not a real person but also not NOT a human

[writingdose]

a million times this. “I don’t like these xyz fics” then don’t read them. THEY ARE NOT FOR YOU!!!!!!! no one forces you to read anything you don’t want to read. no one forces you to consume art you don’t enjoy. it’s so easy to click that mute or block button. instead of insulting fanfics or fan art for not fitting your personal liking, either choose something that does fit your personal liking, or write the fic you want to read yourself / draw the art you want to consume yourself.

fanfic writers and fan artists create as THEIR hobbies. they create for themselves and their own enjoyment. they don’t create for strangers’ approval

[thebellekeys]

europeans be like “omg north americans are so racist it’s horrible” and then elect fascists

[thebellekeys]

I would like to emphasize that I agree with all of these tags by the way. My post wasn't aiming to pin all of Europe's grotesque racism on the new elections.

[dailymanners]

A few weeks ago I was at a board game night with some of my old classmates from various mainland European countries. They started talking about how horrible Trump's treatment of immigrants is and how they're so glad to be in Europe where nothing like that is happening right now. I asked them what they thought about the fact that their own governments were complicit in turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave of asylum seekers, and some of them legitimately didn't even know and were surprised to hear that their own governments had enacted policies that caused the deaths of thousands of asylum seekers.

Even here in Iceland, almost nobody has been talking about the fact that some of the far right populist parties have legitimately been talking about wanting to establish detainment camps to keep asylum seekers in.

[barishal]

Additional readings:

Greece suspends asylum applications for migrants from North Africa by Laura Gozzi (BBC).

Greece passes draconian legislation with prison terms for rejected asylum seekers by Helena Smith (The Guardian).

Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say by Lucile Smith and Ben Steele (BBC).

Bill on Detention Centres for Asylum Seekers Published by Jelena Ćirić (Iceland Review).

Italy sends 40 rejected asylum seekers to Albania by Karl Sexton (DW).

Record number of migrants, refugees reached Canary Islands by sea in 2024 (Al Jazeera).

Portuguese government announces major migrant expulsion plan by ANSA (InfoMigrants).

[dailymanners]

This post is a few months old now, and the bit about Iceland is now outdated, because Alþingi (the Icelandic parliament) passed the bill approving the detention center for asylum seekers. It will be legal to handcuff and detain children there.

Never let anyone from Europe feed you the lie that racism and fascism are unique to North America in the 21st century.

[dailymanners]

This post made racists angry enough to harass me over it, which all that's going to do is make me bring this post back and reblog it more.

[aintgotanamehere]

Basically so stressed I can't decide if I wanna puke or cry

[byjove]

So exhausting how the mainstream American news media will be like “Resurfaced tweet shows this progressive Democratic candidate tweeted ‘shut up cunt’ in response to a Nazi when they were 17 years old. This troubling misogyny and censorship shows the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the Democratic Party.” while the Republican candidate has called for Iran to be nuked off the face of the planet, groped multiple woman, been photographed snorting coke off a 19 year old exotic dancer’s breast while his pregnant wife was in the hospital and plainly stated he is racist. Like, why are we doing this? (I know why.) Why aren’t we talking about who is funding these people and what their positions on the issues are?

[pingo1387]

having a headache while hydrated is so unfair. you were supposed to protect me.

[aintgotanamehere]

I feel similarly betrayed when I get a cold despite having quit smoking

[chroniccoolness]

racist white canadians and europeans want you to believe the slave trade worked like this

it did not. it is public knowledge the slave trade worked like this

and in fighting antiblackness within canada and europe it is so so so important to acknowledge these places's participation in and benefit from the transantlantic slave trade. Slavery is not just the US's dirty past, it is a triangular industry lasting centuries that white people in the united states, canada, and europe benefitted from and continue to benefit from to this day. Slavery was good for white canadians and white europeans. They liked it. they encouraged it. they had slaves, they profited from the slave trade, and they used products grown from US slave labour in every day life. The slavery of Black people would not have been possible on the sheer scale at which it happened if it were not for active, consistent participation from europe and canada.

