I put together a page for the relatively few posts on my Tumblr that were flagged by their adult content algorithm. Sorry deviants but it looks like you’ll have to go elsewhere for your Steve Wozniak gifs.
The ban on adult content is disappointing and I’m sad to see some of the artists I was following leave because of it. I’m gonna keep using it though because I still find it useful as a “look at this thing I found” engine.
Tumblr was (is?) a great way to keep up with comics and illustrators and its customizable design is incredibly flexible. I don’t fully understand why artists seem to have migrated to Instagram which has similarly draconian policies and none of the flexibility. That’s just where the people are, I guess.
Edit (one hour later): I just logged in and they changed the color scheme from “pleasant” to “active assault on my eyeballs”… maybe I should rethink this “gonna keep using it” thing
I watched FYRE FRAUD on Hulu and learned about Fuck Jerry, which appears to be an Instagram account that mainly posts screenshots of stuff teenagers wrote on Tumblr or Twitter. And somehow they managed to parlay that into a million dollar PR firm???
This leads me to a new theory: You can summarize the past two decades of the internet by dividing it into four different “eras” defined by content aggregators: eBaum’s World, I Can Haz Cheezburger?, Buzzfeed, and Fuck Jerry.
12/17/2018
Mallard Fillmore bids farewell to President George “Home Work” Bush, who was the comic’s biggest fan:
Bruce Tinsley, creator of the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore, remembers feeling stunned when the fan letter showed up in February 1998. After all, his strip— featuring a right-leaning TV newsman or, more accurately, newsduck—was still in its relative infancy. Yet here was George Herbert Walker Bush declaring that he and Barbara turned to Mallard, “sage duck that he is,” first thing every morning. Even more gratifying, the former president thanked Tinsley for taking on “that horrible Doonesbury” and its creator, liberal icon Garry Trudeau, “a guy that tore me up in a vicious, personal way strip after strip.”
I didn’t realize Bush’s distaste for Doonesbury ran so deep until I read this article by Matt Taibbi. Nowadays newspaper comic strips are thought of as this weird relic of a bygone era so it’s wild to learn about, like, Mort Walker being ambushed by a feminist on Phil Donahue or that four panels could reduce The Most Powerful Man On The Face of the Earth into a fuming volcano of rage:
A few weeks later, the Doonesbury comic strip — which was a big deal in an age when everyone read newspapers — ran a cartoon playing on the theme of Bush’s “manhood problem.” Cartoonist Garry Trudeau had newsman character Roland Hedley Jr. doing a standup outside the White House, announcing, “In a White House ceremony today, Bush will formally place his embattled manhood in a blind trust.”
The Bush family never got over the Doonesbury thing. “He’s been reduced to a cartoon,” fumed son Jeb in a 1987 Newsweek cover story called “BUSH BATTLES THE WIMP FACTOR”…
After the “Wimp” cover, Doonesbury doubled down — among other things, depicting Bush as literally invisible, which caused the Bushes to overreact in historic fashion. Bush himself admitted in an interview that he wanted to “kick the hell” out of Trudeau dating back to 1984, and his sons George and Jeb actually reached out to the cartoonist, who was a Yale classmate of W. This is in Poppy’s recollection:
″Trudeau says to our son, ‘Well, I hope your family doesn’t take this personally.’ And George says, ’They don’t take it personally, but my brother (Jeb) wanted to come up and kick your ass all over New York.”
This all seems absurd now, but Bush spent the rest of his political career beating back the wimp/manhood thing.
Back in 2011 I said I was going to do annual galleries of “pictures I made or at least modified over the past year but didn’t post on this site for whatever reason,” and then I just plain forgot about it for, uh, eight years. Well, it’s back now, for 2018, with photoshops, gifs, and screenshots and commentary.
→ 2018
