I haven’t posted anything to my Tumblr blog in 649 days, but in that time I’ve gained maybe 50 new followers, and they’re all strangers. I don’t think any of them are bots either. They found a link on my homepage and maybe they decided I would some day post something again. Sometimes, I click on their profile picture and check out their Tumblr blogs too. I open up web inspector and grab the URL of their avatar thumbnail, and then I change the _128 suffix to _512, because I knew that Tumblr offered avatar thumbnails with sizes in powers of 2, between 32 and 512. And then I remembered that a few years ago I built a tool to uncover Tumblr avatars and put it on RogerHub, and suddenly it feels kind of creepy checking out 512px thumbnails of… more →