Mostly Void, Partially Tau

• Tau • • xe/xir \\ they •

[devinellekurtz]

My very first tiger drawing and my latest

[formaldehydedoesstuff]

Your skill level is unquestionable but listen.

I love him.

[toasthaste-art]

me also. as well.

[devinellekurtz]

This is the COOLEST thing I’ve seen in AGES. You both completely made my entire week.

[blondebrainpowered]

Cat paw prints in the medieval floor tiles of the 12th century CE St Peter Church in Wormleighton, England

[parakeet]

just found out about this cute little birdy and i am in love

[crowcryptid]

[awheckery]

from the above-linked ebird.org:

Anis are bizarre, coal-black cuckoos with long floppy tails and unique, curiously tall, flattened bills. Groove-billed occurs in a variety of open and semi-open habitats in tropical lowlands and foothills, typically staying low in shrubs and grasses. Gregarious and not particularly graceful; usually seen crashing around awkwardly in small groups.

oh my god

[roach-works]

groove billed anis are a hilarious cuckoo situation where they ended up laying their eggs in one another’s nests instead of anyone else’s. they hang out together in groups of up to five pairs until a nest gets built (sometimes by committee, sometimes they just hang around hopefully until someone does it all on their own) then they start sneaking over and laying an egg in at a time. the females who lay for the first time will sometimes flip prior eggs out of the nest like ‘oh i KNOW this one isn’t mine! away it goes’ but eventually everyone’s laid a couple eggs in there and is stuck with the mutual hostage situation. then they take turns incubating until all the kids hatch and everyone pitches in on feeding them, because no one knows which of the kids are theirs so they all might as well.

they also like to do a team handshake where they clump up and mutually make a low bubbling noise together, to signal group affiliation. go team!

[keeskiwi]

Also their eggs are incredibly beautiful. They’re a very pretty blue color, but covered by a white chalky outer layer that is easily scratched off, so they end up in various stages of in-between.

(Photo © Henrique_Anizio, shared under CC BY-NC).

[wearesorcerer]

Hyperthetical

You can tell someone/people in the past -- say turn of the millennium-ish to like pre-COVID -- about everything that's going on, possibly allowing them to change things for the better to prevent whatever problem(s) you're worried about. You can even show them documentation -- videos, pictures, screenshots, articles, whatever -- and have like 10 gigs of that stuff you can take with you. You are aware of the discourse going on right now that no one would believe this shit because it's too strange for even fiction.

Do you still take the documentation with you back in time?

Yes, it is my moral obligation.

Yes, because the chance that it works is worth the chance it doesn't.

Yes, I have other reasons.

No, it's pointless: no one would believe me.

No, there's no way they could prevent what's happening.

No, it would allow other people to stymie my efforts, maybe making things worse.

No, there are other things I'd rather take with me.

No, I don't think it's my responsibility.

No, I'd rather observe things to see how things unfolded on their own.

Voting ended onMay 23

[helenasurvives]

i am asked about my favorite color.

i am seven

and my reply is

pink

because i am a girl

and pink

is a princess color.

i am asked about my favorite color.

i am ten

and i like

green

because a boy told me that pink

is lame and girly.

i am asked about my favorite color.

i am thirteen

and i tell them

purple

it is unique and spunky

like i want to be.

i am asked about my favorite color.

i am seventeen

and i just say

red

i do not say

it is bright and angry at the world

as i am

i cannot form the words to express

all of my frustrations

so i paint my lips with

rage.

i am asked about my favorite color.

i am twenty

and it’s pink

i remember the joy

of being a child

i reclaim the freedom

of femininity

because i cannot remember

what my shoulders felt like

before the depression

hung from them.

i am asked about my favorite color.

i am twenty-six

and my answer is

brown

it confuses most people

they don’t see it

they may think of dirt

and dust

and dead things

but it is coffee with friends

and the chocolate chip cookies

my mom used to make.

it is my hair

and my eyes

amber and gold

in the sun

and i love myself

again

[taunomorph]

I am asked about my favourite color.

I am maybe 4?

I have never thought about it before.

After a bit of thinking, I decide on blue.

