a hot cup of bears @smallestbear - Tumblr Blog

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Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do

setulose

I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you

shamebats

mugwomps

He is absolutely copying you, and cuddling, and doing the slow close of eyes that is a cat kiss! #this is one very happy cat #i hope the two of you have many years of harmony and happiness

cricketcat9

Perfect harmony

tpwrtrmnky

Ok but when you say "restorative justice" do you mean "hegemonic power structures need to provide ways for people who've done bad things to reintegrate into society" or do you mean "you, personally, someone with no hegemonic power whatsoever, need to keep forgiving people who've hurt you forever" because those are like. Pretty different.

tpwrtrmnky

Do you mean community as in "broad coalition of people united by some shared material interests" or do you mean "Discord server"

sailorcuba

the purest form of serotonin is when a cat looks at u and u go like “what?” and it meows at u

arborealgargoyle

like, that is a very unspecific response I still have no idea what you want but I applaud how adorably you meowed all the same, well done

arborealgargoyle

This post led me to reminisce on the nature of cat’s meowing, and I have a funny story

I befriended a feral cat once who had spent her life in the forest without human interaction. I was worried about her because she had a paw damaged from an old injury and was emaciated but obviously nursing kittens that were hidden away somewhere. It took me weeks of putting out food and sitting across the yard every evening for her to trust me even a little and when she decided we were friends and she expected dinner every night she started coming to my door and trying to call for me in the evening, but she didn’t meow. Why would she? Cats only meow naturally as kittens when their vocal chords/ears aren’t fully developed, adult cats communicate with vocalizations that aren’t audible to humans. She probably tried making noises I couldn’t hear to call me but ended up sticking to the one I always responded to- a horrible yowling growl that she had made at me when we first encountered each other in the forest. Except once we were friends she would make this noise while purring and rubbing affectionately against a nearby tree or the porch railing (because she didn’t want to touch me yet). This understandably freaked my family members out but I was touched that she had taken the time to find a way to basically yell FUCK OFF in an affectionate way.

Fast forward to when she finally trusts me enough to bring her hidden kittens out of the forest to me, long story short I gained their trust and put them in this big pen, that I had previously used to keep chickens in, so they’d be safe and to keep her from having another litter. Except she was already secretly pregnant again! (Fix your pets, guys, they make SO many babies) and ended up having her new babies in this pen. I kept my distance, sitting on the outside once they were born until she seemed comfortable enough to let me come inside. The kittens were a bit wild, hissing viscously at me as soon as they opened their eyes, but they warmed up to me. There were four of them and soon they all wanted to be the center of attention during the twice daily play sessions. I’d be playing with one and another would meow insistently behind me and I’d immediately answer them and give them love, teaching them that humans could be friends that answer their needs- making them adoptable once they were weaned. Mama cat (Artie) would just watch me play with them, and I guess she was doing some thinking because one day when they were about a month old I was playing with them and one meowed behind me. I was confused because I hadn’t realized there was a kitten behind me and when I turned, there wasn’t. The only cat there was Artie looking at me really intensely. I turned back around to the kittens and I heard the meow again, I turned back to Artie and responded in the way I always did with the kittens “yes baby?” And she meowed again in an exact imitation of her kittens! After that she would.not.shut.up. It was like she had cracked some kind of code, meowing for attention and snacks and just to say hi. Her two older kittens, the ones she’d had in the forest, had never meowed at me either but started to once they saw how I responded to their mom. and I find it endlessly fascinating because before that it had never occurred to me that cats only meow at humans because they were taught by other cats to keep meowing past kittenhood because that’s the best way to get a human’s attention.

Imagine befriending some weird giant with the wrong number of legs that you met in the forest who seems nice enough but doesn’t seem to be able to hear you, until your friend explains that all they can understand is fuck off! And I’m a baby give me love!

improbablecarny

people who don’t watch horror movies are SO confident that they know everything there is to know about the genre. like it’s okay to not know things. it’s okay if you don’t like friday the 13th or whatever. i promise you don’t need to make an ass out of yourself on the internet about it

improbablecarny

horror is an incredibly diverse genre, because there is potential horror in everything. it’s in nature, it’s in architecture and technology, it’s in human relationships, it’s in folklore, the past, the future, the mundane. there are horror movies from all over the world. it is straight up anti-intellectual to pretend that the handful of B slashers you’ve vaguely heard about comprise the totality of what horror has to offer. If you’re just not interested in horror, or if you dislike certain subgenres of horror, then that’s fine, you’re not obligated to like anything at all. but smugly announcing that you don’t like horror because you dislike a handful of VERY specific non-universal tropes is just as stupid as saying that you hate comedy because you don’t like adam sandler movies.

