oh my god. they changed the “hide my blog from search results” setting to “discourage searching of my blog”. ie it’s no longer possible to stop google & co from indexing your blog.
this feels like the kind of change tumblr should give a heads up about rather than silently make. if you have a blog, google is indexing it now. there is no way to stop google from indexing your blog now. regardless of previous settings, your blog is now being indexed by search engines. you can’t turn this off.
I went to look because I wanted to see what it said. “It is up to them to honor your request” - this is such bullshit. If a blog is marked to be hidden then it should be hidden.
Tumblr has not changed anything about how indexing works. They’ve just stopped lying to you about how indexing works.
If you want your blog guaranteed hidden from search results, you can’t put it on the open internet. This is not me being combative, this is how Google works (and any other search engine, too). If they can find and access a web page, they will access that web page. Once they do, they’ll index its contents and return it as a search result to people. The reason they know it’s okay to do this is that… basically, is that they can. Making something world-readable gives implied permission for the world to read it.
Tumblr can use a file called robots.txt to offer a suggestion that Google shouldn’t index your blog even though it’s perfectly accessible to anyone in the world including them. And Google will take that suggestion under advisement, and traditionally they have always gone along with it. But if they change their mind and stop going along with it, then your page goes into search results.
You can think of robots.txt as a “Do Not Enter” sign on an unlocked door. The reason people don’t go in is that there’s a sign asking them not to. But if they ignore the sign, the door is unlocked.
To guarantee your blog is hidden from search results, you have to remove it from the open internet. Tumblr lets you do this with either a blog password or by setting your blog to only be visible to logged-in Tumblr users. Those are the two things that’ll work out of the list of exactly two things that will work.
The Barbie movie really said. Yes you will grow up and childhood wonder will vanish. Yes you will grow up and learn to hate yourself, your body, your awkwardness. Yes you will grow up and lose your confidence and certainty and sense of purpose. Yes you will grow up and the world will seem a bleaker, lonelier place every day, and society will seem bleaker and lonelier every day, and you won’t understand what went wrong in the span of just a few years, what took you from a happy and secure young girl to a sad, uncertain, scared grown woman.
And yet. You will learn to find beauty again. You will find joy in not having a purpose, in building a purpose for yourself. You will find beauty in connection, with the people and the world around you. You will learn to love signs of ageing as proof of a life well lived, of experience and happiness. You will take that little girl by the hand and tell her “I know, this isn’t what you thought it would be, but it’s real. Let me show you how beautiful it can be.”
angel in space who falls in love with an astronaut floating out in the void, not realizing they’ve been dead for years out there nor comprehending what death even is. is that anything
the angel starts leading them back to earth cuz they think that’s what’ll make them feel better, finally talk back to them, open up. it takes lightyears to get back to earth’s atmosphere and when they do, the angel embraces them as gravity takes hold and pulls them crashing down. they both incinerate into ash and disappear. is that anything
