Rb to give your mutuals a baby stoat to gently hold

Homestar Runner, Mystery Science Theater and Space Ghost Coast to Coast is superwholock for people who listen to They Might Be Giants

Specifically this is superwholock for the kind of people who think they're better/smarter/some kind of iconoclast for listening to They Might be Giants.

Strutting in as our next bird; the Nicobar pigeon.

The nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica) is a pretty good sized pigeon from India! The bird, while known for its fantastic, beaming rainbow iridescent feathers is also known for being the closest living relative of the dodo (yes, the dodo was a pigeon!) and also near threatened. It is also the only living member in its genus. Amazing!

I had a dream last night that I was moving to a rural lakeside area where the lake had a monster in it, Kelp Kevin. But Kelp Kevin wasn’t a mysterious rumor, he was just a weird big kelp-looking thing that showed up all the time. 

And as they were explaining Kelp Kevin to me, the monster himself burst out of the water, and I raised my hand on some weird instinct and as soon as I did he gave me a high five with a big kelpy limb. Then he vanished back into the water and everyone was like “Ayup, that’s Kelp Kevin.”

I hope everyone has a day of equivalent awesome to that of being high-fived by a cryptic lake monster named Kevin. 

Happy seventh anniversary to Kelp Kevin, my own personal cryptid. Nothing but high fives for you, bud.

Of course you don’t. Free college might hinder the school-to-prison pipeline your  prison owning donors depend on

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

welp;

Actual quote, in context:

“I believe that we should make community college free. We should have debt-free college if you got to a public college or university. You should not have to borrow a dime to pay tuition… I disagree with free college for everybody. I don’t think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump’s kids to college.“ [video link]

Don’t spread misinformation just to fit a narrative, Clinton is advocating for there to be a cap on who gets free college so that the government doesn’t have to subsidize the education of people with enough disposable income to pay for it themselves. The plan she’s proposing would have a better chance of being passed, is more cost-effective, and still opens up higher education to low-income individuals who previously couldn’t afford it. 

the op lagonegirl literally ended up being a russian psyop im losing my mind

Reblogging this as an example of what the Russian interference here on tumblr was. I have seen some people in the past days casting doubts on Tumblr because the blogs that were banned had social justice content. 

But that was the point exactly. They posted some real things and a lot of half-truths that would appeal to the kind of politics on here and therefore spread disinformation to discourage us from participating in stopping Trump through the only option we had. I’m glad tumblr left these posts up so we could see for ourselves. 

I don’t know if it actually worked on anyone, I hope we all remember to check our sources before making our decisions, but life is short and maybe some people didn’t.  There are plenty of real social justice blogs available still, so I hope we will follow those instead.

Reblogging this now. Because some of you think that a leftist space can be trusted. They can’t. Lagonegirl posted content that had nothing to do with politics, it made her seem like a real person.

She was not. There were SO many posts by her that got big numbers and most of them were fine. That was an illusion so that when she posted things like this it might not click like it would if it were loudly pro- Trump.

You see a blog that is leftist but only critical of the more “safe bet” cookie cutter candidate and has very little to say about the obviously right wing, objectively worse for everything you stand for candidate?

Be on guard.

I reblogged a few of these posts. I found them kind of creepy and odd at the time, but the whole psyop was these people pretending to be black.

Im white.

In a lot of leftist circles, there’s a whole thing where you’re told to “uplift marginalized voices.” If marginalized people say something you aren’t sure about, you’re told to “stay in your lane.”

For me, and i can’t say for sure but probably for others too, this leads to a predisposition not to question the views of people (supposedly) more marginalized than me.

Which meant that even when I felt they weren’t quite right, I sometimes reblogged anyway, on the theory that we should all be exposed to marginalized groups’ views, even if they make us a bit uneasy.

The whole psyop was to get you to have trouble telling the difference between “I’m uneasy because this viewpoint is new to me, but once I consider it I’ll settle down because I will have formed an opinion” and “I’m uneasy because I can tell that’s incorrect, but I’m not sure yet what smells fishy here.”

Leftism is VERY fertile ground for this kind of con, precisely because we already worry our bullshit detectors may be miscalibrated because we have privilege of various kinds.

