Rooks and Wags @yanethyrael - Tumblr Blog

for those who don’t remember, “mole interest” was an experiment I did 2 years ago because I wanted to test what causes tags to go trending on tumblr. My hypothesis was that all it takes is one (1) post blowing up in an established tag to make the entire tag trend.

I had randomly generated 2 words, which is where “mole interest” came from. I failed to consider that by generating a new tag, it wouldn’t have had enough posts already in it to prove what I now call “the mole interest effect”.

But now it does.

In 2023, we said “fuck it” a la mythbusters and ended up doing whatever it took to get #mole interest to trend. And it did. And it happened to be September 11th that day, and we managed to get #mole interest to trend ABOVE #9/11.

So, in the name of science, I ask you to reblog just this post. Let’s put the mole interest effect to the test.

todaysbird

there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

butchosprey

never tell terfs about white-throated sparrow or they will lose their fucking minds

tkingfisher

Do you want to hear about white-throated sparrows?!

Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!

To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.

There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*

And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***

This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.

The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.

Is that cool or what?!

*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.

**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.

**A population solely of tan-stripes can reproduce safely, they’re just not that into each other.

krakensdottir

I reblogged this a minute ago but I’m going to reblog it again, because I want to add another non-binary bird species: the ruff.

First of all, look at it.

That’s a male ruff, specifically. You can see how they get their name. The females don’t have that fancy collar. They just look like sandpipers, which is what they are.

Like other sandpipers, these are wading birds, but they live in wet meadows and marshes instead of by the seashore. During the breeding season they gather together and the males hold territories, called leks, in which they display to attract females.

At least, some of them do.

Some male ruffs do not display in leks. They have plainer, often white, neck ruffs, and they sort of wander around the display grounds courting the females wherever. The interesting thing is that the territorial males tolerate this. Research suggests it’s because females are more interested in a display ground that has both kinds of males. The ladies like variety, it seems.

But it gets even more complicated. In 2006, a third male form was discovered. This form is extremely rare, and doesn’t have male display plumage at all. It looks just like a female ruff in the field. The other birds, however, can tell the difference, judging by their behavior. These female mimics travel with other males when the sexes split for the winter, and during homosexual mountings (which are common, as they are in many other animals), they often top.

What’s really interesting about these ‘cryptic males’, or faeders, is that they are apparently super sexy. Seriously. Females and males both prefer mating with them. And it’s believed that, like the satellite males, the presence of a faeder attracts more females to the area, which benefits all three forms.

And the thing about these forms is they are fundamentally different from one another. The plumage and behavior differences last throughout a bird’s life, and are determined by genetics. They are functionally three different genders - one of which shows natural intersex characteristics. All three can breed with females, and females are more interested in breeding when all three are present. They know that diversity is the good shit. Which makes them much, much smarter than TERFs.

nasa-official

if this gets 100,000 notes then i, the worlds greatest space agency will personally shoot donald trump into the sun

nasa-official

200,000 notes to also shoot the republican party leaders who don’t want to fund science into the sun

nasa-official

i am asking once again to help me get donald trump to the sun

homunculus-argument

There needs to be more drama where most of the characters are over the age of 50. I want to watch two mortal enemies that have had beef with each other for like 45 years, and they still want to fucking kill each other, but as much as they both fucking hate it, they now have mutual grandchildren.

monsterpotion

another underappreciated tumblr feature that you dont get on other sites is the queue. i love it when something i thought was funny six months ago and then forgot about a week later crawlts its way out of the processing vortex and i get to see it all over again.

monsterpotion

you should queue this post it would be funny and grant me immortality

monsterpotion

you motherfuckers put me in the processing vortex

monsterpotion

THE TIME LOOP

deboracabral

Happy 25th of May everyone

teaboot

We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective

teaboot

Like that story isn’t about an ugly duckling that grew up sexy, it’s a fucking swan was judged as a duck and hated itself as a duck until it found out it wasn’t a duck and stopped trying to be a duck.

The actual ducks in the neighborhood were probably still looking around at perfectly normal swans like “damn, look at those busted ass ducks”

derinthescarletpescatarian

This is pretty important, actually. The good ending is finding the other swans, not tearing yourself to pieces trying to impress the ducks.

elodieunderglass

although a lot of adaptations skip over this and sanitise it to the point where the message is apparently meant to read "you'll be forgiven for being born wrong, if you turn out thin and white and pretty!" - there's a lot going on in the original. For one thing, most adaptations present him as a wild animal, but the Ugly Duckling is born into captivity, into a society that mimics upper-class pretensions, which is why he's declared 'ugly'. His mother is loving and very generous at first - hatching him despite the inconvenient incubation period, and defending him firmly - but after the other domestic animals (including a higher-class dominant one) point out what a burden he is, she turns on her child. Previously, she genuinely appeared to like him.

