Tips on Tumblr Role Playing

Starting Out:

          First thing I recommend for those novice role players in tumblr is to do a whole new account just for the blog you will be using for the RP. It's best to have a primary blog instead of a secondary for the following reasons:

• You can follow people with that blog.
• Send asks, submits, etc. to others with that account.
• It will be easier to manage and it will prevent any future confusions that might happen while posting things.

        Another important little detail that I recommend is having a whole different e-mail just for the RP blog. If you don't want to forget the email, a good thing to do would be to use the same name your planning on using as URL for the RP blog, for example: randomrp.tumblr.com, the email can be randomrp@hotmail.com.

        After having that done, all you need to do is go to Tumblr and sign up, which is very quick and easy. Then it will ask for an email confirmation which you need to do in order to continue to the next step.

Setting up your blog:

        When you have your account done in Tumblr, next thing is to set up your blog, make it look pretty. The website already gives you some free theme options but they can be pretty boring, and I'm pretty sure you want your blog to look awesome, right? Not to mention that a good looking theme attracts more people to click that 'Follow' button in the top right corner. Luckily, there are amazing people called 'theme makers' that like to create beautiful themes and share them for free for people like you and me to use them. Of course, you must not take away the credit of the theme maker who worked so hard.

        You can always use one of the themes Tumblr offers but if you don't want to, then I really recommend this blog: themehunter.tumblr.com. It's a blog dedicated to themes, pages and resources for Tumblr users. However my personal favorites are Manatopia.org and a--themes.tumblr.com. There are seemingly endless amounts of theme maker blogs out there so don't worry, you will find that perfect theme you want somewhere. Just have to be patient and search. I'll probably write another entry later on about HTML and Tumble themes, but that's later on.

       After you've chosen the theme, you have to fill out the description of your blog, and all other information that you want others to know at first glance. I say first glance because in order to be a decent RP, you need more than just a description in your blog.

Pages and Information in your blog:

        When people get in your blog, the first thing they search for is what character do you role play. Is it an original character, a canon character or maybe just an appreciation blog of a character? To let them know, you need to write down in the description area something that says such thing, not too long though. People rarely read the long descriptions in the index of the blog. 

       For those extra long things you want to write, like descriptions, you have to create pages. This can be done by going to the bottom of the 'Customize your theme' section with the word 'Pages'. Click there and it will give you an option to create a new page. Now one of the most if not the most important thing in your blog are the rules and guidelines. Here you will have to write down the rules you have for your blog, your preferences and such. Then you can create other pages for everything else you feel like doing.

       As you create your page, you'll notice it says 'Standard View' in the top. After the blog has had 24 hours of being opened, Tumble will allow you three options for creating new pages which are: Standard View, Custom Layout and Redirect. The Standard view is a normal page to what you can add photos as well. You can use this to write the rules and descriptions. Custom Layout is for those who want to get a little more fancy and customize the page itself with HTML codes. These codes for pages can also be found in the blogs I suggested in the previous section. A redirect page is a page where you don't write anything. It's where posts you've made or reblogged get added once you tag them. For example: You post a picture of your character and write the tag 'character'. If the page you created has the url 'http://randomrp.tumblr.com/tagged/character', then it will automatically be added to the redirect page. 

       There are more things that can be said about pages but I won't cover that in this entry. 

Follow People:

       After your blog looks all pretty and has all the information you want others to know, it's time to start following people. Search in the tumblr tags for people of your fandom like 'Avengers', 'Thor RP', 'Naruto', etc. Get in the people's blogs, look through their posts and follow those people too. If they have blogrolls then even better because you can view them over and pick up new people to follow there. Once you think you're following enough people, go to your dashboard and start reblogging stuff. This will make others notice. It's better if you also tag your posts and reblogs to make them easier to find in your blog. 

