lumpofbird:

Yeti baby pics highlight flashback reel, in honor of his first hatchday

lizardywizard:

not-terezi-pyrope:

piosplayhouse:

piosplayhouse:

I feel like a somewhat disregarded aspect of modern internet callout culture is the impact on people with anxiety or paranoia or intrusive thoughts and how the general sentiment of “bad things will only happen to you if you’re bad, so just be good all the time” just exacerbates obsessive self flagellation

For once I’m actually happy about one of my posts blowing up because I so rarely see discussions about OCD and OCD-flavored anxiety and paranoia as they relate to social media, which leads to things like posts with major OCD triggers blowing up like crazy (“if you don’t rb this I don’t trust you” type shit). Every so often posts go around with good information but that are worded in an extremely triggering way meant to guilt trip you into sharing it and it makes me really sad because you could’ve just left that off!!

It can be extremely disheartening to see that kind of thing be continually be tacked into posts and realise that, to the people writing them, the fact that they’re risking triggering you is a feature rather than a bug. They want you be brought low by anxiety, they think it’s worth it to make you pay attention to and/or spread their Important Message. Your panic attack and compulsive attention switch is a bonus to them and they are deliberately trying to induce it, because their post for the Urgent Social Cause is more important than your wellbeing, and is happily sacrificed.

If you’re doing this, please remember:

The other person’s panic attack is going to make them less able to help.

And less likely to be able to help in the future, as they now associate calls for their attention with panic attacks.

Traumatised people are going to respond in self-preservation, not in the altruistic, empathic ways you want. If you want that, you have to show them empathy.

twentybrokenipodclassics:

toskarin:

toskarin:

I went to see Parasite completely blind besides being aware (unavoidably) that there was a hard tonal shift at some point. I saw the poster and stuff, but that was it

the entire time I was bracing myself for it to shift into some sort of alien parasite psychological horror movie, which seems really presumptuous, except I saw Bong Joon-ho’s The Host and that movie actually did have a giant monster in it, so I wasn’t putting it past him

god the class dynamics in this movie are so stressful already… keeping up this double life while still taking care of your family…… and if that’s not bad enough, they’re gonna have to deal with The Parasite when it shows up

rosemarydiely:

DIE 69

tanadrin:

by far the most interesting part of the latest You’re Wrong About on homosexuality in the animal kingdom is the account of how science missed it for so long. the guest, lulu miller (of radiolab fame) basically divides the reasons into three categories: ignorance, self-suppression, and what you might call “official” suppression.

essentially, since the days of thomas aquinas when it had been simply declared that homosexuality was inherently against nature, you had a lot of observers of the natural world, even once the enlightenment got underway, who simply didn’t know what they were looking at. many animal species are very sexually dimorphic and thus easy to sex; but many more are not, and if your background assumption (because the background assumption of society in general) is that homosexuality does not occur in nature, if you see two animals of unidentified sex mating, you will assume one is male and one is female. or you might simply assume what you are seeing is an aberration, with no real systemic significance, and not pointing to any kind of underlying phenomenon, and simply fail to note it down–or talk to any other naturalists about it.

and this blends into self-suppression, which includes all researchers who might have noticed homosexuality among animals in the wild, but didn’t write about it. this includes researchers who might not have thought it was significant, or who might have thought nobody was interested in it–miller offers the example of a guy who died relatively recently who spent his life studying mountain rams, who omitted mentioning from his quite detailed survey of their behavior that about one in twelve males mate exclusively with other males, because it seemed to him (at the time of writing) an aberrant and unpleasant fact about an otherwise majestic creature.

“official” suppression we might apply to any time a researcher noticed and wanted to write about the phenomenon, but who simply couldn’t get their data published, including researchers who might have pressed the scientific community at large to recognize this phenomenon, only to be greeted with hostility and suspicion–i.e., what kind of pervert is so obsessed with this topic?

and out of a combination of all these factors you get centuries of a bias being confirmed, because anybody who might care to ask, “well, homosexuality clearly occurs in humans, have we observed it in other animals?” would have been confronted with a vast lacuna in the scientific literature, not because it did not occur, but because multiple intersecting cultural biases prevented anybody from actually talking about it. and it makes it hard to have a conversation about natural phenomena from an empirical and rational perspective when a bias that irrational runs that deep! and i cannot help but wonder what other biases we have in our culture, that might be producing similarly irrational lacunae in our apprehension of the world.

thewertsearch:

AG: You can do it, John. 8e the hero!
AG: Just like in one of your movies a8out sweaty, rugged adult human males.
EB: ah HA!
EB: so you did watch that video I sent.

Lest we forget, John’s a little responsible for Vriska’s development, too. What goes around comes around!

AG: 8y the way, John, have you ever considered growing your hair out?
AG: I 8et it would look fa8ulous.
EB: no, it would look so stupid!

I’m not so sure. I mean, I couldn’t see John with Cameron Poe hair, but I do think he could rock a ponytail.

EB: before i fell asleep, i was about to prototype something really ridiculous to make jack weaker.
EB: i am pretty sure that it would have made jack lose both eyes, both arms, and give him silly blue hair, and possibly also make him be a girl?

Could I take a dip in the kernel, actually? HRT is slow as fuck.

EB: but instead, it was prototyped by jade’s first guardian dog lusus.
EB: and now he is unstoppable! […]
AG: Of course I realized that would happen.
AG: It was pretty much the whole point, you goof!

Oh, boy.

