Here at Met Radio, we’re celebrating the year 2024 with a series of lists rounding up our favourites of the year! We’ve invited station volunteers and staff to share their top ten of anything that encapsulates their year in pop culture (or otherwise). New lists to surprise and delight will be dropping on the Met Radio website every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this December!
Hello Met Radio readers! My name is Delphine, and I’m the Music Director here at Met Radio. While I love music dearly and have enjoyed a lot of it this year, I’ve also written quite a lot about it as we’ve reached the final months of 2024, so I’m taking this opportunity to write about my other passion: the near-defunct social media app Tumblr.
While Tumblr had its heyday around 2012-2014 (depending on who you ask), there are still those of us who are enjoying it. The website has only gotten weirder, more insular, and more fun as time goes on and people stop using their accounts. Most of the toxic discourse has moved to X, The Everything App, and possibly onto Bluesky from there (keep an eye out!), leaving us hangers-on with a quiet, calmed-down version of Tumblr that’s mostly focused on posting about various television shows and people’s real-life jobs. If you have a weird, niche interest, or simply the urge to share your every thought with a group of strangers, Tumblr could be the perfect place for you. But I’m not here to shill for a website with dozens (dozens!) of users – I’m simply here to round up my favourite posts of the year and bring them to you.
A quick note on criteria: in order for a post to be eligible, it had to have been posted within 2024, or had its final reblog added within 2024. It also had to be native to Tumblr, so reposts of Tweets, TikToks, and other externally sourced content wouldn’t count.
Without any further ado:
10. I ❤️MY INTERNET ECHOCHAMBER
Just a classic Tumblr post. Recognizable format. Relatable sentiment. I, too, love my internet echochamber. Great work by cruiserweightcoke on this one.
9. My insane musscle memory
Another classic-type Tumblr post. Who among us has not done this exact thing? This post uses a perfectly-placed typo that makes it even funnier. Relatable, ironic – what more could you want?
8. Delusional cosplayers
Getting a little more controversial here, but Tumblr has always been known for its willingness to enter the political arena. This post is best read lightheartedly – joking animosity towards Europeans isn’t uncommon on a social media platform so dominated by Americans. I appreciate that all of Canada is deemed real French, not just Quebec. It’s one of our official languages!
7. Real exchange I overheard between two of my bosses
Now this post is a bit of a sleeper hit, but I truly have not stopped thinking about it since I read it. There’s nothing that Tumblr collectively enjoys like a strange interpersonal dynamic, and this post taps into that. The use of the comic to illustrate the interaction is perfect, and the facial expressions make me laugh every time.
6. The communal jaywalk
Something very powerful that a post can do is, much like a song, articulate a feeling that you’ve had but never consciously thought about, and this post does that for me. As a certified car hater, I’m a big fan of jaywalking, and jaywalking with others creates in me the same feeling of solidarity as being in a good pit at a concert. This post distills that feeling into seven simple words, masterfully composed.
5. Rat on cassette
Some top-tier Tumblr weirdness here. There’s some debate in the notes of this post about what this could possibly mean – does the cassette have a recording of someone reading the Wikipedia page for “Rat” out loud, or is the information saved in some other way? There are also some healthy reminders that data on the internet is fleeting, and now is always the right time to make backup copies of media that you care about. In the words of astra-the-dragon, “The preservation of knowledge is a collaborative effort.”
4. Taylor Swift and the mysterious amulet
This is something of a Tumblr/Archive Of Our Own collaboration post, which is fitting given how integrated the two websites are. I really can’t speak to the quality of this fanfiction about Taylor Swift enthusiastically falling under the corrupting influence of a mysterious amulet, but the insistence of the author that there will be no parasocial hate or love in the comments is admirable. Let’s keep it respectful, people!
3. Phan vs Jedus
So, this one is going to take some explaining. Ever since Tumblr added a polling function to the site, various tournaments have become popular, most notably the poetry tournament which ended very controversially (in MY opinion). The RPF (short for Real Person Fiction) tournament took up a significant amount of Tumblr’s attention, eventually culminating in the Phan (YouTubers Dan Howell and Phil Lester) vs Jedus (Jesus and Judas, from the Bible) poll. Phan eventually won, and Dan Howell and Phil Lester themselves both reblogged the poll. Does this count as election interference or is it simply campaigning? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
2. Elf liberalism
This post combines two of my favourite things – political discourse and high fantasy. The idea of “elf liberalism” can’t really be explained, you just have to understand it based on vibes. The conclusion of “its not my job to educate you” perfectly pulls the post into a satire of real-life internet interactions. maidthings has built an entire world that the reader can choose to engage in or not, and I think that’s beautiful.
1. A sort of dull brown goat that didn’t train
Finally, my all-time favourite post of the year. I’ve spent the past three years working as a barista, so I’m predisposed to find posts about cafes funny, but this one really takes the cake. It’s a perfect exaggeration of a weird customer interaction, condescending and absurd. The fact that the “you” in the post is remembered incredibly unkindly by the speaker, the use of the pointing emoji, the “stupid little breads”. Every single word of this post is just perfect to me. It deserves a dramatic reading. I think about it every time I work a shift at my cafe, and it brings me comfort to know that no matter how strange or hostile a customer is, at least they don’t remember me as a goat from a past life.