A Fish Without a Bicycle

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

#tapping the reblog button with utmost care because i’m handling a historical artifact (via @malarkiness)

I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say

reblog if attacking fascism is really the hill you want to die on

this is literally like one of the most justified and honorable hills you could die on??? lol??

Quick someone reply with the gif™️

Always reblog this if you are cool

@/savoirflair: On #EarthDay, it's crucial to recognize that the guardians of our planet are its indigenous peoples, who have historically maintained biodiversity and preserved natural resources through deep-rooted practices and ancestral wisdom. There is no climate justice without human rights, and we cannot celebrate our planet without honoring its original and eternal custodians. Without the stewardship of indigenous populations like the Palestinians, our environmental efforts are incomplete. Their resilience and ongoing struggle underline that Earth Day is not only a call for environmental action but also for justice and the recognition of the rights of indigenous guardians who have nurtured the land for centuries.

I asked my friends on Discord if they used "psipsipsi" or "swswsw" when they are trying to call kitties, and I got a wide array of answers and it got me wondering--

How do you

Thank you to @space-glitter-gay, @frogs-under-logs, @justoneofthosebibliophiles, and Virginia for the blessing and the other options!

And to thank you for your answer, here's a photo of our adopted kitten:

TW: Animal Death / Death

Senior pets have a hard time getting adopted. The likelihood of adoption is only 25% compared to 60% for a younger dog. Unfortunately, this is often due to prejudice. I want to raise awareness with this comic (and also get back to my roots, which I haven't really managed to do yet). But I want to start uploading more regularly again. Thank you for your patience so far.

Our blessed tumblr

A holy site

Nah nah nah, you ain’t hiding this in the tags

Not one of the 7 deadly sins, but a secret 8th sin

sorry what

Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

Now, a skirt that’s too long will be harder to work in–skirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazard–but that is not a problem with skirts in general, it’s a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in. Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if you’re hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called “girding your loins”). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didn’t need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)

Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”

Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)

Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)

Or to quote one of my all favorite posts, “fuck women’s contribution to our survival.”

Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.

Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.

*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT

(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)

Ancient Rome

Modern Morocco

Medieval Europe

Traditional Saudi Arabia

16th century Russia

Traditional Papua New Guinea

16th century Turkey

Modern India

i deliver propane.  this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold.  i was the first woman my company ever hired.

and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC.  they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was.  i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then.  they stayed in the house all the time.”  and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.

anyway i’ve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.

Another thing to keep in mind is that often a garment can be cumbersome if you’re not used to it, but no problem at all if you’ve worn it everyday for years and years.

Of course people who rarely/never wear skirts are going to have a harder time working in them than people who wear them every day! I wear shirts with big puffy sleeves everyday, and I never have any trouble with them, but someone who’s used to t shirts probably would.

I have to strongly disagree with the assertion that bifurcated garments are only useful for riding horses though. Plenty of cultures wore some form of pants, wether they had horses or not. Often you’ll see bifurcated garments with skirts layered on top of them.

Try and tell me that traditional Inuit women’s clothing includes trousers because they were riding horses they didn’t have and not because it’s sometimes -40 there. Skirts without anything underneath are very practical in some parts of the world, but in others you would quite literally freeze your junk off.

Bifurcated garments are useful for keeping cold drafts out! Or for keeping bugs from biting you, or just showing off your legs! And probably good for keeping sand out too, but I’ve never encountered a sand storm. None of this goes against all the other stuff about skirts being practical of course, but you can make a pro-skirt post without minimizing the usefulness or ubiquity of bifurcated things.

I wear below-knee skirts and dresses exclusively* and have for a number of years. The one thing I have to say about What People Say About Skirts is:

When someone tells you that you “can’t do X in a skirt”, they are wrong.

Specifically, they are leaving out some critical modifiers. It’s not true that you physically cannot do various things - ride horse, climb tree, run hard - in a loose skirt such as normal people have historically worn. What they may not be aware that they mean is: you cannot do those things in a socially acceptable fashion, which generally means without a chance of anyone seeing your underwear/lack of underwear. If you are in serious danger, or are alone, or simply choose not to care about this, I promise you can do those things just fine.

(Personally, in my life I find that I can also shovel snow in a skirt, because my scandinavian heritage makes me get warm VERY fast when I’m exercising. Obviously snow is not Super Cold Weather, but: you can do it. It will kind of suck if it goes over the tops of your shoes, though. Get good shoes.)

*It’s not a religion thing or anything, I just hate shopping for pants and wearing pants that don’t fit right or have bad texture so much that I quit forever. If it sucks, hit the bricks!

This is about skirts, but I want to add another thing to the truly EXCELLENT “if you can pretend women were too hobbled by their clothes” thing above.