       If there's this really cool character you want to role play with, send them an ask! Just be friendly and ask if they want to RP with you. It's always nice to go to someone when you already have a plot in mind so try to do that before heading over to someone's inbox. If the person doesn't answer you, then don't be so insisting. There are many friendly users in Tumblr but there are some not so friendly ones as well. 

       Something that can help you interact with others is make random starters for the people that follow you. When you see that notification that someone is following you now, it's a nice welcome to do a short starter post for that person, anything random if you want. Then tag that post with the person's URL. If the URL has a '-' in the name, don't include it. Example: 'random-rp' you tag it 'randomrp', together. If not, then the person won't see it when they search their own tag. 

Tags:

        Tags are an important part in the Tumblr community because it's though them that people can find your stuff in the search. Downfall is, that Tumblr only shows off the first five (5) tags you used in a post. Example of tags: random, tag, coma, showing, example, blog, post. Out of all the tags I just wrote there, only the first five will make the post appear so make them count. 

       Role players follow their own url as a tag so this way, whenever someone else wants you to see something, they will tag your url. Be sure to follow your own tag just so you don't miss anything, or at least, prevent from missing anything. Truth is, you will always loose something since sometimes the tags aren't working so well. 

Add-ons and other things that make your RP life easier:

        Sometimes the default things that Tumblr offers you aren't all that helpful and you need to do twice the work to make something go right. So that's what add-ons are for. The two main add-ons for Tumblr are Missing-e and XKit. Those offer a good variety of things that help you with all RP stuff you may need. 

       If you're one of those that can't have just one RP blog, then there's another thing that helps out a lot. If you have the awesome browser Google Chrome, here's something you can do to not sign in and out of Tumblr accounts all the time:

• Go to the upper right corner and you will see an icon with three lines. Click that and then click the 'Settings' option. 
• There, you scroll down to where it says 'Users'. If you didn't know this trick before, then you will only have one user there. 
• Click 'Add new user' option, selecting an avatar you like, type the name you want for your new user and click 'Create'.
• And so Chrome will open a new window with a whole new different user from the one you had before.

       This handy little thing enables you to have more than one Tumblr account signed in at the same time so you can work on all your blogs without having to switch in and out. 

And that's it!

       That's pretty much the very basic and general idea on how to start your Tumblr RP account. Hope you enjoyed it and remember, any questions or doubts, let me know and I will gladly help. Thank you all for reading! 

Meeting the Blogger

Self Intro;

I know this sometimes is pretty boring to read and thus people don’t actually read it at all. But still, I’m doing it just to be polite and for the sake of those that actually read and want to know more about the blogger.

Alright, so my name’s Tatiana and I’m from Puerto Rico, both born and live there in the beautiful island of enchantment. If you know where we’re located, awesome! It means you studied well, or your open minded or you’re simply not that ignorant like some people that think any name is Spanish is synonymous to Mexican. I will gladly write more details later on about this amazing and unique island so don’t worry, now let’s just concentrate on the task at hand, the self intro.

So I’m a young woman, 21 years old, happily engaged and soon to finish a bachelor’s in Graphic Design and Computer Animation. Yes, I’m an artist; I draw, I write, I can sing (done so in school concerts though, so nothing big) and I’m also a gamer… If that’s considered an art. I’ve recently discovered a passion for Web Design also, all HTML stuff (Here's the first web page I did for my best friend who's a professional photographer), it’s pretty cool and so I sometimes pass a couple of hours of my day playing with codes on Tumblr and making the themes I like more to my liking. Since I’m also a graphic designer, I can do the pictures however I want them to be too so it’s pretty nice.

In terms of illustration, I love to draw people or characters, preferably in shadows but I can also do full color works. I started out since I was a little girl with drawing anime like Dragon ball Z, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sailor Moon and so on until I finally got an interesting in drawing more realistic things. Then when I took the anatomy class at college, I was able of perfecting those skills I had learned on my own and got even better. I’m not the best out there, of course, but I dare say that I’m not half bad either.