And a thing that's missed, while kid's abridged adaptations miss out on the rest of the point, is that the Ugly Duckling decides he can't live like this and leaves the farmyard; he goes into the wild himself. In the various passages in which people try to keep him as a pet, or a duck, it's hammered home again and again that this does not make a good pet. there is nothing in him that suits being a domestic animal.

one of the particular parts that makes you go "sweet jesus, hans christian andersen" is where the wild geese rock up and are nice to the young swan, not quite recognising him as a swan but saying they're pretty into whatever weird vibe he has (is this a sort of queer recognition thing? we are told, explicitly, that the wild geese are both male, and they definitely say "you're so ugly it's hot - come with us" - given HCA, it might be) and then they're, you know, instantly shot dead. Because that's what happens to wild geese. They like your vibe and try to take you with them, and even offer to teach you how to flirt - and then you see exactly what happens to them. And then every encounter from there, from the old woman who attempts to keep him - a very satirical and funny passage - to the young family who genuinely attempt to save his life (but he's too fundamentally panicked and awkward to reciprocate their kindness, and explodes out of their house in a social catastrophe) the story hammers in: not only are you a terrible duck, but you just aren't MEANT to live with people. You're closer to the things they kill than the things they keep.

but yeah, adaptations miss this often: you have to go out into the wild to save your own life. you may die in the wild, and you WILL die where you are. nobody comes to save you - and nobody really could have, when you were younger - but ultimately, mate, you just aren't a very good pet. Of the list of "attributes of a domestic animal" you really suck, in detail, at all of them.

so it's very telling to me that the good ending is the one where he is a wild animal - but more importantly, a WILD SWAN.

Not killed. (like a wild goose).

Not kept. (like a duck).

but a secret third thing, that swans - of few creatures - get. they get admired and they get paid and they get LEFT ALONE. they have a position in relation to humanity, and it is BEING A LOVELY SWAN OVER THERE.

what a thing for a lonely heart to yearn for!

elodieunderglass

I saw some notes saying "oh wow I need to look up the original." It's very easy! It's here: The Ugly Duckling, by Hans Christian Andersen on Project Gutenberg. It is 3500 words or so and free.

The Ugly Duckling isn't a "fairy tale" or a fable. It didn't emerge from the collective unconscious - it didn't come from nowhere. It's an original work. Andersen wrote it in 1843. It didn't exist before he came up with it. the translation I linked above was translated in 1930.

like many HCA stories (The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen) it's out of copyright and has pretty images, so it gets mined frequently as a free text - you can always republish a cheap Ugly Duckling, and don't have to pay an author. So people tend to just read and remember the various abridged versions. as a result, they think about it like a fairy tale - a sort of ambiguous, detached, floating thing that belongs to everyone and can mean everything. fairy tales - loose cultural fragments - can be hammered to suit any moral, or handwaved to be about anything, and then when you get bored of them, you can "twist" them a different way. Maybe it's about this. maybe it's about that. I read it as being about beauty. I read it as being about me. I don't like the politics. Today King Arthur is going to be Roman. Tomorrow Sleeping Beauty will wake up by herself. it doesn't really matter. And that's grand! that's what fairy tales have become - they are the people's mental property - they're to be played with.

But The Ugly Duckling isn't a fairy tale. it's a single sad, weird queer guy from a while ago, trying to tell you something personal about himself. maybe he isn't communicating clearly, maybe he's too weird, maybe you don't like it, maybe it annoys you - but <TheUglyDuckling> DOES have meaning and intention.

"I think the moral is this / I think the moral is that" - do try reading it first though! do try reading the whole thing first.

snoopysupe

tower fics are so back baby

disc80s

it’s the “date of birth: 1303 BC” for me...

theoutsanityshoppe

“Profession: King (deceased)”

grabyourpillow

Fact checked: it's false! ❌

grabyourpillow

Because I can't help myself, here are the key points of the article disproving it:

The transfer of the mummy happened in 1976, not 1974

The fake-passport presents as a biometric passport, which are only delivered since 2008 in Egypt

The barcode on the fake-passport comes from the original blog article posted on the website heritagedaily.com. it's written underneath

This heritagedaily is a blog dedicated to paleontology and archeology that CLEARLY STATES THE FAKE PASSPORT IMAGE WAS CREATED TO ILLUSTRATE THE BLOG ARTICLE

The creator of the heritagedaily website confirmed to the fact-checking website linked above that he created it in 2018 and then republished it in 2020

Other versions are online, one more minimalistic, another in Arabic. All are false.

