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

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

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.

an absolutely insane way to end this year 

honestly she wasn’t even trying… saying ~small dick energy~ to a guy like that when he @ you is basically the equivalent of giving a catcaller the middle finger as you walk past him, isn’t it?

which kinda makes it funnier that he got so worked up over it that he tripped and fell into a Romanian jail cell while rushing to counterattack what was essentially a digital eyeroll

She upped her game for the sign-off, look

the new disney movies made me realize that we no longer want prince charming to save us, or win against the big evil. we just want an apology and acceptance from our parents

— Éowyn, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields

Paintings by Matthew Stewart, Nick Robles, Chris Rahn, Çağlayan Kaya Göksoy, Craig Spearing, and Stephen Graham Walsh

Yasss Jamaica🇯🇲🇯🇲🇯🇲

“We see no reason to celebrate 70 years of the ascension of your grandmother to the British throne because her leadership, and that of her predecessors, have perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind.”

- Letter signed by 100 Jamaican leaders

To clarify, they are bisexual, not lesbians:

https://twitter.com/fancy_foxtrot/status/1205747696813756416

Still iconic

WHEN DO WE GET THE COMIC SERIES AND/OR MOVIE?

It keeps getting better:

Bonus:

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

This is why it’s important to learn how to analyze media, a skill we are apparently losing.

While Huck Finn, for example, absolutely and obviously carries a moral message, not all stories do, because not every story is supposed to teach you something, nor will every story hold your hand and gently walk you to an easy conclusion.

Jack Black is the only person who could play Tom Bombadil with the correct energy send tweet.

Tumblr holidays:



these parents are so angry 😭

Remember that funny scene in Big Hero 6 when Baymax falsely diagnosed Hiro with puberty and started trying to go over what symptoms he would go through (including where he was gonna grow hair and was cut off by Hiro right before he was about to mention pubic hair).

Nobody batted an eye at that.

But Turning Red bringing up periods and *GASP* SHOWING PADS ON SCREEN????

How DARE puberty be mentioned in a kids movie when it’s about girls

my dad taught me history in high school (all girls, private, catholic school) and one of my absolute favorite things about him was that, unlike every other teacher I had, he was never calm when a bee or, more accurately, a hornet or yellowjacket, flew in the window. he would stop whatever he was doing, reach for a book or rolled up piece of paper, and say with great dramatic flair, “ladies, the enemy is here.”

A Tiki bar but instead of appropriating Oceanic cultures and religions, it’s all Garbled Catholic Iconography.

Me *points to cherub*: can you make that but hollow so I can fill it with Mai Tais?

The walls are covered in Lorem Ipsum but if anyone asks, all the staff say it’s a sacred, mystical text.

Bar snacks are all shaped like communion wafers, but, like, salted

You stick your tongue out and a waiter in short shorts and a Roman collar gently places one onion ring on your tongue.

Mini crucifixes instead of drink umbrellas

fun fact: there’s literally a bar with this exact theme in vancouver called hail mary’s! it’s catholic themed and there’s a confession booth and the bathroom is styled like hell

you say that and then you´re not going to add pics?

I’m really glad this post is making the rounds again (yaaaay validation) but it kills me that folks are reblogging versions without all the lovely pictures!!!

turning red is such a thinly veiled metaphor for the immigrant/diaspora experience of losing touch with your heritage. it’s all those stories of immigrant parents not teaching their children their native language in the hopes that they will assimilate easier into society. it hit me in such a particular way when the aunties all started singing in cantonese, and mei asked what they were saying.

the red panda means a lot of things in turning red, and i think one interpretation is the family’s relationship with their cultural roots. it’s spelled out in the movie already: when their family moved to a ‘new world’, and the blessing became a curse. as much as the red panda is a metaphor for self-expression in general, a message that’s easier to empathize with too, cultural identity still plays into it. the fact that they had to cut themselves off from it is so telling.

and! they literally tokenized themselves. ming and her family literally packaged and contained this huge part of their identity into something small and palatable for the society they want to exist in, a shallow connection to their culture that they can wear as an accessory. it’s exotic enough to be interesting but ultimately not impactful or disruptive to their current setting. i cannot stress enough how obsessed i am with this detail. they made little tokens to contain their pandas. they actually tokenized themselves.

SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME — 2021, dir. Jon Watts