"My name is Rhoda Morgenstern. I was born in the Upper Midwest in the mid seventies, but I've lived all over the world. People love me or hate me, and it's nice knowing where I stand. I had a bad puberty, and it's still going strong. I'm a high school graduate, I went to a liberal arts college where I learned about writing and feminism and paternalism. If I remembered my ACT scores, I'd never admit it. You may remember me from Trainwrecks. I was the one with good grammar and occasional lazy spelling errors. I started Rhoda's Tact Shack as a side project where I could dispense tactful advise, both solicited and unsolicited, into the tumblr-sphere. Then I abandoned it. Now I'm back. Tumblr, this is your last chance!"

The artful snarker

I’m feeling pretty good about my digs here at the new tact shack, and I’ll tell you why:  I’ve got a new weapon in my snarky arsenal that I couldn’t use very often on Trainwrecks.  Subtlety.

Now, let’s be frank, the only reason any of you are reading this is because you enjoyed Trainwrecks.  It’s possible that you hated everything I ever wrote, but how would you know?  We never assigned credit or bylines and some or all of us lobbed our share of stinkers into the tumblrsphere.  I count the Robinette debacle among my own failings, but you only know that because I’m telling you.  Trainwrecks writers shared the credit and the censure of everything we posted as a community, and that certainly colored my contributions there.

Here, I’ve got free reign to be earnest if I like, and yet my audience’s expectation is that I’ll break out the snark.  And I probably will.  But my snark can be much more nuanced than it was at Trainwrecks.  This excites the hell out of me.

But I’m totally off topic, I wanted to comment on this post from orderedlists.   More specifically, I wanted to comment on his breakdown of the tumblr demographic:

Still, the initial stratification was like this:

  1. Creators (artists, writers, etc) - very few
  2. Users (for lack of a better term, people who used the site like a traditional blogging platform) - majority
  3. “Rebloggers” (negative nellies) - few

Can the “reblogs,” the “negative nellie” blogs, the “annonyblogs,” the “snark blogs” be art? 

Comments (View)
blog comments powered by Disqus