Blue like the endless sky,

and more importantly like the sea, hiding secrets and immeasurable depths, shimmering in all shades between green and purple here and there.

My mum is surprised.

Almost taken aback.

Blue? She asks. Really?

That's such a cold color.

She does not say anything is wrong with my choice (she doesn't have to)

She does not say that blue is a boys' color (she doesn't have to)(and besides, that is not what she means, she is a feminist and does not care about that)(but she is surprised)

So what is your favourite color then? I ask.

Red, she says.

I try liking red for a bit, but it wears off quickly.

I try liking green and yellow and purple and orange and it also doesn’t stick.

I almost feel like my favourite color is a secret. It's okay to like blue, but better not like it too much. Or I will have to explain myself. Or they might suspect ...something. I don't even know what.

When asked for my favourite color, I often play indecisive - after all, it does depend on circumstance and mood.

It's okay to like any color, I know that. It doesn't mean anything, I know that.

When we play board games, I usually get to choose the color first.

Don't choose blue, I think.

They will ask you why, I think.

I have to choose something neutral and unquestioned, I think.

I am not sure if green is warm enough to pass muster, being so close to blue. Purple is too obviously a mix of blue and red.

I choose yellow.

A sunny, warm and happy color. I don't really care for it much, but it does contrast with blue nicely.

My mum always chooses red and my dad takes blue. This makes sense.

When dad likes blue things, nobody asks him why he likes such a cold color.

I think it's unfair that boys get blue and girls get stuck with pink, of all things. Pink feels overbearing, cutesy, tooth-rottingly sweet, false.

(Pink doesn't deserve this, the things that are colored pink for children do)(nobody ever tries to force pink on me, thankfully)

I am 14 and I am asked for my favourite color.

Blue, I say.

My mum overhears this.

Really? She asks. But blue is such a cold color.

I think it looks nice, I say. Like the sky and the sea.

There is no further questioning. (yeah it's that simple. Nobody was asking me to write a thesis on the superiority of my favourite colour, including correctly cited sources and solid logical reasoning on why my choice is Correct and what it says about me. Go figure.)

I still choose the yellow piece in boardgames. Sometimes also green or purple. Never blue, because that feels like it would mean ...something. Never red because no thanks I Would Prefer Not To.

I am 16 and I start specifying my answer more exactly. Not just blue: greenish-blue, turquoise, teal. Not all shades of blue are made equally.

I choose the blue boardgame piece and wonder why I didn't do so earlier.

Nobody questions my preferences. Nobody suspects it of meaning anything.

[jnacho]

[notyourplayground]

i promise: however big you think this wave will be, it is bigger

[uinuvien]

That wasn’t a joke. I aimed my estimate high and then added some.

The wave was bigger.

[fozmeadows]

I like to imagine that, thousands of years ago, humans still stood a (reasonably) safe distance from the ocean during weather like this to watch the waves, hooting and cheering when the spray came closer than expected and left them drenched

[pmamtraveller]

The Great Mosque of Samarra during fog, Samarra, Iraq

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[json-derulo]

I have a wild idea. what if we supported our claims of fact by linking to a reliable source. better yet, what if we went hogwild and just straight up linked to the actual unpaywalled study

[maisiewilliams]

10 Female Written Short Stories Everyone Should Read

I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!

1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout. 

2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.

3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms. 

4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway. 

5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs. 

6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race. 

7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past. 

8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose. 

9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas. 

10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.

[astrangewoman]

I LOVE THIS POST!!

I’d like to add:

11. Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor

12. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (this one is my favorite short story of all time)

13. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

14. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

15. Désirée’s Baby by Kate Chopin

16. The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

17. Impressions of an Indian Childhood by Zitkala-Ša

(I wanted to put little summaries for each of them, but I’m afraid I’d spoil the whole story if I did!)

[ellydash]

adding a few more! all by women of color, & the first four were published within the last few years

18. “My Dear You,” Rachel Khong — love, loss, & absurdity in the afterlife

19. “The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado — a feminist retelling of the folklore story “The Green Ribbon”

20. “Inventory,” Carmen Maria Machado — one woman’s retrospective list of her life’s sexual encounters

21. “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Danielle Evans — what happens after a white college student poses for a photo in a Confederate flag bikini

22. “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” ZZ Packer — a Black woman attends Yale University

[izzychao]

oh i have some of these too! many are science-fiction or science-fantasy, because the woman in those genres are severely under-represented ! The first two authors are slightly older, but their works are so important in the development of the roles of women in scifi as a genre so!

