pokémon game plots will forever be some of the wildest things to grasp for me. a bunch of environmentalists dressing up like pirates actually almost drown the world. oh yeah you can also dress up your pikachu in silly outfits and pick berries for them. jeff bezos creates a death laser using gods to try and destroy france. oh yeah you can also participate in cutsy pageants w your pokémon and yassify your poodle. meanwhile, in hawaii, aliens sent by your girlfriend’s abusive mom are trying to kill everything and many of them look like lovecraftian horrors. have fun surfing on manta rays though. meanwhile, in meiji era japan, you have to battle The Devil from The Bible TWICE because this loser who’s been Just There the whole game has religious trauma and wants to fistfight god. everything wants to KILL YOU and you’re getting paid minimum wage for groundbreaking scientific research. GOD from THE BIBLE gives you an iphone -11 reality is BREAKING NOW GO CATCH 20 BIDOOF AND THREE LAKE SPIRITS
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning
Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.
(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.
When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.
It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:
Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.
Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.
Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’
They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.
Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’
They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.
Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’
The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.
Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.
“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’
The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.
It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.
Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’
Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.
Source: ‘Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’
He finds Peter and Stiles sitting side by side at the dining table, matching smirks on their faces. In front of them, tied to a chair with glowing rope and a deeply unimpressed expression, is a creature that looks like a cross between a disgruntled librarian and a tax auditor with claws.
“Why is it here?” Derek asks.
“Because,” Stiles says, gesturing grandly, “this little bitch is a sarcasm sprite. She literally feeds on smugness and sass. So obviously, Peter and I were the natural choice.”
Peter nods, pleased. “We’re a platonic power couple of derision.”
“I hate that sentence,” Derek mutters.
“We’re doing an interrogation,” Stiles explains. “But normal questions don’t work. Only insults do.”
“Technically,” Peter adds, “mockery based communication is the only method she responds to. Which means I get to legally say whatever I want and call it a strategy.”
Derek pinches the bridge of his nose. “I should’ve let Deaton handle this.”
“You say that every week,” Stiles says.
“And yet you’re still here,” Peter adds. “Like an unpaid intern to your own bad decisions.”
The sprite snarls but doesn’t speak.
Stiles leans forward, eyebrows raised. “What’s the matter, Susan? You look like the kind of person who edits Wikipedia pages for power.”
“Still wearing that musty trench coat I saw on a scarecrow once,” Peter adds casually. “Bold choice.”
The sprite bares its teeth and hisses, “Your mother was a warlock and your father was a walking disappointment.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Stiles says brightly, scribbling something in a notebook labeled Interrogation, Probably Illegal but Effective.
Derek stands in the doorway, looking like he aged three years in three minutes. “This is not real. This cannot be real.”
“You’ve dated Stiles for two years,” Peter says. “This is exactly real.”
“I told you this would work,” Stiles says, elbowing Derek gently. “I mean, sure, the sprite is still kind of pissed, but she called me a noodle armed chaos goblin and told us the summoning circle we found leads to something called ‘The Bitch Dimension,’ so - win?”
Derek sighs like the universe is personally testing him. “I need a nap. Or a coma.”
The sprite sneers. “You look like a man who moisturizes with regret.”
Peter actually chokes. “Okay, she’s good.”
“I’m writing that down,” Stiles says gleefully.
Derek, in defeat, sits down. “Fine. Whatever. Just finish up so I can return her to wherever she came from.”
Peter turns back to the sprite. “Hey. One last thing - are you working alone, or is there some magical MLM you’re peddling sarcasm for?”
The sprite squints. “You smell like Daddy Issues and hand sanitizer.”
“Honestly,” Peter says, standing, “that’s fair.”
Thirty minutes later, the sprite is banished (with flair), and Derek is lying face down on the couch while Stiles rests on top of him like a weighted blanket of chaos.
“That went well,” Stiles says, clearly proud.
Peter pours himself something unnecessarily expensive and mutters, “I feel energized and insulted. This is what friendship must be like.”
“You have a weird idea of friendship,” Derek groans into the cushion.
“You have a weird idea of dating,” Peter says, pointing at Stiles with his wine glass.
Literally my favourite thing about Rogue One is that it makes the opening of New Hope so funny. Like, Vader has followed Leia from a planet he just blew up seconds ago and pursued her across the galaxy and then she’s just like: ‘I’m on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan’
Vader: You’re a rebel. I just had a fight with your entire rebel fleet and followed you here. Straight from the rebels. Of which you are a part
Leia: *dramatic gasp* rebel? Me??? I was just passing through. Diplomatically. Thought it was a five-space-ship pile-up or something going on there…
ok but this is like legitimate Canon Improvement because I’d always wondered why Vader was so wildly furious at the start of the movie like “rahhhhh bring me the passengers I WANT THEM ALIVE!!!!” and now I’m like
ohh yeah okay they literally JUST blew up Vader’s base, stole his sh!t, and took off while giving him the finger from the window
It is the best thing ever because it establishes that he knows she’s a Rebel and she knows he knows she’s a Rebel and he knows she knows he knows she’s a Rebel and—here’s the kicker—every moment she stalls him is another moment Artoo has to get the plans off the ship and head for Kenobi, and so she’s standing there all “Rebellion? What Rebellion? Me? *kicks dead Stormtrooper underneath carpet* I don’t know about any plans, have you checked behind the sofa?” and making Darth Vader’s blood pressure rise, and, oh, the best part of it is that she’s his daughter so guess where she got that sass from, like every fucking dead blue Force Ghost Jedi who got killed at the birth of the Empire is whooping and cheering from the Blue Force Ghost Afterlife seeing Anakin Skywalker get inflicted with everything they had to deal with from him.
Don't you mean classist Typo, as in discriminating against poor people, and not classicist, the type of academic who studies antiquity in southern Europe?
While this song makes me merry,
Tyrian purple dyes many a hue
From magenta to berry
And a true purple too.
But fun as it is to watch this poetic race
The answer is staring you right in the face:
Roses are red and violets are blue
Because nothing fucking rhymes with purple.
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
For a second I didn’t realize it meant “high” as in a stoner–I thought “High Geologist” was like a rank of geologist or something and he was insulted you would challenge him to naming stones
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep
Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.
Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.
Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!
So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.
Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:
Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?
I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.
Stop and think about that for a minute.
Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.
Joan Cusack has never appeared in a film that she did not steal.
And as for Debbie, I will always repost my stance on her end.
I’ve said it a million times - if Debbie had listened to what the Addamses were saying in response to her tales of woe, she’s have realized that they understood completely. She had found her people, and was too wrapped up in herself to realize it.
If they could have, they’d have burst from their bonds, hugged the stuffing out of her, bought her a Bentley (and a vintage Ballerina Barbie) and declare her an Addams.
She could spend the rest of her life trying to kill Fester, and he’d love her all the more every time she tried. And the rest would keep offering helpful suggestions. “No point in trying poison, Debbie my dear - he’s been putting strychnine on his cornflakes since was seven”.
