Cancel Your Plans We’re Thinking About The Pale Blue Dot Voyager Pic Tonight

Hey Tumblr newbies! This is your periodic reminder to not look like a bot!

Recently I've had an uptick in bot followers after a long lull, but I have ALSO had an uptick in followers who, once I click on their blogs, appear to be real, but have the default userpic, no bio, and/or "Untitled" for the blog title, and so look like bots at first glance.

Please don't forget to change your userpic - it doesn't matter what you change it to, you can turn the default one upside-down, just so it's clear a human has interacted with it! While you're at it, change the title of the blog to be literally anything other than "Untitled" and for good measure toss up a few words in your bio; naming a couple fandoms you're in is a good one that immediately marks you as real.

But if you only do one of these, change your userpic for sure. Many people will just see a default userpic and block on sight without doing any further investigation. If you have a default userpic you have probably already been blocked by a few people you followed! Is it fair that Tumblr makes you follow people when you sign up before it lets you change your userpic, and doesn't warn you that the default userpic will make people think you're a bot? No. But that's life on the hellsite.

“in the 21st century borders aren’t decided by force” and yet they are maintained by it

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

excerpt from In Memoriam by David Wojnarowicz, Day Without Art, 1989

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, 2022

The Spanish surnames of many Filipinos have often misled foreigners here and abroad, who are unaware of the decree on the adoption of surnames issued by Governor-General Narciso Clavería in 1849. Until quite recently in the United States, the Filipinos were classified in demographic statistics as a “Spanish-speaking minority,” along with Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, and other nationals of the Central or South American republics. The Philippines, as is well known, was a Spanish colony when Spain was mistress of empires in the Western Hemisphere; but the Americans were “hispanized” demographically, culturally, and linguistically, in a way the Philippines never was. Yet the Spanish surnames of the Filipinos today—García, Gómez, Gutiérrez, Fernández—seem to confirm the impression of the American statistician, as well as of the American tourist, that the Philippines is just another Mexico in Asia. Nor is this misunderstanding confined to the United States; most Spaniards still tend to think of “las Islas Filipinas” as a country united to them through the language of Cervantes, and they catalogue Philippine studies under “Hispano-America.” The fact is that after nearly three-and-a-half centuries of Spanish rule probably not more than one Filipino in ten spoke Spanish, and today scarcely one in fifty does. Still the illusion lives on, thanks in large part to these surnames, which apparently reflect descent from ancient Peninsular forbears, but in reality often date back no farther than this decree of 1849.

Somehow overlooked, this decree, with the Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos which accompanied it, accounts for another curiousity which often intrigues both Filipinos and foreign visitors alike, namely, that there are towns in which all the surnames of the people begin with the same letter. This is easily verifiable today in many parts of the country. For example, in the Bikol region, the entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single jurisdiction of Albay. Beginning with A at the provincial capital, the letters B and C mark the towns along the coast beyond Tabaco to Tiwi. We return and trace along the coast of Sorsogon the letters E to L; then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with M, we stop with S to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a quick tour around the island of Catan-duanes. Today’s lists of municipal officials, memorials to local heroes, even business or telephone directories, also show that towns where family names begin with a single letter are not uncommon. In as, for example, the letter R is so prevalent that besides the Roas, Reburianos, Rebajantes, etc., some claim with tongue in cheek that the town also produced Romuáldez, Rizal, and Roosevelt!

Excerpt from the 1973 introduction to Catálogo de Alfabético de Apellidos by Domingo Abella