I'm not sure how old you are or if you were active on the internet ten years ago or so, but Tumblr is more or less the LiveJournal of today, and like LiveJournal, a huge segment of it's users live on it at every waking moment and think it's the only website worth visiting.

Moreso this is the subset of the extreme fans who believe they're saving the world via reblogging fanart of their favorite actors, because social justice that's why.

My theory is that it's age dependent....ie, a lot of peoples favorite music/musician is one that they 'discovered' when they were in their teens and that artist was at their peak. Same thing with internet...things.

There seems to be a shift every couple years as a new generation of teenagers 'discovers' a social media platform and has that set as their default.


I grew up in web 1.0 and honestly I hate all the web 2.0 websites filled with java scripts and social media shit. I like PoETV's ancient, quick-loading and responsive design.

Tumblr is the unfortunate intersection of that age when you thought you had all the answers for the world (despite living at home in high school), that point in your life where all the pop culture you liked was somehow deep and meaningful to the deepest inner reaches of your life, and an echo chamber where instead of having to write out your opinion you can hit the reblog button and photocopy someone else's, all topped with a heaping scoop of white guilt as white middle-class kids invent new genders, mental disorders and sexualities on the fly to justify being part of a persecuted class and therefore not be part of the problem.

It's not the technology, it's the age of maximum appeal.

Tumblr is a blogging website.

That's a rather Randian way of putting it.

Indeed. Let's give the devil her due. The basic appeal of all of her work is the observation that a great many of the people who made our modern life possible were never remotely compensated for their efforts. Then there are the Kardasians, who reap great rewards effectively doing nothing of value for anyone.

Ayn's mistake, of course, was assuming that free market capitalism was somehow a solution to this problem. Well we're swimming in it now, and the problem has only grown worse by some order of magnitudes.

This is a pretty good example. The people operating this convention are good capitalists. They don't pay for anything unless forced to at the point of a gun or a lawsuit and they take whatever they can get and exploit it without concern for tomorrow or others. That's what they teach you in Biz School, so save all your hard earned cash, you just got a 4 year degree.

And they've already got a page up for 2015:

http://www.dashcon.org/dashcon-2015-basic-information/

Our problems aren't caused by "free" markets, they're caused by noncompetitive markets and an increasing over-estimation of the power of state regulatory bodies to fix these problems, when the state regulatory bodies are themselves controlled by the very same moneyed interests that anti-liberal rhetoric claims the state can provide a vanguard against. Threatening to shoot people who don't fall in line isn't actually a good solution, but it does illustrate where this sort of thinking leads, once the disillusionment sets in.

Anyway, the people operating this convention aren't good capitalists; they have no money, no way of delivering profits to investors, and they assume (wrongly) that everyone wants to work for free, on the owners' own terms. In lieu of actual products and services, they offer pizza, and appeals to emotion or some intangible commodity, like "community" or "pity for the victimized" (in this case, the victims are the organizers themselves). If anything, I'd say they're budding Marxist-Leninists, perhaps informed by the anarcho-libertarian Hacker ethos, but unaware that this ethos is not shared by everyone. To them, everything should be shared and given freely unto the state's representatives. But given another year and access to billions of dollars worth of tanks, bombs, and racist cops, I'm sure they'd get around to coercing the hell out of those greedy Night Vale kulaks.

I see a lot of people who each paid for the conference. What I don't see is any conference. Just an empty hotel room with a ball pit.

So a big chunk of money went in, where did it go Homie? Did they give it to some homeless man out of altruism? Or did they keep it for themselves, like good capitalists? Somebody made out well enough to be planning 2015. I doubt it was the panelists.

Here's some fun text from the site badass kindly pointed us to.

"Our second event will focus on expanding on the values we brought to our first event, and we hope to even further bring the people of tumblr together. We're bringing back popular 2014 programming and are going to provide yet another great panel of guests!"

