Thursday, November 13, 2014

Ok, So Blog A Day, Number 13 - Too Old For (Parts of) The Internet - The Tumblr and What Not.....

So, yeah, I've been on Tumblr for quite some time.  It started out as a secret live journal place to post about my feelings and a place to "store" instagram photos, and over time, I started to like people's pages/feed and like a fungus, it has grown to where I follow approximately 50 pages. Not necessarily a large number of pages, but enough for me.

And I think I've FINALLY got to the point where I kind of hate it.  It seems there are very few people my age that are creating or sharing content, and when they do, they're is usually a jock strap involved.

Now, I get that Tumblr, started in 2006 as a "microblog" site by someone over a 2 week period when he was between jobs, is great for the young people with their hippity hop and their snoopy dogg dogg.  Pretty much, most people scroll through everyone's feed, they see things they like and they share it to their feed.  I've found myself doing the same thing at times, often something I find humorous.  I've even added comments to feeds with a couple of photos/videos.  It's a great time suck and a way to avoid the world (It was a favorite spot to dip my toe in the weeks prior to my self imposed exile from social media over the summer.  A way to not be introspective, because, hey, EVERYONE loves Broad City gifs, right?)

I can feel myself slipping back into bad habits (only now I'm adding in MyVegasSlots time - Goal is to get to 150k Gold Coins for next year's Pride48, and I'm at 144.5k), and find that Tumblr actually makes me mad sometimes.  It's fast food - tastes great and sweet and salty at first, but almost immediately brings on an upset stomach and bloat.  There are little to no articles on there that have a lot of merit or time put into them (at least not in the ones that I have found)  Just a lot of links to other people's work.  I've also found that most of the people I follow are as follows:

Porn: Yep, Tumblr has porn.  LOTS of it.  And I like looking at naked people, I really do - in particular naked men - It ASTOUNDS me how MUCH porn is on my dashboard, and it's really only from 2 to 3 sites I follow (no, I'm not putting links here.)  And how much of it is on my dash at, like, 7:30 in the morning.  Like, I'll be looking at things on my Mac while waiting for my work laptop to boot up, I'll see there's new content since I started looking, refresh and there will be like 8 enormous cocks staring at me.  I haven't even had an english muffin yet, but I've gotten my daily fill of cock for the day (shut up - you know what I mean.)  I feel that the amount of porn on my dash has begun to actually desensitize me to sex.  These men (and rarely, women), in my feed aren't people.  They're just things.  Wow, that's scary when I read it back to myself.

The A-list Gays/Bears/Cubs: There seems to be a group of people who all seem to post each other's pictures and engage in a circle jerk of attention that is for the rest of us to enjoy.  Many of their pages have thousands of followers, and there is often a creative component to their sites (photography, music, graphic designs)  More power to them! But that's not what everyone comes for.  This group of men know how to tease juuuuust enough to keep everyone percolating!  Most of these guys who I follow have a caption under their most popular posts that goes something like this: "Tummy Tuesday" or "All Fresh And Clean" with a picture of them getting out of the shower showing the top of the pubes covered by a towel and a reflection of their bare ass in the mirror in the back.  These pictures are often my first "encounter" with these people and I've found myself feeling like an asshole waiting for them to eventually show the goods.  But they don't, ever.  So here I sit, the fool, and I'm tired of it.

Children of the 90s: I can say that I have received a crash course in all things Pokemon over the last few years of having my Tumblr page.  Lots of people focusing large posts about all kinds of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-O and Disney Shows from the 90s and youTube videos of 90s toys that all seemed to be EXTREME!!!!!  Lord knows that we sometimes post things about the 80s here on PiMC and make reference to the life and times of Duran Duran or Joanie Loves Chachi on the show every week.  And I'm not faulting the generation after mine (X, in case you haven't figured that out already).  It's great that they have a forum where they can all share memories and what not.  It just makes me feel old and, like the generation before mine, wonder what the hell they see in most 90's children's culture.  I mean...come ON!  We had Masters of The Universe and Bell Biv Devoe!

Girls who just can't*:  Can't what, I don't know.  I see there pictures or links to stories of a human interest style, and the comments underneath it seem to be things like "LITERALLY DYING!!!!"  "Staaaaaahp."  I purposely annoy Taffy and the Huffington girls by announcing sometimes that I'm feeling "ALL THE FEELS!", a stupid catchphrase that I got from someone's dashboard.  There are many more out there, but as a 42 year old man, I look at these posts and think, "You really have no fucking clue how the real world works..." (Again, I am aware I'm probably aged out of Tumblr)  People with no fucking clue brings me to the next stick in my craw.......

The Ill-Informed: I completely get that wherever we get our news from - CNN, Fox, Huffington Report, The Daily Show.  We are being fed biased media.  It's always a "Wag The Dog" world and we tend to not question things because we're too busy or don't care, or we like Anderson Cooper's tie.  The problem is that you have people (and not to get to conspiracy theory-ish, corporations) that put stuff on Tumblr that is, in fact, false.  Like, not even REMOTELY true.  But because these "girls who can't even", they get a nerve hit and immediately repost things without confirming their accuracy.  These seem to be the same people who are offended by anything, and will look at any picture or issue, blame some other part of society for a problem that may not actually be there in the first place.  It's not that there shouldn't be some concern or offense for things that are wrong with the world: I just thank that raging on your Tumblr isn't going to make a whole lot of change in the world, especially when your rage is not valid because you don't have all the facts.  And, to be fair, how much rage can you really have when your next post is a photo of the cast of Full House and you just can't even because Uncle Jesse was SO your first crush.  (But to be fair, John Stamos IS timeless....)

So is Tumblr the worst thing ever?  Of course not - There are parts of Tumblr that I very much enjoy - funny, creative videos and/or memes, comedy, AWESOME Cosplay photos and pages with interests of mine (there are many great pages dedicated to Disney photography and cruises, pugs and comic books) beautiful art and photography.  It's just hard to appreciate the work that goes into a creative post when it's surrounded by cock. And, like, not even well photographed cock.  Grainy cock.  Who wants to look at that?

I just think that, like the old guy at the end of the bar (who, according to Rodan is, like 30.), It's time to leave the late nights and thump thump thump music to the younger kids with their Pokemon, Lana Del Ray and and tattoo sleeves.  I'll be over here with my vitamins, overcooked vegetables and 401k portfolio.

*When I say "girls who just can't", I'm talking about anyone who uses these odd defense mechanisms to show how they feel without saying anything at all.  The majority of the pages I follow who use this or the reposts are from female bloggers.  However, this also applies to gay men and even some straight men.

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