The Best Part of "Believe" is the "Lie"

unfuck the system. phoebe. 28. they/them. putting the bi in bitter.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

interesting kink assortment on the dash

[slimegargoyle]

guys you gotta stop thinking of women in their 30s as elderly it’s just misogyny

[courtesyname]

you also gotta stop thinking about actual elderly women as lesser human beings. Youth is not a measure of one’s worth.

[fagstaynight]

heartwarming: transfem named mary sue and transmasc named gary stu have had a beautiful nonbinary baby named donut steel

[grundoonmgnx]

Lindsay Merrill (American b. 1987), Untitled, 2026

Oil on canvas, 41 ⅞ x 55 ⅞ in

[proxima-bee]

can you imagine how good shows would be if writers thought of women as human beings

[cleric-chono-is-my-everything]

can you imagine how good fandoms would be if fans thought of women as human beings

[house-of-mirrors]

Post about increasingly niche stuff that nobody follows you for and barely has a tumblr presence NOW

[house-of-mirrors]

That indie game no one else has played. That show from the 1980s that isn't big in the pop culture osmosis. Your deep dive into Tudor history. A liveblog of your experience learning C++. Your welding skills. Post all of it. This is your house

[horsefigureoftheday]

Sucks how many people were taught that "horses put their ears back when they're mad" but then never taught the difference between "angry backwards ears," "mildly annoyed backwards ears," "pain backwards ears," "concentrated backwards ears," "sleepy backwards ears" and "just happens to be listening to something behind it."

"Horses put their ears back when they're mad" idk man i think it depends

[horsefigureoftheday]

These are all completely different expressions in completely different scenarios, and only two of them are decidedly negative.

[horsefigureoftheday]

Actually, I wanna talk about the third horse, the one putting its ears back in pain. Over the last 15 years veterinarians and animal scientists have worked out pain scales for most domestic animals by taking photos of the during routine procedures.

We know vaccines painful, and by comparing horses at rest with horses getting vaccinated, we've been able to determine how they express pain visually. By looking at horses with disorders like colic, broken bones, wounds, and so on, we can determine their facial expressions during more severe pain.

At zookeeper school we were drilled through the pain faces of the most common lab animals and livestock. Nowadays I believe this has become a routine lesson in all animal related fields, but the general public still doesn't know that this is a thing that exists.

Here are all the pain face/grimace scales I've been able to find. Please study them if you interact with any of these animals on a regular basis:

[release-the-sheep]

just witnessed something devastating

guy on the subway with one ear pierced, little gold hoop. other guy on the subway very quickly and subtly googling "which one is the gay ear". it is not the gay ear. visible disappointment on his face as he puts his phone away.

[gendercensus]

Posters and flyers

Every year I get people making posters and flyers for the Gender Census and they email them to me, and I LOVE THAT and would really like to make them more widely available, so it's time to make a system.

Here's a Google Drive folder. I'll throw in posters and flyers that people send me, provided they meet all of the fairly minimal Official Gender Census Promo Criteria:

❌ No mention of any gender words that someone might want to choose or write in for the identity words question. (So, no mention of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, queer, etc.) This is a tough one, right?

✅ You can, however, mention the "gender binary", use acronyms like LGBT+, and use symbols like pride flags or Mars/Venus.

✅ If it's for an open survey, mention the closing date. (This year that's 13th August 2026.)

✅ Mention the website address: gendercensus.com (or, if it's for an open survey, survey.gendercensus.com)

✅ You have explicitly consented to me putting your file in there for general use.

I'll include these rules in the folder in a Google Doc as well. :)

[pangur-and-grim]

there's this book written in the 1870's by an abolitionist minister, Moncure D. Conway, and I find it super interesting. it's called 'Demonology and Devil-lore', and it's basically this guy's theories as to how various deities evolved. keep in mind this is all just a single dead dude's opinions, so a big spoonful of salt is required, but he says that older deities (like Old Testament God) rarely have a clear split between good/bad, and can deliver both with the same hand, and that the later splitting of good vs evil (like New Testament God, who's quite a bit nicer) can sometimes be attributed to politics. because if you're attempting to use religion as a form of control, it's better to position your guy as the Good guy. and he goes over how various demons are just the bastardized remnants of gods from conquered/colonized religions that have been swallowed by christianity, and then makes an attempt to exhaustively categorize them by type (this is where the book gets a bit dull. as an aside, this guy would have loved Pokemon.)

