Analemma #2: The Frog who was Plugged-In

It's the 14th of Prarial, the day of the Acacia tree. The sun's shining outside, my nose is congested from allergies, and Acacia continues to be a very distinctive orange in Minecraft. Without further ado, let's get into this week, starting with... frogs?

Tumblr has frogs. It's a pretty simple gimmick, where a button title “Click for Frogs” gives you a little array of frogs to make music with, like recreating the Gravity Falls theme or classic childrens’ songs about frogs. On another note, taking a peek at the code has reveals something else– Tumblr has a gifting crabs features, and as far as I can tell, the frogs might be reskinned variants of the crabs. It’s an April Fool’s-like feature, with no clear intent besides fun!

On the inverse: sometimes there are features that are integral to a platform and they just... vanish. You now, in a cool and totally viable way. Anyway, Translate on Twitter seems to be gone for some users. Which is interesting considering how Elon, in one of his arbitrary and unofficial flash in a pan tweets, wanted all tweets to auto-translate, and now they may simply not want to pay Google Translate. All in all, it's a week for being useless and fun, or useful and kaput!

But back to frogs and Tumblr: as I said last week, I write a lot about Tumblr because it's so integral to my online identity, and the communities that I've found myself within, as well as the social rhetoric and modes of interaction that I've learned. It's something where the logic of the space and the evolution of the platform are intertwined with my digital footprint. For that reason, the current state of the platform is fascinating: merch that draws off of 2014 nostalgia, a subscription model based on paying to opt out of ads, and features, much like the frogs, that foster affection between user and the platform, to cater to a user base, that much like me, finds the site quintessential to their online identity. 

The last two elements are especially vital. To take a quick detour: classic cyberpunk is a fraught space, and a genre that can stand to be challenged. That being said, sometimes it presents perspectives that do stand the test of time. Such is the case of James Tiptree Jr's "The Girl Who was Plugged In." Tiptree presents a future in which advertising is banned, and the only way for companies to market their products is via influencer-esque product placement, with desirable individuals accidentally being "caught" using the products in public, fostering an emotional tie between those that aspire to be those individuals and the products being used. And while I don't think that that is what's happening here, the language of removing ads from Tumblr is framed in the tone of "just pitch us a few dollars a month" with a sense of the platform and user being friends. And honestly, the design of the platform does its best to encourage that. Tumblr is a curated space at this point, haunted by people who don’t want to leave it. It’s a community and space that has built up a certain reputation and ethos. But that doesn’t mean that critical engagement isn’t vital, on some level.

Sometimes, it's important to make physical things. And sometimes those physical things can serve a dual purpose: both replicating a dear item from childhood media, as well as serving as a solid dinner. Which is exactly what the Brock's Pokemon anime soup recipe does! It looks hearty, and even with the summer coming, sometimes you just want good soup (have I mentioned yet that I've got hay fever? Well, hay fever is hitting hard and soup is integral to me whacking it off with a broom, so this has some personal relevance at the moment).

There's a new Isabel J Kim short story! "Day Ten Thousand" is a story I don't know how to actually describe, because of the way that it plays with style and genre, but at the heart it's focusing on time as a loop, a sequence of people named Dave, and how we deal with death. The thing about Kim's short stories is that they're the kind of stories that make me want to sit down and write. They're this almost revelatory moment, a crystallization of what can be done with voice and style to craft something distinctive and emotionally resonant. And at the end of it, I'm always left with a moment of "holy shit, you can do that?" And then: it makes me want to write something that breaks any and all rules that I know of.

Music wise, the bop of the week is Sidney Gish's "Not but for You, Bunny" (specifically, the Audiotree Live version). Gish is a bit twee, a bit out of a certain form of 2017 folk punk self aware joking, but she's got a way of establishing imagery and setting tone that makes the moments of joking deflection work, instead of letting them sit center and grate incessantly.

Don't have a lot to say for this section this week beyond A) being glad that I predicted the resurgence of Calloway debate that came with the new Vanity Fair article that details how she’s a nightmare to work with on any level and got high on mushrooms while on an interview and B) niche internet phenomenon Blaseball has decided to end today. There's also the whole Gadsby thing, but you couldn't pay me to have a take on that with a ten foot pole, and let's be real here: this is a free newsletter. You’re not paying me.

This has been Analemma! Thanks for reading, see you all next week, since despitea any current AI developer attempts to predict an AI apocalypse, I don't think we're going anywhere just yet. If you've got thoughts, opinions, good soup recs, etc, feel free to hit me with them @hedgefruit or @hedgefruit.bsky.social.