isn't total donkey crap.

(This is more like musing and gripey nitpicking rather than me being hugely annoyed at any of this, but it's fascinating how the above quotes, and some other parts of the linked post, made me consider how there's been this general turnaround from having a slow ramping up on a new social media, where you start out with a somewhat barren experience and spend some time having to seek out content to engage with, vs having it firehosed at you - it's *new*, it's not inevitable, and I don't even think it's inevitable that every new content platform is going to be like that; there's still plenty of interest in Medium-style, Reddit-style websites, where there might be a What's New section or suggestions offered to you, but mostly you go there because you want to see specific things and have at least a minimal, Google-assisted-if-necessary ability to search for them.)

(I also just kind of resent the above-quoted bit where "curating your experience" is equated to "picking blogs you want to follow" - because *that's not how that's used,* it refers more specifically to blocking blogs, muting tags, and generally cherry-picking from the available content on your dash for a better experience, not the basic underlying mechanism that you choose what blogs you want to follow vs having the site pick for you.)

Baby's first gifset.

I finally broke down and paid for a year's subscription to the full version of Photoshop. Ever since I upgraded to a new computer that can't run my old CS2, I've been getting by with Elements, but I'm doing more covers and other pro stuff now that needs the full-featured program. So naturally I'm using it in a responsible, professional kind of way ... to make animated gifs of television characters.

I'm pretty happy with how it came out, although I should have cropped the third one so you can see more of Jack's hand. That one was the first gif in the set that I made, though, and I did a ton of editing to it, so I don't think it bothers me enough to start over from scratch making a new one. (Foolishly, I didn't save any of the intermediate, pre-cropping stages.)

One thing I've noticed making Agent Carter vids, and it's also true of gifs, is that the first season is so desaturated compared to the second season, almost sepia-toned. You have to really lighten and saturate it to get it to match ...

.... so I went and signed up for mcu_aufest (with utter predictability in which characters/pairings I asked for). I have mostly managed to talk myself out of signing up for Not Prime Time, mainly because of difficulty in coming up with a third fandom that I'm really enthusiastic about; Agent Carter and White Collar are easy, but there isn't really anything else I'm that into right now. Also, let's face it, after a couple years of not signing up for anything, I am going to regret it if I end up overloading myself.

On a random side note about Agent Carter fandom, it has been really an interesting experience to FINALLY get into a fandom that has an active and chatty fanbase on tumblr. Suddenly I understand what people actually get out of doing fandom on tumblr (beyond lurking and looking at shiny pictures), because if there are other people who are into the same thing and actively monitor the tags and talk back to text/meta posts, it's a whole new experience! It's the first time since I got on tumblr that I've actually started to feel like I'm getting to know people a little bit over there, and feel an actual sense of community. The chat feature definitely helps. But also, when I post a fic announcement on tumblr, I usually get at least a few comments over there; when I say something about the show, people talk back.

The size of the fandom probably makes a difference; it's at that sweet spot where it isn't so huge that the amount of content in the tags is overwhelming, but it's not so small that there's just nothing. And it helps to have a few chatty people who talk back and forth with each other a lot. I get the impression that Rivers of London fandom on tumblr is similar: not too big, not too small, with a few chatty people, and therefore an overall welcoming and socially active vibe.

Okay, let me get this straight. When I schedule a post on Tumblr for 8 a.m. Alaska time, it fails to pick up the correct time zone for the blog and posts at 8 a.m. Eastern time ... which is 4 a.m. here. But when I try to compensate for that (apparent) bug by setting it to post at noon local time ... it goes ahead and uses the correct time formatting, and therefore doesn't post early like I wanted it to.

TUMBLR WHY ARE YOU EVEN A THING.

(In heavily related news, Kismet's Tumblr site is live and updating now!)

ETA: Orrrrr ... it could be that I hadn't set the time zone on that blog yet. >_> (But I did have the timezone-glitch thing happen several times with scheduled posts on the kismetcity blog, and I DID check the timezone settings there! Fingers crossed that it's just some weirdness in that one blog, and everything works correctly now ...)

BECAUSE CLEARLY ANOTHER ONE IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEED.

http://sholiofic.tumblr.com/

This one is just for fanfic announcements and fic exchanges, though. Mostly I created it because apparently now Tumblr-based fic exchanges are a thing, and I don't want to keep using my real-name tumblr to sign up for fannish things. Everything that normally lives at my regular tumblr will continue to live there.

*back to the word mines*

Since I still want to keep my tumblr at least mostly fandom-free (notwithstanding the Iron Man 3 explosion last spring, which we will not talk about XD) I decided to break down and create a fannish tumblr. "Sholio" was inexplicably taken, therefore it's http://alltheirfaces.tumblr.com/, and will probably be mostly (but not exclusively) White Collar, at least until something new comes along.

It's a subsidiary tumblr off my main "laylainalaska" one, which means I can't follow people on it -- which is probably just as well.

*attempts to pull self out of the tumblr quicksand*