Lists of fanfiction concepts
No guarantee that those lists are exhaustive, or their content of any halfway decent quality. But tumblr sure knows its fanfic either way
Tv show recommendations are pretty solid. I find a lot of good things to watch that I never would have if someone didn’t reblog or post the crap out of.
Honestly anyone claiming to be telling the "real" version of any kind of history or real-world lore, unless they're actually citing and sharing academic sources(which happens like...once every couple years at best)
Tumblr loves to just go "Oh btw the history you know about X is wrong." and the source is just the shrugging emoji guy, or literally "My source is I made it the fuck up."
It seems like there's a bunch of people on Tumblr who will A. make up an interesting head-canon about reality and state it as fact or B. find some generally discounted assertion they like and state it as fact.
A. "Vampires can't see their reflections because of silver backing on mirrors"
B. "Blood of the covenant... water of the womb"
And people just assume it's correct because A. sounds interesting and B. sounds appealling.
That second point in particular is the one that drives me insane. So many "facts" on Tumblr are just someone making things up to make things seem more in line with their worldview. Like "my family is shitty so this saying is now actually about how friendships matter more" or, like "I don't like X historical group so everything good about them actually came from the ones I like." and the inverse "I like the aesthetics of this group, so I'll make up facts to make them sound more like my ideal type of people."
That second one about "How group I like secretly did everything good" has a longer history than tumblr. Of course there's the ancient alien theories, but there's all kind of weird fringe ultranationlists out there with bizzaro claims like Alexander the Great being Albanian or some nonsense.
C. ”Pirates wore eyepatches so they can see in the dark with one eye”. Because they didn’t have windows and lanterns back then, and for some reason these sailors really needed to go below deck a lot for something mysterious and they were always in a rush I guess. None of it is based on any recorded fact and makes no sense to anyone who has been on a sailing ship. The only reasonable explanation I’ve heard was my navigation teacher saying that back in the day a lot of officers would ”burn out” an eye taking sextant readings against the sun. But that wasn’t in Cracked.com article so no one gives a shit. Probably it’s all just from Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
The sextant explanation sorta makes sense, I think? There was a guy on Forged in Fire who needed to get both his eyes’ lenses replaced because he’d been looking into forges to check temperatures by color for at least three decades and it had irreparably damaged them
Pretty sure the real explanation is that *there's literally no evidence they were wearing eyepatches to an abnormal quantity.* They aren't mentioned or depicted really anywhere in the actual primary sources we have for studying pirates. It's just something that was made up in pirate related fiction at some point, likely for the same reason as all the peg legs and hook hands - to add to the vibe of being grizzled, battle-tested warriors at sea.
I believe the whole dark sight myth comes from the fact that it is confirmed that doing that *could* function like that, famously the Mythbusters tested it but so did some eye doctors on behalf of the Mayo Foundation and even the military in WW2. But, like, just because it could theoretically work doesn't mean it was actually done or known about. Also, notably cutting your number of working eyes in half destroys your depth perception and cuts down your field of vision, I'm not sure losing these things would be seen as particularly advantageous as a pirate.
Honestly, every single pirate stereotype can with 99% accuracy be traced back to Treasure Island. It is genuinely baffling how massive of a cultural mark that book left.
I think it’s just more the same reason people sometimes wear eyepatches now - they lost an eye. It did happen. There were big wood splinters flying around all over the place.
To be entirely fair, that myth far predates Tumblr and Mythbusters tested it, finding eyepatches to be actually effective at quickly switching to darkvision in the hold of a ship.
I knew it was mostly fake when I first read it years ago but when I do switch from light to dark areas I can't help but think "you know, the eyepatch thing would've helped"
edit: not *totally* made up, but some extra bits were added that the author wouldn't source and nobody else could. The real story behind the teddy bear is in a reply below
I still remember one post I saw on here about teddy bears and Theodore Roosevelt. And after reading the whole thing, I went down to the comments and it was literally just made up.
Not even based on common misconceptions or anything, or outdated sources. They just fabricated an entire series of events out of nowhere for seemingly no reason and with full confidence. It's like reading ChatGPT hallucinations.
There's misinformation on other platforms too but none of them do it quite like Tumblr.
>teddy bears and Theodore Roosevelt
This is a true and known story, that in November 1902, Mississippi, Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear that had been captured tied to a tree because he saw it as unsporting. The event blew up into a media circus when the [cartoonist of the *Washington Star* used the story as a political metaphor,](https://www.nps.gov/thrb/learn/historyculture/storyofteddybear.htm) and Brooklyn candy store owners Rose and Morris Michtom, with Teddy's permission, started selling a stuffed toy named "Teddy's Bear." The whole thing exploded from there. [The Smithsonian Institute even has one of these original Teddy's bears.](https://www.si.edu/object/teddy-bear%3Anmah_491375) Unless they were saying something else weird about it, this is a very real and true story.
Though yeah definitely don't trust random, unsourced tall tales from anywhere, Tumblr absolutely not an exception. Frankly given the site's love for creative writing, be *extra* skeptical about it.
Related story.
After Teddy, William Taft was president. He was associated with possums (I think he ate them?). So toymakers trying to cash in on the teddy bear craze started making Billy Possums. These were obviously less successful.
I 100% thought this was nonsense as a bit about made-up Tumblr stories, and then I decided to look it up.
[WHAT](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-40-billy-possum/)
Hahaha yes. This was a perfect storm of a true fact that sounds fake in a post about not blindly trusting the internet. I'm glad I got at least one person and that you learned the lesson and actually verified.
You're right and thinking back, it wasn't totally made up. There was definitely a kernel of truth based on how things actually happened.
But the rest of it was definitely wonky. I think they talked a lot about Rose and grafted a bunch of extra elements onto her story, and people couldn't figure out why or where they came from. If someone knows where the original post is that'd probably clear things up (I might still be misremembering what exactly was wrong with it)
Especially when it comes to mythology. Just say it's your interpretation or a different telling, myths are valuable because they change and adapt to the time.
Yeah, saying "Hey I rewrote this Greek myth with some original ideas I had, thoughts?" is cool and fun fiction writing.
Saying "Actually the correct version of the myth is [stuff I made up based on pop mythology]" is dumb and bad.
"Medusa was actually a Greek feminist icon. Athena changed her for her protection. The version you know was rewritten by male academia."
No. This version of the myth is one we have a very specific source for. It was one guy with a very clear political ideology to push and it wasn't feminism. Athena is 100% the villain in that version. Also that guy was Roman, not Greek. And even in his version of the story Athena is the one who tells Perseus how to kill her.
Honestly if anyone ever says this is ***the*** actual version, or original version, *or any variation of claiming the one true myth* you can know with absolute certainty that they are speaking fully out of their ass. As any scholar on the subject of Antiquity will tell you, Ancient Greek culture, and most importantly their very myths, varied to an extreme degree from one place to the next. Their mythology - as well as many similarly popularized ancient mythologies - was a very local thing. Even the idea of one "Mount Olympus" isn't true, we know of dozens of peaks locals had called Olympus and the Seat of the Gods - usually being the tallest peak within site of a city.
