The Story Makes Us

Chalk hearts melting on a playground wall. Editor, bookworm, writer, theatre-goer, geek, podcast enthusiast, audiobook listener.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

The World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise has a new white-faced owl chick… and he’s doing 1pm demos the next two days 5/28-5/29.

I cannot, sadly, teleport to Idaho this week. But if you’re in Idaho and have Thursdays or Fridays off, please go see this fluffball on my behalf.

[onionowlwatchingu]

I got to see the lil fella today!

So many people showed up they had to split the session into 2 groups so we didn't overwhelm the birb

This lil guy is Nox! They aren't 100% sure what sex it is, but they're pretty sure he's male.

He's a brancher, so he can't fly yet but is real good at jumping. In the wild he'd be jumping from branch to branch to build up his flight muscles, but he'll be flying soon

Nox is 5 weeks old, weighs 190g, and has reached his adult size, but his flight and tail feathers haven't grown in yet. He'll be a full adult next week!

The Northern White Faced Owl is from Africa, usually between the Sahara and the equator (according to Wikipedia, staff just said Africa). It used to be believed that this and another species, the southern white faced owl, were the same species but are now recognized as separate birds

His lil whiskers are called bristles, and they function like cat whiskers! He's just learned to tear meat, the trainer had big tweezers to give him lil bits of rabbit (some were placed on her glove and some were put right in front of his beak!)

He kept bobbing his head around, which is called triangulating and helps him figure out how far away things are.

*checks notes* these are also known as transformer owls! Like screech owls, they can stretch themselves real tall and thin to try and camouflage itself as a branch (search for transformer owl and you'll see what I mean)

After today he'll spend time with a foster parent to teach him how to Bird, then he'll join the legion of ambassador birds they have out here!

(PS his feathers are so fluffy my phone had a hard time taking clear pictures of them)

If you're near Boise this is absolutely worth a trip, they have so many other birds to see, and there's a walking trail just outside as well as a huge ampitheatre they use when it's not too hot out

Thanks so much for telling us about this!!!

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Thank you for taking such wonderful photos and sharing!!

I also highly recommend checking out the Center if you’re in the area.

[fandomsarefamily1966]

Greetings my fellow Little Women fans 👋

So I've been thinking- every sister has traits that all of us can relate to, right? Well, here's my idea: reblog this and tell us which traits each sister has that you relate to.

I'll go first:

Meg- mom friend, wants to get married and maybe start a family someday, feels like she has to do everything

Jo- major bookworm, loves reading and writing, feels lonely and stuck in the same place

Beth- very shy, tries to be kind and sweet, big homebody, feels very out of place in this world

Amy- enjoys art, wants to travel the world, gets better at keeping calm as she gets older

Tagging: @princesssarisa @littlewomenpodcast @joandfriedrich @thatscarletflycatcher

[chalkletters]

Meg - lazy, would like to sit around all day not doing household chores. Jo - reader and writier. Beth - shy around strangers, happy to listen to conversations rather than talk. Amy - pragmatic about my short-comings. (Amy accepts that she won't be a talented artist and contents herself with helping others. I accept that I'm not going to find a romantic relationship and content myself with being single.)

[eggshellsareneat]

Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.

[brightlotusmoon]

[cdrlogic]

Reblog the reblogging post.

Like to ignore its wisdom.

[thoseratbastards]

Brittney lee

[brecbc123]

[bruxadepano]

Rainy sea, by Ganesh Ulya.

[ends-2-beginnings]

claude monet (1840-1926)

source Substack

[skaldish]

I think about this a lot.

[computationalcalculator]

may I add also “butt dial” vs “booty call” vs “bottom text”

[clitorius-maximus]

Hand job vs manual labor

[ohgreatblackbunny]

Tags deserved to be seen

[petitworld]

Granada, Spain by Warren Bodnaruk

[sstrange-cloudss]

[cpahlow]

[batnbreakfast]

Hey, let me share more pictures and videos of Unfortunate - The Untold Story of Ursula, the Sea Witch! Now at The Other Palace until 5th April, but still with the same troupe from the video.

It’s sooooooooo much fun, it’s camp, it’s raunchy, it’s queer, it’s body positivity. 😍

[chalkletters]

It is sad, when one thinks of all one's dreams, working together for some noble aim in perfect concord, but one soon gets disillusionnée, especially when one is de trop everywhere, and it doesn't mend matters to write sentiment in middling French and English mixed.

Ellen Peel, 'A Victorian Young Lady, 1887

[dailyflicks]

LADY AND THE TRAMP (1955) Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson And Hamilton Luske

[chalkletters]

Boarding school had trained her to hide her feelings. She could always find refuge in good manners when an unfamiliar situation threatened to unbalance her.

Secrets of the Lighthouse, Santa Montefiore

[afloweroutofstone]

I don't care how much AI chatbots do to discredit use of the em-dash and the using-too-many-hyphens-to-describe-complex-concepts-in-noun-form, they will never take these things from me. I have been overusing em-dashes in my online writing for longer than some of my followers have been alive. I did not get the em-dash from ChatGPT, ChatGPT got the em-dash from me. Molon labe

[arcadianwinters]

[redstonedust]

motivating yourself to do things by thinking "my blorbo would want me to do this" is much less effective when you know in your heart that your blorbo is operating on a much worse level of self care than you. my blorbo would not care if i brush my teeth or take a shower today. my blorbo eats rocks and wears shirts they found on the floor.

[mapsontheweb]

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

[largedad]

[impossiblepackage]

I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.

[bisquid]

I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

The universe is infinite. So are the stars

[bisquid]

I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.

[5c0l0p3ndr4]

this is not a shot from a space telescope overlayed behind a woods, or anything. that’s not the sky as kepler or hubble or james webb see it. that’s the sky from a dark sky park in michigan. that’s the view you are missing out on from right here on earth. that’s the view that has been stolen from you.

[mckitterick]

I fell in love with the sky as a child growing up in western Minnesota, miles from a small town, near a massive lake and just downhill from an 18-hole golf course - the pure darkness broken only by a single bright light I could escape by hauling my telescope up that hill or into a nearby field

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

that’s what’s been taken from us all

[scarletswalking]

Growing up in Wyoming, we had low light pollution no matter where we were, but I lived in the biggest town there. I used to lay on the trampoline at night with my best friend and we would look at the stars. On clear nights, I remember thinking that the sky was cloudy - but I was seeing the milky way. Every summer night that I could, I would watch the sky and spot the satellites (this was waaay before star link), and count the shooting stars.

You can’t imagine it - it really is something you have to see.

[mckitterick]

I want our baby (and every kid!) to see skies that dark - we might need to move to one of those unpolluted areas one day, unless groups like DarkSky International can help turn things around dramatically