If you want to try coding a blog post on Tumblr, you'd have a much easier time opening an umbrella up your own ass

AFOS has a Tumblr--an infrequently updated one, to be more accurate. I joined Tumblr in 2012 mostly to see if I could attract Tumblr users to either AFOS or the AFOS blog.

Since 2012, I've discovered that I don't care much for Tumblr as a platform or a place to compose original content (also after 2012, it was bought by Yahoo). If you want to write a long-form post on Tumblr or get that post to look exactly like how you want it to look, you can't rely on Tumblr for any of that. Any attempt to code on Tumblr a piece of writing of any size ought to be accompanied by nothing but Price Is Right failure horns.

How the fuck did Dan Harmon manage to accomplish paragraph breaks in the long-form posts he used to write on Tumblr? Over on that platform, a simple, normal-looking paragraph break is damn near impossible to code into existence. Tumblr makes it so impossible for you to create paragraph breaks because they want to make your writing look like that of a rambling and mentally unstable 14-year-old who doesn't know what a paragraph break is.

I like my paragraph breaks, Tumblr. Fuck you. I like being able to pause between ideas while reading through something and mentally catch a breath. If you can't give me that, Tumblr, catch a fade.



I looked around the Internet to see if I was alone in finding Tumblr to be the shittiest platform for composing long-form writing, and I stumbled into a 2014 listicle by a blogger named Liz Galvao. Yes, I know I've said I despise the listicle format so much that if I ever run into any hed that begins with a numeral, I refuse to read anything below that hed. But it was a critique of Tumblr's many fails as a platform, which became so frustrating for Galvao that she switched from Tumblr to WordPress for composing posts ("Most of the templates don't even let you pick your own font! This is supposed to be MY space on the Internet as a writer, and I can't even pick the font? That's fucked"), and I couldn't resist reading through her rant.

"In-post editing is SUPER limited on Tumblr. I can't italicize a word in the title of a post, for example, which drove me crazy every time I wrote about a TV show. I can't change the size or color of a word in the body of a text post, something that should be incredibly easy to do with basic HTML," wrote Galvao.

Meanwhile, all those things can be achieved on either WordPress, the service Word Is Bond contributors like myself and Hardeep Aujla use for composing Word Is Bond posts, or Blogger, which is why I've stuck to Blogger for composing long-form writing. All Tumblr is good for is reblogging .GIFs. Tumblr, you're as reliable as a Yahoo content editor who can't tell Damon Wayans Sr. and Damon Wayans Jr. apart. Tumblr and Yahoo, you deserve each other.