The only solution I’ve found is to remember that I don’t need permission to vehemently disagree with someone who’s marginalized in a way I’m not.

It might be a good idea to think about why they see things differently. I might learn something. But the mere fact my response was “lol no wtf?” That’s not something to feel guilty or concerned about.

That’s just having an opinion, and we all have those.

Which means if someone is lying about being in those groups, I’ll be more inclined to catch it because I won’t be worried about who I need to “uplift” to prove “allies aren’t garbage,” etc.

Doughnut whale sharks 🍩✨

Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.

The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.

Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks.  Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that?  In the computer core, or the communications hub?  You just lose power.  And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.

If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.

It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost.  Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.

Most fleets give you something, of course.  For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass.  I looked at the vial.

“It’s too soon,” Traav said.

Kvala gestured negation, shakily.  She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now.  Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive.  “You know we’re losing the war.”

They couldn’t deny that.  “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”

“Doesn’t it?  The Chreee have better technology.  Better resources.  And they have their warrior code.  They don’t care if they die.”

“We can’t give up!” Traav protested.  They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told.  “Any heartbeat now—”

There was a clunk.  Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.

“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.

Kvala exchanged glances with me.  The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors.  What was the point, after all?

The Aushkune did.

There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here.  They were supposed to hide in nebulas.

But if there were—

If there were, we were too late.  The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—

Footsteps.

Bipedal.  The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.

And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it.  My first thought was, robot?  That’s almost worse than Aushkune . . .  But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.

Who wore suits?

“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala.  “Urgent treatment.  Evacuation.”

“Who are you?”  Kvala struggled upright.

Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners.  “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain.  Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.

“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?”  Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.

“Not Chreee,” the sound system said.  “You Man.  Soil Starship Nichols.”  The being hesitated.  “Rescue Chreee as well.  On ship.  Will separate.”

“You what?” I said faintly.  Who would do that?

“Oath,” the being explained.

“What kind of oath?  To what deity?”

The shoulders of the being moved up and down.  “Several different.  Also none.  For me, none.  Just—oath.”

I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was.  I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.

The being scanned me.  “Have water,” it said.  “Recommend.”

Raithari have fast metabolisms.  I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.

“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”

“Raithari to Raithar.  Chreee to Chreeeholm.”

“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.

The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad.  Sometimes lie.”

We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?

“And you—what?” I asked.  “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”

The being seemed to consider this.  “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.

Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense.  Did it worship soil?  But it had said that it had sworn to no deity . . .

Madness.

On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it.  So why not embrace madness and see what happened?

“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.

“Yes.  Soil Starship Nichols.”

I followed the being in the suit.

Took me well over a minute to realize "low frequency right angle shape" was Red Cross.

I love how this shows the weirdness both of language and of culture. Excellent writing!

"Soil Starship Nichols"

This is what took me a moment.

Earth Starship [Nichelle] Nichols

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

Ncuti Gatwa - Attitude Magazine (May/June 2024)

It should be a bigger scandal that J.K. Rowling is threatening to sue small accounts for accurately calling her a Holocaust denier. So glad the Streisand effect exists. Now we can all rebuke her reprehensible views more than ever.

making my way downtown

❗⚠️❗ERROR❗⚠️❗

Potato

this user is potato

If a flaming old queen in a cape wants to kill off racists in power I say have at it

That wasn’t even his plan!! His plan was to make the senator a mutant, so he’d have to advocate for mutants or be destroyed by his own policy, and tbh. It’s the best villain plan I’ve ever seen. The goo was the plan unexpectedly failing. 9/10 only bc he was going to kill Rogue. Next time use someone willing to sacrifice herself for the cause, pls. No further notes

I like how his plan in like real world terms, was to turn desantis gay but instead he exploded

like to charge reblog to cast tbh

Ever hear an Andean cock of the rock before? Probably not, or maybe you have and didn't realise it, because they sound quite a bit like a kookaburra!

Kookaburra laugh: just absolutely losing it at some silly nonsense

Cock of the rock laugh: you are about to die to an Evil Scientist Device

Motion-sensor-activated Halloween decoration on its last legs.

“I don’t care about dumb weed jokes,” I said naively, before I saw this