23. “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” and “Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin — The first is a study of philosophical questions similar to the trolley problem, told in very loose form. The second is a science-fantasy story about two women navigating love and sexuality in their society’s polyamorous marriage rituals. But honestly you should read all of Le Guin’s short stories and novels, she’s amazing.

24. “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler — One of my all-time FAVORITE short stories, about a future where humans live alongside large insect-like aliens, and serve as hosts for their eggs and larval young. It’s gruesome, gory, unsettling, and honestly pretty horrific but it’s really wonderful–if you can handle horror in your stories I highly recommended it. Butler’s novels are also wonderful, please check them out if you can (not all of them are this unsettling)

25. “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan — A trans allegory in which future humans go through surgery to become invertebrate sea creatures (cephalopods and arthropods mostly) in order to better work in space. Wonderfully weird in so many ways.

26. “From the Lost Diary of Treefrog7” and “The Palm Tree Bandit” by Nnedi Okorafor — Lost Diary is a story about a woman and her husband exploring an alien jungle told through research log-style journal entries. Very much survival horror scifi. Palm Tree Bandit is told as a mother reciting a story to her daughter as she braids her hair, about her great-grandmother who started a kind of small revolution for women in Nigeria. Nnedi’s novels and other short stories, as well as her works within the comics industry, are all fantastic, so look into her more if you can!!!

[literaryformofthelastcentury]

I haven’t seen it yet on this post so I want to add probably my all-time favorite short story!

27. “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison — implicit racial biases analyzed through two girls’ stories as they grow up. Every paragraph is a new perspective on race and prejudice and it really makes you think.

[athenadark]

28. “Wolfland” by Tanith Lee - a girl is summoned to her grandmother’s house in the woods. An investigation of female rage and why it’s necessary

[mousidy]

we're abolishing gender! in the future people will just be referred to as AMAB or AFAB, no need for gender at all! 😀

[mousidy]

this is a progressive stance, you see, because AMAB and AFAB are different words from "man" and "woman." we're leaving such outdated concepts behind!

[mousidy]

no no no it's not "misgendering you." it doesn't refer to your gender, it refers to the sex you were assigned. that way we don't need gender anymore! you can just throw that old thing away

[mousidy]

now there's only two categories: AMABS and AFABS! so much simpler! what? no I didn't say there's only two genders. these aren't genders they're categories. this is progress we're making progress

[mousidy]

you want to change your assignment? because of what, your gender? no you don't need one of those, I said to get rid of it

[mousidy]

you know this started satirical but this is the logical endpoint of what so much of the "queer" community has already been doing. erasing transness by increasingly focusing instead on assigned sex at birth, something that truly cannot, by its definition, change. we're already doing the right's jobs for them, but if they realize this about agab language and adopt it too... trans people are really well and truly fucked, you know

[snowkissedmonsters]

Also on age verification: I have been on this website since 2011. Unless you think I started blogging at age 2, you KNOW I'm an adult.

[dreamerinsilico]

#the fact that 'can prove access to an online account at least 12 years old' or even 'account to be verified is itself fully 18 years old'#AREN'T accepted methods of age verification is such a telling sign of what the real purpose of age-gating laws is:#data harvesting and deanonymization and the buildout of state-controllable ways to restrict both content and internet access itself en masse (via @shinelikethunder )

⬆️

[catchymemes]

[doberbutts]

“trans men don’t experience misogyny because they’re men thus cannot experience women’s oppression”

I hate to tell you this but even cis men experience misogyny if they step a toe over the line of what our incredibly sexist society sees as “proper” for a man. You really don’t think that a man with interests or expression the world sees as “female” aren’t treated with violence?

[doberbutts]

“would you say that of other privileged groups? do you think white people experience racism?”

