Eleven Red Pandas

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
big-meows
big-meows

Last fall when it became clear that the neighbors on either side of me were Tr*mp voters, I decided it was my moral obligation to be Weirder and More Fun as....some sort of resistance effort I guess. And for some reason that manifested in....maintaining my Halloween decorations year round. Primarily via my giant bush Spider.

Halloween decorations in front of a small town house. there is a very large, black decorative spider decoration sitting atop the privacy bush in the front yard.ALT
a close up of the large decorative spider. it has furry accents and large orange rhinestone eyes.ALT

(Her name is Rebeccatha. If you even care.)


So after Halloween passed I dressed her for the cold.

the decorative spider is wearing a red Santa hat, a scarf, and tiny red mittens on the ends of all her legs.ALT

And it's a good thing I did!

the spider is covered in an inch of fresh snowfall.ALT

I spent January in the hospital and most of February in recovery so I didn't get a chance to dress her for Valentine's, but I did get her set for St Patrick's

the spider is now wearing a jaunty green glitter top hat and a shiny gold bowtie. the top hat is embellished with a gold shamrock.ALT

And Easter.

the spider has large felted bunny ears.ALT

Today I dressed her for spring!

the spider is wearing a flower crown and a faux beehive on her head. there are also artificial bees and dragonflies pinned on her, as though they are enjoying the flowers.ALT
a close up of the spider's head. she's very pretty.ALT

Dressing her up brings me a lot of joy and tbh I don't know how my neighbors feel about it. Does it annoy them? Do they like it? Are they indifferent? Does it matter?

I think you gotta find a way to be outwardly and publicly joyous about mundane things in dark times.

I know this: come June I'm going to have the gayest spider in the neighborhood.

rebeccatha the all-season yard spider love you rebeccatha the all-season yard spider
n7punk
cishetsbeingcishet

tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows

cishetsbeingcishet

for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016

each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen

you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster

in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could

chantrymouse

image

lest we forget

sreegs

This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.

- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.

- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.

- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.

- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards

- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)

- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work

- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon

- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak

- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself

- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great

- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone

image
cyle

a whole chapter of my tumblr memoir will be “lizard election 2016”

it was the first project i ever led myself, and i thought i’d be fired for sure by the end of it. completely worth it. would do it all again.

my only regret, echoed by @zacksultan and a few of the other creatives, was that we didn’t get BuzzFeed and other press in the war room with us at the time. it was magical.

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