Just as art is my passion, so is writing. Though this I do more as a hobby even though a good amount of people believe I should try writing a book and see how it goes. Maybe I will later on, who knows? But for now, I love to role play. Mainly, I role play Naruto characters, the main one being Itachi Uchiha. But I also play Sasuke, Minato and Kushina plus I’m also considering trying out with Sakura. Another fandom I’m part of is Avengers where I role play as Loki (the God of Mischief) and Sigyn (Goddess of fidelity). In both fandoms I’ve had so much fun and met many amazing people who’ve I grown close to.

Do I feel ashamed in any way to role play characters that don’t exist? Not at all. Why? Because thanks to those role play blogs on Tumblr, I’ve both met great people, learned many things, practiced HTML, and have gotten much better at writing. Being born and living in Puerto Rico, English is not my first language and at least in my family, it’s not even spoken. But I’m very fluent in it, thankfully.

Now, getting a little more personal, I’m a pretty friendly girl who manages to get along just fine with everyone. I’ve lived a not so perfect life, don’t have a great health nor a perfect house hold but I’m happy with my life. I suffer from severe atopic dermatitis since I was born, asthma, am allergic to a good dozen of things (including my own hormones) and I have some renal conditions which are now thankfully under control. Yes, I look terrible when the dermatitis and it’s a pain, I get all frustrated and I can’t sleep because of the itching but anyways, I won’t go into that now.

Like I mentioned before, I’m happily engaged to the love of my life whom I’ve been with since May, 2007 (6 years now). Many things have happened in those years both good and bad but the good are always worth all the bad ones.  So I’ll probably write stuff about relationships too at some point…

Other than art and writing, I also love video games. My favorite console? Playstation 3 all the way, ever since the first Playstation was released. I love a lot of games but the ones that will never leave my fav’s list are: Metal Gear, Final Fantasy VII (all games that have to do with FFVII), Assassin’s Creed, Tekken and Kingdom Hearts. Though these are my favorites, I’ve played lots more that I’ve loved like Naruto games, Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, Sims, Uncharted, Infamous, Borderlands, Call of Duty, Rock Band, Devil May Cry, God of War, etc. I’m not a very hard core gamer but I do know my share about them.

Just as I like video games, I like anime, books, music and movies. Anime, obviously Naruto but I also like and have seen lots more like Helsing, Saber J, DBZ, Blood +, etc. Books, I read all I find. I’m a sort of knowledge junkie, that I always want to learn new stuff so if I’m not reading over the internet and I happen to have money to spare, I read books. I’ve watched many movies that I probably don’t remember and I’m not such a big fan of watching too many movies or series but I do love to listen to music a lot. My fav music genre is rock, mainly metal or hard rock. I love bands such as Slipknot, Bullet for My Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold, Trivium, Atreyu, System of a Down, etc. But I also enjoy the more softer melodies like Secondhand Serenade, Imagine Dragons and many more. As long as they have a guitar, some drums and good lyrics, I listen to them.

Speaking of music, I’m also a big fan of Japanese rock singer, Gackt. I love that guy, not just his music but his voice and his lyrics and just him as a whole human being. Probably just as much as I love Tom Hiddleston… (Yes, I’m a Hiddles fan, me, a Loki role player; what a surprise?) It’s probably because of these many things that I like and my quite spontaneous way of being that lots of people tend to refer to me as crazy but I couldn’t care less. I love being me, I’m proud of who I am and even though they do refer to me with that term, those people love me. I’m honest, I hate lies, I value friends always, I’m very understanding, tolerant and patient with others; and I believe these traits are what help me get along very well with many people.

As I blog more things and share more stuff with all of you, I’m very sure you’ll understand what I’ve written in this self intro. So for now, I think this is it! To those of you who actually took valuable time from your daily internet surfing to read this, I am eternally grateful and I hope you enjoyed! Once again, thank you!