Lana Del Rey and your 'aesthetic': 7 things we all forgot we did on Tumblr.

For years, I’d pushed soul-sucking microblogging site Tumblr to the back of my mind.

Then earlier in 2019, Taylor Swift posted not one, but two, major statements to the site and suddenly… I remembered.

Getting home from uni, opening my laptop, getting into bed and not moving for precisely eight hours because I was too busy reblogging photos and thinking I was edgy.

How annoying would it be if people did in real life what they do on Facebook? Post continues below video.

And it wasn’t just me. All my friends did it. Anyone who was a teen or in their early 20s in 2012 did it. Tumblr was iconic and honestly, looking back, a little… sad.

We’d just repost photos we thought looked cool. Sometimes it was music, or #relatable text posts about how hard life was for a moody young adult.

Looking back at it now is like opening up a diary from your teenage years and it is incredibly, incredibly embarrassing.

I’m sorry to open up old wounds, but here’s a few things we all did on Tumblr to uh, jog your memory.

Your “aesthetic”.

Everyone had a theme and it was very important to never reblog something that didn’t fit within that.

Cool kids had pastel themes, and there was always that edgy person with the black and white 'grunge' blog, maybe with the odd photo of bright red lips or blood scattered among their usual images of people smoking and upside down cross tattoos. Because edgy.

Getting creative with a good username.

It's weird to think that we now use our names for social media like Instagram, when on Tumblr that was the furthest thing from cool. Instead, you wanted to use a random word or song lyric, but with a number as a letter or lots of dashes for dramatic effect.

Like city-of-b-l-i-n-d-i-n-g-lights or placeinthisw0rld.

Perfect.

Being obsessed with Lana Del Rey.

listening to lana del rey makes me want to remember my tumblr password

— * (@carmsux) August 30, 2019

In 2012, Lana Del Rey released her second album, Born to Die, and it sold more than half a million copies in the US in its first year because every Tumblr kid was obliged to support the queen of Tumblr.

They then spent the next six months reblogging gifs from the Video Games and Summertime Sadness music videos (the names of which are both peak Tumblr).

And dudes with snakebite piercings and hair like this:

I wonder what our favourite scene kids are doing now?

Actually, Tumblr people were obsessed with lots of things.

Like these shoes:

Plus, Starbucks, Pretty Little Liars And Effy from Skins:

Thinking fish eye lens photos were the coolest things in the world.

Especially if the photo was of two people wearing converse. So cool.

Asking yourself questions on anon and pretending they were from someone else.

I sent myself a few "Omg love your blog! xxxx" over the years, and I'm only now willing to admit it.

Sigh.

At its peak, Tumblr was the coolest corner of the internet (or so we thought at the time), but these days it's honestly just as bad as looking back at cringey high school dance photos. What were we thinking?

I dug into the very depths of my brain to remember my Tumblr password for the purpose of this article and look, having just revisited the site in 2019... don't follow my lead. It's not worth it.