Blessed Be the Boy Who Shrugs

• Oh hey I'm Mason • NH/ME/Boston • 🏳️‍🌈 • I work with Words + Images [BA Photojournalism, MFA Nonfiction Writing; nonprofit program manager, public health educator] • trans people are valid, kink belongs at pride, sex work is work, black lives matter, meaning is subjective, ACAB, free Palestine, drag is not a crime, tip your goddamn servers •

[youcanstillwhistle]

I think the "pre" and "post" parts in "preposterous" should cancel each other out but everyone else seems to find my idea completely erous

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

[typhlonectes]

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

i was looking up synonyms for tired and seeing these two next to each other gave me whiplash

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

happy pride month. reblog if you are also fagged out and bushed

[nudityandnerdery]

Sub-Radio, the band that did Stacy's Dad, coming out with another banger for Pride.

[xener-aol]

[xener-aol]

[alice-of-scales-deactivated2026]

[mwg-drwg]

Please stop he is drowning…..

[pocket-deer-belly]

Gone forever

[cloverslime]

[cloverslime]

[dotty-literati]

the big mamdani

[dotty-literati]

[targetedknowledge]

[saul-tortellini]

It was like the sun came out from behind the clouds...

[marisatomay]

Happy Pride

[velvetcloak]

[velvetcloak]

[velvetcloak]

👏👏👏

[yorickish-deactivated20230903]

[yorickish-deactivated20230903]

this wasn't a quote from a real PDF btw I just thought it would be funny to tex this up so it looked like one instead of posting it directly

[adjoint-law]

the next evolution of Tumblr shitposting is looking promising

[paradise-sys]

believe it or not there is an xkcd for this

[babyjanedough]

Already know I wanna send this to people on June 1

[dailyhistoryposts]

The Original Rainbow Pride Flag (1978) by Gilbert Baker.

[frontmansdefender]

RIP to the legend

[silvermoon424]

This goose fucking rocks and had a crazy life!

I really just have to summarize Thomas's entire life:

He was in a committed relationship with a male swan named Henry for 18-24 years before a female swan named Henrietta showed up and mated with Henry.

Thomas was initially jealous of the pair and attacked them, breaking 2 of the 5 eggs Henrietta had laid. However, once the remaining eggs hatched, Thomas warmed up to them and helped raise them.

Henry couldn't fly because of an injured wing, so Thomas taught the cygnets how to fly.

When they needed to reduce the goose population in the pond where Thomas and the swans lived, they dyed Thomas's feathers red so he wouldn't be separated from Henry.

Henry, Henrietta, and Thomas remained in their happy throuple for years and raised 68 cygnets before Henry died in 2009. After Henry's death, Henrietta found another swan and flew away, leaving Thomas alone.

Thomas finally met and mated with a female goose in 2011 and had his own babies. However, another goose named George stole them and raised them himself.

As Thomas grew elderly and blind, he was relocated to a wildlife center where he raised orphaned cygnets.

His caretaker at the center described him as "pretty high maintenance."

Thomas died in 2018 at the age of around 40. He had a funeral that included a small coffin and a procession that was led by a bagpiper. He was buried under the stone where Henry was buried, the two finally reunited in death.

Before and after his death, Thomas has been celebrated as an icon of the LGBTQ+ community for obvious reasons.

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[luulapants]

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

[naamahdarling]

Finally, a good fucking take.

[princncess]

porn is bad because [christian talking point] and [alt-right study] and [misunderstood neurochemistry] and of course [feature of capitalism]

[princncess]

thank you SO MUCH for reminding me about [feature of patriarchy] and [problem caused by lack of kids' sex ed] random tumblr user in the notes! louder for those in the back!

[fantaboy91]

The adult content warning on this post is really just the icing on the cake