Sigh In A Storm

I'm having a lot of trouble, right now, living up to the promise of my blog.

[miamaimania]

“Charlie” ⦿ Lola Dupre — mixed-media collage

[sighinastorm]

so shaped

[roswellsoup]

little abstract animation i did to a music clip for my class!!

[cicero-not-cisero]

As a chronic "good heavens" sayer, and as a casual rhyme enjoyer, it's been really hard not to pepper in the phrase "good heavens six sevens" into my vocabulary. It would be so much fun to say, but it would immediately alienate both young hip people and old antiquated people and really only be enjoyed by whimsically autistic transgender women, so yeah :/

[sighinastorm]

I'LL DO IT.

[afurioushawk]

[rokkazu]

does anyone else feel me. can anyone hear me in here.

[rokkazu]

do you see the issue now

[sighinastorm]

[sighinastorm]

Hey, about mamdani, I think its a bit disingenuous to discount the amount he's done in the half year he's been a mayor in an attempt to insist that people who support him lack critical thinking and are inherently antisemitic. I think its completely fair to criticize him, but the free daycare & balancing the budget without cutting any public services is more than any politician I can remember has done, and those are just the first two that come to mind, so it really feels like a straw man to insinuate that theres no reason to like him outside of his social media presence - especially considering that a lot of the democratic party seems to exist to convince people that things like free childcare are impossible even in places that produce wealth. I really don't mean this from any negative place and youre still allowed to disagree of course, but this framing device of "everyone who likes him has thrown critical thinking to the wayside" only serves as a thought terminating cliche to make sure you never ask yourself how he got so popular despite the powers he was going up against.

.

[nemfrog]

“The moon partially eclipsed.” A Study of the Sky. 1906. Frontispiece, detail.

[animalphotorefs]

New Species: Striped Hyenas!

I don't have a ton of photos of this species: this sweet old man was the only one anywhere near me. He's since passed, so I wanted to get photos of him online. All he wanted to do the times I saw him was relax in the sun, so that's how we'll remember him.

The Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project and funded entirely by donations. Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use all photos in the repository as references.

**Patreon** -- **Ko-Fi**

[frothlad]

I love him!

North American zoos seem to prioritize spotted hyena conservation over the other species (which makes sense given SSPs and zoos' limited resources), and spotted hyena are great, but I'd love to see the full variety.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I think there’s also a sourcing issue. I don’t know of anywhere in the US breeding non-spotted hyaenids, which means you have to import, and that’s expensive and tedious.

I know we’re completely out of aardwolves in the US and I think there’s only a couple places that have striped hyenas left. The two facilities I knew of who had them, including this guy, have both passed. EDIT: I have been reminded that there are a couple of aardwolves, Nashville was raising a couple babies although I don’t know where they are now.

One of the reasons I’m really looking forward to being able to take donated photos in the future (we’re still working towards it!) is to be able to represent lesser-known species from all around the world.

[six-improbable-things]

Per social media, Cincinnati Zoo reported that their aardwolf, a female named Chipo, passed away a couple months ago, and in the announcement post on social media they claimed she was "the last aardwolf at an AZA institution".

So I'm not sure what happened to Nashville's pups, but as of ~May 2026, AZA zoos are apparently aardwolf-free.

(It's possible Cinci's claim was incorrect! I'm just passing along what they posted publicly on social media, and I know a lot of zoos are very strict about not spreading misinformation due to their positions as educational institutions. But that doesn't mean things don't ever slip through the cracks.)

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Aaaah, that’s what I remembered. There’s two places I can find with them right now, both not AZA, and it looks like they’re starting to try to spin up an aardwolf breeding program through ZAA.

A whole bunch of the AZA SSP’s got downgraded or just removed a few years ago (guess what they didn’t bother to message about lol) so the existing SSP’s are getting a lot more strict, but it also means that facilities have more room to start their own consortium programs if there’s interest.

[six-improbable-things]

Between the SSP changes and also listing a good number of species as "phase-outs", I'll be curious to see what changes there are in what animals are represented in AZA institutions in the next 5-10 years.

(Not to mention other things like species that just don't breed well and have declining populations, like polar bears.)

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I have a lot of very loud feelings about the SSP changes. I’ve been meaning to write something up about it for ages. I hope everyone likes seeing the same 100 species at every AZA zoo in the country… also the fact that conservation as a criteria was removed from the SSP structure. That’s all SAFE now, formally. GRUMP.

[nemfrog]

“Stress in small particles.” Encyclopedia of X-rays and gamma rays. 1963. 

Internet Archive

[roswellsoup]

bonus/proof:

we tipped her well dw. best waitress ever 🍒

[bi-kingdavid]

Seriously stop calling people born to Jews from Poland “Polish” because they aren’t. Same goes for Jews from Germany or Russia or Ukraine or Bulgaria or England or literally anywhere in Europe. We were discriminated against and slaughtered over and over and over again for NOT being Polish et al. Things like the Venetian Ghetto and the Pale of Settlement weren’t established because Jews were viewed as European or “just like everybody else.”

I was once told not to refer to myself as Polish because I am a Jew by someone I had met literally 15 minutes earlier. That was the moment I stopped telling people where my family LIVED, and just started saying I’m Jewish.

I understand most people think it’s uncool to be Jewish these days and want to whitewash us to pretend we are fundamentally European, but we aren’t. We were never viewed as European within Europe, ever. Ashkenazi Jews only are called Polish etc. now because it serves a political purpose. You don't get to rewrite our history just so you can feel better when you talk over us and dismiss our lived experiences.

