Agender, pronoun indifferent, Asexual, Over 25. Mostly Zoology/ Vet/ Animal Behavior Stuff with more than occasional delves into social and political issues. Feel free to PM me with questions, I'll try to answer or point you to someone who can! If you need or want something tagged, just ask!
Your cats are not "manipulating" you they are communicating with you. They do not understand why you're limiting their food supply or keeping them indoors or preventing them from ruining your furniture or whatever.
When they meyowl pathetically for more food, it's not because they're trying to "trick" you into feeding them again. They just want to be fed, and they're smart enough to notice the correlation between certain sounds they make and the responses they get from you.
They've figured out that if they want to communicate to you that they want more food, if they make those pathetic sounds, you're more likely to behave as if you've understood what they're trying to communicate.
When your cat waits for you to look away then yoinks food off of your plate, it's not because they love crime. It's because they're social colony creatures who instinctively share food with each other and they don't understand why you're not sharing the best foods with them.
Your cats are very intelligent, social creatures who see you as their Very Strange sibling.
They've learned how to make intricate sounds just to communicate with their humans. When the sounds they make elicit the responses they want, they learn that those sounds are the most effective way to communicate their desires.
Not because they're scheming about how to control you, but because they don't know how to communicate with you any other way.
have now made the rest of the discord cry about this little boy who had multi-coloured ducks sewn onto a tunic that he loved so much he wore it to a Very Important Event because he was EIGHT and have you SEEN my DUCKS
sorry no iām not done iām gonna make you all cry some more iām bringing you down with me
there was once a little boy.
he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he canāt walk properly the way the other children do. he doesnāt understand why. heās a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.
somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.
the little boy is eight years old, and heās going to be king now. thereās a big ceremony about it. he doesnāt really fully understand whatās going on, because heās eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! arenāt they great?
he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.
as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. heās not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.
he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.
and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.
yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesnāt really click. it doesnāt seem real
but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didnāt develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.
tutankhamun was a child and he didnāt make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child
his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.
but he had brightly coloured little ducks on his favourite shirt, and he kept it.
tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chestā¦ was carved with ducks.
and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.
but he was a little boy who thought ducks were just the best
Ok but this is how to teach history. This is how you get people to pay attention, to care. Find something small and make it personal, then zoom out to the wider context. History is best taught as a story, with people who lived their lives in ways that came together to create something remarkable that we still talk about today, but who were still just human at the end of the day. They kissed, argued, cried, and dreamed just like we do. And sometimes they really liked ducks.
I want to point out that there are at least two obvious duck heads on the sandals (circled in red) but!
The patterns between them, to either side of what looks like lilypad/lotus flower petals, could very well be āducks as seen from above.ā There is a beak on the lower edge, a clear āheadā shape above/behind it, darker ovals that look like folded wings, and a body/tail. I didnāt see the red circled ducks first, I saw the āswimming on a pondā ducks amongst the lotus flowers.
Here's an idea about why kids are so anxious and depressed all the time...the environments kids are in most of the time are very stressful and don't fulfill their needs for play, rest, proper variety of foods, positive social opportunities, and freedom from fear pain punishment etc
Like everyone with any basic understanding of animal welfare knows that if you put an animal in an enclosure that is too crowded, without hiding spots, with no freedom to move around, no ability to avoid harsh and stressful stimuli, and scare it by shouting at it and punishing it, the animal will become stressed and start chewing its own fur off or hurting itself or become sick or unable to eat...
