[softlyfiercely]

i love how weird kids are. they make up the most bizarre stuff when left to their own devices and it's never what an adult would naively predict a kid would do in their imaginative play

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

10/10 no notes. kids are amazing

[bramblepatch]

The thing is you can have a grassy lawn or even a golf course without it being an ecological disaster, you just have to a: be cool about having the occasional non-grass plant in the mix and b: be willing to live in a climate that supports grass without irrigation.

[bramblepatch]

Golf courses in California are an abomination which is why the sport was in fact invented in Scotland.

[abstrusetheorist]

I always thought that golf as a sport should be adapted to the local native landscape. I think this will encourage regional pride when local golfers completely trounce visitors at Swamp Golf, Desert Golf, Forest Golf, etc. Rich tourists will be pressured to travel extensively to experience all forms of golf, instead of staying in their backyard country club golf courses. Internet discourse will probably somehow get worse but I think this is a small price to pay.

[ghsot]

everyones got that fic they chip away at like michaelangelo sculpting david. and brother? its penis month

[ghsot]

asked my friends if they knew what i was referencing and they said no. we all know that post where someone divided how long it took michelangelo to sculpt david by it's size and went "yuuuuup. whole month spent on penis" right. sure, my search history is full variations upon "michelangelo penis month tumblr" to no avail, but we all know it. right.

[itriedonce]

Hi, that was a MBMBAM bit. But i see you and i hear you and i dont know if someone already said something

[ghsot]

oh my god youre right.

[transformativeworks]

[ID: Screenshot of a transcript.

Travis: Yeah. It well--but it's seventeen feet tall divided by twenty-four months means that every month he crafted point seven--so like about three-quarters of a foot. Right? So, nine inches. So yes, I could say that just statistically speaking, there was a wiener month.

Griffin: Okay. "So how was your September, Michelangelo?" "It was, it was intense."

/ID]

[sparksembers]

An art piece I made a while ago and just never posted using the drawfee color palette from last year

[jeannepompadour]

Marble bust of Marie d’Anjou, Queen of France, circa 1465

[sartorialadventure]

The wimple - the head veil with the chin covering - was traditional in the Middle Ages for married women. Just like women in Islam today, in certain periods married Christian women were required for religious and modesty reasons to cover their hair.

The cloth that covers the chin was called a barbette, and had the extra benefit of hiding a sagging neck!

I call it a barbette because it appears to be a strip of cloth unconnected to the cloth on the shoulders and chest. If it were all one piece of cloth, it would be a wimple.

There was also a version with the cloth under the chin but NOT over the head, and that was called a gorget:

As you can see, the amount of hair that needed to be covered changed across the middle ages, though in general, married women were pretty much always required to wear their hair up and neat. Loose hair was considered to indicate either a “maiden” (unmarried woman) or a “loose woman”.

Source

[sartorialadventure]

[mynqzo]

finished my first semester oufh god finally blorbo time

[handbasket-to-helen]

[pangur-and-grim]

Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point

Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain of five years of escalating anti-LGBTQ censorship.

[pangur-and-grim]

if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story of two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.

[adventures-in-a-world-of-fiction]

Blood on the Icehouse Wall is a fantasy with a time travelling lesbian witch and her asexual werewolf girlfriend trying to undo their mistakes.

Salts of Mercury is the best book I've read this year and features a non-binary necromancer explaining why they did all that treason.

An Unexpected Attachment is an erotic novella about an android who's just got a penis attachment and wants to try it out for the first time.

Three Men in Orbit is inspired by Three Men in a Boat and tells the story of three men taking an excursion to a space station and then the moon. One of the characters is a trans woman and the author is openly trans.

[myarmcanfly]

Fat Horse No. 2

It’s the year of the horse and I’ve always been a horse girl at heart, so I’m finally taking advantage of the excuse to fill the world with fat little horses! These felted friends are about the size (and shape!) of an apple, and if you happen to have any apples to share I’m sure they’d help you out!

This piece and four others will be available at Furry Weekend Atlanta May 8-10!

