Fancy dude! It's a leaf-footed bug for sure (family Coreidae), and I think probably a citron bug, Leptoglossus gonagra.

Apparently she is female. Here is a picture of her babies I found yesterday.

Last year I did demon Sakura and exorcist Sasuke and now it's reversed 😂

Reblog if you think asexuality is a legitimate sexuality.

I’m trying to prove something.

Reblog if your blog is a safe place for asexuals.

I found an interesting thread on twitter about how fandom puts the well- being of fictional characters above that of actual abuse victims and I wanted to share it cause some of y'all really need to read

To add to the list:

This is why pro-life people prefer to put most or all their energy on defending unborn children over living ones

This is why certain vegans/animal rights advocates put their energy on defending animals over a wider, more complex analysis of sustainability

These groups often self-describe as "a voice for the voiceless"—but they intentionally seek the voiceless to use them to amplify their own agendas and sense of righteousness. These groups are also notoriously bad at advocating for marginalized groups that can speak for themselves, and are bewildered and angry when they are challenged or held accountable by those they do advocate for.

this is why people put enormous money and energy into 'animal welfare' groups while walking over the bodies of homeless humans on the street.

A glorious fuck-ton of perspective angle references (per request).

[From various sources.]

Sources:

There’s zero way I’m not reblogging this

godsend

I want to really dig into this idea here. Because I think this is really important, and kind of mind blowing. It essentially, it boils down to “all writing everywhere should conform to what I like, because all writing is For Me”. I think this might be especially bad in white fandom, because white people really do have a lot of trouble realizing something is Not For Us. But looking at fic especially the other way, as something fundamentally For The Writer is really interesting. Positing fic as bits of a person’s diary that they’re making available to the rest of us really lowers the acceptable level of handwringing. I mean, would you police what someone could or couldn’t write in their diary? Of course not, that’s like trying to police someone’s thoughts. So, by extension, don’t police fic, because fundamentally it was not written For You, but For The Author.

Now. Here’s the thing. Can we then extrapolate from fic to published fiction? I mean, there is often very little difference between a well-written fic and a good romance novel. So does that mean every fiction book ever written is not written For The Audience, but is written For The Author, and the author just chooses to share it with us? If we go down that road, then we get into territory of “well, should we be publishing harmful fiction that further marginalize marginalized people” which…is an ongoing debate. But if every book is just a piece of the author’s diary made visible to the world, then do we have to say “anything goes”?

Anyway. This whole debate always plays very strongly into my internal debate as a librarian on whether Freedom of Speech applies to everyone, or whether we take a stance against harmful books and refuse to give them space.

Sorry, this got longer than I intended and I kinda went round in circles.

To be honest, I think it’s less white fandom and more American fandom.

My answer to the librarian’s debate is simple and it boils down to these questions:

What is your archive’s aim? What are your limiting factors?

Your average children’s section of actual physical books in the local public library only has so much shelf space. Books wear out and must be replaced. Every time that happens, a decision is already being made to get another of the old book or to choose a new one. Whether we consider bigoted content or not, this constant pruning is already going on, so it’s foolish to think we’re destroying the integrity of the collection by phasing out some out-of-date works. It’s pretty likely that the collection exists with the aim of helping young readers learn to enjoy reading or to educate kids. The librarians are picking and choosing within a lot of constraints on space and budget to make a collection that fulfills those needs. So not only should racist books be pruned, but perfectly fine books may also need to go to make room for a more varied collection that hits more readers’ tastes, a broader range of topics, etc.

People try to apply this logic to something like AO3, and that’s nonsense. AO3 is much more analogous to one of those university library collections of all of so-and-so’s papers--at least in the sense that the aim is to preserve the whole shebang, and one individual letter is probably not a big drain on the library’s resources. If you find out a box of papers was fraudulently or mistakenly included and literally isn’t so-and-so’s papers, it will be removed from the collection for irrelevance, but things like so-and-so being a hateful bigot or some of their content sucking just aren’t important considerations unless you’re rethinking having the collection at all.

AO3 does have problems with its massively high traffic, but those are problems with readers. The toll on AO3 from each individual work--the work itself, not the search that finds it--is basically nothing. There is essentially no limit to how many plain pieces of text AO3 can archive. And we know its aim: to preserve them all.

The part of AO3 that’s similar to the children’s section at a public library is those bookmark collections that have topics like Non Triggering Fics in Fandom X or A Representative Overview of Fics in Fandom Y. Granted, those are done by individual users and they’re not beholden to the site’s mandate, but when you see one, you know it was their aim to show off some specific selection of works, not to preserve all works generally.

