Flexibility, Love, and Trust

Official Mom-Friend

[bruzum]

[wenlokholmes]

sorry, prev, your tags are too true to be silenced

[dontbelasagnax]

Mentioned to my mom I'm asexual a couple months ago and today.... we got into the car and she hit me with, "So you use they/them pronouns now?"

I went, "What. no. she/her."

"How does that work? With she/her/hers and they/them?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Well you came out as-" and I said, "I'm asexual."

She replied, "Like an amoeba, I know."

"Oh. My god. No. Mom. It doesn't- it's not the asexual you learned about in biology. I didn't come out as a single celled organism."

With heavy relief, she said "Oh, it has a different meaning?"

"Yes, mom."

[savetheworldkissaplushie]

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

[deramin2]

Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

The Klamath River Runs Free

The Klamath River Runs Free

[supreme-leader-stoat]

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

[mothsprout]

✷ What is that song you sing for the dead? ✷

[dramatic-dolphin]

i have a banger collection of out of context reddit comments but very few of them top this one:

[one-time-i-dreamt]

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

[red-mercer]

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

[sreegs]

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

Yahoo’s grand plan for Tumblr was to turn it into a “next-generation PDF”

They didn't really get it.

[noctumsolis]

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

[sreegs]

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

[virdigrishammer]

you left out the best part of that article. the poor yahoo emplyees at those meetings were just as confused as the rest of us.

[ralfmaximus]

Everyone is right to dunk on Yahoo and "tumblr is the new PDF" because yeah, everything about that era was stupid.

But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.

But first, some context.

See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.

Adobe changed all that with PDF.

Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.

Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.

Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.

Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.

Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.

If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.

(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)

So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.

The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.

"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"

Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".

@sreegs or @cyle or @jv can probably explain it better, but that's what I remember hearing at the time. Please feel free to correct me.

[cyle]

the details here aren't correct, but as i've said many times, yeah, the PDF thing was in direct response to the Neue Post Format, which is how post and reply content is stored on tumblr. it's not as dumb as it sounds. (without that context, it does sound dumb.)

[hugtheteadrinkthekitten]

Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.

[rainbowgod666]

TEN

FUCKING

YEARS

[vettir]

Anyways, they fucked it up because they brought unnecessary censorship onto the platform, and killed a lot of the draw for it.

[vacuously-true]

It is extremely rare that I get unintentionally rickrolled. It is extremely common that I look at a link and think to myself, that's a rickroll, and I click on it. Then I get to enjoy the satisfaction of being correct, as well as the entirety of Never Gonna Give You Up. That shit is a banger. If someone offers me a link directly to that song you think I'm not gonna take it? No. You know the rules and so do I. It's Astley time.

[moniquill]

You're not gonna take it?

[lalulutres]

I love this picture so much! Post it whenever I come across it.

[dewitty1]

Inner Mongolian Child

The little girl’s name is Butedmaa and she was just 5 when this picture was taken in 2003 by Han Chengli.

(I used to have a printout of this at my desk at work because I just loved looking at it so much.)

[smute]

i think the most upsetting thing about american-flavor puritanism is how fucking patronizing it is. it's 2026 but the whole world still has to deal with a cultural hegemony grown from the gnarled vestiges of victorian-era paternalism. tax-paying adults with passports and the right to vote are treated like wayward children because of the antiquated idea that authorities must protect the weak minds of the unwashed masses from depravity and corruption. the average american can send a fellow citizen to the chair, but they can't piss in a ditch without being declared an outlaw. american entertainment media is saturated with sex, but you can't talk about it online without getting your account suspended. it's such blatant censorship at a universal scale, but because sexual content is framed as inherently dangerous, this restriction on basic adult autonomy, this blanket denial of moral and intellectual adulthood, can be reframed as protection, an expression of care, a moral duty. "won't someone think of the children!" I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN!

[smute]

thank god that the video game that features slow motion animations of graphic gunshot wounds and is rated 18+ has a profanity filter in single player offline mode. thank you for protecting this 33 year old mind from the corrupting influence that is a horse named apple slut

[crazy-brazilian]

[enki2]

[scorpio-system]

AAA video game publisher voice: "Look. The goose layed a golden egg, and that's nice! Everyone loved that egg. But keeping the golden goose means paying for bird feed and I don't want to, so I killed the goose."

[vanshira]

#‘that goose keeps laying golden eggs. that’s stagnation. I’m going to kill it and go look for a goose that lays diamond eggs’#‘that goose normally lays golden eggs but this time it laid a silver egg. I’m going to kill it because even though I can still make good#money with that it’s not as good as a golden egg’#‘that golden egg laying goose only lays an egg once a day instead of constantly shitting them out. I don’t care that golden eggs take time#if they’re not constant the goose is worthless to me’

@thebaldursmouthgazette y u leave all the good stuff in the tags

[floweroflaurelin]

I got the chance to road trip out to the path of totality! My phone camera didn’t do it justice, so I painted what I saw instead 🌞🌚

Here’s the photo I took and the sketch I made with my finger in the notes app while watching it happen 😆

[floweroflaurelin]

WOW, thank you for all the love on this!! I’ve gotten a few asks about prints, so let me answer them all at once by saying that prints are now available right here! 😄✨

Total Eclipse 2024, an art print by Sabira Langevin

This is a gallery-quality giclée art print on 100% cotton rag archival paper, printed with archival inks.

[floweroflaurelin]

Today is the one year anniversary of this incredible experience!!

[tsalala]

Stunning double kill performed by a lone lioness taking advantage of the Great Migration, which occurs regularly in the Maasai Mara-Serengeti ecosystem. It is a often great source of prey for predators like lions.

Taken in the Maasai Mara, Kenya Video shared by Enkishui Safari Camp

[the-future-is-chrome]

whenever a transmed draws the hypothetical non-dysphoric "fake" trans person it always looks identical to how transphobes draw trans people. which could mean nothing

[blumineck]

How can I do this as a MAN?

Honestly, platform heels are absolutely not my favourite thing to wear for pole, but they are deeply connected to the history and modern context of pole. And if by wearing them I can show some people that it’s OK to not fit the “standard” template of masculinity or femininity, then that’s worth a bit of extra effort!

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[ohnoitstbskyen]

12 years on and still the best articulation ever made of how one should respond to useless critiques