I made my first post on Tumblr on November 28, 2009. I can’t tell you why I was moved today to see when my first post was from, only that I was messing around on Tumblr when I decided to download my blog as a backup. That led to me looking at my index to see when I started, and then my surprise at discovering that today was the day. My first post is a much worse version of the pic above. I had the idea that I wanted to do a blog that was just photographs shot and edited on my phone. Hopefully daily. Over the years I’ve had a number of other tumblrs, and the daily photo idea was not one that I was able to stick with. I’ve never had a ton of followers over there, but I remain affectionately engaged with the platform. The fact that Automattic! has basically admitted that even they can’t make it profitable seems kind of endearing. There are still a lot of kooks over there and my feed remains a rich source of imagery for me. I like that the currency is the “repost”, rather than the “like”. I paid for an ad free version when they offered it and I still have a couple of blogs that I post to regularly: my photo one above and Knee Deep In the Flooded Victory , which is mostly reposts growing out of an installation of mine from 10 years ago, as well as bing a gathering place for imagery about public space, costume, sex and queer monstrosity.

I had hoped with the recent ownership change that Tumblr would become more fully integrated with wordpress and potentially have easier cross posting with Bluesky, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. I was never part of the great fandom wars on the site, but there’s a ton of queer creators still putting out great information.