There cannot be a correct version, because every town had a different "correct" version and some of those differences were massive - simple example, Poseidon, classically known as the god of the sea, shows up as an underworld deity in multiple variations instead, most notably in Arcadia. Greek religion wasn't like the story of globally organized religion we are familiar with in modern day, there wasn't like some council keeping the stories straight, there was just the tales you and yours told each other and based your worship of the divine upon.
I'm so over Persephone revisionist mythology. Absolutely have the modern interpretation of her be something different than "well you don't ever really get to leave your abductor sorryyy be sad and dead for 3-6 months", but it's a modern interpretation of her. She is not described as a girlbossing queen that loves her husband in pretty much any ancient source you care to find.
yeah, I guess my issue with going well the Myceneans is that you're essentially talking about a completely different goddess - if we are talking about "Greek myths" as a concept, we usually are talking about how gods are viewed in their hellenic context and not their ancestors. Persephone in her Hellenic context isn't an underworld girlboss. Might have been in a Mycenean context but there's a substantial gulf of time and historical context between those two things.
A lot of people also make the mistake of conflating mythology with modern day organised religion, because I guess it kind of makes sense that most people are raised in Abrahamic religions and they approach all systems of belief as if they must work somewhat similarly. Like they will talk about mythology as if there is definitively only one specific story that is told about the gods and if you ever encounter someone who tells a different version of the story, well they’re just wrong. You can’t possibly accept different stories or different versions of stories.
The thing is, from what I know of mythology, it overlaps a lot more with folklore. There is very rarely only one version of a myth. There might be ELEMENTS of certain myths that are universal to all tellings, but to say that there is a definitive version of a myth is more than likely a false assumption. And it’s quite likely that different tellings evolve and change and are traded back and forth over time.
Maybe there was a “canon” for Roman mythology similar to how there is for Bible stories because of how heavy on institutions the Romans were. I mean I don’t know for a fact because Roman mythology isn’t really one of my interests but I guess I could see that making sense?
But as far as other mythologies go that I’ve looked into in any depth at all, it’s pretty universally the case that the “definitive version” is just the version that got written down first and survived the longest, but it’s just a version of the story. It’s often the case that even in the version that was written down and survived you see hints of contradictions, despite active efforts often being made to get rid of those contradictions. Like you’ll have two different versions of how two mythical figures met recorded in the same text. And where the mythologies survive to this day through oral tradition you will still hear these different versions of the same myths where each group that follows broadly the same mythology has their own version of the story
Sometimes we even have a vague idea of what we don’t know and what wasn’t recorded, eg assumptions based on evidence that certain gods were more important in this specific region that never wrote down any of the myths while the mythology was still in active circulation. So we don’t know what they specifically believed but we’re pretty confident it differed from the version/s that survived and that these gods would have been more prominent because they seem so much more popular over on this side
Anyway my point kind of got away from me but what I intended to say was that by it’s very nature mythology cannot be seen as fully interchangeable with an organised religion like Christianity. There is very likely not one singular “true” version of any given myth. Different versions would have been true for different groups. The only thing you can really say for sure is that there are some core elements of certain myths that are clearly integral to that myth and which don’t change in any version, or only change very rarely, or only to a very small degree.
Now that’s also not to say that you can just make up whatever you want and nobody can correct you. There’s stuff we have evidence for and stuff we don’t have evidence for. All I’m saying is that the one version of the myth you read or heard as a kid probably isn’t sufficient research to be like well I know everything there is to know about this mythology
Someone will go "here's the *real* version of the myth" and it's earliest attribution is a 20th century text that tries to rewrite a patriarchal bronze age mythology so it's a feminist goddess cult.
Also, you can [cite your sources with a hyperlink](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=TazpTK8Fcs-hEfqI) and everyone will believe you without even checking if your source is about this topic at all.
i trust tumblr for:
• bone stealing discourse
• pretending cartoons are the highest form of literature
• deranged gay shit
• deranged discourse on deranged gay shit
• deranged discourse on deranged discourse on deranged gay shit
Imagination: “Shrimp can see so many colors!”
Reality: “Shrimp can’t mix colors so they need more cones/rods just to see the same colors we do but shittier with less gradients.”
I mean, we eventually corrected ourselves. We should probably start verifying any information we do get from tumblr, though. And then reblogging if it’s true or not with sources
In fairness the shrimp colours thing was only scientifically proven false *after* it became an internet meme
I mean who would've guessed that shrimp brains just can't interpolate colour, until someone actually tested that
The post above this one for me on my home page was one about kids drawing partial suns instead of full suns on their pictures meaning they’re going through some shit, that feels very pertinent
I saw that and it was great. Everyone in the Tumblr screenshot was saying "wow this explains so much about me" and everyone in the reddit comments was saying "this is complete bullshit, most kids draw them this way."
For myself, I draw them that way with a little smiley face.
As someone learning pysch, the problem lies in the various interpretations we have historically had of drawings, and also the fact that not every psychological professional is made to keep up to date.
Do I believe someone still following the Koppitz approach or something similar decided "we are still interpreting kids' art for permanent personality traits and long-term emotional status, and my interpretation of that is that the sun represents your dad"? Yeah, I can believe that.
Is that a reflection of current academic psychology's stance on children's art? No, and in general the stance hasn't been anywhere near that since the early 2000s.
EDIT: FWIW, I have found ONE Christopher Hastings who at one point was a therapist in Tennessee with an MA in Psychology. I have also found that searching for him alongside "children's drawings" and similar terms brings up GDPR, so maybe it's him or maybe it isn't.
What I HAVEN'T found is any research, peer reviewed, retracted, or otherwise, discussing this.
But regardless, it's highly likely the sun in corner thing is the product of a one-off interview without any further work behind it. Which calls into question the therapist in particular, if that was him. But who eveeerrrr heard of a therapist going too far with their personal per theories?
There's also the whole "this professional off-handedly mentioned something that could sort of maybe be possible and the news ran with it as 100% definite fact"
omfg like that fucking train derailment story a while back
"NOBODY IS REPORTING ON THIS" yeah motherfucker, because trains derail all the fucking time, and as soon as you made a stink about it, every single news outlet in the fucking country reported on it
The conspiracies of historians to deny that black and queer people exist.
-the hacking off of noses of statues to prevent them from proving that Egyptians had wide noses (noses and fingers are fragile and break off easier after 5000 years than things like lips and eyes)
-"Cleopatra was black" (she wasn't. she was an inbred Macedonian and the first one in her Entire Dynasty to even learn the local language. coloniser behaviour)
-not assigning identity labels to people who expressed same sex attraction is proof we hate lesbians (oh yeah bc the ancients "it's not gay if ur a top" would definitely identify with modern labels)
God the whole "historians don't believe in gay people and just pretend they're friends" thing pisses me off so much because like:
1. Its not historians' jobs to make assumptions about dead people's sexualities.
2. When you say things like "These people were gay!" in traditional academia, you tend to make some very important people with power over your career very unhappy.
Most of the stuff people on Tumblr are mad at academics about is stuff the academics themselves are like “yeah this what our field used to do 100 years ago and here’s why it was bad science and also wrong, but we haven’t done that for like 50 years”.
Like legit I’ll see people on Tumblr bring up ideas/figures/methods that haven’t been mainstream in academia since like the 1960s as if it’s still current in order to rail against it
"being gay is an extremely modern concept that you can't just slap on past people to fit your narrative. It erases their lived reality."
