Cattails and Cat Tales

Nat Roscoe W. - 35 - Aro Ace - They/them Random stuff that I find interesting. I also like to knit; check that out here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/KnitsByNantucketCat

[ang9lic]

thinking about michael and his love for animals

[ilyjane]

victory day ⎯ june 13th, 2005.

[kvtnisseverdeen]

You’re confident. You’re strong. You’re beautiful. You’re the greatest of all time.

MICHAEL (2026) dir. Antoine Fuqua

[penny-anna]

the current twitter discourse du jour is cervical smear tests for some reason and here is my take: there absolutely is a widespread assumption that if you have a vagina and are over a certain age you'll be habituated to vaginal penetration and this is self-evidently heteronormative and sexist and im honestly amazed that more people don't seem to register it fdkjghfdjk

[penny-anna]

it's not just an issue w smear tests. was investigated for PCOS not too long ago and when i was referred for an ultrasound absolutely nobody thought to mention that it would be a transvaginal ultrasound. if i hadn't happened to do my own research i would literally have found out on the day of the appointment?? i remain baffled by this

[penny-anna]

anyway a lot of people on twitter responding to 'actually smear tests are painful for some people' with 'oh well I suppose if you have some kind of medical condition it might be painful' and it's well the thing is people with medical conditions exist in real life

[penny-anna]

oh the other one is 'well the nurse will be super nice and will make sure you're comfortable and will switch to a smaller speculum if necessary' and i'm like you must know that isn't true. like c'mon. even if all your cervical smear experiences have been positive you must be conscious of the fact that some medical practitioners are assholes about stuff like this. a more helpful statement might be 'your nurse should make sure you're comfortable and if they don't then you don't have to put up with it'.

[moniquill]

[revoltingchild]

[mxlabradorite]

I will reblog this every Christmas season I’m on tumblr.

[drunkygoesonadventures]

It’s beginning to look a lot like shit scram

[midnight-spectrum-again]

Oh my god

[this-too-too-sullied-flesh]

i discovered this configuration recently

[scoops-aboy86]

Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes you pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭

[risingoflights]

reblog to instantly disintegrate some of your peers to dust

[reallyintoscience]

Also, courtesy of an otherwise great book set in the 70s I just read: if you're writing about landlines, "blocking" numbers was not a thing. (Without police and exchange-level involvement, anyway, iirc.)

Caller ID (being able to see the number of the person calling) was a Cool Extra Feature that started being available in the 90s and you had to have a phone that could handle it and pay extra for the feature to be activated. And then you just didn't pick up the phone if that number was calling. Nothing you could do about them ringing you. And before that, every call was a mystery. Before answering machines, (a whole separate bit of kit originally) if you didn't answer you'd never know what the call was about.

[heywriters]

Some of you might need to watch old films and television while trying to write eras your audience remembers perfectly well. Just to see things in action. Please.

[the-davest-of-uncles]

Old folks are a wealth of knowledge about everyday, mundane things from the past.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

While cell phones did exist in the 90s, they were a Significant Purchase, and were usually limited to one or both parents. Children in the 90s did not talk to each other on cell phones, and they definitely didn't text. Texting back then was hard. If you wanted to type a C, you had to hit the 1 key three times. Kids talked to each other on the house line, and our parents were always kicking us off. Oh, and you couldn't get on the internet and use the phone at the same time. So if you have a character online and they also get a phone call, that internet connection is dead (unless it's broadband but that wasn't widely used until the mid 2000s)

[juuls]

And the internet wasn’t widely available until the late 90s/early 00s! I remember my dad telling me that when I was 5, and had already started using the computer and internet (he was in computer sciences and network technology), we were among 1% of the world’s population to have access to the internet.

One. Percent!!

So I looked up the stats and yeah he was right! It’s pretty nuts to think about not having access to the internet now, but just 30 years ago it was still not considered a thing you had in your home.

So keep that in mind too.

Graph found here. [x]

[theonion]

Claiming that he recognized the member of the royal family, but his memory was hazy, President Donald Trump has spent his entire trip to the U.K. trying to figure out where he knows Prince Andrew from, sources confirmed Thursday. “Who is that guy? His face seems so familiar,” said Trump, pausing in the middle of shaking hands with various royal dignitaries to get a closer look at the disgraced Duke of York, whose name, as well as the activities they engaged in together, had been eluding him for the past couple days.

Full Story

[haunteddollsgeorg]

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

[catchymemes]

[thememedaddy]

[lastoneout]

Sorry we really went from free the nipple, take back the night, slut walks, and ending gender/sex segregation in sports being fucking milquetoast feminism 101 concepts to fucking girl dinner and "I just worry about fairness if we let trans girls play against cis ones" and "it was right of that woman to call the cops on a black man for existing near here in public during the day time because men are all violent monsters" and "radical feminism isn't transphobic we just need to kill all men including trans ones those oppressive traitors" and I will legit never be able to be normal about it. What the FUCK happened. I'd say I wonder what the feminists of my youth would say about this but I'm one and lemme tell ya I want to throw up. Go fucking read bell hooks or do something else useful please because all of this learned helplessness, gender essentialism, and transphobia dressed up as feminism is actively holding us back.

[talvin-muircastle]

Advice To College Students

Some of you are heading off to college/university soon.  Some of you, this will be your first experience of college or university.

