PONYDOODLES IS DOING AN ART RAFFLE TO SUPPORT THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE!

Win art of your characters AND support Palestine at the same time! This is an art raffle, where tickets are given out based on how much you donate to the linked causes! Can't donate? Share our post around and encourage others to donate instead!

A $5 donation to one of the causes will earn you one entry. Higher donations = More entries! Provide proof of your donation & contact info in the form below to get a chance to win 5 pieces of art from our mods of a pony character(s) of your choosing!

Full info and donation details here: https://forms.gle/VRL3SV7hGL4u4dkA8

tumblr friendships are hard to maintain like im sorry i know i havent talked to you in 5 months but you’re still super rad and i still consider us friends im just dumb

#if you’re wondering if this is for you #it’s probably for you

If I have ever messaged you or messaged me and never heard from me again, I still consider us friends. I just suck

"This person has a secret onlyfans!" "This artist does NSFW commissions!" "This author writes porn on the side!" I cannot begin to tell you how swag and awesome that is.

My friend’s little brother (non-verbal) used to hide people’s shoes if he liked the person, because it meant they had to stay longer. The more difficult it was to find your shoes, the more he liked you.

One day my cousin came over, and she was a bitch. When it was time to leave, my friend’s brother handed her shoes directly to her and she went on and on about how he must have a crush on her because he only “helped” her.

online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.

I need help with dental bills!

Hey, Them's Fightin' Herds, and Brony Communities. I come asking for your help. I need to undergo a massive dental treatment plan in the future, it will cost a lot, so I opened up a ko-fi and gofundme. Any amount you can give is appreciated, please consider donating! Thanks! https://ko-fi.com/shadowking58 https://gofund.me/a4b308ce

Art: (2) Lux (@LuxuryRealm) / X (twitter.com)

Writing Trans Stories For Fun (and Liberation) --- My latest newsletter!

More profound when you consider that Doctors Without Borders rarely makes political statements.

In #UNSC mtg on Middle East, @MSF SG Christopher Lockyear says: "Israeli forces have attacked our convoys, detained our staff, bulldozed our vehicles, hospitals have been bombed and raided. And now for a second time, one of our staff shelters has been hit. This pattern of attacks is either intentional or indicative of reckless incompetence. Our colleagues in #Gaza are fearful that as I speak to you today, they will be punished tomorrow."

He adds: "The humanitarian response in Gaza today is an illusion. A convenient illusion that perpetuates a narrative that this war is being waged in line with international laws. Calls for humanitarian assistance have echoed across this chamber. Yet in Gaza we have less and less every day, less space, less medicine, less food, less water, less safety."

Specifically, Doctors Without Borders rarely makes political statements because doing so can jeopardize their ability to work in as many places as possible (including places controlled by incredibly shitty governments), and their one singular goal is to provide medical care wherever it's needed. They are extremely practical-minded as an organization and will, regardless of members' personal beliefs, avoid potentially offending people who have the ability to make their work more difficult/impossible. All they care about is getting doctors to the people who need the doctors. If they're doing this, it's because providing medical care in Palestine has become so difficult that calling on the global community for action gives them better odds of being able to do their jobs than avoiding offense to the Israeli government, possibly because offending the Israeli government can no longer make the situation worse than it already is.

As a public service announcement, someone scraped every single text file on GameFAQS in March 2020 for archival purposes, and you can find it on archive.org with the title "Gamespot TXT GameFAQs - Full Archive." You can download the whole thing (it's about 2 gigs) if you want to spite Wikia's attempts to make themselves the gatekeepers of all fan knowledge.

Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

by Ellen Ullman

a while back I made a post along the lines of "every STEM major should have a required 'history of science' course that's just all about previously wrong and bad scientific theories like sperm all containing homunculi and spontaneous generation" and I got a lot of responses like "but STEM majors already have gen ed requirements!" and would not understand why I was specifically asking for a course that would teach people about why science is not infallible and does not exist in a vacuum and THIS IS EXACTLY WHY ACTUALLY

THESE BOOKS I’m dying

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.

Here it is. The bee post is back

I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.

Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.

When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.

So.

It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.

Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.

And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water. Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!

Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (風の谷のナウシカ)

“Kazul’s not my dragon.“ Cimorene said sharply. “I’m her princess. You’ll never have any luck dealing with dragons if you don’t get these things straight.”

Dealing With Dragons - Patricia C. Wrede

I saw this art when I was 11 years old and I was like “this is the best drawing in the history of the world”