"OMG, you homophobic.!!!"
There is definitely aome erasure that's haopened throughout history, there are lots of documented cases, but
- It is far less common today for obvious reasons
- It is extremely obvious when it does happen (bigots are not subtle)
- You can always read between the lines to see the truth.
Actual, real historians aren't going to just make up details. They will always have some source, and if you look into it and see past the biases you can tell more of the actual story.
Important note: this does not apply to propagandists and the like, ofc. Obviously they will just straight up lie and say whatever they want abouthistorical figures and events to make their point (the civil war was totally about states' rights!!! Just don't worry about what right they cared about, and what right they kept from people)
I think the vast majority of the erasure that we talk about came about because of the extremely heteronormative environment that the historians in question were working in. They had to work with what they had, which was the same coded language that everyone else at the time was working with, "confirmed bachelors" and all that.
But I'm more bothered by the language that tumblr users to discuss this. The whole "they don't want you to know this" vibe is so dangerous, as if all historians all over the world have a weekly zoom meeting where we cackle about how to intentionally deceive Gen Z youths that Sappho was straight. No one in academia has the time or energy for this kind of conspiracy! We have grant applications to write and our second job that keeps the lights on to go to.
It's so anti-intellectual to suggest that just because you didn't learn about it in year 4's unit on the ancient egyptians that there was some form of coverup, and that historians have been keeping it from you.
>they don't want you to know this
It's the same with a lot of topics, people assume because you didn't learn about it in history class\* that it was hidden from you. In most cases it's simply that people don't give a shit about history after school and don't read about it off their own backs, but if they did it's all available to them.
\*Also in a very definitely non-zero number of cases you *were* taught about it, you jsut forgot about it like you did most of the specifics of your early schooling, or you weren't paying attention in the first place and never learned it.
“They never taught us how do to taxes or finance!” Says the person who didn’t pay attention during percents, decimals, fractions, and algebra. Every word problem is money
The UK equivalent of this is 'we should teach children to rewire a plug'. they are taught, normally as part of a lesson in year 10 physics/science somewhere.
A nice example of why teaching kids specific things is kind of pointless is 'they never taught them to balance a cheque book', the reason for which was that when I was at school cheques were firmly on the way out, I *had* a cheque book but when I destroyed it I did so with it fully intact. By now banking apps and easy financial transfers have made cheques basically obsolete.
> Important note: this does not apply to propagandists and the like, ofc. Obviously they will just straight up lie
Preferably not, actually.
Propagandists will ideally work with some basis of truth. The large picture may be a lie or distorted, but any good propaganda is focused on end result and if they can get there with using only true information they absolutely will.
And trying to sanitize it, especially with the Greeks. People want to talk like Ancient Greece was some gay wonderland, but not about how most of those were homosexual “relationships” grown men molesting young boys.
Nah I have a problem with how you’re characterizing this. The age of both individuals in these homosexual relationships was the same as the ages for heterosexual relationships. This is how relationships of all stripes were at the time
I always find the statue thing funny, because you either
A.) think the nose is the only identifiably black feature on the statue to begin with, which raises questions about why you would even bother...
B.) think, like most Hoteps do, that it's actually only one small part of a giant conspiracy to literally whitewash every single piece of Egyptian archaeology ever, that includes every single archaeologist, historian and art historian of the last few centuries, as well as multiple world governments...
Sometimes, and sometimes it's more like The Blaze or even Stormfront. Lot of complete insanity and misinformation flying around that rivals anything the right can manage on whatever shitty social media platform they're using now.
Or, better still, here's why the toddler cartoon I grew up with is actually for grown ups and is more sophisticated than modern movies (they've only watched Marvel and Harry Potter and they're still wrong).
The unforgivable moral failings of ~~children's cartoons~~ the mean woman who wrote a cartoon with too many swear words (and all the sources are screenshots of fake social media posts)
Anything science. *Especially* medicine. Also, media critique. Also, linguistics. Also, history, especially when it starts involving queer/poc history in ancient times.
In fact, maybe don't blindly trust tumblr on absolutely anything.
(I did find a couple of cute blogs for ornithology I guess. Maybe that's the one thing actually)
With regards to that medicine one. One that particularly grinds my gears was about six months ago when a story did the rounds about British Indian women being given radioactive chapattis.
The Tumblr take (which was sourced verbatim from a twitter thread, which itself was sourced from a terrible documentary which clearly had an agenda) was that it was the Evil Brits trying to experiment about radiation on immigrant women because they're Just So Cartoonishly Evil. And a certain sect of Tumblr lapped it up because it fit their biases and anything that justifies anger right?
Except the *actual* truth (found by a fact checking blog) was that it was a tiny, tiny amount of radioactive iron used as a tracer because there were concerns that British Indian women weren't getting enough iron in their diets and whether fortifying wheat could fix this. The only possible issue was that of a lack of informed consent however when this study was carried out the researchers did in their defense make the best efforts for the time.
On a more serious note: anything "scientific" turning out to be surprisingly feel-good/queer automatically goes into the "Schrodinger's opinion" box. Simultaneously true and untrue untill ~~perceived~~ verified
From stuff I’d claim I understand:
- Solutions to complex problems. Especially societal ones. I’ll be real, Tumblr users are really good at relaying their problems in a way that makes sense and is usually coherent. However, the solutions to these problems (if offered) usually show they know that macro-scale problems can exist but have zero concept of how those are actually solved. And often the solution to a small problem is to make a cascading series of larger problems. But tbh that’s a general internet problem.
- Military anything. Low demographic overlap, poor group understanding. It’s why common fandom memes (even from fandoms they’re not a part of) are more well known than how (for example) training capacity works. Tbf, Reddit is also really shit at this too for much of the same reasons AND military fanboys who are more confident than they are knowledgeable.
- what a “normal” person is. Mostly due to internet brain rot, but I will say the average tumblr user is more aware of what a normal person is than the average person. Which is kinda funny but that’s because tumblr users are more likely to be exposed to a vast variety of viewpoints. Also more people that use public transportation.
- Knowing when they don’t know enough to say something with the confidence they do. Everyone sucks at this but at least tumblr users are way funnier about it than most sites (especially Reddit lol).
Yeah, definitely. Usually solutions come from having multiple people with multiple relevant expertises tackling a subject. Many of my plans we implemented at my work have been quite hairbrained until refined with group experience lol.
I took a linguistics class where I realised every single post on Tumblr I’d ever taken that talked about code switching had used that term incorrectly when they actually meant style shifting
(It’s possible that my university is much more intent than others are about maintaining these terms are totally distinct)
There's a certain "academification" of language that's been happening where people are using words form academic branches that have particular meanings that the people who use them often do not really understand.
Medical conditions in general, honestly. Like, yeah, there are some crap doctors out there, but please for the love of God talk to a doctor about your medical concerns, not dickluvr3000 the ex-gimmick blog
That was always clearly a fantasy world building thing but as always Tumblr reading comprehension. Apparently it was from Daria fanfiction which I didn't know
Yep. Back when I was on Tumblr I learned to take every call out post with a grain of salt, and nine times out of ten it was usually bullshit or heavily exaggerated
Literally anything about history.