I also look at this with the stance I use on pro publishing:

What is one work or author taking away by being there?

If it’s a big publishing company, they’re only going to take on a few new authors per year. Whomever gets that chance takes it away from every other hopeful.

But on AO3 or even in the indie selfpub world, what is one author taking away? Even if they are a straight author writing m/m or something, they haven’t removed a chance from a queer author or anybody else.

I guess you could see the AO3 invite queue as a limiting factor, but at however many thousand invites per day, most of them for readers, I wouldn’t count it.

I’ve seen people argue that by centralizing fandom, AO3 took away the impetus for a different, less squicky central archive... except this is bullshit because AO3 never intended to be the only hub for fic (quite the opposite!) and many parts of fandom saw FFN as the central hub up until recently. A few do even now.

Many arguments are about the ratio of this content to that on AO3. I see a lot of people crying about how other people put in the work and finished a story, and frankly, I am not sympathetic. If they want different content, they can roll up their sleeves and produce it.

The other arguments are all “My chance to use AO3 is taken away by it having content I hate”, but this is just a weasel-y way of trying to sound good while content policing something that was set up explicitly not to content police.

Better arguments for social justice on AO3 are like “How can we give users tools to better avoid shit they hate?” This isn’t equivalent to censoring the special collections at the university library. It’s more like giving the librarians some budget to go to diversity seminars so they can make better recs to patrons or paying someone to digitize the card catalog so people can actually find things.

tl;dr - I think librarian shit is super relevant. People just draw analogies between the wrong parts.

Also, I really want some Namkook recs.

Jed portrayed the shapeshifting alien taking the form of a Norwegian dog in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Jed was half-wolf, half Canadian malamute, and according to Carpenter, was an excellent animal actor—after becoming familiar with the cast and crew, he would not look at the camera, crew, or dolly during scenes. Jed’s quiet manner perfectly reflected the alien’s unsettling nature. Jed would go on to act in a few other movies, and lived on his trainer Clint Rowe’s animal sanctuary until his death at age eighteen—quite old for a dog of his breed.

literally where is his oscar

Comic on having long-COVID as a young person. Sending love to others who may be similarly suffering.

Ko-Fi

(ID under the cut)

Keep reading

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

VIDEO

Finally. People need to realize aliens aren’t the answer for everything (when they use it to erase poc civilizations and how smart they were)

(via TumbleOn)

What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”

Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it

And the Iroquois told Europeans that squirels showed them how to tap maple syrup and no one believed them until they caught it on video

Oral history from various First Nations tribes in the Pacific Northwest contained stories about a massive earthquake/tsunami hitting the coast, but no one listened to them until scientists discovered physical evidence of quakes from the Cascadia fault line.

Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.

Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/

Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄

Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year. 

“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.

In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.

“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut

“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”

Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.

“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”

 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/sammy-kogvik-hms-terror-franklin-1.3763653

Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.

Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.

oh man let me tell you about Indigenous Australian myths - the framework they use (with multi-generational checking that’s unique on the planet, meaning there’s no drifting or mutation of the story, seriously they are hardcore about maintaining integrity) means that we literally have multiple first-hand accounts of life and the ecosystem before the end of the last ice age

it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.  

Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with  the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians.  So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least

Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?

I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.

THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.

No. Just NO.

I’m so glad someone put it into words.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and he’s absolutely right.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.

Purity culture is gonna kill art if y’all let it.

Fiction is a safe place to explore whatever fucked up or dark desire that you have. You can write the most vile and fucked up shit in fiction and it be absolutely nothing you desire in real life. You can write about a serial killer who gets away with it. You can write about someone who goes on moral crusades to purge the world of all evils and still be the protagonist. You can write anything in fiction because that’s what it is meant for. 

It isn’t meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be. 

It isn’t meant to be educational unless you create it to be. 

Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Not everything has to be deep, or have meaning, etc. unless the creator wants it to be and a lot of the purity types end up forcing something to have deep meaning or social commentary where it isn’t meant to.  Is this inherently bad? No, but these people don’t just say “But this is my interpretation of it.” they go as far as trying to force that interpretation onto everyone else, including the creator, as a means of saying “See? It means that they promote/condone xyz so they’re bad and shitty people who should spend the rest of their life in jail with/are the same as people who’ve actually committed acts of violence against other people.” 

