By James Thurber

by james thurber

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

I actually like that all media is now created to be thoughtlessly consumed within a single alloted month before it's destroyed by business guys whose stated favourite book is a dingy unread copy of The Art of War they left on their bedside to "reference". it's cool that everything is just one middling budget twelve episode season and half of it is dropped all at once directly onto streaming services so you have to sit down for six miserable hours to watch it in the most antisocial way possible. this is probably how art was meant to be consumed. this is how humans best process things, like death.

Tag yourself which official Bad Art trait are you

All the Midnight Burger season 1 paintings! On to season 2!

All my Midnight Burger paintings

hi, matt, what's the work of audio fiction you'd recommend to get someone excited about the medium?

Hey, thanks for asking! Making me narrow it down to one is cruel but sharpening. THE one I'll go for is

Midnight Burger

a series about a time travelling, dimension spanning diner staffed by misfits who help people and fix damage to the fabric of spacetime

because

I'd recommend it to anyone (other strong recs like Unwell are brilliant but not for everyone, but I think everyone can get something out of Midnight Burger)

I want to talk to everyone about the characters (I identify strongly with Leif's drive not to be Just One Guy)

the dialogue makes me want to span my spectacles in half from how good it is

it's doing things that would have ruled it out from ever getting made before the current resurgence in audio drama (unlike another go-to rec, Wooden Overcoats, which is an extremely good sitcom that I could imagine being broadcast on the radio)

it teaches me complex things about physics while also making me tear up, and it's not a 'despite' thing, it's often the physics that causes the emotional reaction

I snuck a couple of bonus recs in there but I feel good about the main choice. Midnight Burger is nearly at the end of season 3, so there's just about time to binge up to speed!

WELCOME TO MIDNIGHT BURGER

WELCOME TO MIDNIGHT BURGER

When Gloria took a waitressing job at Midnight Burger outside of Phoenix, she didn’t realize she was now an employee of a time-traveling, di