A Tune for the Tumblr

she/it | 21 | "garden variety social failure" | aspiring delver | LGBTESCREAL+ | 進めば二つ also findable at asongforthestars.substack.com, or other posting sites with the same username

[redstonedust]

everyone knows about the filing the serial numbers off that comes with turning a fanfiction character into an original character but theres a lesser known and equally funny "putting an original character created for a preexisting fandom setting into my own world" . like yeah this was always my own oc. i made this guy. however i need to shave off their homestuck horns. dont worry about it. its fine.

[attheendhello]

you heard it. reblog if u support yuri

[roofon]

My “Don’t ask me what I did to you last time loop” shirt is getting me a lot of questions that are answered by my shirt.

[dawnlightmelody]

"don't ask me what i did to you last time loop" shirt gf "i know exactly what you did to me last time loop :3" shirt gf

[pomellon]

Been sitting on these for a solid month now so I figured it’s time to post em! AU in which an aging and frail Grace gets his consciousness transfered to an eridian body to extend his life :D

Some notes:

-Grace did not design the body himself, but was encouraged to pick a phenotype to grow it from so he opted for an orange colouration and the genetic traits that came with it. The science behind growing the body was based on the me-burger experiments.

-The body was grown to be older than Grace’s human age to make sure he would still be seen as a mature adult, but he’s still somewhat younger than Rocky.

-He requested having the scar of Rocky’s handprint tattooed onto one of his arms.

-He struggled with finding his balance and voice at the start, and grew a bad habit of not fully using the mobility of his fifth limb, either slightly dragging it or keeping it raised and out of the way. This resulted in a lot of tripping and stumbling but he figured it out eventually! …Mostly!

-He was able to pick up the language pretty fast since he was already familiar but his voice remains pretty “flat” sounding to other eridians. This is a somewhat uncommon but not rare speech impediment on Erid, akin to human stutters, so he gets by okay and most eridians might just struggle reading his emotional tones until they get used to it. At the start this made him hesitant to use his voice but Rocky and Adrian were quick to encourage him into several scientific yap sessions to make him more comfortable!

Potentially more doodles and situations to be added in the future :D

[effiecalvin]

I have this idea for a video game called Are You Out There? where two players control two different alien civilizations and the goal of the game is to invent spaceflight and then manage to find one another in a ginormous universe. You can try to leave signs for each other to find, or send out probes and radio waves, or colonize many systems so you're a bigger target, but its hard because the universe is really big.

Idk just a thought.

[catmask]

i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

[catmask]

this also goes for aesthetic or -core titles. 'y2k tank top' is going to get you resellers and fast fashion brands advertising to people looking to meet a current trend. 'thin strap crop tank top' is going to get you a diverse group of results and not upcharge you to hell and back

additionally, shop second hand when you can, second hand and thrift sites typically organize clothes by the cut and color. theyll be more affordable than a depop seller curating you a style to sell you

[daftpatience]

useful terminology for different kinds of clothing shapes :)

[cutabello]

here are more terms! these are all from enérie. it is a really good blog that has lots of fashion terminology and it's a good mix of menswear and womenswear! they also have a book as well compiling all their diagrams. you could also look into getting a visual fashion dictionary for terms as well!

[gondorrevealparty]

baseball interviewers will ask "how do you throw the ball so good" and Mariners players will casually drop that they have a headmate who plays the game for them

[renthony]

I was 12 when the first of my siblings was born, so I have very vivid memories of the way my mother was excluded from a lot of spaces because people find children annoying.

If you think "children should not be allowed in this space," you HAVE TO reckon with the fact that you are now excluding parents (and very often women specifically) who don't have access to childcare. You are isolating people who are poor, or rural, or single parents, or any number of other factors that might prevent someone from having on-demand childcare. You are cutting them off from being able to exist in public. You are denying parents and children the ability to fully participate in society.

My mom spent several years only leaving the house to buy groceries or take me to school, and even then, people would still come up to her to complain TO HER FACE about how she shouldn't bring a crying toddler to Walmart. Entitled strangers would literally try and demand that my mom leave and come back without the kids.

"Why can't your husband watch them?" Because he was at work, usually working extreme amounts of overtime so we didn't get evicted, because landlords don't like it when you stop paying rent.

"Why can't you send them to daycare?" Because that costs money.

"Why can't your teenager stay home with them and babysit?" Because I also deserved to be able to leave the house for something other than school, and taking me to the grocery store was how my mom taught me to manage a household budget, shop sales, and meal plan.