anyway, it got me thinking about how religious syncretism would work in a world where gods were REAL, and so that became the subplot of The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo.

it's set in 'fantasy Britain', which is a land that has experienced wave after wave of conquest and colonization. about mid 1500's, so we've had the Bell Beaker people, the Celts, the Romans, all the way to the current spread of Christianity, sorry, I mean The Goddess of the Resurrection. and she has to ability to literally demonize worshippers of other religions (which is why there's so many fun animal-people hybrids around), which makes it mentally easier for the crusaders of the Goddess to mop them up. easier to kill people if you don't see them as people.

her ultimate goal in all this is to swallow up all the gods she can and incorporate them into herself, because that's just what every god wants as part of their life cycle. and she's had great success, so far!

tl;dr The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo might be an isekai yaoi monsterfucking book, but I couldn't have done it without minister Moncure Daniel Conway and his autism-fuelled theory book.

[pangur-and-grim]

it's also funny, because when there's talk of 'The Old Gods' or 'The Elder Gods' in TIIOPP, a lot of the time they just mean like..... Apollo or something. it sounds very eldritch, but it's just roman leftovers.

the game Pentiment was actually a huge inspiration for this. I won't spoil why that is, because that would be giving away the game's climax, but it's very worth checking out. also the entire game is styled to look like a medieval manuscript, so it's just a beautiful world to walk around in.

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

i....found a rare shoegaze tape. legit. band does not exist online. tape is at least 20 years old. This is so Sam

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

rare tape.

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

ok ok....track for you from rare tape. ripped by me

Visit Original Link

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

I HAVE SOURCED MORE INFO!!!! from my friend who works at an nz audio archive and they HAVE THE TAPE THERE? COVER:

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

Final info ive put together after i have just looked over the insert notes (inside the other tape) sent to me by my friend:

This band had Steven Wells and Andrew Bain in it - they went on to be in a pretty popular NZ rock band called Fur Patrol from late 90s-2000s, so this is a precursor to that. in the notes they also thank Campbell Kneale, a prolific underground nz musician in bands like Birchville Cat Motel and Black Boned Angel. they also thank "Drinkwater".

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

alright everyone. after 33k+ notes on an obscure 90s indie song from Aotearoa i gotta admit many want to hear the rest, & as i cant think of a better format to supply this, here's the rest of the tape in this post. please let it stay here where it needs to be, don't spread it like its yours. its not mine either! i now present to you: Clayflower - Still (1993, Aotearoa, Cassette, Shoegaze/Indie Rock)

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

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Visit Original Link

beautiful and cool obscure music like this is everywhere if you just wanna look for it even for a few minutes. dont let yourself think someone has to come along and show it to you <3

[overseer-picard]

It’s difficult to fully articulate the hold that Patrick Stewart had on audiences when TNG was airing. Between the hundreds of magazine covers, the talk show circuits, and the paparazzi nonsense, the amount of baldness puns editors were compelled to create was astounding.

It was like the media fixated on this man because he had catastrophic levels of charisma and audiences were losing their minds over him (TNG was regularly beating network shows in ratings), yet he was so far removed from the narrow Hollywood standards of beauty that it vexed and haunted these people for years.

Baldness was a joke in Hollywood. 75% of George Costanza's identity revolved around bald jokes. If you were a bald actor, you were cast as a villain or a buffoon, never the hero. And if you were losing your hair, you had to slap a wig on or risk losing your career. Yul Brynner was somewhat of an exception but he was from a much different generation of Hollywood and even Bruce Willis didn't fully shave his head until 1994 (post TNG success incidentally).

In Patrick Stewart's case, there was often an undercurrent of snide putdowns with many interviewers, drawing focus to his baldness over and over and over again with low hanging jokes. It was like you could see their vanity-based paradigms cracking in real time and it was strange to witness. Imagine how bizarre it would be if talk show hosts today could only ask The Rock, Vin Diesel, or Jason Statham about their bald heads.