improbablecarny

this is what I mean by anti-intellectualism btw

babyfoxcollectionthings

zitasaurusrex

unrestrained summer fun

teddywesworl

ok i am indoors for a heat wave break with my gatorade and my air conditioning the ACTUAL PROBLEM with "cut everything that doesn't move the plot forward" is that it was never meant to be the actual advice. the actual advice is that everything in the story should serve a purpose, and that is a distinction that i think a lot of modern editors, let alone members of the modern audience, fail to grasp.

this IS one of the craft discussions that got me yelled at on fandom twt because of the exact same misunderstanding. there are MANY ways for a scene to serve a story that have nothing to do with driving a plot, because plot itself is only one element of story. anyone who has not yet developed an understanding of story beyond "fictional events, described in order" might hear "everything in the story should serve a purpose" and parse it as "cut everything that doesn't move the plot forward" but, at the risk of being a pretentious bitch, that's never what the serious people were saying. in lrb example of far from the madding crowd four pages of a guy standing in a freezing sheep field at midnight watching the stars sticks with op because it serves the story without driving the plot. and a lot of those old books are classics that we still study to this day because (among other reasons) it is worth taking the time to sit with those scenes and ask ourselves what their purpose is, what they're doing there, how they work.

op is still thinking about gabriel oak in that field. why?

natalieironside

I think the aversion in our society to coming up w/ utilitarian answers to ethical questions (my favorite hobby) has caused us to cede way too much ground to the assholes of the world in the vein of "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb," as Dark Helmet put it. Like.

Laypeople (and also a concerning number of scientists) have often got the idea that unethical human experimentation is some sort of ultra-effective super science that would fix all the disease and discover all of the medicine and we only don't do it because it isn't nice (see: every science fiction show ever). No! Jumping straight from abstract theory to human trials is a terrible way to do science. It produces incoherent results and useless observations and nonsensical conclusions. We have pages and pages of historical precedent demonstrating this.

And lots of people have got the idea that totalitarianism is some sort of magic super-government that does all the government stuff really effectively abd efficiently and we only don't do it because it isn't nice. No!!!! "Let's put one idiot in charge and do whatever dumb shit they say" is the worst way to organize any project at all, let alone an economy and a political machine. Fascist regimes are models of corruption, waste, and inefficiency.

And so on

itsabear

mengela discovered nothing. 731 discovered nothing. Residential school trials discovered nothing. Unethical medical trials are just cruelty by mediocre people. None of the doctors in these unethical trials were outstanding students or notable doctors. We dont need science fiction we just need history and honesty.

natalieironside

In addition to its being niceys, ethics is a form of rigor. Someone who disregards ethics is (1) Doing It Wrong and (2) just as likely to disregard any other forms of rigor they decide they don't like.

wizardshark

99% of queer discourse stops right before they define the true difference between bisexual and pansexual!

saspitite

FOR THE LAST FUCKING TIME

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

PANSEXUALS GROW FROM THE CEILING

elizapad

Happy Pride, cave dwellers 🦇

iiumz

mangonetics

Dogs serve as a kind of virtue eater for Americans to pour all of their kindness into without the risk of improving society or being nice to someone with any agency

cheaphalloweencostume

im so sick of unnecessary dinner scenes in movies 😡 every fucking movie they just want to titillate you with some food because they think you’re a dumb animal who just wants to see mashed potatoes bouncing. if its an IMPORTANT dinner scene where they explain lore then whatever i understand. but they shove useless meals into every movie these days and its disgusting

cheaphalloweencostume

really? you don’t say

sanguinifex

You gotta read and watch some old books and films that aren’t 100% modern politically correct. I’m not saying you should agree with everything in them but you need to learn where genres came from to understand what those genres are doing today and where media deconstructing old tropes is coming from.

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

Kill the censor in your head.

ashintheairlikesnow

When we choose to avoid history because it's Problematic or Says Bad Things, we are choosing to divorce ourselves from understanding how we came from that time to this one, which makes it even more likely for the cycle to repeat, with no one but a few people with shelves of old books aware that it's happened before.

swimmingblue

and this shit's important. Media from the past tells us how people from the past acted and thought and behaved.

Plus, a lot of these media pieces were socially acceptable and/or progressive for their time. For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while it contains a lot of words and ideas that are offensive now, was very progressive for its time. The book is a statement piece for how a young man who's grown up in a racist environment, with no words to explain himself other than racist and bigoted ones, decides that the whole system is shit and he's not going to follow those rules any more. So not reading or engaging with it because it uses the n-word a lot really misses the point.