Today, Monday June 3rd is my birthday! I am 32 years older than some dumb baby that was just born today. SUCK ON THAT, BABY! I can drive and rent a car and get car insurance and… do other stuff that involves cars. If you want to say “HAPPY FANCY BIRTHDAY!” might I suggest sharing HE with your friends via your link medium of choice? Might I also point you to my Amazon Wishlist and my donation page? I might? Well, good then. I just did. CELEBRATE ME FOREVER!!!
Lar made this for my birthday because he loves me… and also he might hate me… and you… and people with eyes.
Yahoo buying Tumblr is like Napster buying Spotify. Or did Napter eventually become Spotify? After the 4th or 5th sell off and rebranding I kind of lost track. I know for a while it was a brand of pocket internet radios and vacuum sealers to keep deli meats and cheeses fresh.
It’s weird to watch a company with no real relevance or identity struggle to recapture some perceived essential usefulness in the mind of the online public that they lost a decade ago. I say it’s weird because any other company that didn’t survive the DotCom bubble and come out with billions would just disappear into total obscurity. Yahoo somehow persists, buying things people like, ruining them then wondering why we move to a different table when they sit next to us at lunch.
COMMENTERS: Are you worried Yahoo is going to ruin Tumblr? Do you care? Haven’t Tumblr users been doing a pretty good job of ruining Tumblr by themselves? Has any site, service or brand you’ve loved gotten better after a buyout?
Comments (34)
The thing Josh is putting vodka and chocolate sauce on – is it mac’n’cheese? It looks amazing.On topic, Yahoo buying Tumblr is basically going to have to result in the significant watering down of Tumblr. I can’t remember where I read this, but I’ll quote: “A significant minority of Tumblr is soft-core porn, and at least a single-digit percentage of it is hardcore porn.” Yahoo won’t be able to square that away with its shareholders easily.
Candace· 104 weeks ago
It looks like it might be Fritos to me. There is a long, proud tradition of putting stuff on Fritos and making something even more awesome than just plain Fritos. 😉
Tom327Cat· 104 weeks ago
No it’s not, It is Mac and Cheese and Chocolate and Vodka. Seriously Joel, you need to keep up, after all, you are writing the darn thing.why doesn’t he just buy the store brand chocolate vodka mac and cheese?? it’s so much easier, and comes in bulk packages…Tom327Cat· 104 weeks ago
Go with the name brands on that, You will always be disappointed buying the Kroger or Safeway stuff.
Ugh, don’t even get me started on Kirkland’s Best Mac n’ Choc n’ Vod ‘n Cheese.Joel….Joel…Joel… You know that Josh and chocolate-anything don’t go together…. Peanut butter and vodka would be a Josh-winning combo though…. IRL Josh ordered the Frito Bandito chili and frito burger at Twisted Root last weekend and had them add peanut butter… I kind of threw up a little 🙂I thought about being true to reality, but I decided comic Josh, like every other regular human, likes chocolate.The good about Yahoo buying Tumblr: One less site with a poorly chosen name I have to worry about not caring about.The bad about Yahoo buying Tumblr: I forgot.
Will Tumblr survive? Not if Yahoo tries to put their login page in front of it… Seriously.. who coded that thing? It wasn’t a code monkey (*sings* maybe manager wanna write god damn login page himself)… it’s the only page I’ve ever been to on my phone that seems to be intentionally written to be completely useless from a mobile device.
No, I’m not worried about it at all. If I’m correct, and I believe I am, the reason the buy-out happened in the first place is because the site was starting to cost too much to run, and it was either sell it to someone and have them worry about the bills, or just shut it down.As it stands now, Yahoo has agreed to let Tumblr run as an independent company and not mess with it; the terms and conditions aren’t changing, and there isn’t gonna be a major shake-up in terms of who runs it.
Tumblr is gonna be fine. It has too much fan-girling, pizza, and smut not to be.
I know it’s not the point of the comic but the slightly out of focus Josh in the background of panel two is amazeaballs. I love little art things like this.
Junkyard· 104 weeks ago
Hah, this is fantastic! My first genuine laugh-out-loud moment from a webcomic in a while. 🙂“It was four things. Trust me.” I’m gonna be chuckling all damn day.I’ve never used Tumblr, but hearing that they are in trouble makes me glad I didn’t focus any time on it.
Sam· 104 weeks ago
“Yahoo somehow persists, buying things people like, ruining them then wondering why we move to a different table when they sit next to us at lunch.”That. is. Gold.
Happy Birthday Joel.
Yahoo! is just buying anything with a missing vowel in it, since it has a surfeit of them in its name. This way Flickr can become Flickyr and Tumblr can become Tumbloor, leaving Yahoo! a somewhat smaller but still somewhat pronounceable Ah!
Kryss LaBryn· 104 weeks ago
Gotten better after a buy-out? Not that I’m aware of. Gotten worse? Yeah, a buy-out ruined my perfect job.It was well-paid, and got me in amazing shape; I really liked it. But then it got bought out by a huge American, and very litigation-conscious, firm, and went straight to hell. Suddenly we all had to wear hard hats and steel toed boots, even in the parking lot, and all the middle management guys who had been fairly relaxed beforehand suddenly were (legitimately) in fear of their jobs and cracked down on us like a tonne of bricks.
This in a place where the equivalent rules beforehand went “No open-toed shoes out on the floor.” And pants, while encouraged, seemed to be pretty optional.
Yeah, I kind of hate buy-outs. Also, Cargill sucks.
It didn’t bother me when Yahoo! bought Tumblr, as I only causally use it to begin with. I am interested to see what happens though.
Ryan· 104 weeks ago
I think you meant ensure instead of insure in the third panel.It’s technical, so probably most folks won’t understand it, but yeah… most of my career I’ve worked with ColdFusion. It was created by Allaire Corp which was later bought by Macromedia, who made it a whole lot better and then Macromedia was bought by Adobe who also made it a whole lot better. Each company in turn was larger and more popular than the one before and each company in turn did real well by the product.lou· 104 weeks ago
I’m not a tumblr user or visit it very often, so I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other (I sound like I’m from the Neutral planet from Futurama). As for a service getting better after a buyout, did youtube get better or worse after Google bought them? But troubles with cartoons aside, Disney buying Marvel really didn’t change much. They kept on like they been doing since before.Oh, and happy birthday, Joel!
I…never really understood what Tumblr is. I don’t get it, and I shrug non-commitally, as if someone asked me about football or something.Chipotle unsold-out. I think that’s the closest thing I can think of. Some years ago, McDonalds went through a process of tidying up, selling stocks that they did not want. So, Chipotle, who sold their stock in order to fund them in the beginning, had the golden opportunity of purging that stain upon their reputation. They seized that opportunity, and bought back that stock. Years later…soft corn tortillas and lime cilantro lime rice.
Things are looking up.
Hah, this is fantastic! My first genuine laugh-out-loud moment from a webcomic in a while. 🙂