The cats are like furry constellations
They lap up the Milky Way
- Current 93, Abba Amma (Babylon Destroyer)
Illustration for these lyrics that I’ve always found evocative.
worst relationship status to have w someone is “objectively they’re a fine person who is nice but i don’t enjoy their company as much as they enjoy mine”
second worst relationship status to have with someone is “objectively they’re a fine person but they Bother You”
secret third technically more harmless but in practicality more frustrating relationship status is “objectively they’re a fine person and they like so many of the same things i do but they like them in a fundamentally different way that is harmless but reads wrong to my brain and it has made attempts at forming an actual bond with them aggravating more than anything”
tbh i think stuff like this is why so many people, especially younger people, fall into this trap of “well if i don’t like a person or thing, they must be bad”. it would be so much easier if you could dismiss them as bad and move on. but it’s like, no, Objectively Fine people or things can just not mesh well with you for totally subjective reasons. and sometimes when they’re people you mesh much better with their brain than they do with yours. and sometimes you have to live with that.
honestly really sexy of tumblr to keep follower numbers private. how many people are following me? you'll never know unless I tell you. maybe it's a million, or a thousand, or five, or maybe it's just you. maybe you're the only one here, all by yourself, unable to see if there's anyone standing next to you.
and you'd never know, because status here is based on opinion and not numbers; how popular you think someone is is a vibes-only calculation, and besides the chronological algorithms-optional feed, it's genuinely the best thing tumblr's ever done.
every other social media site: here's how many followers this person has
tumblr:
ALT
Day 24093
This is my house.
I won’t allow anyone to harm it.
There should have been no more intruders after the last one.
I do not want these people here. They will leave-
Day 24095
They are siblings. They are loud.
Always singing and talking and stomping. As if they must be louder than anything else.
Day 24106
There are bolts on the door now. Bolts and hideous, gaudy new locks.
How dare they-
Night 24112
I was going to fill the night with terrors. But he woke up screaming before I began. She came running from the other room. They sleep right across the hall from each other, with the doors on a crack.
…they are young, are they not, to be living on their own. Was I ever so young?
Day 24114
She has fixed the squeak in the door at the top of the stairs.
It never squeaked when I still lived.
Day 24121
The noise of the doorbell scares them. But they get so many deliveries.
It is a good bell. It has worked all these years-
I can see one of the men coming now with his packages, trudging up to the door.
…perhaps if I knock before he is here, they will come and look before he can sound the bell.
Day 24129
He is planting flowers in boxes on my windowsills.
I always wished I could have some flowers.
Night 24137
She is afraid of the dark. I could see it in her eyes when she got out of bed.
…I lit the lamps for her.
Day 24142
They have moved the couch to the sun spot a little to the right of the window.
That is where I used to have my armchair.
It is the only sensible place for it.
Day 24163
Sometimes the noises of the world are suddenly too much for him. He winces and tries not to sway his head.
This is my house.
…I can keep it calm and quiet for a while.
Day 24178
She just got a phone call and now they are both laughing.
Laughter is a good sound, isn’t it.
They said this house has been good luck…
Night 24205
They are singing in our kitchen.
He found my cookbook in the gap at the back of the kitchen cabinet and now they are trying to cook.
They wanted to start with the soufflé. They don’t even know how to make béchamel!
I turned the page to the casserole instead.
Day 24236
This is my house.
These are my boarders.
I won’t allow anyone to harm them.
Oh no, you must've misheard me. I never said morally GRAY, I said morally GAY. As in he takes a certain homosexual approach to dealing with ethical dilemmas. Also he's killed 200 people
Religion and bigotry are interchangeable.
Aligning your bigotry with your 'god' is imagining your god in your image.
#SundaySermon
Ah, guys, just to be clear, I realize most of you probably know this but I’m seeing it framed….weirdly, so –
Tumblr is not $30M in debt. You can’t get Tumblr out of the red by giving them $30M. I mean you can, for a bit, but Tumblr is operating at a $30M deficit. That means yearly, Tumblr is spending $30M more than it earns.
None of this is to say we can’t have a Crab Day and try to get that $30M covered, sounds like fun! But that just means Tumblr breaks even for the current fiscal year. Tumblr has investors that want profits (or, well, I guess it’s Automattic’s investors, but regardless they want profit), so in order for it to continue operation, it has to either become Genuinely Profitable Very Quickly, or it has to do a fundraising round of some kind and get even more investors on board, which is really just kicking the problem down the road a year or two.
