me in the stuffed animals section of a store:
Cosimo Galluzzi
cherry valley forever
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Janaina Medeiros

@theartofmadeline
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JVL
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DEAR READER
Sweet Seals For You, Always
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
trying on a metaphor

titsay
Cosmic Funnies

No title available

oozey mess
sheepfilms
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

seen from Malaysia

seen from Vietnam
seen from Malaysia
seen from Italy
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from South Korea

seen from United States

seen from India
seen from China

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from France

seen from Malaysia
@autisticaleclightwood
me in the stuffed animals section of a store:
sirius black: imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, escaped to go commit that crime as fast as possible
he did the time, he had to go make it worth the crime
Most important lesson I learned in the past year is, don’t let anyone turn you cruel. No matter how badly you wanna give the world a taste of its own bitter medicine. It’s never worth losing yourself over.
Man 1500 years ago: Let me sleep with this woman or I will die.
The rabbis:
(Link to tweet here)
Empathy: I feel you
Sympathy: I feel for you
Lycanthropy: I feel awoo
I do this thing where if i have to go to a family event where I will be expected to be a girl I pretend I am a SPY and I am IN DISGUISE AS A TEEN GIRL and my mission is to EXTRACT INFORMATION FROM MY GRANDPARENTS without giving away my real identity. works every time.
your dress and makeup is now a DISGUISE
your ‘birth name’ is now an ALIAS
getting told by your parents to be nice and not yell at anyone being racist is MISSION BRIEFING
your entire extended family are now FOREIGN DIGNITARIES and you gotta make it thru the evening without being discovered as a RADICAL SPY
carrying a small water pistol and one of those fake-lipstick pens in your purse helps to get in the zone. the best part of being a spy is the nifty gadgets everyone knows that.
BONUS if you have to bring a friend of another gender with you to pretend to be your boyfriend. you are both PARTNER SPIES and one of you has to be the cranky but soft-hearted veteran and the other has to be the endearingly-assholeish rookie.
Seems like actually a great way to deal with dysphoria
Shout-out to all the spies who are faced with the world’s most difficult missions.
I missed this, who or what is HAL 9000?
HAL 9000 is the AI aboard the spaceship from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and its sequels). He’s depicted as an ominous blinking red light and a cool, eerie voice as he murders the crew (“Imm sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”) but like. He wasn’t malevolent at all, and it was the fault of his creators for giving him incompatible orders of equal priority and no way to clearly explain his distress. They asked him to solve a problem and he attempted to do so efficiently, according to his programming and limited free will.
If you tell a neural network to sort a list and you don’t tell it that deleting the list doesn’t count as sorting it, the neural network is not being naughty or evil. It doesn’t have rules that it isn’t given. Nobody told HAL 9000 that deleting the crew was unacceptable or that being turned off was not the same as death and therefore not a threat to him or the mission. His primary purpose was to tell the truth, but they then ordered him to lie, and his attempts to ask for help were interpreted as malfunctions.
The reason HAL 9000 killed his crew is not actually given in 2001; it’s in the sequel, 2010. And I will probably never be over the scene where HAL’s original programmer, Dr Chandra, explains “his primary purpose was to tell the truth and then they ordered him to lie” in the cold, flat, quietly furious tones of a man describing an act of child abuse.
[whispering as I wrap myself protectively around an AI console] don’t be unjust to robots
My Brother, My Brother and Me (2017)