So here is some advice:

Find Out What Resources Are Available To You, And Be Willing To Use Them.

YOU PAID FOR THEM, THERE IS NO SHAME IN USING THEM.

Office Hours?  Definitely use those.  I remember an instructor saying that they were thinking about curving the grade on an exam, but since they got paid to hold office hours for students to come and ask for help, and they spent the whole two hours playing solitaire…y’all deserve whatever you get.  You paid for those office hours.  Your tuition paid for that.  If you have a question, show up. Professors are far, far, FAR more merciful on average to those who show up and have an honest conversation in the office beforehand.

Counseling Center?  You paid for it.  Your money paid for that.  Look into it if you think you need it. Look into it if you think you might need it.  If you have been to therapy in the past, and you are concerned how college life is going to affect you, go talk to them right away.  They’ve heard it all before.

Free concerts, free climbing walls, free hot dogs, free movie night–ok, you don’t have to use all of that.  But you paid for it, it’s not really “free”, it’s just part of the package, so…spare your budget and give something a try!

Financial Aid Counseling?  Use it.  They are paid to be there.  Your money, either directly or through your scholarships and financial aid and your and your family’s taxes, they paid for that.  So go talk to them.

English/Math/Writing Lab?  Reference Desk at the Library?  Free course on how to use the school’s library? Oh, get your butt in there.  

Career Services? Need help making that resume?  You paid for it!  USE IT!

Your Academic Advisor.  You should definitely be on good terms with them.  

Not sure what the resources are?  Not sure which one you need?  Ask!  Ask at the Dean of Students office if nothing else!  Ask a professor!  Ask a Graduate Assistant who was an Undergrad at the school!  Somebody will know the answers!  (The Counseling Center probably knows, too!)  

YOU PAID FOR ALL THIS STUFF! DON’T WASTE IT!

[talvin-muircastle]

Our only child starts college next week, and that reminded me to do my annual reblog of this.

[talvin-muircastle]

Entering Junior year, and this stuck with them. They use it.

Interview for a campus job or internship? Ask Career Services for advice on how to handle difficult questions. I paid for it, I am going to use it.

Special Events? I paid for the food they are giving out. It is not free, I helped subsidize this.

Etc., etc.

[katherinecrighton]

Favorite "humans being human" history posts, please

I've seen the collections of favorite tumblr fiction posts; now I'd like to see what your favorite "humans being human" historical posts are. (Because sometimes it is Nice to be reminded that compassion is not something easy for us to lose; we laugh at the same bad jokes; there are entire fossil records of our kindness.)

Here are my favorites-- add on yours.

The story of the RMS Carpathia, with a follow-up (aka one of if not the best pieces of short nonfiction historical writing in the modern age and one that reduces me to tears every goddamn reread)

Bronze-age grave of teenage gamer girl lovingly buried with her sheep ankle bone collection

The 1st-2nd century CE Roman tombstone with a bar joke that reads like a Dril tweet

And even earlier: A 4500-1900 BCE Sumerian bar joke

"Please know that there's an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that's beautiful to you"

Reconstructing Otzi's shoes

The Paleolithic grandmother and the child's fingerprint

Stone-age toddlers had art lessons

Ice-age children played in megafauna-footprint puddles

There once was a little boy who loved ducks

The oldest human burial found in Africa is a toddler; they made a pillow for his head

Henry Kenelm Beste's father loved him very much

"A Timeline of Humanity"

"I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them."

"I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today. It's right-handed. I am right-handed"

A 3rd century dog carved on a marble tomb; a 1st century dog lovingly described and named for posterity

Patrice, a 1st-2nd century dog, was dearly loved

And: we found a Paleolithic dog, buried with its bone

Humanity, unified across time by everyday experiences

The Golden Record sent into space in the 1970s

Ancient Egypt had archaeologists

Egyptian figurine of a woman waiting for her bread to finish baking

The graffiti of Pompeii

Ancient Greek tourist graffiti at the tomb of Ramses V

Hidden messages on circuit boards

The earliest examples of someone chewing on the end of their pencils

"im having feelings about the uffington white horse again"

The vast relatability of Medieval marginalia (and cats peeing on things)

Potoooooooo

What our ancient ancestors would think, seeing us prosper

Engage with older art; it keeps you from forgetting their humanity

"They were just like you and me. They write don't forget eggs, and wondered if their neighbors secretly hated them or if they are reading into it too much. They loved and were loved and they wondered. They wondered about you."

"Why do you study history" web-weaving

And ending on a high note: Ea-nasir and his shitty copper

[pigswithwings]

comic about driving i guess

[depsidase]

[flower-crowns-and-combat-boots]

Every time you have GenAI make you an anime waifu with three titties and a dumptruck ass a family doesn't get to have a drink or bathe.

Every time you ask Copilot to write you a PowerShell script to stroke your boss' ego, a city experiences a brownout.

Every time you chat with your AI "girlfriend" a farmer doesn't get to water their animals.

Using these tools actively hurts you and your community, while at the same time enriching some shitheel who would happily step on your neck to make an additional dollar. Don't use them. Actively remove them from devices you own. Disable them whenever possible. Go out of your way to avoid them. It's honestly not hard. You've been using the internet just fine without GenAI hallucinating at you.

[cowboyspones]

housewives were not banging out spirk fanfiction in the 60s for you to be AI generating your fic