Local Bird

You can call us Match, he/they, Mostly shitposts, we love birds so so so much, and also music, sometimes we write or draw

[matchboxcats]

This is my son snorkle

[kurulover]

I hate that when you’re stressed enough your body just starts falling apart. I think it should realize you’re already stressed and don’t need that and start functioning better actually

[matchboxcats]

Terrible that anxiety can mimic symptoms of Things That Can Kill You

[aceamethyst12]

THIS SHIT HAPPENS EVERY CHAPTER

(book is Transformers: Exodus by Alex Irvine)

[queerpeers]

me: “yeah I dated a guy in high school who came out as gay. it was before i knew i was a boy so needless to say it didn’t work out”

coworker: “damn dude was preordering”

[queerpeers]

other things this coworker (who is a cis guy) has done/said:

—got confused about why I’d never been a boy scout because he forgot i was trans

—told me he was gonna get top surgery scar tattoos to match me after i get mine

—laughs at all my trans jokes, even if they’re supremely unfunny

—calls me big dog (and him little dog) even though he is about as tall as two of me

— “I can’t believe she would say that transphobic thing to you. In June? Pride month?”

[the-ladyguinevere]

Once I said "My gender is whatever's funniest at the time" and my coworker stops dead in his tracks, turns slowly and says "So are your pronouns honk/honk?" killing me instantly

[doggirlpaws]

I was talking to a friend I knew before I transitioned about my new relationship (my first one ever!) and I said "Yeah, I think I only indentified as aro/ace most of my life because I didn't have lesbian as an option" and he looked me dead in the eye and said "Oh? Why not? ...Ohhh"

Then he said "You know, I completely forgot you weren't always this way. Femininity really suits you" and let me tell you I started tearing up

Of course, not ten minutes later I mentioned that I had to relearn how to sing and he said "oh no, what happened?" so he might just be a little slow

[doggirlpaws]

Update on that friend: a bunch of people sent me "he's a little confused, but he's got the spirit" gifs in response to that story. I can tell you now with certainty that she definitely has the spirit, and she's not confused anymore

[thistoowillpasss]

[thistoowillpasss]

[thistoowillpasss]

[thistoowillpasss]

[kittykittyredcat]

[ozempicofficial]

[diseases-for-center-control]

If you worry nobody wants to be with you, don't. Diseases always want to be with you 💜

[chamomile-dove]

some friendship dynamics i doodled that i love a lot because im a certified FRIENDSHIP LOVER from the board of FRIENDIRECTORS on planet PLATONIC

[stickthepearl]

tumblr i do not need to have tags whoever finds my posts is the chosen one

[leathersys]

so... we may have made something.

have YOU ever thought like this?????? i know WE hate the current plural diagnostics!!!! so! WE MADE OUR OWN!!!!!!!

it's 44 questions long, you can receive a total of 50 points!

it's unfortunately hosted through google forms for now unless we find something better...

Plural Checklist

*Due to how Google Forms is built, your "System Percentage" is shown as your amount of correct answers. Plural systems typically get a score

we are not doctors, do not take your result as medical advice.

feel free to reblog with your result!

note: if you're a system and got under 30, let us know! the 30 points minimum is based solely off of, like, five non-system takers. we're working on getting a bigger sample size!

[matchboxcats]

So on the one hand

[nevernot-confused]

I approve of eating because bean soup made me go from pissed and miserable to not pissed and not miserable

[linguisticparadox]

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

[ri-writing]

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

[linguisticparadox]

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

[wanderingchaos]

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

[athenadark]

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

[the-haiku-bot]

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[elfwreck]

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

[noswordinourlake]

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

[stevespookington]

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

[rostekhorn]

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

[trambrosia]

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

[willgrahamscock]

the generational gap between me and the chronic complainers in fandom tags for every little thing

[willgrahamscock]

“we need more fics where…” write it

“I don’t like…” no one asked go complain in dms

“he wouldn’t say…” to YOU maybe it’s just FUN

[six-demon-bag]

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[malwareproductions]

hey. you have to love your trans brothers of color okay. and your trans sisters of color. and your nonbinary siblings of color. you have to okay. its simply non-optional