Prone to random bouts of Enthusiasm @ramblebrambleamble - Tumblr Blog

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

— Beyond Words, by Carl Safina

#interesting

orteil42

given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that

theslaybymic

Don’t overlook paternity leave because it’s a hugely important feminist issue

Celebrating fatherhood with official paternity leave policies challenges traditional gender roles and empowers parents in the workplace. It’s one of those rare issues where men’s rights activists and feminists can find common ground with a mutually beneficial cause. It even has an impact on LGBTQ equality.

Follow @this-is-life-actually

dailymanners

I’ve reblogged a lot of posts today about why paid paternity leave (or just in general all parents regardless of gender being entitled to the same amount of paid parental leave) is such an important social issue, and these posts have made a lot of great points about why gender equality in parental leave is such a massively important issue for equality, such as:

- It’s important for LGBT+ parents who don’t fit the cis-hetero mold of one mother and one father.

- It’s an important feminist issue for reducing the second shift: when only one parent gets adequate parental leave, it’s only natural for a pattern to develop that the only parent who got adequate parental leave takes on the lion’s share of childcare. However, if both parents get adequate parental leave, then it’s more likely for a pattern to develop of sharing childcare duties. This is obviously massively important for reducing how much women’s careers are affected by having children.

- If the mother has post-partum health issues (anything from recovering from a C-section or other physical traumas, to post-partum depression and/or anxiety) it’s incredibly unfair to expect her partner to just go back to work immediately instead of allowing her partner to stay home and help with childcare duties. When someone is recovering from having a baby, it can be really important for their partner to stay home to help care for them and the baby.

However, one important point I haven’t seen brought up in why equal paid parental is so important for social equality is how important it is for reducing hiring discrimination.

By that I mean, when a country has *only* guaranteed maternity leave, but either no paternity leave (or really short paternity leave of a few weeks like the U.K. has), this is only going to raise the risk of hiring discrimination against women.

So if a company is choosing between two candidates for a position: one is a young woman and the other is a young man, if the country this company is in has a maternity leave policy of several months or more, but paternity leave is either just a few weeks (or completely non-existent), the company will look at the woman as riskier and less reliable to hire than the man.

So equal paid parental leave leads to more equality in the job market, because it means companies are less likely to see women as riskier and less reliable to hire. If everyone, not just women, has the same length of parental leave, everyone runs the same risk of needing to go on leave for the same amount of time.

There’s no reason not to demand that all parents regardless of gender receive equal paid parental leave. All parents and all children benefit from it.

reeddraws

Happy Pride! The world is always brighter with more color. Daily drawing 2438.

blxnc

there’s this term i coined in my friendgroup i call “the charizard effect” and it can apply to anything and everything, but it was born from me explaining my feelings about the pokemon charizard. the term is basically about how overexposure to something be it by corporate shilling or fandom prominence drives me away from really enjoying something bc i’m exposed to it so much against my will i become tired of it. it came to me bc i was ranting about how tpci does not, and cannot stop reinventing charizard, and how it is popular and obtusely included in almost every region, merch, etc in every way possible and it’s highly commodified.

i dont dislike the pokemon charizard, in fact i really like its X form, but i am exposed to so much charizard in my pokemon consumption that i cant be bothered to care for it in any more than in passing. this applies to a bunch of other stuff i’d otherwise be ok with, but i always just call this aversion phenomena “the charizard effect”

blxnc

making this term has done numbers for me being able to concisely express how i feel abt something. like. its not charizard’s fault i feel this way, im sure i’d feel normal abt it if it was stripped of all this over commodification, but i cannot. hence the name

mysterycat-official

I lowkey hate when programs talk to me in a friendly way. "don't worry, nearly there!" Shut up. It should say "loading 64.3% completed. Do not turn off device" and absolutely nothing else. You arent my friend you are computer. Act like it

insertsomthinawesome

I have too many thoughts about Sunday's bird.

This was one of my first thoughts after finishing 4.0 akldjLJSLG Now that Sunday is more secured as part of our group he needs to be affectionately bullied more <3

[No Romance Included]

#honkai star rail

ramblebrambleamble

A world that is spinning;

A soul without a spark;

A lover that has left you

Lonely in the dark.

#throwback thursday

winding-maze

"Blackbird" - personal work, inspired by my hometown. Blackbirds are my favourite - they sing so beautifully.

mixelation

thoughts on tori's relationship with authority (mostly reborn au)

so i think tori comes out plasticity with the idea that rules and authority are simply barriers for her to strategize around and if she gets it wrong, she dies! and then she's reincarnated and grows up in oto and this just reinforces it

i was rotating her relationship with orochimaru last night a bit, and i think she does crave his attention and approval, mostly because he is VERY good at pretending to give it and she has basically nothing in terms of positive interactions Tori felt her throat clench with a burgeoning sob, and she turned on the faucet and splashed water in her face. It would be absolutely stupid to cry over this. She knew what Orochimaru was like, after all. Withdrawing his approval had nothing to do with him liking her or not and everything to do with controlling her. His affections are conditional, Tori reminded herself, glaring at her reflection. Water was trapped in her eyelashes. And so your affection must be too.

