love 2 learn new things

Neat

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects

Honey is literally murder but go off

Prove it.

They literally puke their guts up to make your honey

I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.

Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.

Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey

This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read

@zoologicallyobsessed please show us pics of your bee grinder

they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom. 

…do they think they put bees in that and spin them around until they vomit…?

bee carnival

bad and naughty bees get put into the b e e c e n t r i f u g e to extract their honey

Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.

… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.

How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.

The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.

Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.

Stop what you’re doing and please look at these doodles of my mom’s cat

you’re laughing. the hannibal fandom jokingly made #consensualcannibalism trending on twitter only for the democrats and republicans to assume its about their opposing party and start viciously attacking each other over supporting cannibalism and you’re laughing

here are some of my favorite screenshots of the event

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

the thing *I* get mad about is no one goes and fixes up any of the hundreds of thousands of airplanes lying around, or even puts together any new ones. like the big fucking stumbling block for all those thousands of years for humans seemed to just be no one managed to combine the idea for a propeller with an engine that would spin it fast enough. but now the genie is thoroughly out of the bottle: drawings of planes have the propeller on it. we will remember that the secret to airplanes is smallish airfoil wings and a very very fast propellor (or three) for a thousand years, until all the books and drawings and planes themselves have decayed away. 

like yeah you couldn’t make commercial jetliners in your garage, but if you camped out in an old airfield, you could probably bang together some kind of working franken-cessna. 

I have an uncle who got bored and built a flyable franken-cessna in his garage a few years ago based upon his knowledge as an automotive worker so you really don’t need to be a specialized aeronautics expert to build a plane. You just gotta be able to stop your dog’s weird anti-aircraft vendetta long enough to put it together.

but yeah, the electricity thing bugs me so much. Solar panels are everywhere these days. It isn’t super hard to set up small wind turbines. But! the thing that bugs me the most is the assumption that the whole power grid of a continent would just fall apart all at once and never get back up and running (assuming your apocalypse doesn’t explicitly state why that happened).

like look at the 2003 Northeast Blackout in North America. Cascading failures sent about 250 power plants offline. But even in areas hit by the blackout there were pockets that were fine. Either they had local power generation or they caught on to what was happening and separated from the grid before it hit them. Or they got back up and running the same night. And it didn’t expand beyond the northeast area because the whole of north america isn’t connected to each other. You could have something hit the east coast and the west coast but Quebec and Texas would be there happily flipping everyone off as they basked in their separate grids.

And! different types of power generation are going to have different levels of protection. A solar farm probably has a fence that will keep out the local hooligans. A wind farm is just fuck off tall and leaves it to sheer height to stop people from fucking with it. Hydroelectric dams depends on how big it is, could be dedicated armed security, could be the two dudes on duty to run the turbine that day who’re just annoyed they’re missing lunch. Nuclear has an entire department who’s sole purpose is to fuck you up and they are very bored and would like to have a reason to use the armoured truck. So yeah, you can’t just walk into most of these places with the intent to “destroy the grid” or if you can walk into them people are going to be like, why is that random dude out there literally tilting at windmills maybe someone should stop him.

Also, I am always disappointed when north american authors forget that ARES (amateur radio emergency services) exists. It’s a bunch of local volunteers who are super into radio but also they will drop everything and head into disaster zones to run emergency communications. Your cell phone might not work, your internet might never come back on, but buddy down the road has access to a  radio and a can do attitude.

some fantastic additions here!

and to everyone who was like “you can’t use your devices directly off a turbine” oh my god i knooooow, did you think my post was a tutorial? you can do the farming part of the postapocalypse. please leave electricity to people who know there are reference materials.

I think you guys are wildly overestimating the existing capacity for at-home power generation, complicated by failing to account for how much harder it would be to get said things in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

The thing you’ve got to appreciate is that everything is interconnected, and in our current system, everything depends on fossil fuels and electricity.  And as far as electricity goes, most of us don’t live in areas that are powered by alternative sources, and there’s not enough power using alternate sources to reach everywhere, so that’s fossil fuels, too.  To make it worse, those alternate sources require maintenance– not just manpower, but parts.  A hydroelectric turbine is a hardy piece of equipment, and there are turbines in operation right now that are 50 years old.  But everything ELSE in a hydroelectric power station requires a lot more maintenance, which includes replacement parts, and even if those factories are in a powered region and there are still people in those factories (more on that in a minute), there’s still a matter of getting the parts to the power station when trucks don’t have fuel.  Not to mention that when a hurricane or tornado tears through the area, those power lines are probably going to stay down, because repairing them depends on being able to get to them, and in many cases, replacing things that require fuel to transport– and factories to produce. 

And none of this touches on food storage and transportation, the lack of which is probably going to kill most of the people who would have been in those factories, either through the not having, the having when someone else wanted it bad enough to kill, being mistaken for someone who has it, or being too near someone who had it when someone else wanted it. 

It’s not a question of lack of reference materials– it’s the fact that electricity requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure to maintain production and transmission.  And the things that require electricity?  Require more infrastructure.  There are no artisanal lightbulbs.  You can’t DIY an electric refrigerator.   They require parts and tools to repair.  

All of this is an excellent reason to switch to non-fossil-fuel sources, but we have not done so yet.  We should try very hard not to have another apocalypse until we do.

tumblr is on the verge of rediscovering regular degular sexual attraction to other humans and i dont know if we can handle it, collectively

how to trick writers into giving you more fanfic to read

Works for comics and art as well.

…this has the opposite effect.

instead try; I love you *generic keysmash* h OW DA RE *lavish praise* *inside fandom joke* *quote fave part* *more generic keysmashing*

you. i like you

Also, the favorites: 1) DID I SAY YOU COULD HURT ME LIKE THIS?!?;?!; 2) DONT HURT MY BABY WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS 3) why must you hurt me this way 4) WHY IS THIS A CLIFFHANGER?! WHAT HAPPENS NEXT I NEED TO KNOW 5) This made me cry/squeal/giggle/wake the dead with my laughter 6) I almost woke my family laughing at ___ part 7) I DIDNT KNOW I NEEDED THIS AU UNTIL YOU POSTED THIS 8) this is so cute I’m dying 9) and (writer’s name) strikes again! 10) I had to reread this bc it’s so good and I love it 11) I wish I could like/heart/kudos this more than once Like, seriously guys, freak out with us and you’ll have us wrapped around your little fingers.

This is so true! A lot of the time, I get stuck in a writer’s hole. But whenever I get a comment like the above ones, it makes me want to write more!

GUYS! THIS IS CHEATCODE FOR MORE!!! SIGNAL BOOST 😱✨😂

Very important!

via gracespelman

#gender exists purely as an affectionate diminutive

Why is this hiding in the tags

boy (affectionate)

sir (customer service voice for when my cat, tux, is trying to eat plastic)

I can never forget how the only method Tumblr has of preventing you from downloading copyrighted content from an audio post is to have a message on the source code saying "please don't download this we'll get in trouble"

This is not a joke

Same energy

trifecta

quadrifecta

“Tortilla” would match to “torta”, which….is a real Spanish word that just means cake, y’all.

Tortillas are little flat cakes.

in addition, mosca means fly

mosquito does mean little fly

lmfao

‘dump’ is an old adjective that meant “doughy” so “dumpling” is basically “little doughy thing”

Yes but that’s not funny.

what does a lapbottom look like?

laptop

lapbottom text

They're confusing, run on their own system, constantly breaking down, and you have to throw a fuck ton of money at it to fix it's problems. I present to you, the lapbottom