But karma swooped in to the rescue. In 1992 Stewart was voted TV Guide's "Sexiest Man on Television" with a whopping 54% of votes. He beat out the likes of Luke Perry, John Corbett, A. Martinez, and even Burt Reynolds (with a total of 20 contenders).

The middle-aged bald guy in the syndicated sci-fi show beat out the hottest of the Hot Guys™️ and it wasn't even remotely close.

^ Bald joke

So yeah, today he's an old, revered thespian who is occasionally Charles Xavier, but not only did Patrick Stewart pave the way for other bald actors to be considered leading men, he discombobulated Hollywood with his unconventional attractiveness and it was amazing.

[beardycarrot]

Don't forget that he originally auditioned for TNG with a wig on, and the executives were sold on his performance... but then swooped into the dressing room right after so they could see him without it. They wanted to see for themselves how authoritative yet approachable he came across with his natural bald head.

Now, I don't actually know which wig it was that he auditioned with... he apparently got The Wig Mandate last-minute, so his wife had to pick one out from one of the plays he had recently acted in. Rumor has it that it was the wig he wore in "I, Claudius".

...But this is the image usually associated with the story:

I've heard people claim that they decided to let him go without a wig because they just couldn't arrive at anything that looked natural, or that they didn't want to deal with having to put the main character in a wig every day. These people are obviously just making stuff up without actually thinking very deeply about it; for every single scene featuring Worf, who appears in all but four episodes of TNG, Michael Dorn had to be fitted with a latex forehead and makeup, a wig, and fake facial hair.

The reality is that Patrick Stewart looked perfect as-is, and it sent a strong message. In a near-utopian, post-scarcity society, in which you can do whatever you want to do, be whoever you want to be, and look however you want to look... some people choose to be bald.

[weepingfireflies]

The thing about Leverage is that even on the rare occasions where I don't believe a normal person would fall for something, I 100% believe a billionaire who's never been told "no" would. This is the same group of people that tried to visit the Titanic with a video game controller

[pomrania]

Tags by @everythingblowsupsilly:

i agree with this totally #whenever a mark falls for something i think is obvious #i remind myself: #what reasoning would they have to think that this situation has been carefully rigged through ultra-complex maneuvers by #a hypercompetent team of people who don't have anything to do with you— all for a not-necessarily-obvious purpose— #and why would that rube goldberg machine type explanation seem more likely than the far more straightforward appearance of the situation? #kind of like an occam's razor double-cross #i also ask #why would this mark— who is frequently conceited; privileged; overconfident— be suspicious of a situation that usually completely suits #their worldview? the crew has to know how to play into a mark's expectations to do any con; and the mark's downfall is always that they were #too carried away with the story of the con to avoid shooting themself in the foot. they're used to things going the way they want: #he considers himself a genius and he's searching for aliens— so of course he would be the one to make first contact. #he thinks he's too clever to fall for a con and he considers everyone else beneath him— so of course he would outsmart the crew and win #he's a hypochondriac— so of course he would become too carried away when he seems to show signs of sickness to be suspicious. #we get to see the sixteen layers of strategy behind the con; but the marks only see the facade. that's why leverage works so well. #it's not just bad people receiving a simple revenge; it's bad people shaking hands with karma and walking into the consequences of their #actions with foolish confidence. yknow; why not buy a popular social media platform to become its king and tailor it to your whims? #after all; you're a genius; you're popular; and your opinions are always right. and it'll obviously be successful; so what could go wrong? #good post op #i did not mean to write this much

[faeberrywine]

User credit: eqrine_horse_rescue on insta

(please like, reblog and give proper credit if you use any of my gifs!)

[bisexualbaker]

Happy Moon Landing Eve! Remember to leave out milk and cookies for Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and don’t let Michael Collins convince you to prank NASA!

[bisexualbaker]

If Tumblr is still here next July 19th, I fully expect this post to obliterate my activity feed.

[wizardnaturalist]

a book should be $5 a little drink should be $2 and museum access should be free and all hours

[butch--dan]

tv from the mid 2000s was so good. if you can look past the everything