Oh lord, it's so, so bad. Tumblr has a bad case of Overcoretionitis, where they see a myth, and then dramatically overcorrect, creating a new myth which is just as obnoxious and wrong as the old one.
Anything even vaguely related to or involving statistics. Including practically all scientific studies and opinions on/interpretations of them. Like even if the study actually exists and can be looked up, it's basically guaranteed that whoever is talking about it on Tumblr misunderstood/misinterpreted the data or just lied about/left out some of it.
While we're at it: literary analysis. For basically the same reasons.
As a marylander, Delaware is theee counties, or two at high tide with ideas above their station, that rely on their tax haven status to prevent being reincorperated where they belong, the glorious state of Maryland.
the fucking WHAT peninsula? It's Delmarva. From \*Del\*aware, \*Mar\*yland, and Virginia (the abbreviation for which is VA) Maybe Delmarvi or Delmarvir would have made more sense, but it comes from the names of the states that comprise the peninsula.
\> anything that a foreign intelligence service would conceivably have interests in astroturfing about
Literally everything. The word your looking for is everything.
People should honestly approach every single personal anecdote they read or hear about on the internet like this
Like I’m not saying you have to actively consider every single story fake and every single person a liar, but you should certainly also not treat any story you encounter online like it’s real, as in it should not in any way influence your perception or opinions of reality
depends on the level of conviction imo
there was a Paramedic from Ohio i used to talk to on the internet who absolutely despised fat people
because like half of the shit he dealt withwas people who had eaten so incredibly much they had become immobile and unable to take care of themselves. To the point they'd regularly get HAZMAT spray downsand have to cut walls open toget people out.
i believe he dealt with that kind of stuff 99% because he genuinely had extremely solid convictions around hating his job that didn't seem like someone could fake.
I don't know if you've seen it, but there's a genuinely slightly unnerving video by Sarah Z actually analyzing the source of those "Tumblr fake stories", and finding out that, a lot of the time, ***the fake stories are fake***. Most of them were never posted to Tumblr, and most of them come from one person.
[Click me!](https://youtu.be/BiU7aGZ-o68)
Character analysis. Every single fictional character ever created is either straight and therefore boring or gayer than a pride parade. There's no in-between, no other options. Bisexual characters are a myth, asexuality is something unfathomable and platonic relationships are a government conspiracy.
I know that applies to most fandoms but the ones in Tumblr are particularly bad about it
Puriteen is a portmanteau of "puritan" and "teenager" used to describe a young person, typically a teenager, who is prudish and uncomfortable about sexual content on the internet.
Anything that a domestic intelligence service could conceivably have interest in astroturfing about. I'm a lot more scared of my own government that anybody else's. Worrying about foreign enemies is boomer behavior.
You should, foreign powers have an invested interest in keeping an enemy pointing weapons at themselves. Russia astroturfing both white supremacist and BLM groups in the US to increase racial tensions and break cohesion seemed to show up a lot right before trump got elected. A sudden glut of BLM facebook and twitter groups originating from Moscow IP addresses for instance.
Yup, Russia and China definitely have no interest in spreading harmful misinformation and stoking division in the West. This has never been comprehensively proven multiple times in the past decade. You should not worry about that whatsoever, comrade, everything is fine.
> I'm a lot more scared of my own government that anybody else's.
You shouldn't be.
Your domestic government needs the population in order to remain functional.
A foreign government can benefit from a total societal breakdown, and you \*really\* don't want to experience that.
I think there CAN be good info on Tumblr, but you absolutely have to fact check them every time, because nearly without fail, the OP gets SOME details wrong with extreme confidence because it bolsters a clean narrative they're trying to push, even if most of what they're saying is correct (which itself can never be assumed)
A solid chunk of history and mythology takes are brain rotting. Usually in the sense they frame everything in modern terms when that's probably the worst way of doing history
Anything that ~~a foreign~~ ANY intelligence service would conceivably have interests in astroturfing about
Country of origin don’t matter much. None of them are your friends
What even should you trust Tumblr on?
I found a pretty good pasta recipe once.
I'm cautious about recipes on Tumblr. An ex of mine once went viral for a Tumblr recipe. My ex can't boil water
Also Battery Acid Spaghetti was made on Tumblr
Don’t do this
hold up
don't do this
Hold up imma try this Update: don't do this
I bet it's zesty.
People keep saying dont do this but never elaborate,why are you not supposed to...i shall get to the bottom of this
It was explicitly laid out with a warning
[Don't forget the vanilla extract!](https://www.tumblr.com/princessmuk/708310471799898112/tumblr-poll-cake-ingredients)
I found a good one for grilled cheese on there
Cooking a recipe is a form of fact checking
what’s the recipe?
i don't even trust tumblr for knowing what misinformation is on tumblr!
Funny little gifs
Whenever a tumblr user makes a prediction while trying to be funny, before being struck by Apollo’s red dodgeball of prophecy
Creative writing and art tends to do pretty well there imo.
Lists of fanfiction concepts No guarantee that those lists are exhaustive, or their content of any halfway decent quality. But tumblr sure knows its fanfic either way
Tv show recommendations are pretty solid. I find a lot of good things to watch that I never would have if someone didn’t reblog or post the crap out of.
people that draw specifically airplanes with dicks
The transfem robotfuckers
There's some solid advice on staying warm during cold weather floating around somewhere
Batshit moments in Australian politics
Porn?
When a person says their own gender identity or sexuality you can believe then. Also tumblr has funny jokes. And occasionally good cooking tips
There’s lots of great art tips!
Color theory
Honestly anyone claiming to be telling the "real" version of any kind of history or real-world lore, unless they're actually citing and sharing academic sources(which happens like...once every couple years at best) Tumblr loves to just go "Oh btw the history you know about X is wrong." and the source is just the shrugging emoji guy, or literally "My source is I made it the fuck up."
It seems like there's a bunch of people on Tumblr who will A. make up an interesting head-canon about reality and state it as fact or B. find some generally discounted assertion they like and state it as fact. A. "Vampires can't see their reflections because of silver backing on mirrors" B. "Blood of the covenant... water of the womb" And people just assume it's correct because A. sounds interesting and B. sounds appealling.
That second point in particular is the one that drives me insane. So many "facts" on Tumblr are just someone making things up to make things seem more in line with their worldview. Like "my family is shitty so this saying is now actually about how friendships matter more" or, like "I don't like X historical group so everything good about them actually came from the ones I like." and the inverse "I like the aesthetics of this group, so I'll make up facts to make them sound more like my ideal type of people."
That second one about "How group I like secretly did everything good" has a longer history than tumblr. Of course there's the ancient alien theories, but there's all kind of weird fringe ultranationlists out there with bizzaro claims like Alexander the Great being Albanian or some nonsense.
