Two Black Whiskers

Canuck | 100% Canadian Bacon | 90s Kid | The Cat's Name is Finch |

[twoblackwhiskers]

Fun Fact: American Robins can absolutely sing the Addams Family.

[legalizegay]

Must watch

[capacity]

This could save the world you know

[beboots]

[thebibliosphere]

Mark the electrician has been here for five minutes and he’s already said “well that’s…weird” twice from the other room and frankly I’m afraid to ask.

[thebibliosphere]

It’s not good when skilled tradesman are standing in the middle of your room pinching the bridge if their nose, is it?

[thebibliosphere]

Mark just referred to the wiring in our bedroom as “creative” and “interesting”.

This is fine.

[thebibliosphere]

And now he’s taking apart the ceiling. I’m not worried, are any of you worried? I’m not, haha, it’s not like this house was previously owned by someone who would do something stupid like try to wire their house themselves…or store tins of varnish under the furnace behind a secret alcove…

Ha ha…

Ha.

Hm.

Fuck.

[thebibliosphere]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO NEUTRAL WIRES??!?

[thebibliosphere]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GROUNDED INTO THE SCREWS HOLDING UP THE CEILING LIGHT???!?!!

[suspiciouscoconut]

This post crosses my dashboard every so often and every time, I’m reminded of when I discovered that my whole house was grounded to a gas line.

Good times.

[the-sapphic-raven]

IT WAS WHAT?

[pi4nobl4ck]

[theawesomeadventurer]

i am on another plane right now and this video has me convinced that I reached nirvana for a few seconds

[funnyposts]

the first time i watched this video i was stoned out of my motherfucking MIND and i watched it on loop for 25 minutes

[boartits]

this is the only fucking post on this entire fucking site

[tredlocity]

[golbat]

I have been trying to find this video for like…a whole year

[poweranon]

I WAS SO FUCKING CONFUSED BECAUSE I THOUGHT I PAUSED THIS AND SCROLLED ON, AND I WAS LISTENING TO MUSIC BEFORE CLICKING PLAY SO WHEN THE MUSIC STARTED PLAYING AGAIN I DODNT REALLY THINK ABOUT IT AND THEN SOMETHING ABOUT LIKING SOME HITMAN KEPT COMING UP AND I WAS LIKE WTF THIS ISNT A GNASH SONG IS It?????????

[just-a-little-creature]

This is one of the first posts I found when I made my tumblr account 

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[unwelcome-ozian]

[roach-works]

when i was getting trained as a welder the guys started playing sneaky grabass with each other and with me. i almost hit a few people while holding dangerous tools in my hand because they wouldn’t stop grabbing me from behind, then laughing that i ‘almost’ hit them, so i finally had to go to the instructor and say, look, i’ve had years and years of self defense training due the fact i’m a very small weirdo who is in legitimate danger of getting hatecrimed and at some point one of these guys is going to goose me again and im going to bury a wrench in his eye. get them to stop grabbing me, because i don’t want to get kicked out for hitting people.

the next day i ended up punching someone in the face with a doughnut in my fist because she thought i was being a big fucking buzzkill who tattled to teacher about a harmless game, and, guess what, grabbed my butt. i got icing all over her hair. she complained to teacher...who let everyone know that this was why they weren’t supposed to be playing grabass in the fucking shop.

anyway don’t fucking sneak up on twitchy little queers with hypervigilance, it fucking sucks and you’re lucky if you get a doughnut to a face instead of a hammer.

[kyraneko]

given that this was a welding class, I was expecting this to end up so much worse

[hedgehog-moss]

I was at the coffeeshop in the village and someone asked me how my llamas are doing, and a woman overheard and told me that when she was a kid, her parents used to have a couple of llamas in their sheep farm, and every single sheep in their flock imprinted on one of the two llamas. Each sheep chose the best most charismatic llama according to mysterious sheep criteria, and never wavered in their ovine loyalty. Each of the two llamas was worshiped by a small sub-flock of devoted sheep who followed him everywhere like Jesus’s apostles and only left their field for transhumance when led by “their” llama. The funniest thing is the way this woman overheard the word “llama” and immediately came to sit next to me to tell me this, like she had waited since childhood to share her bewilderment about the two religious congregations of sheep led by rival llama prophets in her family farm.