But we expect human children to grow up in these conditions and literally blame them when they develop the exact type of problems that any creature under those conditions would
You gotta be really publicly passionate about things if you want your friends to text you. Bc people will forget to text you because theyāre human. But if youāre really openly the friend who loves identifying ants your friends will think of you when they see ants. And theyāll text you āwhat ant is this [blurry photo]ā. And then theyāll ask you how youāve been and we should get coffee sometime. But if they donāt know what you love theyāll never know what you like
And then when the ant convention is in town theyāll be like dudeā¦ we should go to the ant convention. But they would never think to go if they didnāt know u loved ants
You gotta be really publicly passionate about things if you want your friends to text you. Bc people will forget to text you because theyāre human. But if youāre really openly the friend who loves identifying ants your friends will think of you when they see ants. And theyāll text you āwhat ant is this [blurry photo]ā. And then theyāll ask you how youāve been and we should get coffee sometime. But if they donāt know what you love theyāll never know what you like
And then when the ant convention is in town theyāll be like dudeā¦ we should go to the ant convention. But they would never think to go if they didnāt know u loved ants
Thinking about that Tumblr user whose prepper brother was put in an emergency situation and finally got to use his prepper basement only to be in dire straits on the first day because the power was out and his only can opener was electric
for anyone wondering, this is the thread (transcript below the cut):
the original on twitter seems to have been deleted, so this is a 3rd party site
so my eldest brother, who is a moron, has been playing soldier with his moron friends in the deserts of texas for the last year preparing for the collapse of civilization if biden won (lol). they were burying food and ammo stashes out in the desert, running drills, crazy stuff
this included getting a cb license so he could be their lifeline to other groups of white idiots when the cell towers all went offline. wouldnāt want to violate federal law while communicating with your resistance groups after the fall of the federal government i guess.
anyways, you would assume given that theyāve been prepping for the end of the world for at least a year theyāre well situated to ride out the rolling blackouts right?
wellll
their plan for cooking and heating during an extended power outage was natural gas, but like a lot of homes their gas service is out. the food in their freezer and fridge is already toast due to the power outrages, so theyāre down to canned stuff, but thereās a catch.
they can get into the pull top cans just fine, but the ones that require an opener? their only can opener is electric. so a good 3/4 of his canned food store is inaccessible to him unless he goes after it with a knife, which i sincerely hope he does.
so captain survival was eating unheated ravioli out of a can yesterday because i guess he doesnāt know how to start a fire? they have a fire pit but it too is gas fired.
he told my mom theyāre probably going to break into the survival buckets soon. iām sure thatās great food.
he told my mom that the blackout is due to texas switching everything to āwind powerā but that he didnāt discount that the government was doing this on purpose. if you can figure out why theyād arbitrarily freeze out a giant state hey points to you.
the saving grace in all this is heās having to ration his phone usage so he canāt sit on the phone with my mom for hours crying about it. heās forced to sit there and talk to his wife, who is almost as dumb as he is.
presumably heās sitting there shivering, ranting about libs while he sucks down cold beefaroni. what a life.
heās tried contacting his best friend in his little larping group, but heās gone to ground. i sincerely hope that means he thinks this is the start of the great purge or whatever and heās disappeared to the mountains to evade fema and child support bailiffs
iām trying to get more details from my mom but i have to play it cool. if i laugh sheāll stop telling me about it, so i have to pretend this is very serious and iām concerned for his safety while iām imagining him hitting a can of baked beans with a screwdriver repeatedly
on the plus side theyāve got plenty of guns and ammo, so they can shoot the shit out of the snow.
locking two people with marital strife in a house with no supplies, no access to power, but plenty of access to guns and ammo seems like a great idea. i think this should work out great.
just to give you all some additional comfort: his wife is part of the group who helps select the textbooks texas buys every year, just in case youāre wondering about the kind of people that make those decisions.
#There's a lot going on here but to be honest I'm mostly just perplexed about what it even means for a can opener to be electric.
They're can openers with a little motor in them so they rotate the can on the blade and open it for you. They're great for people with arm/hand mobility issues, weak hands, arthritis, etc. They are not great for opening your prepper food mid-blackout.
I'm curious, what kind of traits do you personally look for in roosters when you decide if they're destined for the freezer or nah? (Sorry if this has already been asked)
Boys who are destined for the freezer are usually larger then average, rude to hens, sickly, loud, nervy, and they give "The Look" where if thought they could they would bite or spur the crap out of you first chance they get. When you handle them they scream and yell and flap and just make a much bigger fuss then needed.
Since hens look to cockerels and roosters for emotional and physical support. When you have a boy who is anxious around humans that can rub off on the hens and make them more fearful and stressed. If they are also rude on top of it, its just not worth it to keep them around since they will bring down flock morale.
Good boys who are potential keepers are easy to handle, healthy, nice to look at, and dont want to stab you with their foot knives the moment your back is turned.
I've been so proud of my young orpington gentleman this summer. He was a little overexcited at first, but he's so sweet with the hens now, very patient with people, and is peacefully coexisting with another mature rooster and four young cockerel growouts.
