1) there is only one algorithm for your dashboard, and you can turn it off in settings. can’t stress this enough. if you turn it off, your dashboard is in chronological order of posts and reblogs from people you follow
2) because of the lack of algorithm, likes do nothing. if you want more people to see a post, you have to reblog it so it goes on your follower’s dashes
3) the vast majority of posts on a person’s blog tend to be reblogs. think 90% or so. some of those will have that person commenting on it, and more will have tags
4) comments stay on reblog chains, while tags only show up on your reblog of that post. it’s kind of like a whisper voice. in either case, both op and the person you reblogged from see that in their notifications
5) tags don’t go in the body of the post. writing “staying in #lasvegas” won’t make it appear in the las vegas tag, it’ll just look weird
6) it’s totally normal to reblog and post multiple things in one day. it’s normal to reblog the same post twice in a row. it’s normal to have 100 posts+reblogs in a day. post limit (the total number of original posts and reblogs) for a single day is 250. you heard me. 250. go hog fucking wild
7) it defaults to having a visible likes tab on your blog (but only on your blog, not the dashboard) but most people toggle it off
8) “tumblr clout” is a fucking joke. no one can see your follower count, and no one makes money here. there are no influencers. enjoy not giving a shit about maintaining a public persona. it’s all anonymous and your employers won’t find you here
one more very important thing. user experience is cultivated by the user. What you see is based entirely on the people you follow. you will not see more stuff unless you follow more people. as much as we joke about this place being a hellsite most of us tend to ignore the drama that isnt absolutely fucking hilarious. if youre having a bad time, reevaluate the people youre following.
even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.
The lyric is:
Well maybe I’m the faggot America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda
I don’t know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I’ve never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don’t know what it’s like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.
And it’s hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren’t slurs when I was your age.
I was 17 when this song came out. “Gay” was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn’t like. “Pop quiz? That’s so gay!” A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. She didn’t deny it, so her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow “nobody saw”. The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn’t do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be “endorsing homosexuality.” My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she “wasn’t supportive of Catholic values.”
The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard’s murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn’t finish writing a play titled “The Lemon Tree” about two girls whose love for each other couldn’t survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn’t like I was losing anything, right?
I didn’t have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society’s homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.
(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang’s sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn’t get radio play here when I was young.)
And yes, “faggot” was worse than “gay”. “Gay” just meant, you know, “bad”, but “faggot” meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.
So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day’s anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn’t believe that for once somebody was on my side.
Green Day’s image was tough and angry and loud, and it’s an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying “maybe I’m the faggot” was them saying Come and get me. You can’t scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I’ll own it, and I’ll use it to lure you into punching range. You’re wrong and I can fight you and win.
It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.
“there were no words for us that werent slurs” is such a powerful statement.
Shit like this makes it very, very hard to tell when someone is making things up. Because, really, no one has yet managed a yarn that’s weirder than reality.
ALT