[augustdementhe]

I’d have trouble keeping that in myself.

[gffa]

[detroitbydark]

I will reblog this everytime I see it until my dying day

[skdubbs]

What is this?! Why have I never seen this?! 😍😍😍😍😍😍 absolutely awesome!

[doobiwankenooku-deactivated2022]

Yessss

[the-stars-are-warring]

The TIMINGS On this thing

It’s so GOOD

[cupidsbower]

Thinking about Dean Winchester today. Specifically the angels’ breeding program. I think they accidentally bred the Winchester brothers to be… sirens to the supernatural, in the process of making them robust enough to work as the vessels for Michael and Lucifer.

I mean, from a Doylist perspective, this was no doubt due to the Ackles Effect – he had chemistry with just about everyone.

But from a Watsonian perspective, if you stick Dean in close proximity to any supernatural being for long enough, they fall in love with him. That’s just weird and otherwise inexplicable – it cannot just be because of Dean’s sparkling personality, because let’s be real, he’s a curmudgeon and doesn’t even attempt to be seductive towards them. Castiel says it’s because of Dean’s beautiful soul. But isn’t it the soul that makes one meat-suit more robust than another?

It happened to Sam to an extent too – the Watsonian answer for why it’s not as strong is that the demon blood weakened it. But he still had his fair share of supernatural admirers.

Anyway, I think the angels accidentally bred the Winchester brothers to be weapons of mass supernatural sed(destr)uction without really understanding what they had wrought.

I’m sure I’m not the first to think this thought, but it’s hanging out in my head today.

[zombiewretch-blog-deactivated20]

SOMEONE WENT TO A STAR TREK CONVENTION IN THE 1980’S AS SPOCK AND KIRK’S PENISES I AM NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP

THEY PERFORMED SPIRK THROUGH INTERPRETIVE DANCE

[burning--amber-deactivated20201]

If you haven’t read the fanlore page yet, here’s an excerpt from the founding mothers of our fandom constitution. KF: Well, four of us in Phoenix saw that. And, it was PJ, Carol, Donna and I, and thought, well they are so wonderfully entertaining to us, we have to do something back for them. But, y'know, we’re really not singers, we’re really not dancers, what can we do? So we sat around with a bottle of wine cooler. And, I don’t drink, and I said, well, how about if we distill down the basis of the cock of the, ahum, Kirk and Spock— (laughter) KF, MS: —Freudian slip, Freudian slip! (laughter) KF: Yes, ah, down to their basics, and how ‘bout if we do a cock show? And— MS: I have that on tape, too. KF: I have it too. Luckily Dixie Owen would come with her video machine, and I ended up putting together a video from the two years. But the first year we ended up going there, and we had a huge seven-foot, and a six-foot cock. Kirk of course was a little shorter and thicker, Spock was taller and thinner— MS: Was very green— KF: —very green with two, with a double ridge on the top. What we did basically is, we took this foam that was used in couch cushions, very dense foam, and we’d sculpt it with an electric knife— MS: Electric knife— (laughter and coughing) KF: —so that we had the proper shapes. Carol, who—a little insider—ended up working doing the— In the beginning, for the Barney TV show? She actually did the animals and things and the costumes for Barney. Anyhow, she was our designer who— MS: (laughter) Sorry. KF: —made the fabric that came down from the head all the way down— And then for the balls, we’re thinking, “Well what are we going to use?” And I said, “Well, listen, we gotta carry ‘em on the plane. How about if we use beach balls covered in fabric, ‘cause then we can deflate them.” MS: Yes. KF: And then of course we had pipe cleaners for the hair and furry bits. MS: I remember when you brought them. Oh my god. KF: And we figure, so we— And I put together a list of songs, and we had little snippets of songs. We started out on the stage with Spock all kind of bent over and just kinda hunched. And he had the little song, y'know, “I am a rock, I am an island.” And of course you hear from off-stage the signs of “Macho Man.” All: (laughter) (indistinguishable shouts) KF: —Pick one— MS: “Macho, macho man"— KF: —and on the stage Spock goes “Huuunh?” and immediately his two balls come out— (squeals) —yeah, from underneath— MS: —from underneath, boing! KF: —and his head starts coming up a little bit, and coming up a little bit, and then the Matt Davis song, “I want you to want me, I want you to need me.” MS: The entire auditorium was in hysterical— KF: And then of course the finale is the 1812 Overture climax with the cannons going off! MS: Complete with, was it— KF: It was, it was— MS: —did you use confetti that time? KF: No, it was white candies wrapped in plas— in cellophane which I then threw up by the handfuls for— MS: Yeah. Woooo! Multiple overlapping voices: —for the climax. KF: For the climax, yeah. And, the audience was hysterical.

[banahbanah]

“Kirk of course was a little shorter and thicker, Spock was taller and thinner-“

I have read this description in a fic on AO3 THIS WEEK. I love fandom.

[azcrowleyfell]

Fandom has always been fucking bananas, and I’m so grateful for our foreparents in the Star Trek fandom for launching what fandom’s become today.

[dduane]

It is nothing, nothing compared to this… but I remember being at a convention masquerade (I think it was even a Worldcon) and two people came down the runway dressed as the Enterprise and a Klingon cruiser… and then they got into a brilliantly staged fistfight, wound up grappling with each other, and fell off the runway into the audience.

I don’t think anyone in that room could breathe for a good while, they were laughing so hard. It’s astonishing to me to this day that ambulances didn’t have to be called.

…But yeah: Trek fandom. For half a century and more, willingly going where no one has ever, EVER gone before. :)

[catchymemes]

[atlinmerrick]

(Will never not reblog this beauty. What genius.)

[ampervadasz]

Unmute !

[chimaerakitten]

people write AUs where characters from a fantasy universe are in like, the setting or plot situation of another non-fantasy story all the time, and usually it’s a no-powers version of those characters because more often than not the powers would absolutely break all the stakes of the au.

And that’s totally logical and makes sense, but I think the version where the transplanted characters get to keep their powers and break the stakes has hilarious and underutilized crack potential.

Like just once I’d like to read “The 74th annual Hunger Games goes absolutely tits up and nobody knows why none of the kids seem to be dying despite some serious effort on the part of the gamemakers. Meanwhile sharp-eyed viewers at home may notice that the shy and unassuming male tribute from district 11—whose personal item was a pair of costume glasses—hasn’t been seen on-camera even once since the opening gong. But not many people do notice. After all, in all the pageantry leading up to the games, no tribute was more boring than Clark Kent.“

[apparently-i-am-an-adult]

Oh my fucking god.

[mylordshesacactus]

So my family has a Gay Pirate Plate.

Stay with me.

We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.

I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.

It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.

(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)

Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.

My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.

When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.

We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.

Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.

The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.

I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.

Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”

Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.

But he’s trying to get me and my sister out to visit him. And plate mounts are cheap.

[mylordshesacactus]

The rules of Gay Pirate Plate are simple by the way.

The plate must be clearly and openly displayed in a place of great prominence whenever it is in your possession. When it is not in your possession, the display piece must remain in place. This is where you would put your gay pirate plate, IF YOU HAD ONE.

No active steps may be taken to prevent the theft of the Gay Pirate Plate. That goes against the spirit of the game, as does attempting to hide it.

The plate MUST be stolen and cannot be gifted or removed with permission. Should you witness attempted theft of the Gay Pirate Plate you are required to intervene and return it to its place.

Every time your sibling successfully absconds with the Gay Pirate Plate, you must respond with indignant fury, as if you have not also repeatedly and blatantly stolen the Gay Pirate Plate.

[mylordshesacactus]

WOE

PLATE BE UPON YE

[twoblackwhiskers]

Have recently found myself caring for five orphaned baby starlings. And when I say orphaned, I mean the hardware store I work at hired exterminators to get rid of them all and while they managed to successfully destroy at least 8 occupied nests (5 babies per nest or so, so lots of dead baby birbs) I managed to get hold of these last five birbs cause their mama was smart and built her nest in a lawnmower.

Found them on Wednesday so they’re likely 10 or so days old at this point. Not sure on their exact age.

Their names are Banshee, Goose, Henway, Tenno and Chicken.

[rongzhi]

Tacit understanding...

[x-menunited]

[marxisforbros]

“There’s a cure?!” asked the girl that kills everything she touches.  “Hey shut up we’re perf” replied the girl that makes clouds. 

[theboylondon]

For real though. Storm has stopped an entire tsunami before. “Makes clouds my ass” she can conjure lightning and tornadoes and is revered as a god in her tribe. She literally changes atmospheric pressure and that’s how she flies. So fuck you. Storm is flawless.

[sun-spiral-deactivated20210109]

I think you missed the part where the GIRL WHO KILLS EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES wants to NOT KILL EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES and everyone dismisses her incredible misfortune just because the lady who is the AVATAR OF THE STORM won the fucking SUPERPOWER LOTTERY

[mangonetics]

“Finally, a cure for my chainsaw hands!” decreed Chainsaw-Hands Joe.

“There is no cure,” said Johnny Five-Dicks. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”

[holyromanhomo]

The last comment literally always cracks me up

[veronicaawakens]

The X-Men are an extremely good metaphor for oppressed minorities until they are suddenly an extremely terrible metaphor for oppressed minorities.

[davidmann95]

The scale on which the first reply misses the point literally never ceases to awe me.

[lyricwritesprose]

I gotta say, though, this is a place where the X-men are being a good metaphor for oppressed minorities.  Specifically, in this case, the disabled community.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” says the girl with depression.  “Cure for what, motherfucker, I’m not sick,” says the person with autism.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” I say, with my fibromyalgia and random bad pain days.  “Yes, because it’s easier to talk about eliminating us than talk about teaching sign language in school,” says the Deaf person.  “‘Cure’ is violent rhetoric.”

The problem is, of course, that a vast number of things have been aggregated under the label of “disability,” and many of them don’t even resemble each other.  Depression sucks in an objective fashion, whereas autism is just a way of being (which, like many ways of being, may suck at some times, and generally sucks worse when not accommodated).  Similar deal with chronic pain versus the Deaf community.  These things really should not be grouped together, but they are.  And since they are grouped so haphazardly, they will often be at cross-purposes.

It is ridiculous, in the X-men universe, to classify all “mutants” as one group.  You have ridiculously powerful people with little downside, you have powerful people with a major downside, you have people with very limited powers but few drawbacks, you have people with limited powers and massive drawbacks, and that’s not even getting into other divisions, like whether you look like a baseline human all the time, part of the time, or none of the time.  “Realistically,” if you can apply that word to a fantasy universe, Storm and Rogue belong to completely different minorities which should require completely different approaches.  But society has grouped them under one umbrella, or forced them to group themselves for self-protection, and thus you have conversations like the one above.

So it’s actually not a bad take.  Mind you, the X-men have had bad takes, and will do so again, and I’m skeptical about whether “powers” of any kind even work for a metaphor about minority representation—but this particular vignette has something useful to say.

[philosopherking1887]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly what bothers me about purely social analyses of disability.

[prismatic-bell]

And even if you look at the mutants as being all one group, it’s still a useful metaphor.

Put another way:

“They can cure us?” asks the autistic person who struggles to think clearly, can’t form full sentences, is overstimulated at the drop of a hat and misses out on a lot of things they’d otherwise like to do because for them, autism is literally crippling.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” I say, as a person with autism who has a job, car, excellent communication and coping skills and a relatively normal life, because for me, autism is a thing I’ve adapted to and worked around.

(And yes, autistic people in the first category do exist. I’ve encountered a few right here on Tumblr and seen more than one say “don’t forget us in your autism activism because we aren’t ‘just a little different,’ this is a genuine problem for us.”)

Or perhaps:

“They can cure us?” asks the amputee who has never fully adapted to the loss of her arm below the shoulder, and gets by okay most days but very much misses being non-disabled.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” says the person who was born with only one arm and has never considered it any kind of deficit because it’s just how things are.

Different people will experience the same disability in different ways. It may have to do with how they were diagnosed, or how they came to be disabled; it may have to do with complications related to the disability (not to use the same metaphor twice, but someone whose arm was crushed and experiences terrible phantom pains daily probably feels a lot more negatively about their lack of an arm than someone who was born without it and has no phantom limb to feel sensation in). It may even be because of how other people around them treat the disability! A blind person treated with dignity and appropriate accommodation is probably going to feel very differently about their disability than someone with the same kind of blindness, but also a bunch of condescending pricks who want to make it into a terrible tragedy.

The metaphor still works even within any given subgroup of disabled people, and I think we need to remember that in our activism, too.