I run a corseting panel at anime conventions. I always start it with my feet up on the table, chatting with the audience until start time. Then I say “so, who believes I’m corseted right now?” WITHOUT FAIL the people who raise their hands are all veteran cosplayers, often wearing a corset of their own. Then I say “you’re right, I am. How many of you believe I’m tightlaced?”

The hands go down. My shirt comes off. I turn around to show them my laces and tell them tightlacing is defined as a waist reduction of over 4”, and I’m at slightly over 6”.

Then I turn back around and say “also, I’ve pushed a stalled car across eight lanes of intersection like this” and you should see the faces. They’re gobsmacked. They’re HOOKED. They never quite know what to say after that revelation. I never bother telling them I wasn’t even breathing hard because I know they wouldn’t believe me.

Women were not nearly as hobbled by their clothing as you think.

not to mention that corsets are actually incredibly helpful if you’re a farmer, or you’re someone who has to be on their hands and knees a lot. they provide excellent back support. the history writer Ruth Goodman has written a lot about it. also, if you genuinely believe no one can do work in a skirt, watch literally any history re-enactors with women. you’ll see the kind of freedom of movement a skirt offers.

Yes, yes, yes to all of this. I just want to add my story. I am a teacher. I travel from class to class (it sucks) and I have to be walking around the room workig with kids. My go to outfit is: underwear, undershirt, corset, bike shorts or leggings, t-shirt, and a-line skirt.

If you don't count leggings I don't own a wearable pair of pants. I'm what some like to call super fat (I don't this is a good term as it is a term most people my size probably have trauma with), I'm 380lbs and have been 420lbs and still wore this outfit.

I started wearing corsets almost 2 years ago to help with debilitating lower back pain. I went through life for 6 years not being able to walk for more than 10 minutes with being in pain. I saw a lot of fashion historians on tiktok talking about corsets and how they actually provided support for the back. I finally bought one and the difference was astounding. I was able to walk or stand for at least an hour. Last summer I went to PT 3 days a week and days I wore a corset the PT said my sacral alignment was much better (if you have back pain you should definitely look up exercises that align your sacrum because they're really easy to do and offer almost immediate relief). Wearing a corset literally changed my life. I wear one any time I have to sit, stand, or walk for long periods of time.

My skirts I get from @mayakern who is an awesome artist. But before I wore her skirts I wore dresses usually. I always looked for dresses and skirts with pockets. Maya's skirts are my go to because the pockets are so big. I can literally carry anything in them. I am able to run around all day and do whatever I want to in them. It is so much more comfortable to wear skirts than pants and you have so much more freedom of movement. When it's hot, skirts are much cooler, when it's cold skirts can offer an extra layer. They just do what they need to do so well.

genuinely concerning that people think "intifada," which means revolution is somehow an extremely violent antisemitic word. These phases of treating the simple fact of something being in Arabic and being seen as violent are concerning and will infact lead to Arabs facing extreme rates of violence. We've seen this with "Allahu Akbar" and we need to call out attempts of framing Arabic as a violent language

there's a massive cadre of people on here who can best be described by the phrase "be gay do war crimes"

#it's me#I'm that person

this is not intended to be a funny quirky joke meme phrase it's a description of american or otherwise western gays with deeply imperialist and racist tendencies, you do not want to say you're this person

Genuinely can you shut the fuck up. do you hear yourself rn

@clarissa39 are you sure you kicked the racism and imperialism? Cause it sure doesn't fucking seem like it

Yeah you're right, it's an ongoing process to correct my attitudes and it's going to take a lot of time and effort but is very much the right thing to do. What I mean here is what I have done and been complicit in in the past doesn't go away because I'm getting better and trying to correct my past errors.

Also because I was involved in the YPG in Syria as an irregular, so an illegal combatant...you know, a war criminal

Like very literally this is why I joke about it.

you could've led with that last part and saved everyone a lot of trouble but it is admittedly very funny that you didn't

you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

this guy gets it

The decadence

lost in the sauce

Girl are you the Hays Code the way you consider media irredeemable if it depicts anything that strays away from the norm you're comfortable with or depicts anything morally questionable without definitively condemning it and anyone associated with it, therefore creating worse stories and content and making it difficult for people to engage with complicated issues from a nuanced and controlled perspective?

you're going about your normal day when, suddenly, surprise! you've been pokémon mystery dungeon'd!

unfortunately, due to budget cuts, the pokémon assigning quiz has been canceled. instead, you must spin THE WHEEL, assigning you a random, unevolved, non-legendary and non-mythical pokémon. you must now go on some sort of world-saving adventure as this pokémon. good luck!

tell me in the tags what you rolled, and how you feel about it - for bonus points, you can spin the wheel again for (or just take your pick of) a pokémon to be your partner.

bonus rules:

by all accounts, she almost drowned...