[weemietime]

This is the same shit as people now trying to call Mizrahi Jews "Arab" in the Middle East because suddenly the fact that most Israelis are not Ashkenazim is "politically inconvenient" for the narrative that they're all European colonizers.

So they have to pivot to "well they're not indigenous Levantine either, they were always 'Arab Jews'!" (While at the same time, turning around to declare that Arabs are indigenous to Israel when they're Palestinian - but somehow not those "Arab Jews." Lol.)

Every single part of this rhetoric is inherently logically inconsistent and if it becomes politically inconvenient in one way, they will magically pivot to the thing they just claimed also wasn't true five minutes ago.

As though almost every single Arab country has not violently ethnically cleansed and/or murdered its Jewish population requiring them to go to Israel in the first place lol. Iraqi Jews weren't Arab enough when the Farhud happened but suddenly overnight they're magically Arabs again when it's inconvenient for the narrative that they still aren't European and you can't make them appear like they are.

It's all designed to deny Jewish indigeneity to Israel, they will do anything possible not to admit that Jews are from Israel. "Rootless cosmopolitan" for when Jews in Poland aren't European enough not to be murdered in pogroms but suddenly "Polish Jews" when the alternative is OK then, I'm indigenous Levantine from Israel.

No, no, not like that! You're nothing! Get it right! It is all intended to say that Jews have no home and no place to belong and the ultimate goal of that rhetoric is to create the permission structure which results in our murder and genocide of the Jewish people. (And no, this is not hyperbolic, since it literally happened in living history.)

And when you ask these people to name one (1) country that Jews are indigenous to (as every human being is indigenous to somewhere) that has not attempted to murder or violently expel them, they condescendingly reply "hey, hey, I ain't reading all that girliepoppppp!" and block you.

Never ever forget that this is the basis of rootless cosmopolitan, the outcome of being from nowhere is literally existing nowhere.

[weemietime]

A Jew is 'white' or 'Arab' insomuch as this can be used to deny his connection to Israel when that is convenient politically.

But when the Jew becomes an inconvenient neighbor to live with, he is abruptly accused of "dual loyalty," stripped of the protections from the racial category he had been assigned 5 minutes earlier, and ejected from his home.

Now he is told to "go back" somewhere, but no one will admit where he is entitled to be from.

[omletlove]

Not so gentle reminder of the “fifth line:” the line on the USSR passport that indicated nationality. Jews from the Soviet Union/FSU countries (including Russia) could not have their country of birth listed on the fifth line, their nationality was listed as “Jewish.”

The only exception was that a child from a “mixed marriage,” I kid you not, that was the term, could choose which parent’s nationality to put in their own passport. Unsurprisingly, only approximately 5% chose to put down Jewish instead of whatever country they were in because if you had a “Jewish” passport, it severely limited your access to universities, certain jobs (government jobs in particular), and your ability to travel abroad (that one always baffled me- they clearly did not want the Jews there.. why not let us leave?).

The fifth line was introduced in 1932, and was not removed until the late 1990s- 1997 in Russia; I don’t have exact years for the other FSU countries, but we had to get new passports when we left Ukraine in late 1995 and ours still had it.. (I think they were just starting to be phased out around then or shortly after so that the 1996 passports didn’t have the line anymore).

So when people say that Jews/Israelis should go back to where they came from.. disrespectfully, I have no idea what they’re talking about.

[nonbinaryjudean]

crazy how the "all politicians are using rhetoric to persuade you and you cannot trust them 100% of the time" is just... gone. for the mayor of new york. why? because hes quirky and goofy and pushing 1930s type antisemitic propaganda?

[glasspalacesstoneshop]

I know I am still fairly green in political activism given but even still it’s crazy to spend time fighting to preserve abortion rights in your state and with politicians you find too pro-business and then realizing people you thought also wanted to throw themselves into the long dirty political fight for higher wages and racial equity actually don’t want to do political work and just wanted some hot guy to say their antisemitic political talking points and promise big things no matter how actually feasible they were

[midnightssea]

the “mediterranean diet” according to every Italian I’ve met:

- sweet pastry for breakfast

- snack around 11-12 (also sweet most likely)

- quick, casual lunch (like a panino) in the mid to late afternoon

- multi-course feast circa 9 PM

- approximately 3 to 8 espresso shots spread throughout the day

-cigarette(s) (optional)

[wyf-of-bathe]

We won, if anyone was wondering.

I was planning to post some sources with actual data on the other post but I'm thinking it'll need more effort dedicated to it than I care to give it atm. What the hell guys.

[sighinastorm]

Oh, nifty... won what?

[tinyuglyworld]

Romanisæl woman from Norway smoking a pipe, 2014

[ninanation]

Come to think of it, it really is insane that my entire country is burning alive and literally no one in the rest of the world cares. Thousands of Indians are dying every day from the heat, it's 45+ degrees in multiple areas, the government couldn't give two fucks, we're getting severe warnings and red alerts, and not a soul outside of South Asia is speaking about it because why would you ever care about brown people

[ninanation]

please keep talking about how Becky from Maryland doesn't like the rising gas prices. It's clearly the more pressing issue.

[metalgrrrl]

underrated pose refs I found on pinterest

there will be more, i have a folder of them