Watching the hens all run to him when something startles them is really sweet. And he watches through the window so he can call everyone over if I'm walking outside with snacks.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosityās birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isnāt a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we canāt get to because itās name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
Thatās not sad, thatās awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
Curiosity celebrates her 14th Martian birthday this week and sheās still trucking along in Gale Crater where sheās sampling Martian soil to learn about the geology and climate and teach us all about the ancient lakes that used to cover our nearest neighbor!
Thank you to everyone who keeps this post queued up so I never forget her special day. I love how much love this post gets every year.
If you would like to see what Tumblrās favourite Rover has been up to recently you can read about her latest mission updates here and you can see her live position in Gale Crater on this map here. (You can also see the great photos she takes!)
prev: #u forgot the best part#the artist figured out the gig and was like#i draw for u for the rest of my life#these chinese netizens are having shojou level romances
Today (20 July 2026), the first six belugas left the Marineland Canada property with a police escort. Four are headed for SeaWorld San Antonio, while the other two will journey to Chicagoās Shedd Aquarium.
As this undertaking is so massive, it will occur in stages. Over the course of the next few weeks, the remaining 24 whales (and 4 Black Sea bottlenose dolphins) will depart Marineland for their new homes at AZA-accredited aquariums in the United States and Spain.
Read more here:
The first group of Marineland beluga whales that have been at a permanently closed theme park and zoo in Niagara Falls, Ont., have begun the
Marineland has begun relocating its whales and is shipping six belugas today to aquariums in the United States.
Here's some additional photos of the first move! They were shared by Shedd Aquarium on their instagram page. This is Acadia, Sierra, Osiris, and Lillooet arriving at Shedd:
And some photos of Bertie Botts and Frankie arriving at Seaworld San Antonio:
You can read more about how the whales were doing upon their arrival to Shedd here. And SeaWorld recently shared a video update on their two whales! Fingers crossed the rest of the belugas follow soon, and all have a safe and comfortable journey to their new homes.
I had a fifteen minute long crying session yesternight over the fact that all I was 10 years ago, at the ripe old age of 14, is lost and lonely, and now, at 24, I am neither and that filled me with so much gratitude
reblog to tell a teenager that these arenāt actually the best years of your life and that things can and will get better when you have independance and maybe are away from your situation right now.
the only reason i have never been groomed online is because when i was 10 i befriended 17 year olds who taught me how to interact with older people online safely.
yall have got to stop being scared of children online and start actually teaching them the ropes. because if you are not up there with them then they're going to be completely alone with the creeps and have 0 metric for what is and is not an appropriate relationship. this also applies offline.
every time i start to feel cringe for being too deep in the hyperfixation i remember the intense depression i have waded through and have to remind myself that enjoyment is fleeting (so grab it with both hands), and life is for loving (so hold that love close), and if anyone thinks iām cringe they must not be having a very good time (and i hope they can find a good time soon).
"you can be 15 years old and also a terrible person" teenagers do stupid shit all the time, adults do stupid shit all the time, what matters is that you learn about that and that you don't let that define you. you are figuring out yourself and you never really stop doing that.
this is a thing i saw on tiktok and it's been bothering me forever and ever. okay yeah you took bad decisions/hurted people/etc. but that doesn't mean that you're destinated to hurt people or to be a bad person forever and ever. perhaps at the moment you thought what you were doing was good. perhaps you were trying to protect yourself. perhaps you just didn't know any better. perhaps you thought that it wouldn't be that bad. whatever thing you've might've done on the past doesn't define you in any sort of way. you are a human being and you will do a lot of mistakes until you die. putting yourself down won't help on anything. others putting you down doesn't mean anything. don't let your mistakes be something that defines you, but let them be a reminder that you're still here and that you can grow as a person.
Hey yeah so this post literally kept me alive for like 6 months. Thank you. And OP is so right. Everyone on this island became my best friends. And guess what? Now they can't wait to meet *you* and they talk about you every single day.
