woke up and someone spilled vanilla extract all over my dash, so as punishment you strange little beasties are getting all the VANILLA FACTS i know:
vanilla is the 2nd most expensive spice in the world (2nd to saffron)
which is why more than 99% of what we call “vanilla extract” is actually vanillin (vanilla’s dominant flavor compound) and is not extracted from real vanilla.
luckily, even professionals struggle to tell the difference when it comes to things like baked goods. but there is a distinct difference in non-heat treated products like vanilla ice cream. real vanilla has a more complex, individualized flavor profile.
why is vanilla so expensive? because it is a ridiculously delicate & demanding crop. complete primadonna.
vanilla beans come from vanilla orchids. these crazy flowers bloom for A SINGLE DAY and have to be HAND-POLLINATED in a process that is exhausting, delicate, and requires specialist knowledge passed down over generations.
then, if you’re lucky, you get vanilla beans.
which then require months of further specialized treatment.
the entire process takes about a year and can go wrong at any stage
vanilla has been cultivated for over 800 years (possibly much longer). the first known cultivators are the Totonac, an indigenous people of Mexico.
the Aztecs used it as a sweetener to balance out the bitter taste of cocoa. it was popular in a drink called xocolatl–the precursor to modern hot chocolate!
it is only pollinated by a very specific orchid bee!!!
which is why no fruit could be grown outside of Mexico until the 1800s
Edmond Albius, born into slavery, invented the pollination method we still use today–launching a global industry when he was just 12 years old.
today, the majority of the world’s vanilla is grown in Madagascar
if you want real vanilla, read the labels carefully–it’s harder to find than you think!
in conclusion, those tiny black specks you see in fancy vanilla ice cream? those are vanilla bean seeds! itty bitty orchid seeds!!! they are delicious and also a PRISSY BITCH!
I finished the main story of totk (and hereby back from my hiatus) so here’s a dump of all the sketches I made while playing. Might finish some of these later lol
Removing the ability to go directly to a specific reblog is a disastrously bad change! I can no longer engage with it when someone reblogs a post referencing the previous reblog's tags, which is, if you somehow missed it, a very common way people interact with each other on tumblr. I also often end up following new people because my mutuals regularly reblogged from them and they have interesting tag commentary; if I can't click through and look at their tags anymore, I'm not going to naturally find new people to interact with, which seems like the kind of thing that tumblr should want to incentivize rather than actively prevent?
I'm aware that this was not your decision personally, in the sense that you were apparently unaware of it at first, but it's a very bad decision, it makes my user experience of the site much worse, and I am going to use multiple avenues available to me to register a complaint about it in order to emphasize this badness!
Whatever this change is supposed to achieve, do something else to achieve it that doesn't remove the ability to actually look at specific posts.
a lot of changes we make won’t be well received by people who have survived the kinda insane ways this site works as-is. that’s the price we have to pay to help make tumblr a growing platform.
i’m sorry, it sucks, i don’t like it either, i’m also someone who’s been using this site for over 10 years and i’m used to the way it’s been working for most of that time. it’s a challenge for me to accept that tumblr isn’t actually working right now for the vast majority of people, who aren’t as vocal as we are.
please do send in feedback, but try to understand that most of what you’re describing is behavior you learned the hard way, and we can’t keep tumblr around if “the way to effectively use tumblr” is learned the hard way.
Just to clarify here, what changed on Web (not the apps yet) is that tapping the blog name in the reblog chain is going to take you to the blog now, not the post.
I get it too, that’s not how Tumblr works, but if you look at everywhere else, that’s how it works over there.
It’s tough to lose this piece of Tumblr’s DNA, but it’s even worse to know that some parts of that DNA don’t make sense to new users. We lose those new users, we lose any funding they would have brought in, and some day, because of that, we’ll lose Tumblr.
But, all is not lost. Tapping the blog name in the reblog chain will now take you to the blog, but tapping any of the white space in the header of the reblog post will still take you to the post.
Can that be clearer? I believe so, and fortunately it’s being worked on.
One step at a time, to a more sustainable Tumblr, where maybe a few more things are less confusing to new users.
Hey @macmanx, thanks for this response. I understand this is still part of a larger change, but I feel like you’re still failing to understand what the actual usecase is here. Tapping on the white space in the header of the reblog post absolutely does not do the same thing that people are talking about.
We’re talking about the ability to see, on our dashboard, the post that the person we’re following reblogged *from*. this post almost certainly did not contain any reblog comments, but it still exists. there is now no way to access it.
This is especially problematic because when users reblog posts, they often add sotto voce comments in the tags and respond to other comments the person they’re reblogging from has added. with no way to see the post someone is reblogging from, there’s no way to understand what those tags are responding to.
Here’s an example at random from my dashboard, literally 5 posts above this one:
Where do I click to see the post by toastling that my friend Estufar is referring to?
In this case, the post was made recently, and it “only” has 237 notes, so I could maybe open up the full notes view and try to piece together which post by toastling she might have reblogged (not a guarantee! maybe toastling reblogged the post three different times, and now I need to figure out specifically which one of those reblogs estufar was looking at—the old link would have made this possible, the new link makes it impossible)
This change isn’t just harder to find, the actual information provided has been removed from the UI entirely and is now accessible only through direct API inspection.
Does that make sense? Do you see how “tapping any of the white space in the post header” isn’t actually solving the problem of being able to go to the *previous* post in the chain? There’s a critical user need that’s been erased with this update, and that’s what’s causing the pain.