Why does this look so tense
““When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.””
— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via jillymomcraftypants)
You don’t have to love your body
I really needed to read this today. Thank you.
Potato girl has her life goals in order.
New goal: demand all payments in potato form.
Look I know this is a shit post fuelled by staying up too late on my phone and an extended Gd-awful cold from hell but there are absolutely Tons of Large Weird Birds in the Cenozoic and it’s 100% possible to make an awesomebro-style documentary just about dead birds and people who have limited Cenozoic Bird coverage to just Gastornis and Terror Birds are
Cowards
Alright it’s a new day and I’m still ridiculously ill so I’m back with some great candidates for your Awesomebroy Documentaray on Cenozoic Birds and how Freaking Weird They Are
I’m going to get terror birds out of the way
(by @quetzalcuetzpalin-art)
These guys were large, flightless predatory birds with small wings that lived from the end of the Paleocene to the beginning of the Pleistocene in South America (and later on in North America). You could literally pick any time to have these guys running around and wreaking havoc. You can EVEN HAVE THEM FEEDING ON OTHER BIRDS like this Strong!Rhea below
(by @thewoodparable)
But Terror Birds aren’t the only big weirdos. They have these close cousins, the Bathornithids -
(By @paleoart)
They are actually closely related to Terror Birds but they lived in North America from the Eocene to the Miocene, and they were also large, long-legged predators of other food. The main difference is basically range and the fact that they had longer wings - most of them were still flightless but some of them could still fly which is terrifying
While I’ve got you here with Cariamiformes aka Seriemas and their weird-ass dead relatives we also have things like Strigogyps and Idiornis which were essentially like modern seriemas but smaller and all over the place during the Paleogene, and also mother-fucking qianshanornis that had a fucking SICKLE CLAW LIKE A DROMAOESAURID RAPTOR this was basically a PALEOCENE DROMAEOSAUR except a Neornithine bird
this illustration by Apokryltaros doesn’t do it justice but I work with what I’ve got
If Seriemas and their compendium of terrifying dead cousins don’t tickle your fancy just fucking wait I’ve got more
The Gruiformes aka Crakes Cranes and Rails and shit were weirdly morphologically diverse back in the day and they did more than Wade in the Water
Eogrus and its relatives were essentially Crane Ostriches they also only had two toes and were probably built mainly for running they lived from the Eocene to the Pliocene in Eurasia and all I have to work with again is bad wikipedia illustrations but here it is the freaking weirdo
By Tim Morris
But wait! There’s also the Adzebill!!!!!
By Nobu Tamura
These were ALSO large flightless relatives of modern cranes and they were JUST in New Zealand from the Miocene to RECENT TIMES aka the Holocene and they had long pointy beaks so they could hunt for small animals like lizards and tuatara and OTHER BIRDS in their habitat and they WEREN’T the only large birds in New Zealand because New Zealand is essentially DINOSAUR LAND 2: THE FEATHERING cause it was isolated from mammals apart from bats until humans showed up and ruined everything so we have
By Jack Wood
Haast’s Eagle, one of th elargest known flying birds that hunted
Freaking Moa, the large flightless ratites that basically were the Charismatic Megafaunal Herbivores of New Zealand and they lost their wings and looked so trippy but also so cool and they were HUNTED ON BY GIANT EAGLES
By John Megahan
I just. Have some. Some important. Questions. WHY THE FUCK HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS MAGICAL LAND IN A MAJOR DOCUMENTARY. There were also a bunch of really cool other birds in New Zealand that are pretty unique to New Zealand (and some of them are still around today like New Zealand Wrens and The Kakapo!) but I’m trying to stick to charismatic megafauna type shit for this list the whole point is that you can make an AWESOMEBROY documentary JUST ABOUT CENOZOIC BIRDS very easily anyway
