hello there @crystal-temp - Tumblr Blog

fell asleep like 5 times while this was in the making. something possessed me to draw him while my eyelids were fighting for their life

rainyydoves

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

rainyydoves

are you really bad at it or are you in "good at it" spaces

gutterselkie

Me: ah shit, I misidentified that yellow rumped warbler as a female goldfinch, I should literally be hung at the gallows for this. I'm such an IDIOT

My friend, pointing at a vulture: check out that fucked up crow lol

redfagdiver

inamindfarfaraway

Shoutout to the maned wolf, which is technically neither wolf nor fox but has its own genus called Chrysocyon! Why -

why are your legs so long?

I mean, intellectually, I understand that it’s because you live in grasslands and have evolved to be able to see over the grass, but emotionally… why? Are they?? Like that??? Surely there was a way to make your body more cohesive and proportional-looking?

horseonketamine

i will never shut up about maned wolves

just look at it

look at this

one of the animals for sure

wretched beast

whatacartouchebag

If it’s neither wolf nor fox, then it’s cat software running on giraffe hardware.

what-a-bastard

I think y'all should know that the closest relative to the maned wolf is the bush dog which looks like this.

wuekka

I was not ready for corgi-bear.

bunjywunjy

you're definitely not ready for the maned wolf Front Angle then

creatures-in-posts

Confirmed creature post

sabtastique

spending his bounteous inheritance

Original photo credit: Pygmy Falcon chick at the San Antonio Zoo

bedupolker

Has anyone else noticed that they do this?

mazurga

Along the northern shore

luulapants

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.