A question for the ages.
The earlier on Tuesday you reblog this the funnier it is. (5:28am)
todays bird

Discoholic 🪩

titsay

if i look back, i am lost
Show & Tell
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

PR's Tumblrdome

Andulka
ojovivo
taylor price
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Monterey Bay Aquarium
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
h

tannertan36
dirt enthusiast
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Not today Justin
cherry valley forever

ellievsbear
seen from United States

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@acypresstree
A question for the ages.
The earlier on Tuesday you reblog this the funnier it is. (5:28am)
Who wants to get fucked up on the green neolithic slime that makes you hallucinate to death?
it's midnight on the 1st of june aest
posting this again cause now its actually true
“bits to use in everyday conversations”
the funniest moment in dungeon meshi is when marcille is having her nightmare and brings up her dead bird while also talking about her dead dad, saying “papa and pipi” and laios automatically assumes pipi is marcilles third nonbinary parent on top of her mom and dad
new reaction image
we all have the homie that's a cautionary tale
had
these two memes have equal and opposite energies
ok but how could you forget this one
god you're so right. hatred, worship, and comradery. below, above, and beside. the ultimate trifecta.
This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:
At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)
What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.
These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.
But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.
3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.
For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.
For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.
And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.
"It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism." --Mary Robinette Kowal
USA Native Plant Resource Masterlist
Because Google is totally useless and won't help you with ANYTHING
iNaturalist: Take photos of living things you see, post them, and the community will identify them for you. Data from iNaturalist is used in scientific research.
Wildflower.org Plant Database: Enter search criteria and find some plants. Very useful if you're looking for plants with specific qualities or know what you have in mind.
Native Plant Finder: This website is still in beta and is a work in progress, but it will show you plants for your area ranked by the number of butterflies that use them for their caterpillars.
WildflowerSearch: AMAZING resource for identification and for learning about new plants. Shows you where plants are native/not native, TONS of search filters.
Native Plant Trust: A New England organization, but probably useful to anyone.
Northern Forest Atlas: Great images and identification resources for trees; has good pictures of bark, seeds, buds, leaves.
FloraFinder: Another plant database site that's being slowly built up by a passionate nerd.
MonarchWatch milkweed by USA ecoregion: Tells you what milkweed species you should plant for monarch butterflies.
Native Beeology: Not plants, but a closely related subject.
I will add more and post an updated list as I find more.
Annual deer post:
If you see a fawn laying down on the ground all alone, leave it alone. It is not lost, it does not need your help, do not pick it up, do not move it.
This behavior evolved to keep deer young safe. The baby is very small, very quiet, and hard for most predators to see. A young fawn cannot keep up with a fleeing mother deer, which is their primary problem-solving strategy. So while the mother goes elsewhere to graze, the fawn stays safe and hidden. The mom will be back.
Leave the fawn alone.
This is always good to pass around this time of year, but I would like to add something for the few of us who might be encountering the moose kind of deer.
Moose are deer, but moose have the opposite strategy. They stay close to their babies, and their primary response for anything getting close to their babies is immediate violent murder. If you do see a baby moose by itself, leave. Leave the baby alone and leave the area, preferably quickly. Momma is at most 30 yards away and has already kicked on the kill bill sirens.
Important PSA if you have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer - it installs Microsoft Copilot, even if you've removed it in the past
I went to right-click a file today and was met with an "Ask Copilot" prompt, despite having diligently removed every trace of the scourge from my computer any time it's ever been installed in the past. When I went and looked in the program list and indeed found "Copilot," it said it was installed today, 4/16/26.
Enraged and confused because I have Windows Updates turned off for this machine, don't install anything unless I can check what's in the patches, and haven't ran any updates since the end of March, I went rooting around in the logs and found that the culprit was... the latest update for Acrobat.
I went to their stupid support website, and their stupid chatbot confirmed it:
Honestly Acrobat is a terrible PDF reader/viewer anyway, it's just been installed on this computer since college and I hadn't previously bothered to remove it. But if you're in the same boat, or if you have previously been forced to use it for work/school, please be aware that this POS puts Copilot back on your computer without permission or notification.
ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS
FETCH ME NEIL
HAPPY BIG TWENTY NEIL
happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!
though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!
thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!
Astronauts are so funny man. Here's just a couple of things I've found hilarious from this past week of space stuff:
It's probably already been spread around here enough already, but in case anyone's missed it; 7 hours after launch, commander Reid Wiseman, dealing with tech issues, uttered the generational quote "I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working."
After fixing the issues that were afflicting the onboard toilet, mission specialist Christina Koch (who has quickly become my favourite of the four) laughingly said “I’m the space plumber, I’m proud to call myself the space plumber.”
On Easter Sunday, the Artemis II crew hosted a makeshift egg hunt, by hiding packets of dehydrated scrambled eggs around their Orion capsule.
The way the crew always makes sure to make it very clear they're in space when doing interviews. From stuff like Wiseman just hanging out floating sideways on screen or Koch letting her hair loose so it can freely span out flowing around her.
While in transit, the crew decided to record a parody of those bad 80s sitcom intros where everyone turns and smiles at the camera.
When the crew reached the furthest point from Earth in the mission, they jokingly clambored over each other in an effort to get to the far side of the capsule, so that they could individually claim to be the furthest person from earth.
At the same time, on the ISS which was at the time on the other side of earth, the 7 astronauts onboard had a light-hearted race to the far side of the station, making jokes about being the furthest humans from Artemis.
On the way back to earth, NASA actually managed to establish an audio call between the crews of the ISS and Artemis II (where they shared the above info), and Koch called one member of the ISS crew, Jessica Meir, her "astro-sister" as the two of them previously spacewalker together in 2019. Meir then responded I'm so happy that we are back in space together, even if we are a few miles apart" (a few here being 230,000).
While Jeremy Hansen was doing an interview, Wiseman and Koch were just in the background swatting the mission mascot (a little moon plush toy named Rise) back and forth between each other.