Make It Mean Something

Fortune teller said I'd be free, and that's the day you came to me. 02/29/16 \\ 02/27/19

[shadythetortie]

Okay, don't get me wrong here. I LOVE Jurassic Park. I love seeing their dinosaurs. But after watching Prehistoric Planet, and going back to look at this...

And then looking at this...

Notice how much healthier the second set looks? Their lips cover their teeth, they actually have fat on their bodies, their skin doesn't wrinkle like they're dehydrated. You can't see every single tendon and muscle move because you aren't supposed to. Dinosaurs are animals, not reptilian body-builders.

THIS is the kind of change I want to see in how we create realistic depictions of not only dinosaurs, but all prehistoric creatures. Paleoart has always had a huge issue with shrink-wrapping and making these animals look terrifying instead of making them look like, well, animals.

Well done, BBC.

[shadythetortie]

STOP BACKYARD BREEDING YOUR DINOSAURS

Get your Tyrannosaurs from responsible, DKC registered breeders! Anyone who says your rex should be skinny or 'thats just how they are' is lying to you.

[sandersstudies]

I am OBSESSED with people telling me how they met the love of their life. Just found out my director met his wife through a misdirected email - that’s fate right there.

[glumshoe]

I have always been partial to stories which feature the removal of many layers of clothing as an important plot element. One of my favorite Scandinavian folktales is about a queen who, through some magical conception mishap, gives birth to twins. The younger twin is beautiful and normal in every way, but the older twin is just. Y’know. A big horrible snake with arms.

When the younger twin grows up and wants to get married, the lindworm returns and insists that he, as the elder prince, must be married first. When a massive horrible snake with arms lays down the law like that there isn’t really any room for disagreement, but it turns out to be awfully hard to find a bride willing to marry him. The king and queen search far and wide for a woman who will take a husband who is 50 feet long, doesn’t have legs, and may or may not eat his would-be wives when they are appalled by him, but eventually they find a local shepherd’s daughter who is either coerced, a monsterfucker, or just very open-minded and agrees to marry the lindworm.

Depending on the version, the bride either seeks out the advice of a witch or comes up with the idea all by herself, and goes to the bedchamber on her wedding night dressed in many layers of dresses. Her big horrible snake with arms husband is waiting for her and bids her to disrobe, but she asks him to shed a skin as well. Her sexy Russian nesting doll cosplay has so many layers that by the time she is naked, he has shed all of his skins and is 1.) either a sexy naked human dude underneath or 2.) is this meaty blob of helpless worm meat that must be whipped and bathed in chemicals before he transforms into a sexy naked human dude. Either way, they presumably live happily ever after and the younger prince can finally get married.

I’d like to know how the elder prince adjusted to having a human body. He was born a lindworm and lived his entire life slithering around—he’s never worn pants! He’s never had to sit on a toilet! What’s he gonna do now that he’s a sexy 20-something heir to the throne? Is it a shock for him when he looks down and he’s just got one sexual organ? His butt is in the back now, he’s got to shave, he’s got to eat with a fork and a knife and chew his food instead of unhinging his jaw and swallowing it whole.... is it weird for him? Is his honeymoon spent learning to walk on two legs? Is his instinct to crawl out of bed and drag himself across the floor by his arms? Does he roll onto his back and play dead when he gets scared? Does he wrap his torso around his lunch and attempt to constrict it? Is his wife... into this?

[headspace-hotel]

There’s no way to predict where this post is going from just the beginning

[lasrina]

OP had me at "either coerced, a monsterfucker, or just very open-minded."

[kravkalackin]

Just saw a post about dolls and how kids play with them, and I remembered that my grandpa, who had real bad alzhiemer's, would buy me and my sisters the same dolls from the dollar store every Friday. It had became a routine for him, and he forgot that he'd already gotten us those toys

So that led to us having a shitton of super cheap barbie knock offs, and my parents could only sneakily return so many

We also had a shitty row boat, because my dad has really bad adhd and no impulse control. He also had no idea how to keep a boat, which meant it immediately filled up nearly to the brim with rain water as it sat next to our driveway for seasons unused

So what's a kid to do with dozens of unwanted barbies and what is basically an above ground pond at this point? I'll tell you

What you do is take those dolls and stick them in the boat very carefully. Then you watch as the seasons change, the temperature gets colder, and the water in the boat freezes as winter takes hold.