(and i think in reborn au, orochimaru actually does like a her quite a bit as a mentee he has during his "prove everyone i can be a kage" era, and she likes that she can use that against him.)

so tori is good at playing along but she does sincerely believe that one fuck up means horrific things could happen to her. she does not believe, trust or respect authority by itself and she is the queen of malicious compliance. she will follow orders if the reason for them is apparent or if you give an explanation she thinks is reasonable, and if you do not, she will ignore it. in the worst case scenario, you give one too many commands she doesn't like and she decides to engineer a series of events where your entire control over the situation is ripped away from you and you don't even know how.

so i think there's a good chunk of people who work with tori and think she's completely ordinary and nice. these are lab/mission leaders/whatever that are just doing their job and aren't doing anything that raises tori's hackles. there's occasional complaints from people who think tori is mouthy and full of herself for questioning them. there's a few people she's completely fucked over and they haven't even connected the dots between their own demise and her. and then there's people who think she is an absolute nightmare to work with. these are people who she's either decided she straight up does not respect and will not follow their orders unless they can defend them, or they're otherwise normal people in shit-hit-the-fan situations where tori decided the best thing to do was abc even if they demanded xyz.

(some people do in fact like this about tori. is your CO being a dick to you for no reason? tori will fix it for you. your boss's new research project is doomed to fail? tori is already standing up to explain why they're a fucking idiot)

kushina gains tori's respect by being the singular authority figure tori trusts to actually have her back. but the difference between "sensei" and "boss" is that kushina also sees it as her job to explain to tori why calls she doesn't like have to be made. and, again, tori is much more likely to accept a decision when she's given a reason that makes sense to her. she doesn't always agree with kushina and they do butt heads occasionally, but kushina sees herself more as a guide than a "my way or the highway!!!" figure, and also tori trusts her to have tori's best interests in mind

i'm working on making a cast of OCs in R&D where several are people who've been put in charge of tori and despise her. there was like 6 month gap between orochimaru fucking off (when it was announced minato was to be hokage) and minato actually getting the hat, and in that time R&D was fucking gutted and the people left behind didn't necessarily have the credentials to be leading research, but also they were good rule-following yes men and eight years later, are now the people in high level positions. just a lot of bloated, undeserved egos. this is the situation where i think tori really shines as "coworker you want in the room to verbally eviscerate your boss" and also there's several high level people who wish she would die on a mission already. tori is aware of this and it is not helping with her issues with authority. also, as she gets older, people are less and less likely to brush it off

in theory, R&D people report up a chain of command and then the head of R&D reports directly to minato. sometimes he talks to lower level people but that's about the same level as "let this rando chunin team have face time because i'm free rn and people behave better if they feel seen by their cool boss." but tori.... the higher ups in R&D complain about tori SO MUCH

and then...... a situation occurs where minato feels he needs to really assert his authority and demote her. and tori absolutely does not interpret this as "you've fucked around and now you've found out." she interprets this as "affections are conditional"

the good news is tori probably gets over the suspicion that konoha will kill her at some point. that one's less about trusting minato/konoha and more about trusting minato's adoration for kushina

the bad news is i think i set the timeline up for she gets demoted BEFORE the cave incident. also it might coincide with her discovering itachi has been secretly dating her without telling her, which is like. in hindsight that seems like an extremely itachi thing to do, but also she had some insane feelings about it at the time even if she's mellowed out about it.* so she's just like. at an all time emotional low since arriving in konoha

*it's okay with time it turns out that dating your friend who understands your specific brand of insane is actually very comfortable and nice

but post cave incident, minato takes her on as a temporary student to learn hiraishin so i think. finally. maybe. she kind of trusts the hokage? but also unfortunately she's been going to book club with him so she sees him as someone she should be allowed to just mouth off to

anyway, i was thinking about the inevitable "they both want to use edo tensei on tobirama at the time" moment. maybe she DOESN'T disobey his orders

tori: i am here to tell you i successfully resisted your direct orders not to raise the dead

minato: g-good? and is there a reason you're clutching a scroll

tori: i resisted temptation but not before i made the jutsu

minato:

tori:

minato: (sigh) do you want to raise the dead

tori: YES PLEASE

and then he already had a guy lined up to sacrifice because he was also planning to do this u_u

mixelation

the itatori angle here is that i think itachi has the opposite struggle where he WANTS someone with a special hat making all his decisions. he has grown and accepted that this is a flawed way to go through life and it has, in fact, screwed him and his loved ones over in many ways, but deep down inside and despite being the biggest smack-talker on earth, he has a hard time refusing authority. but that's okay because tori and deidara will do it for him <3

itachi: i do sleep easier at night knowing that, if it were necessary, tori would pre-empt the hokage's sudden betrayal of my trust and then come up with a way for us to dispose of him, and if i objected she and deidara would make it happen behind my back for my own good

shisui: itachi you have got to work on your dinner conversation

#naruto