It seems I’m in the minority with this opinion – nearly every online review I’ve read since it opened in the US has been extremely harsh. IO9 has been particularly scornful of Into Darkness.

If I had one complaint about the film, it’s that the “Carol Marcus gets undressed” scene was completely gratuitous and unnecessary. Other than that I thought it was a stand-up film. Unlike Star Trek (2009) I could actually get behind the cast. This time around I didn’t want to smack Kirk in the face over and over (much like a scene from ST:ID), and I believed in the relationship between Kirk and Spock (who incidentally is a snarky git). Simon Pegg, as Scotty, would have stole the show if Benedict Cumberbatch hadn’t been cast as the villain.

For me, the plot was a nice twist on some classic Trek stories, as they would have played out following the events of the 2009 film. The world of “Nu-Trek” is a very different one to The Original Series, so even though many of the same events might happen, the reactions to them will be completely different. Some of it was pure fan-service, but other parts were subversion served up in a fan-service wrapping.

It’s not going to win any Oscars – and I’m expecting other films this summer to be better – but so far this year Star Trek Into Darkness is the only film I’ve come out of the cinema thinking “I really want to see that again!”

It looks great, and succeeds in putting photos first. 1TB of storage is insane, and monthly upload limits are gone. Yahoo needed to shoot for the moon on this and to me it looks like they flew past the moon, did a couple of laps of the solar-system for fun, then came back to land on target.

I’m pretty sure 95% or more of Tumblr users will carry on as they have up to now, but inevitably there will be a number of users looking to jump-ship in case Yahoo! break their promise to “not screw this up”. Where will they go though? To me, the answer isn’t obvious.

If I had to list the most important things any potential replacement needed to have, to capture the core Tumblr demographic, I’d say:

• Images (photos + animated GIFs), videos, and audio should all be treated as equally as text – if not better.
• Sharing between blogs on the service should be “two-click simple”.
• Robust theming and customisation options. No two blogs need look alike.
• It should probably be free, with some paid, non-essential, upgrades (i.e. don’t charge me to use a custom domain)
• Rules and policies should stay out of the way of the community and content as much as possible (with only a few exceptions)
• It should be easy to stay anonymous/pseudo-anonymous

Posterous used to be touted as the main rival to Tumblr, but they were acquired by Twitter and eventually shutdown earlier this year. Right now I imagine some of the original team are kicking themselves at a lost opportunity.

Automattic have added a lot of Tumblr-esque  features to WordPress over the last couple of years. Matt Mullenweg today blogged they’re getting a huge uptick in the number of  users importing from Tumblr (I can believe it – importing my small Tumblr site took over 2 hours to import). That may well be the case, but I took a look this evening and couldn’t find a single theme in the WordPress theme directory which I would count as a “Tumblog“, or which worked well enough with a wide variety of post-types out of the box to make switching painless. Top it off with most customisation features are a paid-for upgrade, and WP.com isn’t going to be an instant choice for most Tumblr users.

So who else is there? I don’t think any “traditional” blogging service is going to cut it, really.  Tumblr content is too varied to fit into the standard blog editor which focusses heavily on text (with a little bit of photo thrown in). Again, in this category WordPress.com comes the closest, using post types and media embeds.

If I was Automattic, I’d be trying to release a tonne of free themes matching the Tumblr media experience right now.

Researching this entry I came across a couple of lesser-known services – Soup.io, and Jux. Of the two, Soup.io resembles an cut-down, early version of Tumblr, and might be a good shout if you don’t need all of the bells and whistles. Jux seems more in tune with the art/photographer side of Tumblr; I can’t tell how well it copes with videos, GIFs, or audio. It was very pretty however, using a full-screen aesthetic.

So where will they go?

I really can’t see a clear winner. WordPress.com comes closest in features, but there’s still a big gap – largely cultural – between the two services that might be too big for many users to bridge. I’d love to hear any thoughts on this, or even recommendations of alternative services, so please leave a comment below!

I just switched over to Crunchbang Linux, on my ageing desktop. So far so good!

Not a fan of the video, but the song itself is gorgeous

As a bonus, I get to use a mobile client which works well and doesn’t destroy my battery!