You never really forget bringing your mom out to the boat in the dead of winter to show off the homemade river Styx her children have crafted in the backyard, a dozen cheaply made plastic monstrosities carefully positioned to reach up to the surface in a frozen agony

Those dolls stayed in their frozen hell until we finally found someone who would buy the boat, like two years later.

Unfortunately, I cannot remember what the guy's reaction was when he actually came to see it and witnessed the art installation inside

[an-actual-box]

This post went in a direction. I’m glad it did.

[guerrillatech]

[showerthoughtspost]

Although often taken for granted, Google Earth is an incredible feat accomplished by mankind that people 300 years ago would have considered completely mental.

[alphashrooms-deactivated2021022]

Bruh that shit was completely mental to me when it came out when I was a kid and I still think it’s crazy. When they introduced street view I lost my shit. There was really a group organized enough to go around photographing every street? In vast areas of the world? Insane

[your-tiny-friend]

Remember the whole family crowding round the computer just to look at your own house from the outside???

[guerrillatech]

[lissar-deactivated20220127]

i have this theory that the shows you watch as a toddler influence how you behave socially in some way. the babies who watch peppa pig end up being socially more savvy and adept at how they navigate interpersonal relationships. the ones who watched spongebob have a distinct sense of humour now you can always recognise. the ones who watched courage the cowardly dog became literateur horror enthusiasts as they grew. the ones who watched powerpuff girls became honorary eldest daughters burdened with the need to be helpful. and so on.

anyway please tag this with your favourite show as a little kid and whether you think my theory is true

[byjove]

I’ve seen this new trend of girls posting videos like “I hate my boyfriend for bringing all of his stupid boy things into our apartment when we moved in together 🙄” and then pictures of his hot wheels collection or a Halloween skeleton or an extremely cool pirate flag. Give him to me you do not deserve him.

[throwbackjoe]

Buckle up, folks. I’ve got a lot to say on this…

I’m not one of those guys who subscribes to the “Man Cave” idea. That theory that once you’re in a relationship, you’re required to forfeit 99% of your own home and be grateful to have one room in which you can be yourself and have your own possessions on display. I think if you’re in a relationship, you have a right to make your home reflect your personality and interests as much your partner does. I’ve run into a couple of instances where a woman thinking a man has no right to his own possessions has not gone over so well and it was hysterical.

I once knew a guy who worked in the telemarketing department of a company I worked at. One Friday night after work, he told me about how he ended up breaking up with his girlfriend.

This guy was like me, very clean and orderly and liked things a certain way but he wasn’t volatile about it or anything. He and his girlfriend decide to have a weekend sleepover at his house, a trial run in his mind for moving in together. She showed up and the red flags sprang up immediately. “Where’s your bag?” he asks. “For a weekend? I don’t need one.” she says. His mind reels. “So you’re not gonna change clothes…or shower…or brush your teeth…?” “No. Why would I do that in just a couple of days?” He tries to be okay about it but then she starts “cooking” and the kitchen looks like a war zone. Then there’s the fact that her B.O. seems to get stronger by the hour.

The last straw comes towards the end of the weekend when she walks around his place, eyes his Elvis Presley memorabilia collection and says “If I lived here, all this Elvis shit would get set out for trash, I’m not wasting space on all that.” When it finally comes time for her to go back home, she says “This was fun! Can’t wait to do it again.” “Yeah, about that…” and he dumped her in his own driveway.

He said if he had to choose between hygiene and an Elvis collection he’s built for years and her, he’s gonna be happier being single, cleaner and having his collectibles around than he would be with her.

Another instance happened when I had a garage sale and one of the things I was selling was a talking football player action figure from the 90s that someone had bought me under the presumption that because I was boy, I was into sports (I was not). The action figure was brand new in the box because that was how little I cared about playing with it despite my mother’s best attempts. A woman shows up, sees the action figure and loses her shit.