What is up with lefty types pushing to learn practical skills (sewing/gardening/etc whatever) as like "you'll need to know this after The Revolution:tm:" and not, like, "this is a useful skill to help yourself & others in your communities Right Now". You all sound like doomsday preppers and it's weirding me out. We don't have to prep for communist rapture maybe thee revolution starts with helping your neighbors
YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN LIKE....... it's weird. It's a subtle distinction but it's weird. People wanna be protagonists in post apocalypse movies so bad & when you're like "well that's not going to fucking happen innit" they call you a counterrevolutionary. Like yeah no I'm on board with dismantling the establishment etc etc I'm just saying you're being fucking weird about it. This is an action movie hero fantasy in a gen z aesthetic trenchcoat. You can just repair your clothes and feed people Right Now
The thing is. If the goal is "help yourself and your community", a lot of people's material reality makes these types of skills ultimately pretty inefficient ways to achieve that goal when compared to other, less exciting alternatives. Like e.g. if what I want to do is feed people in my community, I'm going to achieve more by taking some overtime hours at my job and donating that money to a food bank or something than I would ever be able to achieve if I spent all my free time gardening.
So the only reason why I'd choose to spend my time gardening in this situation would be for fun, or out of a sense of personal fulfillment. Which to be clear is completely morally neutral. But like. If you're aware of the fact that these skills are a pretty inefficient way to "help your community" which you're choosing over the efficient alternatives due to personal enjoyment, and you were uncomfortable admitting that, I definitely see how it'd be tempting to conceptualize developing these skills as things that are going to be vital to Helping Your Community in a future hypothetical situation.
Food banks and meal programs close to me partner up with gardeners and community gardens, so I don't think that's quite right.
Skills like gardening and food preservation and people around who can teach those skills can be a really important part of food security
In particular, access to gardening can really increase the quality of people's diets in areas where fresh vegetables and fruits are not as available.
I was learning in my African American history class about how when Black people in the USA started moving into cities, the cities passed laws and ordinances to restrict gardening because it was an ingrained part of their culture at this point to keep a garden to provide for some of their needs for food
If we want a world where cheap food produced by underpaid/slave labor in ways that damage the environment and are shipped across the planet no longer exists without causing major societal issues then we need to prepare for that now, even if itās not the most convenient or practical. If a good percentage of the population is growing food for themselves and others, they can better push for regulations, boycott companies, etc.
If we want a world with quality clothing without sweatshops where fast fashion companies arenāt dumping unsold clothes in landfills we need to prepare for that now, even if itās not the most convenient or practical. If a good percentage of the population can make, tailor, and/or repair clothes, people can use that leverage to fight for an ethical, sustainable fashion industry.
Thereās a reason why places like Detroit are hubs of urban farming ā because thatās whatās helped people survive after everything collapsed. There are real, actual people around the world who have and are using these skills to help their communities. Hunting and gardening allowed my parents to feed me and my siblings. Preserving food meant that we didnāt starve when ice storms resulted in us losing power for days to weeks at a time because nobody wanted to replace failing infrastructure. My local Master Gardeners donate nearly a thousand pounds of fresh vegetables each year to food banks ā better quality and less ecologically damaging than the food bank could ever afford to buy.
Also, peopleās mental health matters. Seeing real, tangible evidence that they can *do* something empowers people and gives them the ability to make more changes. And letās be real, most peopleās lives are not going to be improved by even more time at work.
If thereās ever going to be any positive societal change, weāre going to need to work at it from different angles. If working overtime and donating money to causes that are important to you is your way to contribute, then do it. Other people have other ways of contributing, and we need to support each other instead of tearing people down if we want to succeed.
it sucks that the overwhelming majority of medical messaging around salt/sodium is "evil poisonous substance that you're definitely already eating way too much of," because like. you do still need it. (trust me, as a POTS-haver, I've had to completely rewire my own brain about salt.) and you need more salt when the entire northern hemisphere is hot enough to fry an egg on. ever tried sucking down the recommended 64oz of hydration per day entirely as water, only to find you're peeing constantly without any of the purported benefits of being "hydrated"? assuming you don't have another medical condition that causes frequent urination, your body probably needed more salt/electrolytes to be able to hold onto that water and make use of it. if there was ever a time to keep a sports drink/pedialyte/etc within constant reach, it's when the heat index is 110Ā°F/43Ā°C.
Water on its own can be great! BUT that is so dependent on your body's concentrations of the other electrolytes ā¤ļø Salt is electrolytes! Get some in ya
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