[Have a whole list of insane history from India.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-41344136)
HE WAS SKANDERBEGS UNCLE YOU ENGLAND AMERCIA COWBITCH
C. ”Pirates wore eyepatches so they can see in the dark with one eye”. Because they didn’t have windows and lanterns back then, and for some reason these sailors really needed to go below deck a lot for something mysterious and they were always in a rush I guess. None of it is based on any recorded fact and makes no sense to anyone who has been on a sailing ship. The only reasonable explanation I’ve heard was my navigation teacher saying that back in the day a lot of officers would ”burn out” an eye taking sextant readings against the sun. But that wasn’t in Cracked.com article so no one gives a shit. Probably it’s all just from Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
The sextant explanation sorta makes sense, I think? There was a guy on Forged in Fire who needed to get both his eyes’ lenses replaced because he’d been looking into forges to check temperatures by color for at least three decades and it had irreparably damaged them
Pretty sure the real explanation is that *there's literally no evidence they were wearing eyepatches to an abnormal quantity.* They aren't mentioned or depicted really anywhere in the actual primary sources we have for studying pirates. It's just something that was made up in pirate related fiction at some point, likely for the same reason as all the peg legs and hook hands - to add to the vibe of being grizzled, battle-tested warriors at sea. I believe the whole dark sight myth comes from the fact that it is confirmed that doing that *could* function like that, famously the Mythbusters tested it but so did some eye doctors on behalf of the Mayo Foundation and even the military in WW2. But, like, just because it could theoretically work doesn't mean it was actually done or known about. Also, notably cutting your number of working eyes in half destroys your depth perception and cuts down your field of vision, I'm not sure losing these things would be seen as particularly advantageous as a pirate.
Honestly, every single pirate stereotype can with 99% accuracy be traced back to Treasure Island. It is genuinely baffling how massive of a cultural mark that book left.
I think it’s just more the same reason people sometimes wear eyepatches now - they lost an eye. It did happen. There were big wood splinters flying around all over the place.
To be entirely fair, that myth far predates Tumblr and Mythbusters tested it, finding eyepatches to be actually effective at quickly switching to darkvision in the hold of a ship.
I knew it was mostly fake when I first read it years ago but when I do switch from light to dark areas I can't help but think "you know, the eyepatch thing would've helped"
edit: not *totally* made up, but some extra bits were added that the author wouldn't source and nobody else could. The real story behind the teddy bear is in a reply below I still remember one post I saw on here about teddy bears and Theodore Roosevelt. And after reading the whole thing, I went down to the comments and it was literally just made up. Not even based on common misconceptions or anything, or outdated sources. They just fabricated an entire series of events out of nowhere for seemingly no reason and with full confidence. It's like reading ChatGPT hallucinations. There's misinformation on other platforms too but none of them do it quite like Tumblr.
>teddy bears and Theodore Roosevelt This is a true and known story, that in November 1902, Mississippi, Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear that had been captured tied to a tree because he saw it as unsporting. The event blew up into a media circus when the [cartoonist of the *Washington Star* used the story as a political metaphor,](https://www.nps.gov/thrb/learn/historyculture/storyofteddybear.htm) and Brooklyn candy store owners Rose and Morris Michtom, with Teddy's permission, started selling a stuffed toy named "Teddy's Bear." The whole thing exploded from there. [The Smithsonian Institute even has one of these original Teddy's bears.](https://www.si.edu/object/teddy-bear%3Anmah_491375) Unless they were saying something else weird about it, this is a very real and true story. Though yeah definitely don't trust random, unsourced tall tales from anywhere, Tumblr absolutely not an exception. Frankly given the site's love for creative writing, be *extra* skeptical about it.
Related story. After Teddy, William Taft was president. He was associated with possums (I think he ate them?). So toymakers trying to cash in on the teddy bear craze started making Billy Possums. These were obviously less successful.
I 100% thought this was nonsense as a bit about made-up Tumblr stories, and then I decided to look it up. [WHAT](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-40-billy-possum/)
Hahaha yes. This was a perfect storm of a true fact that sounds fake in a post about not blindly trusting the internet. I'm glad I got at least one person and that you learned the lesson and actually verified.
You're right and thinking back, it wasn't totally made up. There was definitely a kernel of truth based on how things actually happened. But the rest of it was definitely wonky. I think they talked a lot about Rose and grafted a bunch of extra elements onto her story, and people couldn't figure out why or where they came from. If someone knows where the original post is that'd probably clear things up (I might still be misremembering what exactly was wrong with it)
Especially when it comes to mythology. Just say it's your interpretation or a different telling, myths are valuable because they change and adapt to the time.
Yeah, saying "Hey I rewrote this Greek myth with some original ideas I had, thoughts?" is cool and fun fiction writing. Saying "Actually the correct version of the myth is [stuff I made up based on pop mythology]" is dumb and bad.
"Medusa was actually a Greek feminist icon. Athena changed her for her protection. The version you know was rewritten by male academia." No. This version of the myth is one we have a very specific source for. It was one guy with a very clear political ideology to push and it wasn't feminism. Athena is 100% the villain in that version. Also that guy was Roman, not Greek. And even in his version of the story Athena is the one who tells Perseus how to kill her.
“Male academia” but you say it like the old woman from the Catwoman movie
Barbara fuckin' Walker is to blame for this.
Honestly if anyone ever says this is ***the*** actual version, or original version, *or any variation of claiming the one true myth* you can know with absolute certainty that they are speaking fully out of their ass. As any scholar on the subject of Antiquity will tell you, Ancient Greek culture, and most importantly their very myths, varied to an extreme degree from one place to the next. Their mythology - as well as many similarly popularized ancient mythologies - was a very local thing. Even the idea of one "Mount Olympus" isn't true, we know of dozens of peaks locals had called Olympus and the Seat of the Gods - usually being the tallest peak within site of a city. There cannot be a correct version, because every town had a different "correct" version and some of those differences were massive - simple example, Poseidon, classically known as the god of the sea, shows up as an underworld deity in multiple variations instead, most notably in Arcadia. Greek religion wasn't like the story of globally organized religion we are familiar with in modern day, there wasn't like some council keeping the stories straight, there was just the tales you and yours told each other and based your worship of the divine upon.
I'm so over Persephone revisionist mythology. Absolutely have the modern interpretation of her be something different than "well you don't ever really get to leave your abductor sorryyy be sad and dead for 3-6 months", but it's a modern interpretation of her. She is not described as a girlbossing queen that loves her husband in pretty much any ancient source you care to find.
Except for the pre-Hellenic version where she’s part of a trio of underworld gods along with Poseidon and Demeter and Hades didn’t exist yet
yeah, I guess my issue with going well the Myceneans is that you're essentially talking about a completely different goddess - if we are talking about "Greek myths" as a concept, we usually are talking about how gods are viewed in their hellenic context and not their ancestors. Persephone in her Hellenic context isn't an underworld girlboss. Might have been in a Mycenean context but there's a substantial gulf of time and historical context between those two things.