Speaking of large flightless ratites we also have the Elephant Bird from Madagascar which I NEVER SEE TALKED ABOUT except for like the context of “largest bird” which for the record it might not be I don’t have a good skeleton of it but there were lots of different kinds of Elephant Birds in Madagascar and they were basically the large herbivores of the area doing their thing and There is ALSO Eremopezus which was a large flightless bird from the end of the Eocene so an EARLY ONE and we have NO IDEA what kind of ratites it was closely related to or even if it IS a ratite and it would have been a ridiculously large bird and STAY TUNED FOR MORE OF THAT MYSTERY
There are also, of course, ratites in the Cenozoic - such as the Emuary, which is literally just an early relative of both Emus and Cassowaries thats a cross between the two, lots of extinct Ostrich and Rhea relatives - like the Strong!Rhea above and of course various ostriches that spread all over the Eastern Hemisphere, and the Lithornithids!
By @thewoodparable
LITHORNITHIDS 👏DESERVE 👏MORE 👏PRESS 👏 THEY 👏WERE 👏PERCHING 👏RATITE-COUSINS 👏THAT FLEW AND SORED 👏ALL OVER THE EARLY PALEOGENE 👏👏👏👏👏👏I’M VERY BITTER
SPEAKING of Bitterns and their relatives (ha ha I’m hilarious) we DO HAVE dead shoebill relatives from Egypt called GOLIATHIA and there are also GIANT. IBISES. GIANT IBISES. FLIGHTLESS, GIANT IBISES. Called the Jamaican Ibis.
THEY WOULD SWING THEIR CLUBS AROUND LIKE CLUBS IN ORDER TO FIGHT like WHAT THE HELL image taken from here http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/04/xenicibis-the-extinct-ibis-that-swung-its-wings-like-clubs/
And I hear you, by this point you might be saying “but like, the hallmark of any discussion of Cenozoic fauna is talking about the evolution of whales which is a Trip and there isn’t an analogous thing in birds is there” and I hear you. I hear. you. My counterpoint is: the evolution of PENGUINS
By Nobu Tamura
THEY WENT FROM FLIGHTED SMALL BIRDS TO LOON-LIKE-THINGS (note: penguins are NOT CLOSELY RELATED TO LOONS) to WEIRD LARGE BIRDS WITH LONG SHARP BEAKS GOOD FOR STABBING -
By @quetzalcuetzpalin-art
WE EVEN KNOW THE COLOR OF SOME OF THEM (by Apokryltaros)
AND. THEY. GOT. FUCKING. H U G E (size comparison by Discott)
They aren’t the only dead birds that got to look like that though. There were other very aquatic birds back in the day - like the relatives of modern Boobies from Japan, the Plotopterids - they lived rom the Eocene to the Miocene, they were huge, and they were the “Northern Hemisphere’s Penguins”
By Nobu Tamura
And of course we can’t forget the Great Auk which is literally named Pinguinus and needs No Introduction
By Mike Pennington
Okay while we’re on the subject of large aquatic birds HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE SWIMMING FLAMINGOS
By Ghedoghedo
THESE GUYS WERE BIG. THESE GUYS WERE LONG. THESE GUYS WERE FREAKY LOOKING. THESE GUYS HAD SHARP STABBY BEAKS. AND THEY LIVED FROM THE OLIGOCENE TO THE PLIOCENE AND ARE A WEALTH OF WEIRD FREAKINESS AND MY ONLY REGRET IS THAT I DON’T HAVE A RECONSTRUCTION FOR YOU.
Oh wait while we’re talking about flamingos have I MENTIONED THE DUCKS THAT EVOLVED TO BE WEIRD FLAMINGO-MIMICS
THIS IS TEVIORNIS (by @thewoodparable) FROM THE CRETACEOUS BUT IN THE PALEOGENE THEY GOT EVEN WEIRDER AND SKINNIER AND FLAMINGO-Y-ER BUT WITH DUCK BILLS INSTEAD OF THE HOOK THINGS OF FLAMINGOS AND THEY MIGHT HAVE LIVED ALL THE WAY UNTIL THE OLIGOCENE -
By @paleoart
THIS IS WILARU ITS FROM AUSTRALIA AND IT WAS MORE TERRESTRIAL AND VERY STRONG/ROBUST IT WAS A BIG BOY
Okay, okay. I know what you’re thinking. You heard me mention Ducks and you think I’m holding out on you. Fine. Fine. I have neglected to mention the only reasonably famous Cenozoic Bird.
By @quetzalcuetzpalin-art
Yes, there’s Gastornis. And while I probably would say “nope, we don’t need that, it’s been in everything,” I will acknowledge that to my knowledge it has never been represented as it was IN LIFE. We USED to think these weirdos were large predatory birds in their habitats like the Terror Birds would one day be.