[saywhat-politics]

Mitch McConnell has been out on paid leave since June 14. That's over seven weeks. He's collected roughly $20,000 in salary the entire time, full benefits included, without casting a single vote.

Here's the part that should make your blood boil.

In 1993, McConnell voted against the Family and Medical Leave Act, the law that gives workers 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to recover from illness or care for a new baby. Unpaid. He voted no anyway.

In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that was killing thousands of Americans a week, McConnell personally blocked an effort to extend paid family and sick leave in a COVID relief bill.

In 2022, he voted against guaranteeing railway workers seven measly days of paid sick leave, the exact policy that pushed rail workers to the brink of a nationwide strike.

For over 30 years, McConnell has made sure that if you get sick, if you have a baby, if your body needs time to heal, you're on your own. No pay. No guarantee. Figure it out.

Meanwhile, he's spent the last seven weeks recovering in a facility, on the taxpayer dime, with the exact kind of paid, job-protected leave he spent his entire career keeping out of reach for everyone else.

This isn't really about McConnell's health. People get sick, people fall, people deserve to heal. The problem is that he only believes that's true for himself.

If paid leave is good enough for a senator recovering from a fall, it's good enough for the mother recovering from childbirth, the warehouse worker with the flu, and the nurse who just got diagnosed with something serious.

Guaranteed paid leave shouldn't be a privilege of power. It should be a floor everyone stands on.

[badgersandbees]

Every single non trans woman who proclaims to be an ally absolutely needs to be posting about how goddamn transmisogynist staff is.

Because when trans women dare to speak up for themselves, Tumblr nukes their blogs.

We need to be fucking loud about this, daily, because Tumblr staff is specifically targeting and deleting trans women who are not breaking ToS and who often have fundraisers up FOR THEIR SURVIVAL.

By deleting these blogs repeatedly, Tumblr staff is saying loud and clear what they hope happens to these girls.

Are y'all okay with that? Because if not we need to be posting about it more because we have seen by now it's incredibly fucking unlikely this sites moderation will delete our blogs for it because we are not trans women

Tumblr staff and CEO Matt Mullenweg want trans women in need to not be able to post their fundraisers, meaning they are okay with these women dying.

[colemckenzies]

you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it

example: you absolute coat hanger

[ggiornojo]

as well u can just add ‘ed’ to any object and it’s sounds like you were really drunk

example: i was absolutely coat hangered last night

[colemckenzies]

#i was gazeboed mate #i was absolutely baubled

[animatedamerican]

Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).

[nentuaby]

Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.

[animatedamerican]

… huh.  I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.

I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.

[thepioden]

Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.

“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Something is

Something is wrong with our language

[rooksandravens]

Is it a glitch or a feature?

[cranberrybogmummy]

Feature

[musashi]

Hey can you guys reblog Cheeseburger so he can take a sunbeam nap on lots of blogs. No other reason I just want you guys to see him.

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

You wake up one day and discover you've lost control over a random action or feeling!

Spin the wheel to find out what!

How bad is it?

Actually way better than before!

Its good

It's alright

It's annoying but I'll be fine

It's pretty bad

IM DEAD

worse than death

Nothing changes/results

Voting ended on4h

This idea was submitted by @dbnekonico!

[aintgotanamehere]

Last week I got to introduce someone to the expression "butts to nuts" for a full space

This week, it was the snarky "it's not a dick, don't take it so hard"

Small wins

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.

[badwificonnection]

Blood is what now?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing

[badwificonnection]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums? 

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.

[badwificonnection]

Thank you that’s…very disturbing

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It’s not my fault you’re human.

[apatheticshipwreck]

Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part that’s confusing 

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

And that’s what a human is!

[elodieunderglass]

Well, there’s another few steps, of course.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.