THANK. YOU.

@ all the people in the notes saying “yes except u can’t write about (list of immoral things they don’t want to see in fiction)” congrats on missing the point so spectacularly I’m not sure I could create better performance art if I tried

I will reblog this every time.

Literally this.

Getting dirty, asking questions, being unapologetically enthusiastic about things, going overboard on projects. These are a few of my favorite things.

This is so heartbreaking, but so true. 

And it’s even more heartbreaking when you see the transition and how performative it is.

I was a camp counselor at a science/nature camp when I was 16, for a bunch of 10 and 11 yr old girls. And one day while we were waiting around for the naturalist to come get us to go on the day’s hike, the boys cabin we were grouped with was exploring the area and overturned a log and found a salamander. One of the boys picked it up and they brought it over.

My girls all went “ewww, gross, keep it away!”

…right up until I said “whoa, cool, can I see it?”

This boy handed me the salamander and all of a sudden my girls were clustering around. They wanted to hold it. They were asking questions about it. They had stories of other times they’d seen a lizard or caught a frog or something. A couple of them went with some of the boys to look under another log and see if they could find another one.

All they had needed was permission to be curious, to show interest instead of disgust. And as soon as someone they were looking to for cues on “how to be a girl” showed interest, as soon as they didn’t feel like they had to perform socially-acceptable girliness and pretend to be grossed out in order to gain adult approval, all that natural curiosity and the fascination most kids have for the natural world just came bubbling right up.

As a female engineer, I have to reblog this.

m/f ships are fun actually you guys just think m/f means cishet white and misogynistic

Y'know what, fuck this bullshit. I need to know y'all are actually against it.

Reblog this if you will NOT use or support Post+.

I hope to make @staff see how that is total bullshit. Tumblr will die without writers/creators.

@staff fuck this shit

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don't know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they'd been all around us the whole time.

XKCD

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it's colors, and it's tail rings (which one would argue would be it's "iconic feature."

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We've found pigmentation in scales and skin. We've completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We've figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by "accident" by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it's life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from "rocks" than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is "We can't possibly know anything about these animals," then you don't understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They're only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as "proof" that paleontologists don't know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of "thanks i hate it" and "stop ruining dinosaurs!"

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

@lusus--naturae​

What’s happening to autistic people right now?

(Trigger warning for abuse, electroshock therapy, torture, and ableism.)

The US court has overturned the ban on shock devices being used against disabled students, predominantly autistic students in the US.

The shock device being legalized is called the graduated electronic decelerator (or GED). This is a torture device that is used to ‘correct’ autistic behaviors / symptoms. Autistic people are shocked for stimming, and for having meltdowns, ect. This device was made popular by a behavioral center (the Judge Rosenberg Center, specifically) that is infamous for its abuse and torture of autistic / disabled patients.

(Image ID: someone is holding their arm out and resting it on a table, with their sleeve rolled up. Attached to their arm are wires, which connect to a small cube device.)

This is what the device looks like. It sends electric shocks into the victim’s skin; the victim often being restrained and held against their will. This is torture. GEDs have been reported to cause intense psychological trauma, PTSD, and physical injuries.

In March of 2020, the FDA ruled for GEDs to be banned. (Although, of course, they were still illegally used at a number of places.) This ruling has recently been appealed, and today, the US court of appeals has re-regulated the law to stop the use of GED. Sounds great, right? It would be!

... If not for a huge loophole in the wording, which basically allows this torture to continue. This device is going to have continued use on autistic students in order to “correct their behavior.”

“So.... What can I do??”

Great question! You can:

That’s all! Thank you. Reblogs are very appreciated!!

what is a starseed and what are its terrible origins

Starseeds, also called star people, were introduced by a guy named Brad Steiger in his 1976 book Gods of Aquarius. It argues that certain people, mainly neurodivergent children, are alien-human hybrids who are partially possessed by the spirit of a psychic alien.

The term has a myriad of modern uses, with myriad definitions, but the original context is a stock standard new-age eugenicist narrative.

Doesnt "indigo children" have a similar backstory?

Nancy Ann Tappe's original description of Indigo Children wasn't as explicitly dehumanizing as Steiger's work, but it was still dehumanizing. Over time, the terms have sorts converged and are often used interchangeably.

Oh yes, I was called Indigo and Crystal Child in the 80s.

I was also called a crystal child by an elder witch. I hardcore believed in that for a while.