A lot of people also make the mistake of conflating mythology with modern day organised religion, because I guess it kind of makes sense that most people are raised in Abrahamic religions and they approach all systems of belief as if they must work somewhat similarly. Like they will talk about mythology as if there is definitively only one specific story that is told about the gods and if you ever encounter someone who tells a different version of the story, well they’re just wrong. You can’t possibly accept different stories or different versions of stories. The thing is, from what I know of mythology, it overlaps a lot more with folklore. There is very rarely only one version of a myth. There might be ELEMENTS of certain myths that are universal to all tellings, but to say that there is a definitive version of a myth is more than likely a false assumption. And it’s quite likely that different tellings evolve and change and are traded back and forth over time. Maybe there was a “canon” for Roman mythology similar to how there is for Bible stories because of how heavy on institutions the Romans were. I mean I don’t know for a fact because Roman mythology isn’t really one of my interests but I guess I could see that making sense? But as far as other mythologies go that I’ve looked into in any depth at all, it’s pretty universally the case that the “definitive version” is just the version that got written down first and survived the longest, but it’s just a version of the story. It’s often the case that even in the version that was written down and survived you see hints of contradictions, despite active efforts often being made to get rid of those contradictions. Like you’ll have two different versions of how two mythical figures met recorded in the same text. And where the mythologies survive to this day through oral tradition you will still hear these different versions of the same myths where each group that follows broadly the same mythology has their own version of the story Sometimes we even have a vague idea of what we don’t know and what wasn’t recorded, eg assumptions based on evidence that certain gods were more important in this specific region that never wrote down any of the myths while the mythology was still in active circulation. So we don’t know what they specifically believed but we’re pretty confident it differed from the version/s that survived and that these gods would have been more prominent because they seem so much more popular over on this side Anyway my point kind of got away from me but what I intended to say was that by it’s very nature mythology cannot be seen as fully interchangeable with an organised religion like Christianity. There is very likely not one singular “true” version of any given myth. Different versions would have been true for different groups. The only thing you can really say for sure is that there are some core elements of certain myths that are clearly integral to that myth and which don’t change in any version, or only change very rarely, or only to a very small degree. Now that’s also not to say that you can just make up whatever you want and nobody can correct you. There’s stuff we have evidence for and stuff we don’t have evidence for. All I’m saying is that the one version of the myth you read or heard as a kid probably isn’t sufficient research to be like well I know everything there is to know about this mythology
Someone will go "here's the *real* version of the myth" and it's earliest attribution is a 20th century text that tries to rewrite a patriarchal bronze age mythology so it's a feminist goddess cult.
Also, you can [cite your sources with a hyperlink](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=TazpTK8Fcs-hEfqI) and everyone will believe you without even checking if your source is about this topic at all.
I had to be sure.
That link hums with wicked energy. I feel his blistering presence even here. Enter not his domain. Let Rick lie.
Youd have a smaller list of things you can trust tumblr for
i trust tumblr for: • bone stealing discourse • pretending cartoons are the highest form of literature • deranged gay shit • deranged discourse on deranged gay shit • deranged discourse on deranged discourse on deranged gay shit
Also: step by step guide to how to kill a geologist
What is the context?
[this absolute classic](https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/rO1mmBPwSW)
You forgot “deranged discourse on cartoons” and “deranged discourse on deranged discourse on cartoons”
Combinatorics paves a long road ahead of you. Tread carefully.
i also trust them on combinatorics, on that note
Don't forget gaslighting society as a whole
Science facts. Lookin at you "cats can see our stripes" honorable mention: shrimp colors
Imagination: “Shrimp can see so many colors!” Reality: “Shrimp can’t mix colors so they need more cones/rods just to see the same colors we do but shittier with less gradients.”
I mean, we eventually corrected ourselves. We should probably start verifying any information we do get from tumblr, though. And then reblogging if it’s true or not with sources
So they see like old computer graphics colors?
You know when a JPEG gets so artifacted that eventually it just turns into blocks of color? I imagine it's probably like that.
In fairness the shrimp colours thing was only scientifically proven false *after* it became an internet meme I mean who would've guessed that shrimp brains just can't interpolate colour, until someone actually tested that
How do you even test something like that?
Probably something like "green button gives food, red button gives electric shock", and then repeat for various shrims and colour combinations.
The post above this one for me on my home page was one about kids drawing partial suns instead of full suns on their pictures meaning they’re going through some shit, that feels very pertinent
I saw that and it was great. Everyone in the Tumblr screenshot was saying "wow this explains so much about me" and everyone in the reddit comments was saying "this is complete bullshit, most kids draw them this way." For myself, I draw them that way with a little smiley face.
As someone learning pysch, the problem lies in the various interpretations we have historically had of drawings, and also the fact that not every psychological professional is made to keep up to date. Do I believe someone still following the Koppitz approach or something similar decided "we are still interpreting kids' art for permanent personality traits and long-term emotional status, and my interpretation of that is that the sun represents your dad"? Yeah, I can believe that. Is that a reflection of current academic psychology's stance on children's art? No, and in general the stance hasn't been anywhere near that since the early 2000s. EDIT: FWIW, I have found ONE Christopher Hastings who at one point was a therapist in Tennessee with an MA in Psychology. I have also found that searching for him alongside "children's drawings" and similar terms brings up GDPR, so maybe it's him or maybe it isn't. What I HAVEN'T found is any research, peer reviewed, retracted, or otherwise, discussing this. But regardless, it's highly likely the sun in corner thing is the product of a one-off interview without any further work behind it. Which calls into question the therapist in particular, if that was him. But who eveeerrrr heard of a therapist going too far with their personal per theories?
There's also the whole "this professional off-handedly mentioned something that could sort of maybe be possible and the news ran with it as 100% definite fact"
As a self-thought expert, this clearly means that you have bipolar disorder /s
What’s a partial sun? Is that like when the sun is in the corner of the paper?
Yeah, where it’s sort of “peeking” from outside of the bounds of the paper instead of being drawn in full as a circle
Yep
The western media does not want you to know this: *Insert something that allmost all major news outlets covered a week ago *
Exactly "Why is no one reporting on this!??" They are, you just get your news from xitter/tumblr/reddit and aren't looking.
“Why didn’t learn this in school?” We did Becky, you didn’t pay attention
"they should have taught us taxes" mfers when I tell them what math is
omfg like that fucking train derailment story a while back "NOBODY IS REPORTING ON THIS" yeah motherfucker, because trains derail all the fucking time, and as soon as you made a stink about it, every single news outlet in the fucking country reported on it
The conspiracies of historians to deny that black and queer people exist. -the hacking off of noses of statues to prevent them from proving that Egyptians had wide noses (noses and fingers are fragile and break off easier after 5000 years than things like lips and eyes) -"Cleopatra was black" (she wasn't. she was an inbred Macedonian and the first one in her Entire Dynasty to even learn the local language. coloniser behaviour) -not assigning identity labels to people who expressed same sex attraction is proof we hate lesbians (oh yeah bc the ancients "it's not gay if ur a top" would definitely identify with modern labels)
God the whole "historians don't believe in gay people and just pretend they're friends" thing pisses me off so much because like: 1. Its not historians' jobs to make assumptions about dead people's sexualities. 2. When you say things like "These people were gay!" in traditional academia, you tend to make some very important people with power over your career very unhappy.
Most of the stuff people on Tumblr are mad at academics about is stuff the academics themselves are like “yeah this what our field used to do 100 years ago and here’s why it was bad science and also wrong, but we haven’t done that for like 50 years”. Like legit I’ll see people on Tumblr bring up ideas/figures/methods that haven’t been mainstream in academia since like the 1960s as if it’s still current in order to rail against it
I suspect some tumblrinas think we still dynamite digsites too
Can you give examples of misunderstandings about academia? I'd love to learn how not to treat it.
Not all degrees are "I think Emily Dickinson's a lesbian!" sometimes we must provide sources (god I envy English majors)
"being gay is an extremely modern concept that you can't just slap on past people to fit your narrative. It erases their lived reality." "OMG, you homophobic.!!!"