“Oh God, I am so sick of seeing these! My husband has the whole set and all I want to do is throw them in the trash!” A guy at the sale overhears this and says “Well, I’m sure your husband has a list of things that he’d like to get rid of that you’re partial to but he doesn’t say anything because that’s the give and take of being in a relationship” She blows him off and says “I should be the one to decide what goes in the house and what he can buy, THAT is how marriage works for ME.” The guy changes his argument. “Maybe on your husband’s list of shit that needs to go, you should be at the top of the list…” Everyone else at the garage sale (including me) was now watching silently and wondering when the throw down would happen…

“What did you say?”, she asks him a bit taken back. “I said if I was him, I wouldn’t take that shit that somehow being married to you means forfeiture of my belongings and personality and substituting it all for your bullshit. I’d sooner throw you out than my action figures.” After picking her jaw up off my driveway, the woman hurumphs and storms back to her car. I high-five the guy for making an excellent point after she leaves.

I have a lot of collectibles myself and am currently in the creative habit of going through my childhood Power Rangers and Pokémon toys and putting the ones I absolutely want to keep in shadow boxes and hanging them on the wall as conversation pieces and selling the rest.

I have Funko Pops. I have lunchboxes. I have special edition magazines and comic books in floater frames on the wall. I have more books than I have time to count or read. I have tub after tub of Halloween and Christmas decorations because that’s my favorite time of year. I would never throw all of this stuff away because I’ve purged plenty already and kept what I wanted to keep. It’s all a reflection of my personality and my story. If someone came into my life and said our life together would mean giving all of this up and doing what he wanted, I would consider that a toxic situation and I would end it before I got in too deep.

Men, gay or straight, can find themselves in toxic, abusive relationships, this is not a phenomenon only experienced by women. It just seems that way because men, especially straight men, rarely speak up about it and mistakenly settle on what they assume is some unchangable default result of being in a relationship. It’s not.

I would never move in with someone and tell them to throw everything out that has been a part of them or spoken to who they are in order to make room for me. I am all about organizing and making a space feel cozy, functional and fun and would go out of my way to make sure we both had space for our things and our personalities and stories. One does not have to overshadow or overpower the other in order to make a relationship between two people work.

So, the next time someone says “It’s me or the Star Wars action figures on that one shelf that aren’t bothering anyone but I hate that that shelf isn’t all about me anyway” say “May The Force not hit you in the ass on the way out” as you show them the door.

[rudjedet]

My dad broke up with the girlfriend he had when he was 20ish because she said "the motorcycle goes or I go". And not because she genuinely didn't like motorcycles, no! Because a friend of hers told her bf to get rid of the bike or lose her, and that guy choose the girl. Dad's ex saw it as a power play she could pull on my dad as well. He turned her out on the spot.

[digdeepergravedigger09]

I used to think guys just didn’t have any interests?? Or hobbies?? Because of all those images of homes where the wife designs everything and there’s basically no touch of the husband there anywhere, and how it was implied that that’s “normal”.

[cookingwithroxy]

I just reblogged this but then I thought and I just have to make this addition?

Yeah, that last comment, that's how fucked up our society has gotten, because men have to conceal or hide or at best get ONE room to put their stuff in, and even then it's treated as terrible and regressive and should not be allowed. The 'Man Cave' aka the one space in a person's house where they're allowed to express themselves and their hobbies and it's treated as a terrible thing because he's 'excluding' his wife from it, while the things that are in there are NOT ALLOWED ANYWHERE ELSE.

We have allowed people to brainwash us into two dumb ideas, one that men are expected to give up everything that they love for their significant others, and the second that it's a burden on women that they have to determine how everything is in the household. Because that is also how it is in so many cases.

[skepticsub]

Felt this meme would be important here.

[ranpoismyblorbo]

The meme is perfect here and this thread as a whole makes me realise how screwed up society is and also how happy I am to not be living in such a household

[bulbiedorf]

Never forget that the Republicans used the covid pandemic to use eugenics to kill off hundreds of thousands of chronically ill and disabled people by insisting we should use "herd immunity" as our response and went on about how it was okay because "most people won't die" leaving out the fact that many of those who died were chronically ill and disabled. They didn't care about the lives of the chronically ill and disabled if it meant they preserved wealth for millionaires.

[volaee]

[tastefullyoffensive]

(photos by Bill Watterson and an octopus)

[transparasite-deactivated201806]

I think this is the best scientist photograph I have ever seen.

[shellysbees-blog]

But people didn’t believe him on reddit. So Watterson made the photo sequence into a gif.

[moonlit-hedge]

Here’s the gif for anyone curious.

[siren-kitten-his-deactivated202]

I had to go through the notes to find the gif. Not because I didn’t believe him but because I wanted to see it.

[tomhasatransblog]

Transition therapy is lacking

All the therapy I ever got from the GICs I attended was basically just them assessing if I was trans and if medical transition would help me. The answer to both was yes, so I got my prescription and that was basically it. And it was the same for top surgery. And at the time that was all I needed really, but some actual therapy would have been good too.

Because after a few years the euphoria of the initial changes wear off and it just becomes normal. Then you begin to fixate on the things that you can never change (no surgery can give me the genital arrangement and fertility I should have been born with, and nothing can be done about the wideness of my hips, etc) and you need to be ready to deal with that.

I feel strongly that my gender therapists should have warned me about this. And relatedly they should make it clear that there is no "complete" transition. You'll never be as you should have been, you can only get close. And you should really make peace with that before you even start or you're in for a lot of dissatisfaction and disappointment (...and grief) down the road. It's not as if it isn't obvious, but it's such a sad thing to have to think about that it's very easy to think over it, think around it, I think it should be the therapist's job to force you to confront it before writing you a prescription.

It hadn't occured to me before, but having had another peek into the detrans subreddits, they should also definitely emphasize that you can't become a different person by transitioning in order to escape a traumatic past of sexual abuse or anything else.

In the UK I suspect the therapy is lacking purely due to lack of resources. I mean, just look at the waiting lists for literally every clinic. Given that transition is the best treatment (in general, and in my opinion) it makes sense from an efficiency point of view that you have your two assessment appointments, get your prescription, and then just get sent on your way so the therapist can then assess the next person who's been in the queue for years.

Except that this approach may come back to bite the GICs if enough people start wanting to detransition. And it's hard to judge the numbers, but I suspect it won't because I think proportionally only a very small number of people do ultimately decide to detransition. Obviously more people detransitioning would be terrible for trans people in society generally (and the possible impacts of that really deserve a separate post) but at least it would make the therapy more rigorous. At the time I know I would have found that very frustrating, but now I'm older and wiser and I've become aware of people who unlike me weren't ultimately happy with the outcome, I think it would be for the best.

[junosteelyourgirl]

when juno said “you’ve just got to keep living, and you’ve got to have faith that eventually you’ll be glad you did” and alessandra strong said “dying is easy, you’ve only got to do it once. you can never stop surviving. you’ve got to get up and do it all day, every day— that’s what’s hard” and “i’m proud of you for surviving. that’s the hardest thing there is” and benzaiten steel said “but if you want to keep seeing what’s ahead, you gotta get back in the car” and sasha wire said “it’s not theatrical, it’s not glamorous, it’s not even satisfying, but it’s what you’re stuck with, so deal with it” and peter nureyev said “of course there’s [something out there worth seeing]. but you need to be alive to see it” and

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

Shoutout to this guy for debunking the argument about the market regulating itself with a real life example

[brucebocchi]

colorblind pride flag just dropped

[antpilled]

[mudwerks]

(via Happy Pride month : facepalm)

[catchymemes]

[authorbettyadams]

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a public utility ruefully praise someone for

property damage….

[likorys-shimenawa]

I mean, you couldn’t plan it if you tried, so it’s a genuine accident. And also a freaky one - like throwing a coin and it landing on its side.

[anais-ninja-bitch]

craighead electric recognizes game.

[rosslynpaladin]

What’s crazy is this might not be the weirdest accidental shot I have seen.

When you take up Archery, you shake Murphy by the hand.

Your sense of what is or is not Probable is opened like a wrecking ball to the Third Eye.

I have seen and managed a “robinhood” more than once. I’ve seen it happen like five times.

It’s when you split your arrow by hitting the very end of it, dead on, with ANOTHER ARROW. Less than a square centimeter of target there. Just by total freak chance. Nearly impossible to do by trying but it HAPPENS all the time.

“One in a million chances crop up nine times out of ten”- Guards! Guards!, Sir Terry Pratchett

[fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive]

#take an archery course and a stats course at the same time and you may Ascend into levels unknown

If nothing else, due to losing your last tenuous hold on sanity because stats, and taking your newfound archery knowledge to live in the woods free of any society that has discovered the discipline of Statistics.

[illustratedjai]

The wild thing about the robinhooding is that the Mythbusters tried - in at least two separate episodes! - to create the perfect circumstances for a robinhooded arrow. They mechanised it, they got their equipment set up perfectly, they had the perfect arrows… and they just couldn’t do it. 

Meanwhile, at my first archery competition, I was watching the top level archers while my group was having a break, and i got to see first hand a robinhooded arrow happen. So every time i watch those episodes and watch the Mythbusters conclude that it’s impossible, I’m tearing my hair out because i have literally watched it happen. 

[gallusrostromegalus]

OK now I’m curious- Typically when people start expiriencing “This isn’t how statistics works” type-phenomena, it’s because we misunderstood how likely the event was in the first place and the factors that contribute to it.

This would mean doing something like having everyone at an archery contest count how many shots they take that day and then comparing the total to the number of unusual shots- Perhaps robinhooding is not a one-in-a-million shot but it IS a one-in-one-thousand shot. 

[squireofgeekdom]

I don’t know anything about archery but I am fond of math, so I thought i’d take a shot at this (ba dum tsh) This is all extremely back of the napkin, so I apologize for any errors. So according to this, a Western round involves shooting two sets of four dozen arrows, so 96 arrows. According to this, within the US alone 23.8 million adults practice archery and 20% of those do so competitively, so 4,760,000 people in the US alone shooting competitively. There are 50 competitions scheduled in the US for 2021 according to this, which we can assume is low due to the current State Of Affairs, but it doesn’t make sense to assume that every person competes in 50 competitions a year. If we say people who shoot competitively compete in an average of two competitions a year, that’s 4,760,000 people competing in 2 competitions a year shooting 96 arrows competitively at each competition, or 913,920,000 arrows shot competitively in a year. Even assuming robin hood-ing is a one in a million shot, we’d expect 913 robin hood shots in competition per year, or about 18 robin hood shots per competition. Even if we assume more conservatively that only half of people who shoot competitively compete in a given year and those who compete only participate in one competition on average a year, and we then assume on top of that only the top 10% of archers who shoot competitively are able to make a robin hood shot a one-in-a-million shot, that’s still 22,848,000 arrows shot by archers good enough to make a robin hood shot a one-in a million shot yearly, and with those one in a million odds, we’d expect 22 robin hood shots in competition per year, or at slightly less than half of the competitions. Even if it’s one in ten million, we’d still expect about 2 robin hood shots in competition yearly. So the real question isn’t ‘if a robin hood arrow is a one in a million chance, how did you see one at an archery competition?’ it’s ‘if a robin hood arrow is only a one in a million chance and not rarer, how would we not see more of them at archery competitions?’

tl;dr extremely uncommon outcomes can happen with unintuitive frequency if the thing is done many many times by many people. 

[gallusrostromegalus]

AW YEAH, THIS IS MY SHIT.

[glumshoe]

I robinhooded an arrow MYSELF once, a few years ago—it wasn’t completely split because it ran out of steam and lodged halfway down the shaft, so I’m not sure if it counts. It’s definitely possible, though, even as a freak accident by amateur out-of-practice archers.