I mean sometimes they do yeah. I know a white guy with monolid eyes and zero known Asian ancestors and he absolutely experiences anti-Asian racism on a fairly regular basis because people think he’s mixed Asian/white. I know a woman who was told throughout her life that she was Native as an adoptee with no known history or background who experienced incredibly violent amounts of anti-Native racism until she discovered as an adult through DNA test that she is 100% white. I know white people who tan incredibly dark in the summer comparatively that are constantly accused of being mixed race and experiencing racism due to that, usually anti-Mexican racism perpetrated against white people with Greek or Italian ancestors.

Their ability to make it stop by saying “hey, I’m white actually” only goes as far as the person enacting violence on them is willing to believe them. They still have to live with the trauma and physical scars from the altercations. We live in a racist world and thus there will be violent people who force all others to pass a whiteness test and eliminating or harming the rest.

[doberbutts]

Got an ask that I just block/deleted but it was basically “so you think cis people experience transphobia!?!?!?!?” and uh

If you think cis butches don’t experience both transphobia and misogyny and homophobia for daring to be women who break gender roles while still holding onto their womanhood you’ve sorely misunderstood just how bad butches have it in this world sorry. If you don’t think cis queens experience transphobia and homophobia and misogyny for daring to be men who break gender roles while being loud and proud about it and still holding onto their manhood then you’ve sorely mistaken just how bad they have it in this world as well.

Not to mention all of the cis men who wear dresses and skirts and makeup and nail polish and heels simply because they like them who experience all of these things. All of the cis straight women who simply just exist but something about them doesn’t pass society’s “woman enough” test, leading to them being caught in bathroom bills and sporting rules and being attacked by people who mistake them for being transgender or gay.

Just like how straight people experience homophobia to such a degree that they literally beat their children out of any potential deviance from rigidly upheld gender roles and let politicians make jokes on national TV about how they’d drown their pre-teen kids if they came out as LGBT. Do you really think a straight kid still figuring themselves out hears that and doesn’t internalize that homophobia? Doesn’t rigidly hold themselves to some impossible standard so that no one could ever possibly think they’re gay? You don’t think straight teenage boys who maybe don’t pass some bully’s straightness test are getting the shit kicked out of them for “being gay” when, surprise, they aren’t? You don’t think all those kids being attacked by their priests and coaches and teachers are being told “this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay” when they’re literally not gay? Do you know how many straight kids had close calls at my school that famously expels all gay kids, because someone made up a believable enough rumor? Do you know how many of them still got their shit kicked in even though administration ultimately decided to let them stay?

All bigotry is violent and all bigotry catches people it doesn’t “intend” to and hurts them as well. It doesn’t matter what someone’s label is, or if they even have one. It matters if the person enacting the violence is doing it because their victim didn’t pass whatever “acceptable enough” test they didn’t know they were being subjected to.

Everyone is at risk. Oppression doesn’t care what your label is. Some people are more visible targets than others, and as a result those people are the more common targets. That doesn’t mean no one else experiences it.

[doberbutts]

My first post to reach 2k without people clowning in the notes I feel so proud

[sophie-baybey]

[sionskaia]

All Morrowind's stained glasses in one pack

[swamp-spirit]

My dog's really a study in Buddhism. He can see my muffin wrapper and he's miserable. Crying. He needs to eat my muffin wrapper so bad.

I get up and throw it away. He forgets about it immediately and happily goes to sleep.

You are not sad because you do not have a muffin wrapper, my beautiful boy, you are sad because you want the muffin wrapper.

[irreparableinnocence]

I always refer to one of my cats as my Lacanian kitty. She will meow incredibly insistently for something, and once it is given to her, she will look at it briefly, decide she dgaf, and continue to demand something. Nothing existing could ever satisfy her desire because it is a metonymic manifestation of a lack that is inherent to the structure of her being, she is not asking for my sandwich, she is asking for something else via sandwich, and once proven that the sandwich isn't that something else she will desire another thing in the same vain hope.

[this-is-trans-joy]

I’m trying to look for synonyms of sneer and i’m fucking dying

yeah that looks normal… yeah these are all— um. hold on. hang on.

what

[the-ravens-king]

[proteidaes]

Moon joy 🚀🌕