The mummy was received in France in a big show, with honors becoming of a sovereign. No mention of passport in any interview or article from that time.

The person in charge of documentary studies at the Egyptian antiquities Department of the Louvre Elisabeth David states that there is no fundament for the existence of a passport.

There is NO FRENCH LEGISLATION ACCORDING TO DECEASED HUMAN PEOPLE REQUIRE PASSPORTS

Mummies aren't even considered as "people" in case of a transport they are considered as "goods".

Elisabeth David cites a report from the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle (National Natural History Museum) issued in 1985 as possible reason for this confusion:

[Translation by me: "Obviously, for such a grand figure to leave Egypt, obtaining a "pass"(port) required reaching out to the highest authorities of both countries, after reaching a mutual agreement, after long and tedious negotiations."]

Okay so obviously I'm not a professional translator so I'm not exactly sure how it reads in English, but in french it's pretty clear that the person writing just uses the term "passport" as a metaphor for the long and tedious procedures required to get the mummy out of the country, just as for issuing a passport. She uses it so the sentence reads as "obtaining an okay [to pass through]".

(Anyone who's ever had to deal with the french administration will have similar feelings on such a matter.)

TLDR: THE WHOLE IMAGE WAS CREATED TO ILLUSTRATE A BLOG ARTICLE. THERE IS NO SUCH FRENCH LEGISLATION

Mostly English-speaking websites relay either the default faulty assertion, or the version according to which only the photo is fake but there was a passport, probably because they don't have to the original 1985 report that mentions this "passport" nor access to this fact-checking article that provides the full context. (The latter part of the sentence is a hypothesis by ME)

MISINFORMATION SPREADS FAST BUT FACT CHECKING TAKES HOURS

PLEASE BE MINDFUL OF WHAT YOU BELIEVE

The original fact-checking article cites and links all relevant sources. This website is a trusted fact-checking website operating under strict guidelines. It is a foundation with no political, commercial, or ideological ties.

grabyourpillow

The artistic rendition is still funny af tho

dragon-in-a-fez

right so last week @mothinthegutter asked me how my washing machine tried to murder me, so here we go.

scene: it's 2022. my ex and I have just moved into our new house. we brought our washing machine with us, and I've just finished hooking it up. I haven't pushed it all the way in under the counter yet, because I want to make sure none of the plumbing is leaking. so I put some clothes in and start a wash. a few minutes later I'm squeezing past it to get to the coffee maker, and I put my hand down on the top of the washing machine and hey, ow, what the fuck

now, I've been electrocuted enough times to know it when it's happening. I grab my multimeter and sure enough the entire outer casing of the washing machine is live with 120 volts. okay so maybe I won't touch that.

except, here's another thing I wasn't counting on: the load in the machine is also unbalanced. and the spin cycle is about to start.

oh, and the only way out of the kitchen is on the other side of the thing.

so now, I am trapped in a corner with an electrified washing machine vibrating slowly in my direction.

panic sets in. definitely the weirdest kind of panic I've ever felt. also the realisation that, if this is how I die, no one will be surprised. I consider my options carefully and decide the only way out is to parkour over the counters. given that I have no parkour skills whatsoever, this ends up looking more like lying prone on the counter, belly sliding around the corner, and then falling onto the floor on my face.

I'm alive. I'm free. I call the washing machine manufacturer and report the weirdest problem their repair team has ever heard of.

dragon-in-a-fez

yeah. and so am I

pixiu-pix

tributary

saw someone tag a post about the guillotine with ‘say what you want about it, france never had another king’

pop quiz! what did france have after the revolution—perhaps a sort of super-king?

tributary

this is the ideal tumblr post. you may not like it, but this is what peak posting looks like.

wolfertinger666

hrt saves trans lives

wolfertinger666

it's a human right that should be accessible to those that desire it.

wolfertinger666

one day this transgender moral panic will be over and it will be a relief, but before that, it's best to remind people that it's no longer about protecting children or women it's about killing minorities and erasing them for a fascist world.

it will be over soon. i have hope for a better future.