The house is bloodthirsty. The housekeeper is noisy. All the girl wants is a garden.
It’s autumn, so the house has been gorging on mice. Normally she only finds one or two pellets a month - the compressed remains of fur, bone, and teeth, which the house can’t digest and wouldn’t want to anyway. Exactly like an owl’s leavings. The house gets hungry in autumn, positively bloodthirsty, and the harvest mice lured in from the fields become handfuls of pellets. Usually the house excretes them discreetly and logically from a drainpipe. But apparently this autumn has been so mouse-rich that the house hasn’t bothered with plumbing and has left pellets on the kitchen floor.
The morning is full of Karen ranting at the house. The bright spikes of her scolding bounce around the house. The dust motes dance in each fresh outburst. Karen doesn’t approve of the mouse remains. She greeted them with a shriek, and now she shrieks again, at intervals, in case anyone should think that she had calmed down about it.
“You’d think you weren’t housebroken,” Karen lays into the house again. “You’d think you weren’t housebroken. What is this? What am I, Am I a laugh to you?” She repeats herself a lot. Then she explains to the girl that she does it because she has mothered three children, none of whom ever listened to her, and none of whom do now. Karen, Karen will say, is used to repeating herself in an effort to get people to simply understand, and they never do. When Karen is repeating this to the girl, the girl feels a weird grimace spreading across her face, like a monkey trying to placate another monkey. The girl has so much secondhand sympathy for Karen’s children. Sometimes she wants to say, out of earshot of the house, Karen, do you think your kids would listen more if you were actually a little bit more selective about what you said? but that would feel horridly mean to Karen, a woman who has so much to put up with: the house, the girl, the mouse bones.
Karen has discovered that the house has eaten a snake. The scream bounces around the house, and the girl almost imagines it cringing sheepishly. “I draw the line!” Karen is saying, “I draw the line at snakes!”
Oh, exquisite. I hope @tkingfisher gets a chance to read this.
Oh, this is marvelous!
Translation of Internalspeak to Externalspeak
A P2 post I made internally a month ago on October 5th about what's next for Tumblr leaked as a screenshot. This is super rare, so I'll try to translate what was said for y'all here. It was also incomplete, so here's the full thing.
We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have its revenue and usage above its previous peaks.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (Hat tip.)
It is better to have tried to summit the peak and failed than never to have tried at all. We have learned a ton on the journey, and honed skills we can use to approach other summits.
This is me saying we've worked on Tumblr for four years with ~200 people full-time, and spent well north of $100M above revenue trying to turn the site around, but it hasn't yet. That sucks, but I also want to recognized the effort of everyone who tried and gave their best.
As we talked about in the past, if it doesn’t work we’ll have a backup plan and set up the business so we don’t need to let anyone go, we’ll just need to reflect and decide where else we should concentrate our energy together. This plan is happening now: the majority of the 139 people in Bumblr will switch to other divisions. No plans for any switches in Happiness or T&S.
Bumblr is the internal team name for the product side of Tumblr, and the link was to our internal company directory which showed the ~140 people currently in that team. There are also other teams that work on Tumblr that aren't affected or changing, so this tries to say specifically who's impacted. "Happiness" is our term for customer support, and "T&S" means trust and safety, which is the team that works on fighting bots, spam, dealing with illegal stuff, etc. While Tumblr was burning cash, we managed the rest of the products and company to support and subsidize it because we thought that would turn it around.
We assume the first choice for everyone working on Tumblr is to continue working on Tumblr, but we’re going to give everyone an opportunity to have a “top three” ranked list of what other things around Automattic they would be interested in working on. To infuse some Tumblr mojo.
As we've been telling the Tumblr team for over a year, if we can't get revenue up we need to switch some portion of them to work on other things within Automattic that do generate revenue and can support their salaries. We offered a survey where people could rank stack choose what they would be interested in working on instead of Tumblr. The team has actually been performing really well in their work, which is why we aren't letting people go, they just haven't been getting results, which usually means we're working on the wrong things and we should try working on different things. We've also learned a ton working on Tumblr that I think will make our other products better.
