glumshoe:

This seems to be your first time on the Internet. Welcome! The particular website you are on is Tumblr dot com, a “microblogging site”. A blog is a series of separate, updated posts by one individual or organization, typically informal, often written as a kind of journal. Some blogs have particular themes, while others may contain content that is only loosely related. Blogs usually describe the sort of content one can expect from them in an “about” section, with phrases like “This is ultimately a personal blog – I post about my life and things that interest me.” It is reasonable to expect that the owner of that blog will likely post about their life and things that interest them.

If that sort of content alarms or upsets you, do not despair! There are many other types of websites. There are forums on which you can discuss a single subject of interest to you with strangers, sites and apps for browsing beautiful photographs, and wikis that contain publicly-editable encyclopedia entries on a nearly unfathomable breadth of topics. There are even countless websites devoted to hosting pictures, videos, and fiction broadly considered sexually arousing.

With a few exceptions, all of these websites are accessible to you to visit at your leisure. Chances are you’ll find something you like – if you’re having trouble, search engines like Google.com will help you find content relevant to your interests by searching for key words or phrases. And if you don’t like the content you find on one site? Leaving is as easy as closing the page. This freedom of passage means that interpersonal interaction is entirely voluntarily, so, if you were so inclined, you could have exclusively constructive or meaningful conversations with people.

If you decide that blogging is something you like and wish to spend more time on Tumblr dot com, you’ll eventually encounter other individuals constructing posts exclusively using words. These are called “text posts”. Even if you follow a blog, you don’t have to read these unless they interest you. If you * do* decide to read them, you should know that humans use certain writing conventions to convey ideas and feelings through typed words. They may employ common devices such as hyperbole, sarcasm, and rhetorical questions to express an emotion or make a point. You can almost always discern whether these things are meant literally using context clues. For example, because time seems to move in a linear fashion, it may be understood that a statement akin to “you wanna fucking go?” in reference to a subject that is not present or in the intended audience of the question, in response to a situation now in the past, is not a literal invitation to a violent physical contest.

Dramatic overstatements and absurdity are used on the Internet for comedic effect. For example, other bloggers might make comments like “call my goldfish cishet and I will literally throw you into the sun”. This is, of course, not meant to be understood literally – humor is derived from the preposterous imagery. If someone were to respond to this statement by unironically and hostilely explaining that goldfish do not have complex theories of gender and the original poster would not have the strength to throw someone forcefully enough to break Earth’s gravitational pull, that would be humorous for a very different reason. Someone would likely make a second response using a photograph of the character Dwight Schrute from the American television series “The Office”. Another example of absurdity-as-comedy you might encounter on Tumblr dot com is someone jokingly taking an insincere and aggressive question at face value and answering with a lengthy, overly-detailed explanation.