AG: No matter what you or I or any of us did, Jack’s here now. That’s the reality!
AG: And if I didn’t stop you, it wouldn’t have changed the reality for us here. We’d still 8e hiding on this rock, and he’d still 8e out there, sniffing around for us. […]
AG: All that REALLY would have happened is I would have allowed you to do something you weren’t supposed to do! […]
AG: And then you and all your friends would exist in a splintered timeline. And you wouldn’t even 8e a8le to talk to me anymore! ::::(

…alright. If I take my brain, and turn it Vriska-wards, I can kind of see how she’d be able to rationalize this to herself. Jack’s ascension is already baked into the Alpha Timeline, so it can’t really be ‘her fault’, even if she consciously, deliberately caused it to feed her own ego.

There is, however, one major problem with her line of reasoning.

Vriska didn’t know that she was responsible for Jack - not until just now.

Before that, she’d have been able to see him falling asleep at the critical moment - but Vriska isn’t the only source of Player narcolepsy in the Medium. For all she knew, her powers could have interfered with the actual reason John fell asleep - for example, some event involving his dream self, which she can’t see.

She couldn’t know for sure if she was fucking something up, by doing this - but she did it anyway.

AG: I did it 8ecause I wanted to 8e the one responsi8le for cre8ting him.

And she did it because she wanted to.

This is, I think, the most important point to drill in on. Everything else - all that equivocation about doomed timelines - it all adds up to nothing but justification after the fact. She wanted to do this, it was fully in line with her established attitude towards John, and she did it for selfish, but entirely genuine, reasons.

Vriska isn’t a Paradox Space P-Zombie. She’s fully in control of her actions, and the existence of the Alpha Timeline doesn’t absolve her of their consequences.

…. and no, I don’t care what Doc Scratch says. That’s just a rhetorical trick he uses to get people - Vriska, usually - to do what he wants.

I’m half convinced that Vriska is only fated to do all this bad shit because she’d want to do it anyway. Maybe if she grows as a person, the Alpha Timeline won’t be able to encode any more Vriska Incidents, since it could no longer maneuver her into a position where she wants to perpetrate them.

And if that’s true, people like Doc Scratch have a vested interest in keeping her the way she is. Food for thought.

theswordwizard:

tenebrius-excellium:

theonlydrewboo:

Sad but true.

Ok it’s not just about the Rich vs. Poor though. There are layers of this coming together, which I want you to have awareness of, among others:

It makes this so much worse, but it’s also true. Many people’s levels of empathy dull because we are confronted with yet another global crisis every single day if we turn on the news. Many want to help from the bottom of their heart, but there’s a sort of paralyzing effect going on when confronted with masses of people, sometimes entire countries in need of assistance. 

People want quick solutions with happy endings. They want to help, but they also want to make the biggest difference possible fast and feel good about themselves afterwards. Everybody wants to hold the baby, but it’s the mother raising it. I’m trying to have grace here - sometimes we even need this, a quick good deed to remind ourselves of the impact we can make if we take action instead of just standing by. It’s inspiring. However, when met with the needs of larger groups or complex, decade-long system change, we often feel helpless.

We can donate $12, but we can’t donate millions. We can bake a cake that’ll feed 12 people, but not the entire homeless population of our city. We can save one pet from being put down, but not the entire shelter. We have some strength for today, but no capability to think beyond a couple months into the future.

There is a successful war strategy against this apathy and it happens when everyone takes responsibility for themselves and their resources and contributes on their part daily.

What I’m trying to get at here is for everyone to have grace with themselves about crowd mentality happening. It just does. It’s a thing. It’s okay. As unfortunate as it is, it doesn’t stop at government levels.

However, I also need everyone to individually recognize the moment that their crowd mentality kicks in about a certain disaster that you hear about. Recognize it. And then respond to the outcry despite your lazy placebo-seeking ass. We are stronger together. Together, we will change. Together, we can change the world.

wufflesvetinari:

hey guys, i solved it! optimistic fiction and pessimistic fiction have the same moral value! we’ve done it! we’re free

invertebrates:

1five1two:

i can’t blame him i’d do the same thing

nose-coffee:

scoobhead:

HEY. HEY. COLUM WAS NOT IN HARROW’S RIVER BUBBLE DREAM THEATER. COLUM’S SOUL ISN’T IN THE RIVER. WHERE THE FUCK IS COLUM ASHT

meraki-sunset:

Random thing. I was just thinking how in CSAU Dave is tecnically dating two alien fairies, and i love tinkerbell so i came out with this.

I imagine Peter pan wasn’t Dave’s thing growing up, but if the oportunity presented, he would have escaped to neverland in a heartbeat

starryeyesstarryskies:

I’M THE K TO THE A, R, K, THE A, THE T,

AND THE *MAJORITY* OF PAIRINGS HAD BETTER INCLUDE ME.

dracolizardlars:

the trans experience of, after running as far away from your forcibly assigned gender as possible, turning around and cautiously approaching it from the other side

rattle-my-stars:

sepiaseraph-deactivated20221120:

uzumaki-rebellion:

wakandamama:

thegreenpea:

blacktabris:

datasoong47:

esoanem:

guerrillatech:

This is a map of the range of all giraffe species. By my count that puts them in just 16 countries out of the 54 in Africa (of which 5 are island countries with no territory on the continental mainland). That’s 30%, quite a long way shy of all, and as you can see many of those countries that do have giraffes only have a tiny portion of their territory within giraffes’ habitats

Wow, I knew they weren’t in “every African country”, but I didn’t realize just how restricted their range was

Good teachers don’t mind saying “I don’t know” or that they need to look it up and will get back to you.

Not only that but giraffes in different areas have different patterns and it’s so cool

Masai giraffes look cool af

The Masai giraffes are stuntin’ on the heauxs!

Masai Giraffe:

Reticulated Giraffe: