Just Your Everyday Bird On Fire

Salutations! I'm Spark and this is the blog that tumblr made me make!

[perception-filter]

staring at the dessert menu and twirling my hair and going "should I be baaaaddd" until the autistic girl I'm eating with says "there is nothing bad about eating dessert. it is a morally neutral action"

[janmisali]

oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this

what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)

0, 1, or 2

3

4 or 5

6

7, 8, or 9

Remaining time: 5 days 12 hours

[muttsandmustelidae]

From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!

[ratsoupee]

More grace and pebbles + the riveting sequel-prequel

[nomaian]

[quasi-normalcy]

We Are the Daughters of the Microbes Who Could Survive in an Oxygen-rich Atmosphere

[lgbtlunaverse]

Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intent to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.

[wheelie-sick]

when people tag posts "unreality" it's a signal to people who struggle with discerning reality that a (likely scary if believed to be true) post is not real even though it's written as if it was. it's also a filter tag so those people can opt out of seeing posts like that entirely. many people who rely on the unreality tag are psychotic and struggle with paranoia alongside (or because of) the struggles discerning what's real. posts that these people interpret to be real can lead to incredible distress and compulsions.

when someone tags your post "#unreality" and you screenshot the tags and say "what are you talking about? this is real" because you consider the post easy to discern as not real and find this joke funny you're actually just causing paranoia for people who now feel like they can't trust the unreality tag. not everyone has the same reality discernment skills as you. what's "obviously" a fictional story to you may not be obvious to other people.

I don't think most people make this joke maliciously. I think most people making this joke don't even realize why the unreality tag exists. anyways, if you've made this joke or have the urge to make this joke then consider not doing that.

[younggayanddoingokay]

Ryland Grace is not a coward, he’s just a normal guy. An I think that he actually still might have said yes if he’d had the time and space to think about it tbh.

Like how much time did the other applicants have before they even put in their applications? How many discussions and hours and days and weeks did they have to make the decision to even apply? How much more time did they have before they signed the contract and made it irrevocable?

Grace had three hours. Three hours and the illusion of choice. Of coirse he said no! I would like to think that I would be willing to die for earth if backed into that corner, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to do it in three hours.

Also, this was such a long shot. The odds that it would work were so infinitesimal even if all went to plan. They were “asking” him to die for a long shot when he already didn’t think he was capable of. He didn’t think he could do it. His self-esteem was not the best.

Also, collectivism was not really his thing. He had people that he cared about, but they would all be either old or dead (his friends) or middle-aged (his students). The Hail Mary, even if successful, was not going to make a meaningful difference in most of the lifespan for any of the people he cared about. His students would either survive against the odds or they’d die of cold or hunger or starvation or sickness whether he succeeded or not.

They were asking him to die, in three hours, for the tiny chance of a better future for people he didn’t know. Everyone he did know would either survive or die without his input in the time it took for him to get there and the beetles to get back. He didn’t believe he could even do what they were asking him to do. They were asking him to die with no time to think or to choose, for the idea of a future for people he didn’t know, for a tiny chance of doing something that he didn’t even think he was capable of in any event.

Of course he said no! But if he had the time and space and a better reason, we know he would have said yes, because he did for Rocky.

[brunhielda]

And we have examples of him being brave!

In the book he walked back into a room full of poison gas and explosive aliens for his kids, because he NEEDED to help make the world better them.

In the movie he ran TOWARDS an exploding building because his friends were in there.

In both he continually handled and taught others how to handle the astrophage, something HE DISCOVERED was extremely dangerous in turns of power output.

Lab danger he knew and had accepted. He needed a moment to adjust to space danger.

He wasn’t a coward. He just didn’t have time to wrap his head around an entirely new kinda danger.

[grimeclown]

I don't know which of you needs to hear this but "narc" is not short for "narcissist" when someone calls you a "narc" for snitching they are calling you a "narcotics officer"

[gaesnek]

[monkey-mulch]

technically narc isnt even short for narcotics officer its just cant for Cop, I believe Roma in origin

[red-mercer]

I read years ago in a book that it was derived from nakk, Romani for nose, as in someone who always has their nose in other people's business

[grimeclown]

ITS DERIVED FROM "NARCO" AS IN "NARCOTICS" WHAT FUCKING BOOK

[grimeclown]

Okay you know what pulling back on my derision because i can see how this mistake would be made but narc and nark are etymologically unrelated

[headspace-hotel]

Etymology is always doing some shit like this

[bogleech]

Convergent evolution.

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

Linguistic crab

[backofthebookshelf]

Two entire linguistic traditions have merged to remind you not to be a fuckin narc

[joygucci-deactivated20160123]

Reblog if you're black tumblr.

You don’t have to be black, it just means you support us, you stand by us and your for us.

[redheadsims-cc]

[remus-sanders-is-the-bestest]

BLM is still a thing. If you don’t reblog this, but would’ve in June/July you were only in support of black lives when it was a trend. They still need justice

[liongrl321]

everyone deserves equality <3

[hartsnkises]

Alan Turing and Ada of Lovelace did not invent computer science for the girls and the gays to claim they can't do math

[ilikewritingandspeedcore]

EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????

IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN

IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"

AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS

LIKE READ THIS SHIT

WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE

[rhyperographer]

I went to find the article. It's fascinating.

[digital-magus]

In retrospect, consider the number 1 thing every grade-schooler knows about plants is they take in light, the idea they might be able to see should not wreck my shit as hard as it does

[riverc1an]

literally obsessed with all of this omg

[pigswithwings]

hi trans people i hope you get to live. i hope you get to laugh so fucking loud and revel in how the wind blows through your hair and i hope you get to dress the way you like and i hope you get complimented on it. i hope you get to kiss someone or hug someone or hold hands with someone or be told how wonderful you are. i hope you get to dance to weird music and i hope you go swimming with no concerns other than how much sunscreen to put on and i hope you sing bad karaoke with your friends. i hope a kid spots you from across the road and realizes they don't have to live one way forever. i hope we all live

[pigswithwings]

trans people i hope you get to eat some really good food and gasp at the animals and insects you see every day i hope you pick up a new hobby and it turns out to be pretty fun i hope you try on that coat and it makes you feel confident. i hope you get to tell people your name and i hope they tell you how cool it is i hope you get to rest i hope you watch a movie and fall over laughing. i hope you rejoice in living because you deserve to be alive and you deserve to have a joyous life

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[fleshengine]

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

We gotta fix that.

[dancinbutterfly]

Progress.

Onwards!

[onthedriftinthetardis]

I can't access the full paper, but their conclusion is right there in the abstract:

While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.

[parakeet]

just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out

[parakeet]

EMERGENCY - ITS AUTO ENABLED!

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list

[parakeet]

so for some reason this feature was actually announced on the tumblr engineering blog. interesting choice not to reblog it to the staff or tumblr blog, esp considering they asked for user input on how to implement it, but i suppose considering the response to the last update maybe the replies would be too overwhelming...

so couple of clarifications. comments are disabled as default for primary blogs that have their likes disabled. they are seemingly enabled for all other blogs that have replied to posts

posts you comment on may show on your followers 'for you' page if you leave your replies publically available. they may, in the future, show in on your followers dashboard if your follower goes to their dash settings and enables this. apparently, if your likes are enabled, your followers can already see those on the dash if they've gone into preferences and selected to do so, which I was unaware of, and that seems to be disabled at default, but it's possible i disabled it previously and forgot about it ig