Welcome!
I’m so glad you’re here — welcome to the Martin and Bosco Tumblr project website!
The Context
On July 13th, 2022, I whimsically blazed a picture of my late husband and his dog on Tumblr — never expecting anything to come of it. But somehow, three hundred thousand strangers resonated with a colourful photo of Martin and Bosco running through a waterpark feature. People welcomed Martin and Bosco into their lives and, in doing so, quietly changed how I moved through my own feelings of grief and loss.
People treated “the boys” like old friends stopping by for a visit. Some reblogged the post for comfort — proof that you matter even after death. Others shared it at meaningful moments in their lives. But mostly, people’s motivations remain a mystery to me. What I do know, from recognizing familiar blog names in my dashboard activity, is that people reblog the post more than once. Over time, what started as my simple summer memory has evolved into a shared ritual — people returning to and reblogging the photo, turning it into a piece of collective folklore on Tumblr. Martin and Bosco are already being tagged as a “World Heritage Post” — the affectionate term used for posts that persist because the community insists on remembering them (Gelfand, 2021). It bemuses me to think of Martin and Bosco joining legendary posts like the “Eye of Sauron” and “Colour Theory”.
I block all blaze posts but yours.
— Message from an Anonymous Tumblr user.
In May 2024, Tumblr staff designated the photo as a “special post”, promoting it to over 100,000 users and featuring it several more times afterward. Users have also been key to increasing the post’s visibility. A Tumblr Premium subscription gives users one free blaze each month. Users have chosen to spend theirs, or even pay out-of-pocket, to boost Martin and Bosco’s post. Each promotion pushes the post deeper into the community, far beyond the natural reach of my blog.
Somehow, Martin — who went out of his way to avoid all forms of social media — is now celebrated every July 13th on Tumblr. Martin and Bosco Day now sits alongside notorious Tumblr holidays like “Destiel Day” and “It’s Gonna Be May.” It’s sure not what I expected when I shared the photo — but I’m grateful.
Blaze is Tumblr’s version of a paid or sponsored post — but it’s not like ads on other social media sites. There’s no way to target who sees it, which makes blaze useless for selling anything. Instead, Tumblr users mostly pay to force random strangers to look at their pets. The user base has hilariously resisted every effort to monetize them — and blaze fits right in with this dysfunctional system.
The Pressure Points
“Tumblr is always dying” (Minkel, 2023). Wired said it in 2023 — but let’s be honest, Tumblr has been dying since I joined in 2010. Tumblr’s culture is irrepressibly vibrant, but its infrastructure has never been a quality build. The official export tool even failed when I recently attempted to back up my blog. The API is rickety, poorly documented, and oddly designed. Its existence feels purely performative, especially given the absence of even basic features like pagination. And with fewer technical staff left, there’s not much reason to expect the platform’s infrastructure to improve (Perez, 2025).
Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.
— Dr. Ian Malcolm (Spielberg, 1993).
Until recently, I shared Dr. Malcolm’s caution — the warning that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I’ve always had the technical ability to download my blaze post’s data and analyze it, but I actively chose not to. For nearly three years, that felt like the right choice. Why couldn’t Martin and Bosco’s post be the one nice thing that belonged to everyone? Why did their appeal need to be quantified or leveraged? I mean, do things ever go well for any character in the Jurassic Park franchise?
But reading about the disappearance of cartoons and television shows, pulled solely for cost-cutting purposes, from streaming services like HBO Max left me feeling unsettled (Gillette, 2025; Horowitz-Ghazi, 2023). What if Tumblr disappeared just as abruptly after yet another buyout by a disappointed investor? For posts like Martin and Bosco’s, ones tied up in complicated mixtures of grief, joy, and collective folklore, would that disappearance even matter in a few years?
I think it would. I have a degree in library and information science; I was taught the value of preserving the past — not just for myself, but for others. The post has quietly become a touchstone — not because it was designed to matter, but because the Tumblr community gave it collective relevance. Preserving social media content is a community responsibility. It matters who does the preserving, and it matters whose values shape what is remembered (Jules, 2018). I’m not interested in just archiving the post and hoarding the information on a forgotten hard drive. I want to explore the patterns of how the post lives in a way that aligns with Tumblr’s culture — a culture I’m deeply enmeshed in. Sharing what I learn and the R code I develop supports community-based archiving and provides tools to help others contextualize their memories.
Tumblr’s slow decay isn’t new — collapse has been part of its lore for as long as the site has existed. But I will be ready.
The Project’s Goals
The project has four goals: preserve the post, study how it lives, invite the Tumblr community to help shape the project, and report the story.
\[ \text{Preserve} \longrightarrow \text{Study} \longrightarrow \text{Invite} \longrightarrow \text{Report} \]
Here’s what each goal will focus on:
Preserve: Develop a reproducible R workflow that follows FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) to ethically download and archive the post’s notes from Tumblr’s rickety API before it vanishes (Wilkinson et al., 2016).
Study: Visualize how posts are reshaped through reblogs and tags to understand how a personal memory became collectively owned and ritualized in a digital community.
Invite: Open the door to the Tumblr community to help shape the project. People can ask questions, suggest ideas for visualizations — and maybe learn how to understand and contextualize their own data along the way.
Report: Reflect on what the project uncovers and tell the story of how a personal memory became collective folklore in a digital community.
Stay Tuned
In my next post, I’ll share the first version of an interactive dashboard. It will be a way to watch the project take shape as I work through the first phase of downloading all 300K notes from Tumblr’s rickety API. You’ll get a glimpse of some early patterns of how people are engaging with the post and how Martin and Bosco are making their way through the Tumblr community.
If you want to follow along, you can subscribe for project updates. Don’t worry — I only overshare in my Tumblr tags. You will just receive an email message when there’s a new post on the website.