Luckily it's less common than it was back in the 70s and 80s but you for sure still see people using it in the original context. Most anti-medical sentiments from the New Age have largely migrated from neo-paganism and into the "alternative medicine"/antivax community. It's one of the biggest avenues for right-wing radicalization of women specifically.

@thebibliosphere iirc you have some insight on this

I'm still on hiatus but was made aware of this tag, and I felt it necessary enough to respond to.

The term indigo child was used to abuse me growing up and there’s a reason I’m so vehemently pro-science, pro-medical advocacy and anti-bullshit in my chronic illness work and why seeing new age definitions bleed into mental health topics and subjects of neurodivergence is extremely triggering for me.

Being labeled an indigo child was used to convince me I didn’t need medical care, both physical and mental. The premise of the thinking was that I wasn't chronically ill; I was special. I have vivid memories of being told I was put on this earth to be a healer; that's why I was always in chronic pain; I was absorbing the pain of others to make the world a better place.

I cannot begin to tell you the amount of psychological damage and trauma that occurred from being exposed to these sort of ideologies as a child/teen, but I can tell you at the age of 34 I’m still working in therapy to untangle it.

We know now I have multiple genetic disorders and disabilities, including Ehlers Danlos Syndrome a condition which causes a great deal of physical pain. Yet there are days when I wake up in agony and the thought still filters through my head: at least someone else is suffering less. It’s a work in progress.

Same with my neurodivergence. I wasn't mentally ill/struggling with school because of a learning disability (ADHD). I was struggling because I was a Pisces (yes, really) and academia wasnt ~spiritual~ enough for me, and I should be focusing my energy more on becoming a healer. I wasn’t struggling with emotional dysregulation, or executive dysfunction, I was just an empath and highly sensitive to the world around me. The person who set me on this path? A teacher who decided to take me under their wing and nurture my vulnerability. I wasn’t failing basic high school classes because I needed help. I was failing because I was meant to be “more than normal.”

I was an indigo child. A starseed. More than human. And thus, dehumanized, denied agency and gaslit into believing my suffering was what the world needed to be a better place.

(My parents were going through their own horrific stuff before anyone asks. My whole childhood is 13 types of trauma in a trench coat pretending to be normal.)

I was 16 years old. By the time I was 17 I was practicing holistic therapies on adults. Reiki, crystal therapy, energy work, angel therapy… and the thing is… I enjoyed it. It was new and stimulating and I enjoyed learning and having people to talk to who valued my presence. And it felt nice to be special and appreciated. I wasn’t just weird or awkward. I was special—that’s why I got on so much better with adults than my own peers. I was just too Spiritual to ever be a child.

Can we say red flags? 🚩🚩🚩

Fortunately there were adults in that social circle who realized I was being abused and stepped in to stop me being radicalized and act as a buffer. By the time I was in my 20s I had a healthier understanding of what holistic and alternative health therapies meant, and how they can be used in conjunction with medicine to help people cope with the trauma of illness. Some of which I implement in a healthy and safe way in my own care today. I also did a complete 180 and started reading proper medical journals and began trying to unravel my own health issues because unfortunately, the doctors I had access to then were as ableist as the people trying to indoctrinate me. Which is also why so many people fall prey to these types of predators*.

People who use these terms are not only perpetuating ideals founded in new age eugenics; they’re often hiding abuse, sometimes without even knowing it because that’s how they were abused too. They frame neglect or exploitation as enabling spiritual growth and it’s Terrifying to see their ideologies about reality and individual uniqueness and exceptionalism being perpetuated on social media. Especially in a lot of pagan and spiritual wellness circles. I can’t even go on certain apps without feeling bombarded by it and I’m truly concerned for the emotional and mental well-being of those being exposed to it.

I know some people still use the terms as self identifiers. And I don’t blame them. There’s usually a lot of trauma behind things like this, and not everyone has the means to break free from cult-like environments. I got lucky. But please, if anyone is coming across these terms for the first time and thinks it’s a good way to describe themselves, please know it’s rooted in ableism and new age eugenics made palatable by a sprinkling of fairy dust and wonder.

I’m going back on hiatus. Stay safe out there.

- - -

*Being desperate to feel in control of your life or to get help can drive you into the arms of the first kind person willing to listen. Multilevel marketing companies thrive off that shit. Poverty, medical instability and ideas of individual exceptionalism all play a factor in the rise of unethical companies like d*terra and y*ung living becoming as prevalent and insidious as they are. When I refer to them as cults, I am not being hyperbolic.