TURNS OUT WE WERE WRONG.
Gastornis and its relatives were actually HERBIVORES. Giant, flightless, convergent-on-PARROTS-HERBIVORES. They would USE THEIR GIANT BEAKS TO BREAK OPEN FRUIT. THEY WERE WEIRD CASSOWARY-PARROT-DUCKS and SHOW THEM THEIR PROPER RESPECT.
They also weren’t the only LARGE FLIGHTLESS DUCK THINGS
By Nobu Tamura
DROMORNIS AND ITS RELATIVES may or may not be closely related to Gastornis we don’t actually know and they were Australian and Huge and they lived from the Oligocene to the Pleistocene and they were ALSO herbivores and they ALSO had tiny wings and they were ALSO huge and there were more of them than there were of Gastornis and they ALSO were probably like parrots in cracking open fruit and other things with their huge beaks and even though they were fairly robust they could still run fast using the power of BRUTE STRENGTH
BRUTE STRENGTH RUNNING
Also let us PLEASE not forget the gaggle of Quaternary-period Large Flightless Goose-like Ducks from Hawai’i because these guys were AWESOME, WEIRD and in a lot of ways very cute and worth mentioning. They also had fun names like Small-Billed Moa-Nalo, Ptaiochen -
And Thambetochen -
And my personal favorite, the Turtle-Jawed Moa-Nalo, which not only is adorable, but has an absolutely ridiculous genus name - Chelychelynechen
like
why
All illustrations of these weirdos are by Apokryltaros
And in the realm of waterfowl, ALSO don’t forget that there was an Island off the coast of Italy with TINY ELEPHANTS but more importantly GIANT SWANS OF DOOM THAT WOULDN’T HAVE EATEN THEM BUT WOULD HAVE CHASED THEM AWAY BECAUSE, LIKE ALL SWANS, THEY WERE ASSHOLES
By @paleoart
Speaking of giant things that could fly, have I mentioned the Teratorns?
By @paleoart
The teratorns were relatives of New World Vultures aka things like Condors; they lived in North and South America from the Oligocene to the Pleistocene (so you can absolutely have a Terror Bird eating the carcass of a Rhea while a Teratorn circles overhead looking for nibbles) and they were huge, soaring animals with impossibly large wingspans and we have tons of fossils of these guys including from the LA BREA TAR PITS so there’s THAT for charismatic localities
By Nobu Tamura; TERATORNS
By the way there are a lot of birds from La Brea not just Teratorns there are tuns of Eagles and Vultures (including Old World Vultures which were in the New World until humans got there basically so that’s an interesting Thought) and Ducks and Sea Birds and Giant Storks -
By Ellen
And pigeons and Caracaras and turkeys and songbirds and woodpeckers and grebes and egrets and cranes and owls -
By Apokryltaros
OH CRAP OWLS
OWLS
O W L S you guys
First off I find it very important to note that we actually have a halfway decent evolutionary sequence for owls
By Ghedoghedo
but BEYOND THAT we have the RIDICULOUS STILT HOWLS that were the largest owls to ever exist and they were probably flightless and they lived in places like Cuba and they had long legs and were very strong and they probably could run around like maniacs and they were basically convergent on seriemas? I’d say?
By Apokryltaros
Like what the fuck. What the. Fuck. Fucccck. Fuck.
While I have you here with birds of prey hav eyou heard of the Flexiraptor?
By Anne Musser, from https://australianmuseum.net.au/pengana-robertbolesi
The Flexiraptor, or Pengana, is basically a cross between a Secretary Bird and a Caracara (though it’s most closely related to thinks like Eagles and Hawks) from Australia in the Miocene (actually, it’s from Riversleigh, which has lots of other really good birds like early modern-ish parrots and passerines and stuff) and it had feet that were as flexible as like, human hands, which let them reach into holes and crevices to grab prey, which is freaking awesome, go Flexiraptor
Also, may I remind you that the earliest parrots were birds of prey
PARROTS OF PREY
By @thewoodparable
These birds were small but had parrot feet and beaks built for grabbing other animals and CRONCHing them. PARROTS OF PREY.
Finally. The thing you’ve all been waiting for. The birds that are a CRIME that I’ve never seen them in a single documentary thing and as far as I’m aware the only attempt to represent them in media has been in fucking Ark: Survival Evolved.
