Imagine how terrifying it’d be if one day you were just chilling playing video games when a giant green alien wearing booty shorts and with his titties out just gets thrown into your living room and passes out
Holy shit I think I just cracked the code of why people think you can’t sell things on Tumblr 😭
I was reading one of the Substacks I subscribe to, talking about how they promote their publication and their various sources of traffic, when I came across this paragraph:
Now I happen to also run a fairly popular Substack (about gay vampires). One whose readers are almost entirely Tumblr users. And Tumblr clicks have just never shown up in my stats, I’m used to it. Naturally I had to comment:
It’s not just Substack’s tracking that doesn’t work on here. NO tracking works on here. Tumblr is just one of the last platforms left that completely obscures its users’ data!
That’s why there’s this persistent myth that you can’t advertise on Tumblr. It’s not that you can’t sell things here, it’s that you can’t use the invasive methods that are standard everywhere else.
I can’t wrap my head around why Tumblr’s self-promo is all about Goncharov and dashboard crabs and not THIS! My god, their website on its last legs and this - this thing which is purely for the benefit of all their users - is certainly hurting their revenue. They aren’t patting themselves on the back for not selling us out? Not even a little?
His Dark Materials is a franchise that tackles so many branches of physics and even creates a universe where the main course of study is experimental theology which is all about identifying and explaining dark matter while also adding dimensions to string theory, the multiverse theory, and the very concept of the human soul. At the same time, it aggressively calls out the problem with the state being controlled by the church, how people are condemned for being different and religious fearmongering stops the chance at growth both on an individual and a societal scale. It’s a franchise where the heroes of the story are two children who aren’t allowed to know the prophecy they’re a part of, who save the world unwittingly simply by doing what they believe to be right. Meanwhile, the person who thought he was the hero all along, the person who rallied an army from multiple universes to FIGHT. GOD. HIMSELF. is ultimately consumed by his own ego and forced to take a back seat when he realises he’s just one tiny piece of a much larger story that’s true heart is his own daugher. The child he abandoned, the child he didn’t know or care to know how to look after. It’s a franchise about finding love even when your biological family abandon you, it’s about looking evil in the eye and seeing your own mother, it’s about good and evil not being black and white but instead a complex and cruel mixture of both. It’s about the two worst people you know banding together at the last second to save their daughter with their final breaths. It’s about exploration and learning how to grow through experience, it’s about kindness being shared across the multiverse, exchanging stories with strangers and saving the whole world by doing something perfectly ordinary and receiving no reward.
Oh, and it’s also a franchise rich with fantasy, with giant talking polar bears, witches and ghosts, angels and daemons, and a mammal-like species from another world that travels exclusively on roller skates.