"Don't bring your kid in public if you can't CONTROL them and make them stop crying!" Kids cry when they're upset, and being dragged around a store is upsetting! Don't be an asshole! Children are human beings who are still learning how the world works, and they don't have a lot of agency. You'd cry, too.

"Spank them until they learn to stop crying!" That's just straight-up child abuse, Jesus Christ.

What the fuck was our family supposed to do? Never go to the grocery store? Starve because strangers couldn't handle a toddler existing in public?

[renthony]

I am incredibly fucking disturbed at the way this post has brought people out of the woodwork who really want to tell me all about how hitting kids isn't actually abuse, how they think babies are the spawn of Satan, and how being confined to the home is an acceptable punishment for women who dare to have children. People have told me all about how they think children should be banned from airplanes, that I'm being inconsiderate to childfree people, that allowing crying babies in public is ableist against people with sensory issues (I have those, too, and so do many children, which is often WHY THEY ARE CRYING, jackass), and that people who have children are "irresponsible" and "selfish."

I have blocked multiple people who went on tirades about how I'm a "horrible breeder" who is "contributing to overpopulation" and how I and my "spawn" deserve to be trapped at home. (I am infertile and my foster kid is an adult now, so I don't know what breeding and spawn they think they're talking about.)

One person asked if I was posting ragebait for fun because "this isn't a real issue." Several have asked if this "really happens" and told me that my "experience isn't universal." (There are multiple parents in the comments who have agreed with me and talked about how hard it is to navigate the world with their kids.)

Children are an oppressed class who are treated like absolute vermin. Parents are given absolutely no support in caring for them. Good parents are set at a disadvantage even when they have all the best intentions, struggling parents aren't given resources to improve their situation or get community assistance, and blatantly abusive parents don't get caught because hitting and screaming and controlling are considered perfectly normal ways to treat a child. Communities would rather shut kids away where they can be ignored and forgotten and mistreated, all for the sin of "being annoying in public."

Youth liberation is vital, regardless of whether you, personally, like kids. You cannot ban children from public. You cannot shut children away in isolation and expect them to grow into happy, healthy, well-adjusted adults who can function in our society. You do not get to demand children be removed from every corner of public life all for your personal comfort.

Children are people.

[vulpinesaint]

saying "question mark?" and "however comma," out loud are game changers. punctuation on the go. and it's always the funniest thing that anyone around you has ever heard

[annabelle--cane]

stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.

[crabussy]

I think I just got catcalled from a truck but I don’t know because I have auditory processing disorder. misogyny 0 autism 1

[bayesic-bitch]

crazy to see "I can't believe these young scholars let the homunculus do their homework" coming from wizards who I know copied all their spells from Sparikus's Commentaries on old grimoires when they were apprentices

[bayesic-bitch]

My wards alert me that scribes keep adding annotations to my scroll saying that the homunculi are wrong sometimes. Of course they're wrong. If you don't have a use for bumbling, overeager, sycophantic, incompetent minions, how can you even call yourself a mage?

[bayesic-bitch]

Commentaries also seem to be circulating widely-disproven ideas about the homunculi's mana consumption. Dude like half of the top artificers think the homunculi are going to try to kill us in our sleep and extract our souls for conjuring ink. We don't need to make up reasons to be distrustful of the treacherous and deceitful minions

[tpwrtrmnky]

humans should be able to do a special Ultra Sleep after major life accomplishments where you're just out for like 32 hours or something and then you wake up fully refreshed in every way

[nightpool]

Oh Chicago

The Chicago Maroon reports:

> At 1:30 p.m. on April 17, a group of undergraduate students identifying themselves as “UChicago For Our Future” gathered on the main quad, handing out onions to protest the 1958 Onion Futures Act.  > The 1958 law prohibits the trading of onion futures contracts, making the bulbs the only type of agricultural product banned from futures markets in the United States.  > To draw attention, the group brought approximately 100 raw onions to the quad in a large cart. They encouraged passersby to participate, saying that any student who ate an entire onion would be featured on their website. About 20 students attended the event, while others took onions as they passed through. The group also collected 131 signatures on a petition to repeal the law. 

I feel like you might see a protest like this at Oberlin as a joke, but at the University of Chicago market distortions are deadly serious and the protest was in earnest. Maybe:

> “It’s always filled me with fury that we accept such odd minuscule policies that really are just odd market distortions,” second-year Adam Ash, a member of the group, said. “Even if one specific issue seems minute or minuscule and trivial, what matters is a combination of all of these. It’s a death by a thousand cuts to our agricultural policy.” … > The group’s Instagram account was later banned, which Ash claimed was the doing of “the corn lobby.”  

Okay maybe a joke?