[clownjuiceart]

@crabussy LOOOK

[sailermoon]

this is how new yorkers @ mamdani

[sailermoon]

[auxphono]

Needed a clean graphic for a project, and figured while I was vectoring I would put sex and magic back in.

Happy Pride Month

[auxphono]

Reblogging this yearly for anyone who needs a very clean version <3 Happy Pride.

[drosophilamania]

Reblog to put the sex and magic back into pride

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[jackkdaniels]

look at me. listen to me. this is directed at americans for the record. the reason you think North American animals are boring is because you live here. there are so many cool and beautiful animals here. we have beavers. we have wolves. we have moose. we have sea lions. we have armadillos. we have mountain lions. we have alligators. we have foxes. we have bighorn sheep. we have manatees. we have bears. we have ocelots. we have BISON. and that’s not even touching on the birds! or the turtles! or the snakes! we have amazing beautiful and diverse wildlife right here and it deserves to be appreciated and protected

[matt-the-blind-cinnamon-roll]

Possums are the only North American marsupial, they eat ticks and keep down cases of Lyme, and they can't carry rabies! We only have two native boa constrictors; the rubber boa and the rosy boa! Bison and the American Alligator are LITERAL MEGAFAUNA LEFT OVER FROM PREHISTORY!

[scifigrl47]

When I was a teenager, I was hiking with my family on Cape Cod. I was not a willing participant to these hikes; I would've preferred to be back at our rental cabin with a book.

But my parents were birders, so hiking we did go.

And about a mile up the trail, a woman came rushing up to us, clutching her binoculars to her chest. "Come quickly," she said, with a British accent. "You have to see this!"

This is what birders are like. They are as excited about a life bird as any fan would be spotting their favorite celebrity. You have to see, you have to.

So my parents rushed off with her, and I plodded along behind them.

To find a cluster of Brits huddled in a bird blind, staring at..

A blue jay.

A goddamn blue jay.

And I was a teenager, but I knew better then to mouth off in front of my mom. So I nodded, and smiled, and bit my tongue, until an elderly man looked at me with tears in his eyes, and said, "Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?"

And I stopped. And looked at it. The way they were. As if it were new. And damned if they weren't right.

I think of that, to this day. That sometimes, you need to step back, and see the world as if it were new. Strange, and haunting, and beautiful, so beautiful.

[falconratesbirds]

Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?

[exai]

i no longer respect the hustle i want universal basic income and dignity for everyone

[cherryjams]

‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.

[bladespark]

My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!

They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.

[macleod]

Why shouldn't you use utorrent?

They are owned by the same corporation as bittorrent and are practically identical in all but name these days. They are proprietary, closed source, have built-in ads, and use telemetry to track usage. They are a privacy nightmare and a scourge on the torrent ecosystem.

qBittorrent is open source, full of features, modern, has a wonderful community, easier to use, has less cruft, natively cross platform, and tends to be more secure in their usage of up-to-date dependencies.

Bonus: if you need to use a VPN for any reason go to settings -> advanced -> and select the VPN as the only available adapter, this makes it so it can ONLY download or upload (seed) via your VPN. This stops the need to make sure you have your VPN on or accidentally leave it off when using P2P networks to help preserve your privacy.

[pirateprincessjess]

Friendly reminder as we get closer to the launch of the ModRetro M64. ModRetro is owned by Palmer Lucky, a self described “Radical Zionist” who fundraises for Donald Trump.

Palmer Lucky also has another company, called Anduril Industries, that manufactures and sells AI powered weapons and surveillance systems. ModRetro even sells Anduril branded gameboys that were made from the same metal that they use to manufacture attack drones.

Don’t buy this thing. A 200 dollar Nintendo 64 clone is not worth your soul.

[macleod]

He also sells one called the "ModRetro Chromatic" which is a modern gameboy, do not buy it, do not watch videos about it, don't give him anything.

Anduril is the primary company that has developed a nationwide surveillance system to keep immigrants out of the country at any cost, developing autonomous tracking systems for everyone it tags with automatic reporting. Their company is the primary recepient of border surveillance funding for their towers and autonomous military weapons (including missles and guns). Don't buy or use anything of theirs.