Who am I today

Irish/Scottish. V queer. She/her.

[kanayagf]

First ever authorised women's rights march in Kazakhstan organised by five different feminist organisations. More than 800 people showed up. This is monumental - it's something that has never been done before - the sheer fact that it was allowed by the authorities, that my organiser friends, who were later threatened by the city officials with arrest if they won't make the "personal decision" to cancel the event, decided to go through with it anyway, the fact that so many people showed up and weren't scared - it was a historic day for us

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Have you heard the good word about the Pembrokeshire walrus yet?

This walrus is fucken lost.

But Wales has lost its collective shit about it. They're generally keeping its location secret to keep people away, but we get updates every day if it's still here, if it's happy, if it's healthy. We think it was in Ireland about two weeks ago, which is interesting, because it is not actually native to Ireland either. Why is it here? No one knows.

It seems to like Pembrokeshire beaches.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I regret to inform you all that the walrus is a delinquent.

In attempting to climb aboard a dinghy in Tenby it capsized it.

It then proceeded to Tenby harbour where it tried to climb aboard a fishing boat.

Incredibly, this is not an April Fools

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Today on English People RUIN Everything, a bunch of English tourists from Essex and Leeds broke covid-19 regulations and travelled to Tenby over Easter to try and see Wally (so named after Where's Wally) and crowded him with jet skis and surfboards and stuff, so he's not been seen since Monday. We don't know yet if he's moved to a secluded spot again, or left Wales entirely.

But, you know, I doubt we were going to have Wally for much longer anyway, since they need to head back home again at some point. Godspeed, Wally. May your fish be ever plentiful.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

The English went back home and Wally came back to Tenby! We stan a true Welsh icon, folks.

Some facts about Wally:

She is named after Where’s Wally because she is hard to spot

She was previously in Ireland, and then secluded beaches in Pembrokeshire, but has really taken a shine to Tenby, which is a delightful village

She has a scar on one flipper but it’s long-healed and doesn’t seem to bother her

She is the southern-most walrus ever spotted in the wild!

The current theory as to how she got here is that she fell asleep on an ice floe that drifted south, but she’s not bothered about returning yet

She’s believed to be two years old

Her gender is still a bit of a mystery but we seem to be leaning female

This story on Wales Online claims she’s believed to be male, but then uses female pronouns. It also features a video of some Welsh people chatting about Wally, including a child whose first language is very clearly Welsh and by the end of his part is struggling to think of things to say about the walrus in English.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

WALLY UPDATE!!

The Western Telegraph has opted for male pronouns, and is being very firm that Wally is male, although other news outlets are still all over the place. But what has Wally been up to the past few days?

He is rapidly gaining weight, and is still giving no cause for concern to either of the organisations watching him (which are the RSPCA a bit and Welsh Marine Life Rescue a lot; this is funny though because a walrus is so far outside of the wheelhouse of either of those organisations like we’re all just guessing here, lads)

His delinquent ways have continued - he has now attempted to climb onto multiple buoys (all unsuccessfully) and at one point nearly got a mooring rope stuck around his neck. 

Has he learned from this?

FOLKS HE HAS NOT!

He is now a Fashion Icon. He has surfaced multiple times wearing accessories in his moustache. Mostly this has been shells, but three days ago he upped his fashion game by wearing this starfish:

What an Icon.

The photographer of this picture, one Amy Compton who has been Wally’s official photographer since the start, has been making these delightful Wally masks (inset). They sell for £5, of which £1 goes to Welsh Marine Life Rescue. If you would like your own Wally mask, contact her here!

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

My mother came for a visit today and we checked and Tenby is an hour away from me, so we went for a Lovely Day Trip to Find a Walrus.

Friends, I took the shittest photo there has ever been of a Walrus. But I absolutely did get to see em.

A lifeboat wandered by to check em out at one point, and ey just... sank. Just dropped below the surface like Homer Simpson moving backwards into a hedge. After a while the boat left, and Wally surfaced again.

I can now confirm that ey really, really likes blowing water around like a whale, and also kept eyeing up that buoy next to em.

Also, I had entirely forgotten how comically beautiful Tenby is, but that's an aside

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Time for a Wally Update!!!

It's only a little one, but apparently we're getting Serious about this walrus, lads - the police are now stepping in to say that anyone interfering with Wally (examples of this interference to date: throwing things at him, taking boats and paddle boards out to him, throwing fish overboard to tempt him closer, etc) is committing a criminal offence and we must send evidence of Assholes to them. So that's fun!

Meanwhile, the tense stand-off between the RNLI and Wally continues over Who Gets To Use The Lifeboat Slipway. Here is a picture of Wally in full delinquent mode.