[kyrosion]

It has been MONTHS, @elodieunderglass, and I am still mumbling “furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship” under my breath as a comfort phrase, and the FUCKING INDIGNITY that it came from this godforsaken post about THE HORRIBLE WETNESS OF MAMMALS!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“The horrible wetness of mammals” would make a great band name.

[gallusrostromegalus]

“hold hope, internally, at 37.5 degrees” and “Mammals internalize everything (eggs, grudges)” Now live permanently in my vocabulary

[aintgotanamehere]

The past several months have been a seriously challenging time, and for no real reason, which makes it even more awful.

Things are, by most metrics, very good: I have a good job that pays well with decent benefits, I can afford both necessities and frivolous bullshit, I am safe and healthy, I have strong relationships and hobbies in which I can indulge.

And yet

I find myself listless and on the verge of crying very often. I have zero energy or interest in most of those hobbies or relationships lately. I'm struggling to see a reason to bother, kinda? I don't especially wanna be dead, but I'm very ambivalent about being alive, too

And I know that my brain's job is to keep me alive, not make me happy, but goddamn, it would be nice if the shit that's in my head was something less "eh, fuck it" again

[awfulpunk]

this is insanely racist and I haven't even seen much about this online yet

[checkyourasianbias]

after Bad Bunny won they added a Latin song category and after Rosé got three nominations the grammys added a k-pop/c-pop/j-pop category they have always been afraid of well-performing artists of color challenging white artists in mainstream categories

[aintgotanamehere]

Did we need the Grammys to further show off their inherent racism?

[soundcarvings]

I’m kinda feeling a bit of everything these days and also nothing

[horreurscopes]

it is human nature to weave strings of yarn, threads, or fibers together to make cloth and textiles

[horreurscopes]

humans will see a soft cellulose plant material or downy animal coat and say is anyone going to twist that staple fibre in order to make a cohesive thread and then not wait for an answer

[justanotherlittlequeerdo]

Seriously, spinning as a craft is ancient. Archaeologists recently discovered three-ply fiber that’s around 46,000 years old, blowing the previous “oldest fingers” out of the water by thousands of years.

But get this: It’s made from fucking TREE BARK. Can you imagine the dedication, foresight, and experimentation involved in figuring out how to harvest and spin that? On top of everything, it’s also lace weight. What the fuck, Neanderthals?

Article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/neanderthals-made-the-worlds-oldest-thread/

World’s oldest yarn hints that Neanderthals had basic math skills

We have no proof Neanderthals told stories, but they definitely spun yarns.

Also, big ole slow clap for the article writer.

[roach-works]

it’s very cool that neanderthals managed to get yarn out of bark fiber, but i think you might be under the impression that all tree bark is like, oak, or sycamore, or something, and only exists in ‘thick chunk of wood’ or ‘flake of wood’ form. but there’s lots of bark like elm and cedar that peels away from the tree in long, tough strips, like so:

like, look at it. it’s string. it’s obviously string. you don’t actually have to be a genius to look at this and think ‘ah! string time :)’

i’ve picked up shed pieces of elm bark on a golf course, stripped and combed out the fiber with just my fingernails, and started hand-twisting good strong cordage right then and there as i walked. you don’t even have to soak it first, though i think if you want finer/softer cordage it helps to soak, beat, and comb the fibers.

the people of the pacific northwest, where there’s so many cedars, developed really wonderful textiles out of cedar bark fiber, pounding and soaking and combing it a bit like linen. i’ve never gotten to touch any, though i’d really like to.

Plant Fibers for Cordage

Many plant fibers can be used to make cordage. Here I'll demonstrate how to process different kinds of plant fibers from the inner bark of t

here’s a whole page on all the different stems and barks that can be used for cordage! how cool is that?

so, not to denigrate the skill and intelligence of ancient people, but if you already know how to hand-spin grass and hair, then spinning bark is an extremely obvious and easy thing to do as soon as you encounter the right kind of bark.