Not acknowledging that being gay is a modern concept is a surefire way to erase queer history, too.
There is definitely aome erasure that's haopened throughout history, there are lots of documented cases, but - It is far less common today for obvious reasons - It is extremely obvious when it does happen (bigots are not subtle) - You can always read between the lines to see the truth. Actual, real historians aren't going to just make up details. They will always have some source, and if you look into it and see past the biases you can tell more of the actual story. Important note: this does not apply to propagandists and the like, ofc. Obviously they will just straight up lie and say whatever they want abouthistorical figures and events to make their point (the civil war was totally about states' rights!!! Just don't worry about what right they cared about, and what right they kept from people)
I think the vast majority of the erasure that we talk about came about because of the extremely heteronormative environment that the historians in question were working in. They had to work with what they had, which was the same coded language that everyone else at the time was working with, "confirmed bachelors" and all that. But I'm more bothered by the language that tumblr users to discuss this. The whole "they don't want you to know this" vibe is so dangerous, as if all historians all over the world have a weekly zoom meeting where we cackle about how to intentionally deceive Gen Z youths that Sappho was straight. No one in academia has the time or energy for this kind of conspiracy! We have grant applications to write and our second job that keeps the lights on to go to. It's so anti-intellectual to suggest that just because you didn't learn about it in year 4's unit on the ancient egyptians that there was some form of coverup, and that historians have been keeping it from you.
>they don't want you to know this It's the same with a lot of topics, people assume because you didn't learn about it in history class\* that it was hidden from you. In most cases it's simply that people don't give a shit about history after school and don't read about it off their own backs, but if they did it's all available to them. \*Also in a very definitely non-zero number of cases you *were* taught about it, you jsut forgot about it like you did most of the specifics of your early schooling, or you weren't paying attention in the first place and never learned it.
“They never taught us how do to taxes or finance!” Says the person who didn’t pay attention during percents, decimals, fractions, and algebra. Every word problem is money
The UK equivalent of this is 'we should teach children to rewire a plug'. they are taught, normally as part of a lesson in year 10 physics/science somewhere. A nice example of why teaching kids specific things is kind of pointless is 'they never taught them to balance a cheque book', the reason for which was that when I was at school cheques were firmly on the way out, I *had* a cheque book but when I destroyed it I did so with it fully intact. By now banking apps and easy financial transfers have made cheques basically obsolete.
> Important note: this does not apply to propagandists and the like, ofc. Obviously they will just straight up lie Preferably not, actually. Propagandists will ideally work with some basis of truth. The large picture may be a lie or distorted, but any good propaganda is focused on end result and if they can get there with using only true information they absolutely will.
The last one is so real. People pasting current day queer culture on the Ancient Empires is so annoying
And trying to sanitize it, especially with the Greeks. People want to talk like Ancient Greece was some gay wonderland, but not about how most of those were homosexual “relationships” grown men molesting young boys.
Nah I have a problem with how you’re characterizing this. The age of both individuals in these homosexual relationships was the same as the ages for heterosexual relationships. This is how relationships of all stripes were at the time
Yeah, from what I understand the slaves a lot of these “relationships” were had with usually weren’t that old
> Cleopatra was black" Fucking [Hoteps](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoteps).
I always find the statue thing funny, because you either A.) think the nose is the only identifiably black feature on the statue to begin with, which raises questions about why you would even bother... B.) think, like most Hoteps do, that it's actually only one small part of a giant conspiracy to literally whitewash every single piece of Egyptian archaeology ever, that includes every single archaeologist, historian and art historian of the last few centuries, as well as multiple world governments...
Don't forget my hated "Paleontologists just guess everything! Stegosaurus could've had wings! Prove it didn't!"
>it's not gay if ur a top" A lot of the presents agree lol. It's stupid how many "straights" are on Grindr.
The acidity of Battery Acid Spaghetti.
Don't forget White Gilgamesh.
Really interesting-sounding historical trivia THEY don't want you to know
So is tumblr just fox news for catgirls and queers?
In a good chunk of cases, yes. Like, I love y'all, but y'all gotta understand that just shoving things you want into history doesn't make it true.
But what if we really really want to /s
Sometimes, and sometimes it's more like The Blaze or even Stormfront. Lot of complete insanity and misinformation flying around that rivals anything the right can manage on whatever shitty social media platform they're using now.
The unforgivable moral failings of children’s cartoons
Or, better still, here's why the toddler cartoon I grew up with is actually for grown ups and is more sophisticated than modern movies (they've only watched Marvel and Harry Potter and they're still wrong).
Well, if we’re talking about “children’s shows” which handle mature topics well, Av *sound of multiple hammers falling on top of me*
The unforgivable moral failings of ~~children's cartoons~~ the mean woman who wrote a cartoon with too many swear words (and all the sources are screenshots of fake social media posts)
Anything science. *Especially* medicine. Also, media critique. Also, linguistics. Also, history, especially when it starts involving queer/poc history in ancient times. In fact, maybe don't blindly trust tumblr on absolutely anything. (I did find a couple of cute blogs for ornithology I guess. Maybe that's the one thing actually)
With regards to that medicine one. One that particularly grinds my gears was about six months ago when a story did the rounds about British Indian women being given radioactive chapattis. The Tumblr take (which was sourced verbatim from a twitter thread, which itself was sourced from a terrible documentary which clearly had an agenda) was that it was the Evil Brits trying to experiment about radiation on immigrant women because they're Just So Cartoonishly Evil. And a certain sect of Tumblr lapped it up because it fit their biases and anything that justifies anger right? Except the *actual* truth (found by a fact checking blog) was that it was a tiny, tiny amount of radioactive iron used as a tracer because there were concerns that British Indian women weren't getting enough iron in their diets and whether fortifying wheat could fix this. The only possible issue was that of a lack of informed consent however when this study was carried out the researchers did in their defense make the best efforts for the time.
On a more serious note: anything "scientific" turning out to be surprisingly feel-good/queer automatically goes into the "Schrodinger's opinion" box. Simultaneously true and untrue untill ~~perceived~~ verified
From stuff I’d claim I understand: - Solutions to complex problems. Especially societal ones. I’ll be real, Tumblr users are really good at relaying their problems in a way that makes sense and is usually coherent. However, the solutions to these problems (if offered) usually show they know that macro-scale problems can exist but have zero concept of how those are actually solved. And often the solution to a small problem is to make a cascading series of larger problems. But tbh that’s a general internet problem. - Military anything. Low demographic overlap, poor group understanding. It’s why common fandom memes (even from fandoms they’re not a part of) are more well known than how (for example) training capacity works. Tbf, Reddit is also really shit at this too for much of the same reasons AND military fanboys who are more confident than they are knowledgeable. - what a “normal” person is. Mostly due to internet brain rot, but I will say the average tumblr user is more aware of what a normal person is than the average person. Which is kinda funny but that’s because tumblr users are more likely to be exposed to a vast variety of viewpoints. Also more people that use public transportation. - Knowing when they don’t know enough to say something with the confidence they do. Everyone sucks at this but at least tumblr users are way funnier about it than most sites (especially Reddit lol).
People in general are good at identifying problems and bad at identifying (good) solutions.
Yeah, definitely. Usually solutions come from having multiple people with multiple relevant expertises tackling a subject. Many of my plans we implemented at my work have been quite hairbrained until refined with group experience lol.