What a public menace.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Time for the weekly Wally news!

Here is the problem with 2,500 lbs of predatory sea potato using the slipway of a lifeboat station as a spa bed: sometimes, canoeists get in trouble near Stackpole and need rescuing and then some underwhelmed Welsh coast guard is going to have to try to chase said predatory sea potato off the slipway so they can launch the boat.

Here is the problem with that scenario: an underwhelmed Welsh coast guard basically views 2,500 lbs of predatory sea potato as a sort of ornery gelatinous cow, and so will try to do this with, and I am not making this up, a broom. But a ton of overgrown seal has no fear of brooms, so the attempt is not entirely successful under time-sensitive conditions while canoeists are actively drowning 10 miles away.

Solution? An air horn.

Which did work long enough to get the boat out, and then Wally clambered back aboard barely minutes later and fell asleep again. So trick learned, I guess.

Anyway, since I've apparently become Tumblr's primary Wally journalist, I thought I'd go for a cheeky visit again today so I could report on their condition FIRST HAND (you're all welcome, I have incredible integrity). Today I tried using a binocular over my phone camera with was extremely stressful and moderately successful - and I have two pieces of NEWS.

Story the First

Two dinghies with divers aboard suddenly turned up and sailed right up to them. There are Welsh Marine Life Rescue volunteers everywhere, and one woman immediately yelled "YOU ARE TOO CLOSE. MOVE AWAY."

Everyone on the cliff went silent. The boats went closer.

"YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW," yelled the beachmaster. "MOVE AWAY."

Tumblrs, they did not.

"CAN YOU HEAR ME?" she yelled. "MOVE AWAY."

At which point, the whole fucken cliff starts joining in, because Welsh people are Like That.

"Move away!"

"Leave 'im alone, mun!"

"Move away, butt, what you doing!"

"He's the size of an 'orse, bois, can't you see 'im from here?!"

"Bloody move you fucks, you'll scare 'im away again!"

(That last one was, I swear, an eighty year old woman.)

The boats, suddenly being yelled at by a whole cliff of Welsh people, sailed away. Later, we followed the beachmaster who was now on a mission, and found her with a couple of community police officers ripping the shit out of the divers. It was very satisfying.

Story the Second

I mentioned my binocular and phone trick. It came in handy. At first it gave me some very satisfying shots for a distance picture on a phone camera:

But, you know, whatever.

But THEN I got this picture:

which I got 0.256778 seconds before that majestic Arctic beast of purest beautiful nature untamed FELL OFF THE SIDE OF THE SLIPWAY LIKE A CAT THAT GOT TOO CLOSE TO A TABLE EDGE

Wally was fine, the seagull to the right was traumatised.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

This is not an update as such but my friend Chris who I took with me to get the scoop on Wally on Sunday had a real camera with him, and he has produced a WAY better photo than I did, and I want you all to see Just How Louche a Walrus is capable of looking:

Handsome boi

[elodieunderglass]

Oh GOSH that walrus is luxurious and visionary. Thank you for your documentation OP

[partialbirthabortion]

I have now seen have a bag of plastic bags attributed to growing up in a black household, a Latino household, an immigrant household, an Appalachian household and a “white trash” household. I think it’s time to just admit that we all have a plastic bag bag

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

[mirkwoodest]

Obsessed with the fact that this really happened😳

[wan-shailu]

When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…

I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.

– Diana Wynne Jones

[funnytwittertweets]

[guerrillatech]

[exigencelost]

I maintain that Hey There Delilah by Plain White Tees is a 450% better song if it’s about a guy who’s lost custody of his daughter

[exigencelost]

Literally every lyric has so much more Energies if it’s sung to a child I’m gonna die on this hill. “Hey there, Delilah /Don’t you worry about the distance /I’m right there if you get lonely /Give this song another listen” and “Hey there, Delilah/ I know times are gettin’ hard /But just believe me, girl / Someday I’ll pay the bills with this guitar / We’ll have it good /We’ll have the life we knew we would / My word is good” like? He’s trying to get his daughter back? Idk if she’s with the other parent or in foster care or what but it’s So Much I have a lot of feelings about this. The repeated promises, “I’d walk to you if I had no other way” and “I’m right there when you get lonely” when, like, obviously, he’s not, and he’s just sort of desperately hoping that she still understands that he loves her, and that she doesn’t feel abandoned. And then, “Delilah, I can promise you /That by the time that we get through / The world will never ever be the same /And you’re to blame” that’s so fucking sweet? That’s such a sweet thing to say to your daughter. Romance is over. Noncustodial parental love songs are where it’s at. 

[celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725]

This is what “death of the author” means. We know that’s not what the song was written about, but what if it was? What if we explored the lyrics as though the speaker was a heartbroken father missing his daughter? It changes EVERYTHING. And it’s so good.

Anyway, OP you are wonderful and I love you.

[egberts]

just learned about the dude in 1992 who got a liver transplant from a baboon and then died 70 days later

[ardent-38]

Vital question; Was his death related to the baboon liver inside his body?

[egberts]

actually no, they don't think so

[boopednose]

The baboon was not a very good surgeon

[50pointstoravenclaw]

Reminder that if you live in Scotland

IT'S ELECTION DAY TODAY

PLEASE VOTE

The bigots will.

[valilihapiirakka]

whenever I see those posts going around Tumblr about spotting neo-nazis, all focusing on the "if he has this sort of tattoo poking out of his manky cutoff denim jacket" level stuff, I'm like... yeah it is good to know the difference between An Iron Cross and some other aesthetic tattoo cross, but one of the most "insidious yet blatant" neo-nazis I've ever spoken to started off by just telling me all about her woes with her (white Swedish) boyfriend, feeling out what kind of reaction I would have, and the moment she got me committing to saying "hey, you don't have to put up with anything like that, you deserve to feel safe and respected in your own house!" she switched seamlessly to talking points like "the government doesn't care about the terrible helplessness of being a white woman in Sweden, now that they've let in all those unstoppably rapacious male 'refugees'... don't you wish you could do something about that?"

I feel more and more with every passing day that this lady, with her cute straight-cut fringe and knit sweater and nerdy girl interests, would be doing absolute numbers on here, while her fans continued to frantically warn each other the whole time about those nasty skinheads and how to spot them

[5laz]

the neo-Nazi dogwhistles I see on tumblr come from the cottagecore & dark academia aesthetic boards. tradwifes are the point of recruitment now.

[valilihapiirakka]

I think this is a really good observation, and thank you for adding it! it's important to keep up with broad trends like this. however, I will say that tumblr being tumblr, statements like this do imo run the risk of people taking it as "it's not X aesthetic choices that are The One Big Current Dogwhistle, it's actually Y aesthetic choices!" which just leads to the exact same problem of fascists just moving on to a different aesthetic with "safe" coding and different buzzwords.

the whole point is that the dangerous stuff always takes the form of people who seem superficially friend-shaped, literally no matter who that is or how generally left-wing people with your aesthetic lean - right-wingers absolutely aren't above trying to pull people further right with bizarre hooks like "as an asexual, don't you feel alienated by this degenerate modern obsession with hookups?" or "autism is a trait most common in northern Europe, it's the free anti-modern-society spirit of our Viking ancestors, don't you think it might be true that lower races' standards controlling society is why you suffer under its rules?", like it really does not matter if their ultimate goal is incompatible with your existence, as you see quite clearly with many white women who like having a job and rights but still get pulled in by the "women's rights angle" of keeping ~scary~ brown men away from them.

you have to keep looking at the actual content, always, not just veer away from whatever the problematic aesthetic du jour is.

[optional]

IMAGINE ME AND YOU (2005) dir. Ol Parker

[girl-sim-deactivated20230806-de]

motherofmemes

[girl-sim-deactivated20230806-de]

No because it IS hot

[catrinecat]

Queen stuff

[loisreeds]

“oh really? you will teach me how to speak russian? u better bring that caviar and vodka, sweetie!”

[lunah-goodbye]

x

[fjordfocused]

Matt Mercer drawing hearts around every entry in the Monster Manual that features “Immunities: Stunned”

[thelatestkate]

April 2021 Illustrations ヽ(• ‿ •)ノ

[princen-jasper]

“There are no trigger warnings in real life”

“The real world is cruel, get over it.”

My boyfriend is triggered by Christmas and Christmas music. We were in a restaurant, and Christmas music was playing, and he started panicking so he went outside for a cigarette. The manager of the restaurant overheard him saying he had to get out, and changed the music over for the rest of the time we were there. There are safe spaces in the real world. People are nicer than you think. And bullshit people who try to tell you to get over your triggers, ain’t shit.

[lynati]

The world can be cruel, so you should be your best to offset that cruelty when you can. Often extreme kindness can be accomplished with minimal effort.

“The world is cruel, so I will be cruel” makes you far less of a rebel or a revolutionary than, “The world is cruel, so I will be kind.”

[vacuously-true]

Hey tumblr friends, in case I haven't told you lately, I have no idea what the FUCK half of you are on about and I WISH I didn't know what the rest of you are on about. Great work. Keep it up.

[nudityandnerdery]