Expect more of the same, is what is sez. Caveat Emptor.

Also: we may quibble about the meaning of "free market capitalism". I assert that it means exactly what we have today. In the same way, ardent Communists I knew would always say "well the Soviet Union isn't really communism". You know the one true Scotsman fallacy? Yes, I thought you did. So what do you want to call it? I'm just going to use the name everyone else in America uses, unless you can think of a better one.

Well, the Soviet Union *wasn't* really Communist. The Soviet Union was a socialist state with messianic-Marxist overtones. Of course we can quibble about what "Communist" means, just as we can quibble about what "freemarket capitalism" means. If, to you, "Communist" means "Authoritarian-Socialist" and "freemarket" means a system that embraces Rooseveltian mercantilism and relies heavily on corporate welfare, nanny-state prohibitions on drugs and unrestricted intellectual-"property" use, and state-funded slave labor both at home and abroad, all while charging companies tax rates that are higher than Sweden's and generating a remarkably well-regulated business atmosphere that's managed to drive almost all of our work (besides WalMart) overseas to China, then that's fine. We need only agree on terms!

But I don't see why you seem to hell-bent on assuming that only "capitalists" acquire money. Marxist-Leninists acquired money, too, and loads of it; the telling difference here lies in the organizer's inability to recognize the self-interest of other economic actors (which is classical M-L thinking), and in their willingness to resort to fraud and to deny consumers their right to free choice (which fits with M-L thinking, and may or may not be "capitalist" depending on your definition, but is most certainly anti-Randian and, in the latter case, anti-freemarket)


Anyway, if it was *me* the convention organizers were after to give a speech, I'd probably do it free of charge. Particularly if they let me speak about My Little Pony! But that is because I'm used to a Spartan lifestyle, and I am informed by the Hacker ethic. Freedom and sharing is my choice; it is not "altruism" (or "coerced-charity") as defined by Ayn Rand. I am willing to undercut the competition and undervalue my public speaking services, although I am under no obligation to do so. I'd also like to point out that this was clearly a case of fraud and breach of contract; the organizers could have faced corrective action by the state, and I wouldn't have minded. (Assault, rape, fraud: these are the things the state can justly meet with coercive force) Or, better yet, the convention-goers themselves could have rioted and re-appropriated their wealth on their own terms! While I don't condone vigilantism, in some cases I think a return to a more informal, Viking-style common law approach to redress could be acceptable.

Hey, now; there was also a sketchy looking bounce house nearby too.

It actually looked like an inflatable raft rather than a kiddie pool.

Congratulations, MP! You are now officially Old. Join the club! We play shuffleboard on tuesdays, and smoke hashish the rest of the time. I think you'll like it here. Life can be pretty sweet when you sweep away all the nonsense.

Suddenly I've been seeing a lot of "all hail the glow cloud" shirts around Seattle and I'm not sure I even want to know.

Welcome to Night Vale is a pretty lame podcast that's supposed to be an NPR-like community radio show in a town where the bizarre and paranormal is an accepted part of daily life; in actuality it sounds more like dramatic readings of someone's lame attempts at horror stories, complete with bargain basement attempts at surreality and whimsy. So nerds go crazy for it.

So basically A Prairie Home Companion written by creepypasta nerds?

You guys are missing the obvious component that makes this a hit on tumblr: the host of the NPR-like show is canon homosexual and is in love with a man named Carlos (presumably a PoC zomg) who has "perfect hair."

WTNV also had the benefit of timing - a shit-ton of Homestucks jumped aboard because the creator of Homestuck said "going on a major hiatus, thanks for your 2 million dollars for the kickstarter!" and they were looking for another omg-so-random fandom thing to take over. Being a podcast they had all the leeway to fanart to their hearts' content.

The Blair Witch Project of radio?

Yeah, I blame the organizers for sure, just a train wreck. I don't know who thought this was a good idea, but I've given up trying to understand internet drudges a long time ago.