And either way, the extremely slick and semi-alarming pitch Tumblr is making about all the changes it’s going to make to increase engagement and such is still going to be necessary, because that’s where the money is, unfortunately. I don’t like it either (my favorite bullet point from that pitch is that they will email people who have their notifications turned off, because sure, that sounds like it won’t annoy anyone who like me was already overly inclined to be annoyed) but like. Baby needs a new pair of shoelaces.
None of this is to be alarmist or anything, I just got a bit worried about all this talk of $30M in debt, because this is not a one-time deal.
What’s the feasibility of creating a nonprofit group to obtain Tumblr and operate it as a nonprofit?
I mean, I guess it depends on how many startups you’ve formed or how many high net worth philanthropists who are into microblogging you do lunch with, but realistically, nil.
The rest of this post is going to sound like I’m being kind of sarcastic to you but I’m not, I genuinely think it’s a) an interesting question and b) a really, really interesting answer that people may find enlightening.
So, to start, you can’t just “obtain” Tumblr; Automattic has to be willing to sell. Automattic isn’t a publicly traded company so if they don’t want to they just kinda don’t have to. Presume Automattic is willing to sell; they bought Tumblr for what, three million? They are unlikely to want to sell at a loss, but whatever price they want to fix, you are going to need to have that money up front. So the question then is, can one fundraise three million dollars to buy a site that has traditionally only declined in value and is running at a deficit? You are unlikely to get a loan for it. Most nonprofit grants can’t be used to purchase a for-profit even if you’re planning to convert it. If you want professional fundraisers to help, you’re going to need to have payroll for them. A good nonprofit fundraiser brings in $5 for every $1 you spend on them, so you’re going to need probably around a million dollars for fundraising up front.
But presume you do have three to four mil lying around and Automattic is willing to sell; you are now responsible for the operating costs of Tumblr including employee compensation, rent on whatever buildings they’re housed in, fees for whatever servers Tumblr is housed on, and probably half a dozen other things I’m not thinking of. I don’t know what the operating cost of Tumblr is but it’s running at a thirty million dollar a year deficit, so the second you buy it you’re on the hook for at least $2.5M a month – you will have to provide that $2.5M for the foreseeable future on top of whatever costs Tumblr has that its income-producing activities (advertising, ad-free subscriptions, etc) are actually covering.
And here’s the problem: taking it nonprofit doesn’t reduce that deficit. The point of a nonprofit isn’t that It Costs Less, it’s that it doesn’t pay dividends to stakeholders once it’s profitable. So unless your very first act as owner of Tumblr is to institute Elon Musk At Twitter level “cost cutting” measures, it being a nonprofit won’t really matter.
This is all on top of the legal wrangle to take a for-profit company and turn it into a nonprofit; I don’t even know where one begins with that, because you almost never see it happen. There may be c-suite management who have been promised stock options as part of a future IPO who now need to be paid out for those options they’ll never get; you may be looking at a long exodus of staff who were also in it for the stock options, and aren’t interested in working for a nonprofit, especially since nonprofit salaries are notoriously low.
And now you’re also dealing with every donor who wants to know why one dollar of their three dollar donation is paying someone who is under a six-figure contract from when it was a for-profit. You could let them go and hire cheaper labor but uh, you do get what you pay for.
And the thing is, nonprofits don’t just….exist. The vast majority of all nonprofits are constantly actively fundraising. So on top of the $3M to buy and the $2.5M/mo deficit, you’re going to need to hire a development staff to continue to raise funds. A good development staff capable of sustaining a nonprofit the size and activity of Tumblr is going to be probably a dozen people minimum; for scale, I’m on a development staff of ten for our nonprofit, which has 35 employees total. Tumblr has around 200 staff total.
So you’re looking at an upfront investment of $1M-$4M for the purchase, probably another million or so to hire development staff, lord knows how much in legal fees and contract severances to take it nonprofit, and $2.5M a month – because of development staff, let’s bump that to $3M – to cover the ongoing deficit until a combination of Whatever Changes You Wish To Make and the fundraisers can cover the deficit.
So…those are the initial barriers to purchasing Tumblr and turning it nonprofit. It’s not insurmountable in theory, but in practice it’s not super likely.