The leak was actually incomplete, here's the rest of the post:
This survey will be posted early next week, alongside some 2-minute videos from WP.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Day One, Pocket Casts, WP VIP, .Org, Applied AI, Texts, self-serve advertising (Blaze), Newspack, Pressable, and Gravatar talking about why you should consider picking them as one of your choices. In the meantime, feel free to bounce around the products linked on Automattic.com to get a feel for them as a consumer and see what tickles your fancy.
We’ll crunch through those preferences with what the opportunities for growth are in the various products and businesses, come back with a plan, get feedback on that, and then post the final plan. The switchovers will happen on December 31, so we start 2024 completely fresh.
We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s performance in 2024.
What followed were a bunch of comments that actually caused us to update the survey, other teams around Automattic posted videos pitching Tumblr folks to work on them, we did the survey, and then posted a first draft of where people could go actually just this week. (Which is maybe why the leak happened, perhaps someone didn't like the proposed changes first draft.) As a reminder, there still are no people switching, it's just planning for what will happen on December 31st, 2023.
As I mentioned this was posted on October 5th, a few weeks before we announced the acquisition of Texts on the 24th, which actually didn't leak. I do appreciate whoever shared the screenshot trimmed it down to not prematurely break the Texts news.
So now you have the full post I made, it also got 45 comments which I'm not going to share out of respect to the privacy of colleagues, but you can imagine it generated a vigorous debate internally and a lot of discussion about how to make sure we're setting up Tumblr for success in this next chapter, a lot of tech discussion about maintenance, libraries, open source, and how small teams can move faster than big teams, if they have the right environment. I'll take further questions in the Asks.
Pro: Paying for Ad Free and supporting Tumblr because it is unique. I’m evaluating the time and money I spend online.
Con: Even if I pay - I’m still stuck with the Twitblr dash. #1 complaint is the smaller center column for posts / spacing / dashboard clutter. #2 the left column navigation. Icons at top made for a cleaner more intuitive UI.
What keeps me here?
The content. Art and music you like. Pics you take. Your personal slice-of-life blurbs and stories. Witchblr.. Ecopunks.. Bookblr.. UFO/Criptids.. Cabins… that article you found that made you rant/ love/ gasp/… AND, the Pick Your Own Adventure story @bookofthegear from the brain of T.Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon
A democrat got in more trouble for pulling a fire alarm than republicans did for trying to overthrow the government.
Fresh Green Bean Casserole - no cans of cream of X soup used !
Looks great!
I don’t wanna act too high and mighty because tomorrow I might fall down on my face.
But, I thank you for sunshine, thank you for rain, thank you for joy, thank you for pain.
It’s a beautiful day!
When I was in the hospital, they gave me a big bracelet that said ALLERGY, but like. I'm allergic to bees. Were they going to prescribe me bees in there.
So there's a medication called hyaluronidase. It's used to make other medications absorb better, because it makes the cell wall more permeable.
One common usage is to make local anesthetic more effective during surgery, for instance. It's used in a number of injected medications.
Bee stings contain an enzyme very similar to this medication, so sometimes, people with bee allergies have an allergic reaction to hyaluronidase.
This is called cross-reactivity, where your body mistakes something for the thing it's actually allergic to, and has an allergic reaction anyway. For instance, sometimes people with latex allergies also are allergic to bananas and other fruits. They don't actually contain latex, but there are some similar proteins.
Apparently, hyraluronidase used in humans is derived from one of four sources: sheep testicles, cow testicles, cow testicles again, and GMO hamster ovaries.
tl;dr: They won't inject you with bees, but they might inject you with purified cow testicle juice, and your body might say 'eh, cow balls are BASICALLY bees' and try to kill you anyway.
That’s helpful to know, but… GMO Hamster Ovaries?!! Who is farmin’ these hamsters?
Professor Zhongde Wang and his lab at Utah State…
“The Wang lab, established at USU in 2012, developed the first genetic hamster models in the world. The models are used in more than a dozen labs and institutions including the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and Public Health Agency of Canada.”
Opening a book is like opening a door. Turning on the TV is like opening a door.Too many doors invite overwhelm. Opening the door to nature brings us closer to our true nature. It’s a revolving door we very much need.
Gunilla Norris
stanfave8-1-17