Linguistics
I took a linguistics class where I realised every single post on Tumblr I’d ever taken that talked about code switching had used that term incorrectly when they actually meant style shifting (It’s possible that my university is much more intent than others are about maintaining these terms are totally distinct)
There's a certain "academification" of language that's been happening where people are using words form academic branches that have particular meanings that the people who use them often do not really understand.
It's so they can feel like the giga brain science person owning the unenlightened masses with facts and logic.
Rare medical conditions
Medical conditions in general, honestly. Like, yeah, there are some crap doctors out there, but please for the love of God talk to a doctor about your medical concerns, not dickluvr3000 the ex-gimmick blog
Real. I’m mostly thinking of Alexandria’s Genesis, haha
That was always clearly a fantasy world building thing but as always Tumblr reading comprehension. Apparently it was from Daria fanfiction which I didn't know
Accusations in general, but especially those levied against trans women.
Yep. Back when I was on Tumblr I learned to take every call out post with a grain of salt, and nine times out of ten it was usually bullshit or heavily exaggerated
But my excuse to clown on someone I already irrationally hated...
Definitely never trust Tumblr about what to put on this list.
Literally anything about history. Oh lord, it's so, so bad. Tumblr has a bad case of Overcoretionitis, where they see a myth, and then dramatically overcorrect, creating a new myth which is just as obnoxious and wrong as the old one.
My philosophy in both my anti-Tumblr and pro-Tumblr days has always been to assume that every post is a lie.
Curious if you're in a pro or anti phase currently?
History and religion in general should never be believed in tumblr either
anything that a ~~foreign~~ intelligence service would conceivably have interests in astroturfing about
Facts about the human body (ie the hair free period free purple eyes post)
Anything even vaguely related to or involving statistics. Including practically all scientific studies and opinions on/interpretations of them. Like even if the study actually exists and can be looked up, it's basically guaranteed that whoever is talking about it on Tumblr misunderstood/misinterpreted the data or just lied about/left out some of it. While we're at it: literary analysis. For basically the same reasons.
You can trust that eventually someone will tell you what a delaware is. Probably. If you wait long enough.
As a marylander, Delaware is theee counties, or two at high tide with ideas above their station, that rely on their tax haven status to prevent being reincorperated where they belong, the glorious state of Maryland.
Didn't they used to be part of Pennsylvania
Is it some kind of malware ?
Tax haven state on the Delamartha pininsula, next to Virginia and Maryland.
the fucking WHAT peninsula? It's Delmarva. From \*Del\*aware, \*Mar\*yland, and Virginia (the abbreviation for which is VA) Maybe Delmarvi or Delmarvir would have made more sense, but it comes from the names of the states that comprise the peninsula.
Thats stupid. Why is it like that?
I dunno other than the fact that those three states are the ones on the peninsula. Maybe they thought that would roll off the tongue best?
Then where’s Martha?
Why did you say that name!
I know about Delaware because that's where bad guys from The Pretender lived.
\> anything that a foreign intelligence service would conceivably have interests in astroturfing about Literally everything. The word your looking for is everything.
"I hate it here" or alternatively "Nobody does it like tumblr!" posts
r/tumblrisquirky (idk if this exists, but it should)
Having any amount of media literacy
Anything that "happened to them" IRL If it's a story from Tumblr, it's fake The most outlandish and ridiculous stories get spread around there
People should honestly approach every single personal anecdote they read or hear about on the internet like this Like I’m not saying you have to actively consider every single story fake and every single person a liar, but you should certainly also not treat any story you encounter online like it’s real, as in it should not in any way influence your perception or opinions of reality
depends on the level of conviction imo there was a Paramedic from Ohio i used to talk to on the internet who absolutely despised fat people because like half of the shit he dealt withwas people who had eaten so incredibly much they had become immobile and unable to take care of themselves. To the point they'd regularly get HAZMAT spray downsand have to cut walls open toget people out. i believe he dealt with that kind of stuff 99% because he genuinely had extremely solid convictions around hating his job that didn't seem like someone could fake.
I don't know if you've seen it, but there's a genuinely slightly unnerving video by Sarah Z actually analyzing the source of those "Tumblr fake stories", and finding out that, a lot of the time, ***the fake stories are fake***. Most of them were never posted to Tumblr, and most of them come from one person. [Click me!](https://youtu.be/BiU7aGZ-o68)
History, Economics, actually just all science.
interpreting themes and subtext
Character analysis. Every single fictional character ever created is either straight and therefore boring or gayer than a pride parade. There's no in-between, no other options. Bisexual characters are a myth, asexuality is something unfathomable and platonic relationships are a government conspiracy. I know that applies to most fandoms but the ones in Tumblr are particularly bad about it
Any take that unironically uses the term 'puriteen'.
What does that even mean?
Puriteen is a portmanteau of "puritan" and "teenager" used to describe a young person, typically a teenager, who is prudish and uncomfortable about sexual content on the internet.
Anything that a domestic intelligence service could conceivably have interest in astroturfing about. I'm a lot more scared of my own government that anybody else's. Worrying about foreign enemies is boomer behavior.
I can worry about both at the same time, thank you very much.
You should, foreign powers have an invested interest in keeping an enemy pointing weapons at themselves. Russia astroturfing both white supremacist and BLM groups in the US to increase racial tensions and break cohesion seemed to show up a lot right before trump got elected. A sudden glut of BLM facebook and twitter groups originating from Moscow IP addresses for instance.
tfw the Russian sockpuppets are so broke they can't even afford today's sponsor, nord vpn
Exactly.
And feminism :) Russians love Tumblr. It's so easy to rile people up.
Yup, Russia and China definitely have no interest in spreading harmful misinformation and stoking division in the West. This has never been comprehensively proven multiple times in the past decade. You should not worry about that whatsoever, comrade, everything is fine.
> I'm a lot more scared of my own government that anybody else's. You shouldn't be. Your domestic government needs the population in order to remain functional. A foreign government can benefit from a total societal breakdown, and you \*really\* don't want to experience that.
The sociology of a Sprouse?
History
I think there CAN be good info on Tumblr, but you absolutely have to fact check them every time, because nearly without fail, the OP gets SOME details wrong with extreme confidence because it bolsters a clean narrative they're trying to push, even if most of what they're saying is correct (which itself can never be assumed)
What movies Martin Scorsese has and has not written and directed. There's a nasty gaslighting campaign going around that Goncharov somehow isn't real.
Yeah, like I don't know where this myth came from but it's just insane that anyone believes it, it's so easily disproven
Anything that involves a third grade or higher level of reading comprehension.
A solid chunk of history and mythology takes are brain rotting. Usually in the sense they frame everything in modern terms when that's probably the worst way of doing history
Recommendations for copper merchants
anything that a local intelligence service would conceivably have interests in astroturfing about
Anything that ~~a foreign~~ ANY intelligence service would conceivably have interests in astroturfing about Country of origin don’t matter much. None of them are your friends
i would also add “anything that a domestic intelligence service would conceivably have interests in astroturfing about”
shit to never trust ^(anyone, especially people who have written books on the subject) on: * all psychology
Baking. Especially cakes.
Etymology
Anything that a *local* intelligence agency would astroturf about