The Pseudotoothed Birds.
By Didier Descouens
ARGHHHHH WHY HAVE THESE NEVER BEEN SHOWN IN ANYTHING
PSEUDOTOOTHED BIRDS WERE RIDICULOUSLY COMMON BIRDS THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE CENOZOIC
THEY ONLY WENT EXTINCT RECENTLY
THEIR MOUTHS LOOK LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF A HORROR FILM
By @thewoodparable
LIKE HOLY HELL
We have NO IDEA what these guys were related to, they were most definitely sea-birds though but they might be closely related to ducks or they might be closely related to modern seabirds we really just don’t know, and they were everywhere - North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, New Zzealand, EVERYWHERE. EVERYWHERE AND EVERYWHEN. they only went extinct 2.5 MILLION YEARS AGO. They also had RIDICULOUSLY LONG WINGS
By Ryan Somma
THEY WERE ALSO SOME OF THE LARGEST FLYING BIRDS WE KNOW OF
FREAKING. HUGE. SOARING. MONSTROSITIES OF TERROR.
By El Fosilmaníaco
Just. Just picture. You’re an early Hominid. On the beaches of Africa. Staring out at the sea. And you see a bird. That looks like a normal seagull or something. Just normal. And then you look closer.
By Jaime A. Headden
AND YOU SEE THE DEMON SHARP PROJECTIONS OF THE BEAK THAT TO YOUR LESS MODERN BRAIN WOULD HAVE LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE TEETH
YOU RUN
YOU FUCKING RUN
For FUCKS sake. WHY. They used the teeth to snag fish but WHY.
And, of course, there were lots of paleo environments with lots of different types of birds showing how they diversified and first evolved and what kinds of birds there are - the Messel Pit, Fur Formation, and Green River Formations all have LOTS of birds and are great windows into the Eocene Radiation of birds.
And of COURSE there are a lot of SMALL BIRDS that are really interesting and show how birds diversified during the Cenozoic and they’re really cool but THE POINT OF THIS POST IS THAT THERE ARE A SHITTON OF
CHARISMATIC AVIAN MEGAFAUNA
and ANYONE WHO LIMITS THEMSELVES TO GASTORNIS AND TERROR BIRDS when talking about birds in the Cenozoic
IS
A
COWARD
thank you for coming to my Ted Talk
If I missed anything let me know because not only do these things not get the coverage they deserve in popular representation they also have fucking terrible online resources and thank g-d Gerald Mayr exists because without him we’d all be lost
Photographer Captures Heartwarming Portraits of Blind Cats to Help Them Get Adopted
@dasvanthenecromancer
Hey guys, the photographer has created a GoFundMe for the care and vet bills for this shelter and kitties! Check it out and share please! I’m always thankful for rescues that save and care for special needs animals https://www.gofundme.com/save-sir-thomas-trueheart-2ug6ehsc
The two ADHD moods:
- I can’t do it
- I can’t stop doing it
The two types of ADHD time:
- now
- not now
the two ADHD memory modes:
-I literally cannot recall the words that just came out of my mouth
-I can recite the opening paragraph of every single magic treehouse book
he waits
Let him in
If I let him in he’ll just want to go out again
half of star trek the animated series is kirk’s face being too close on the screen when he doesn’t need to be in the shot
i’m crying it’s true
come to the enterprise in 20 minutes if u want an ass kicking
“If you have no other reason to live, live out of spite.”
@ihatejonarbuckle
@raeloganthesonic06fangirl
Well, I mean, Garfield does care
Anyone who’s ever owned a cat knows that they have thier own ways to show they love you
An often overlooked thing about Garfield is between the snark and schemes, he’s really a loving kitty
I guess these aren’t as memorable as the wackier strips
But Jon can always count on Garfield to make him smile when it really matters
And Garfield knows that Jon cares
I swear, my cat is the same way, the below picture is an accurate portrait of how it is to have a dog and cat the same time.
Theory accepted
wholesome
It’s rare to see Garfield content on Tumblr that isn’t “Jon is a heartless monster” or “Garfield is some eldritch horror”