(via matt levine)

deep and abiding respect to the uchicago undergrads who decided 2026 was the year we stand up and protest the 1958 onions futures act

[mortalityplays]

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

there are a million things to do in the world, and they don't vanish overnight because an imaginary number gets too big

[mousidy]

"if I ever say something transmisogynistic you have the right to smack me" ok but like. can we maybe just have a conversation about it instead

[mousidy]

I know it's a jokey funny thing to say but like I hope the people who say this sort of thing do realize that transmisogyny is not, like, a sin for which they must repent by suffering. we actually just want you to understand your mistake and adjust your future behavior. no suffering necessary

[mousidy]

like this goes doubly if we're friends! if I'm your friend I would take no pleasure or sense of justice in your suffering. I want you to be happy! I just want to know that I can trust you enough to have a conversation with you if something you do doesn't sit right with me. if we can do that it will lead to a happier and lovelier friendship for us both. I don't want to smack you I want to frolic through the flowers with you and sing lalala

[tanadrin]

in my head you're one of the main posters on here who's complained about the way many rationalists are race-science-sympathetic; do you have any recommendations for places to read the factual arguments against its veracity? (not going to try to debate you or anything, feel free to turn replies/reblogs off)

Cosma Shalizi:

https://bactra.org/weblog/523.html - the idea of a general factor of intelligence is not supported by factor analysis (i know a lot of people believe in g, and i don't think you have to disclaim g to not be a race realist, but i find this argument persuasive)

https://bactra.org/weblog/520.html - on abuse of heritability in general as a concept

David Bessis:

https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist - twin studies (foundational to many aspects of hereditarian discussions of iq heritability) are basically all bunk

Sasha Gusev:

https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height - direct heritability of educational attainment is about 4%, radically lower than height; GWAS results for cognitive traits are heavily confounded in ways height isn't

https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/how-population-stratification-led - earlier findings about polygenetic selection on height turned out to be artifacts of population stratification, and this problem is much worse for cognitive traits

https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/where-are-the-recent-selective-sweeps - evidence for recent selection effects on complex behavioral traits is essentially zilch

gusevlab.org/projects/hsq - see chapter 5 in particular, re: heritability of educational attainment, how polygenetic indices for educational attainment are hopelessly confounded, how heritability varies with socioeconomic status, adoption studies, claim polygenetic scores reflect selection effects; also chapter 6 on IQ, chapter 9 on whether race maps onto genetic variation in the way hereditarians claim

Kevin Bird:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.24216 - no evidence for divergent selection on cognitive traits between african and european populations; maximum genetic contributon to iq gap is around 12-23% under unrealistically generous assumptions

https://kevinabird.github.io/2021/02/12/still-no-support.html - reply to some criticisms on the previous paper

https://kevinabird.github.io/2023/12/30/No-Case-For-Race-Realism.html - addresses bo winegard's "case for race realism," a continuously recycled argument that relies on bad math and badly separated confounders (among other issues)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289625000704 - re: institutional connections of hereditarian research to far-right political movements

Graham Coop:

https://gcbias.org/2018/03/14/polygenic-scores-and-tea-drinking/ - why it's tricky to use polygenetic scores to make claims about between-population differences

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.00892 - essentially a more formal version of the above

Noah Rosenberg et al:

https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/26/5262222?login=false - why between-population polygenetic scores don't mean what hereditarians say they mean

Turkheimer et al:

https://labs.la.utexas.edu/harden/files/2018/10/Charles-Murray-is-once-again-peddling-junk-science-about-race-and-IQ-Vox.pdf - sort of a general "why charles murray is full of shit" piece

the hereditarian position was straightforward: that as molecular genetics matured, we would find that polygenetic scores for cognitive traits show large directionally consistent differences between racial groups that reflect genetic causation. this prediction has failed at every level it has been tested. the headline numbers for heritability of IQ come from twin studies (see Bessis, above) and population-level GWAS, both of which are hopelessly confounded. when you use within-family designs, the heritability of educational attainment falls to an extraordinarily low number. for IQ specifically, the direct estimates are also dramatically lower than the population estimates. the signal, in short, disappears.

there is no evidence of divergent selection on cognitive traits. the hereditarian arguments that high intra-group heritability implies genetic group differences, and that correlations between european ancestry proportion and iq in admixed populations demonstrate genetic causation have both been thoroughly dismantled. there is just no empirical leg left for the hereditarians to stand on. it's not that the question is unanswerable or too sensitive to study, it's that the data is in and the hereditarians are just wrong.

[transunlight]

@dawnlightmelody

[dawnlightmelody]

oh thanks! this will be useful for my anti-HBD project