My Looks

Just Some Outfit Snapshots (Or: Why I’ll Always Pour One Out For Tumblr)

This is an actual, legitimate question: Do people still use Tumblr? Is it, like, what the cool fifteen-year-olds use nowadays because it’s #retro, or has it gone the way of MySpace (sidenote: I HIGHLY recommend figuring out how to login to your old MySpace page; it’s like visiting a Museum of Shame, but in the very most entertaining of ways).

Some of you might that I started out on Tumblr way back when, and only made my way over to the current WordPress site a few months after starting Ramshackle Glam, when I decided I wanted to focus on more long-form posts, rather than just snapshots of my daily goings-on. This was, as it turned out, a solid move, because guess what was invented not long afterwards that would have immediately made a site like my former one obsolete?

Thaaaat’s right. Instagram.

My site has pretty much held to that model – less frequent, but longer-form posts – ever since, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes miss the immediacy of the Tumblr Days. And Instagram really doesn’t fill that gap, because there is nothing immediate about a platform where people do things like download custom color overlays so as to have an across-the-board consistent aesthetic applied to photographs of their adorable shoes/dining rooms/children/sponcon.

Which brings me to IG Stories, and the reason they’ve held their position as My Favorite Social Platform for a solid three years now. When I started blogging, my primary content-generation method was to use my brand-new, rockin’ iPhone 3G to upload photos, quotes, and songs (and sure, sometimes actual writing) to my Tumblr feed maybe six to eight times a day.

Not everything about the early days of blogging was great – the absence of income, the rampant nondisclosure and the emphasis on “getting stuff” stand as salient examples – and I like think the work I do now ostensibly has more value, largely because I’ve been at this a long time and am not super interested in posting completely out-of-context scarf pictures, no matter how cute said scarf may be. But even so, I sometimes feel nostalgic for the silliness, the imperfectness, the lo-tech feel of that era. The photos I put up back then weren’t lit and filtered creations…they were just photos. Of whatever was happening.

And even though IG Stories have – of course – gotten more and more elaborate and less and less “here’s whatever’s going on right now,” I’ve personally avoided…well, caring very much about that. Is it a smart business plan, to refuse to evolve along with a platform? Nope! But call me old-fashioned: I love the feeling of having one little piece of a business theoretically built on authenticity and immediacy feel…you know…

Authentic. And immediate.

Which is all to say that I think the reason I enjoy Stories so much is that they let me swim around in what was fun about early-era blogging without having to actually be in my twenties again, because me not being in my twenties anymore is a really, really good thing for all involved.

The end.

Some recent OOTD-type posts from my Insta Stories, because OOTDs are always fun.

blazer and black shorts

jordan reid ramshackle glam

jordan reid ramshackle glam

blazer and black shorts

jordan reid ramshackle glam

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