Paraglider and black vulture chilling

(via)

I NEVER get tired of this video. It would be fantastic if the bird was just flying near him, but the fact it feels safe and comfortable enough to land ON his paraglider, isn't startled when he pets it, and is NIBBLING HIS SHOES... blessed moment, absolutely fabulous, 10/10 gold stars.

Okay but the bird isn't just nibbling

Note that it doesn't start nibbling until he starts smoothing its feathers.

They're grooming each other.

This is called parahawking! That vulture is tame -- it’s wearing jesses (a leather tie around the leg that a falconer will use to hold a bird when it’s on the glove). In fact that vulture is employed. Parahawking birds seek out thermals the same way they would naturally, allowing paragliders to follow them in the process.

Vultures are often used for parahawking both because of their attraction to thermals, and because vultures, as scavengers, are comparatively gentler and more sociable than birds of prey!

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

agshjfsj you know what? sure. I can do this from an in-universe perspective too

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to when it was on air.

firstly, you'd better hope it stays up on amazon prime, because it aired 24/7 for multiple decades, so the size of it is astronomical. there's a reason the other streaming services dropped it - the server costs alone are ridiculous. but even on prime there are ad breaks in it that it never used to have, because back then all the advertising was product placement, but modern advertisers want mid-roll ads, and they really break up some of the most emotional moments imo.

(and don't get me started on the music licensing btw - all of the changes are bad, but the song swap in episode 9775 killed me dead. awful)

not to mention that the vhs, laserdisc, dvd, and blu-ray releases have been out of print for years. and if you want to try torrenting it, to get it in even barely decent quality you're gonna need at least 300TB of free space, and that's not including the deleted scenes and director's commentary tracks, which are a whole other thing.

secondly, everyone has this parasocial thing where they feel like they grew up with Truman, because their mom kept it on in the house when they were a kid or w/e, and we need to just. get over it. I mean, he's just a guy. you're not special for liking him; everyone likes him.

like, some of you guys are worse about this than you were with Steve from Blue's Clues, and that's saying something. you've gotta move on.

and people need to be nicer to the actors who played his friends and family, too. like I know the ones who were adults at the start have a lot to answer for, but the kids were pushed into this by the industry just like he was! and they don't deserve to be cancelled on twitter just because their dad got them into acting as a 3yo or w/e. like. come on.

thirdly, because of the way the show ended, we need to actually address the fact that we don't know what happened to him? like, Truman wasn't some actor who quit, he was lied to about his whole life, and now nobody knows where he is! and after the SAG-AFTRA strike when the crew and extras were fighting to get paid for the work they did on that show, did fucking anybody think about Truman? if anyone's owed residuals, it's that guy.

I just feel like nobody's taking it seriously that he's not a celebrity? he's a kid who got shoved into a machine, and after what happened to him, it'd be completely fine if he never showed his face in public again.

(though personally, I want him to just so he can sue the shit out of everyone involved in his upbringing. but that's just me.)

anyway on a fandom level, if you want to help, the Truman Archival Project is looking for some eps that were lost due to corruption, and some scenes that got cut later. there's a list on the wiki, but there are a lot of gaps and old tape formats that need converting, so if you can help, go do that!

and Truman, if you're out there - I hope you're living a good life. whatever comfort and entertainment you bring to people really means nothing compared to the value of you getting to live a normal life. I hope you're having a good time, wherever you are.

when it comes down to it, what was done to you was awful. nobody deserves to have their most private moments shown to millions of people without their consent.

it's probably bad that we've normalized this experience.

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

I am in love with you /p

What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time

Oh, love that story, adding it to the list: 20. Princess Talia and adding a few more contenders 21. Thyme 22. The Monster under the Bed 23. A Meaningful Death 24. Humans are unstoppable…until they aren’t 25. The Monster under the Fridge 26. Antler Guy 27. Cleric slamming healing spells

Adding a few more I remembered:  28. The Frog and the Scorpion 29. HSTHETE 30. The First Witch in the World 31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by Forests  32. A Faerie taking a Name  33. The Dragon on the Farm  34. Synovus & Menace  35. Raising the Anti-Christ  36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of Earth (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved)  37. Doctors without Borders…in Space!  38. The Villain-Wrangler  39. The Last Contact  40. The 100 Parent-Point Children  41. And the Heavens Wept  42. The Night Gentleman  43. The Serpent God and their Priestess 

44. No One Showed Up for the Last Storytime

Wow! @writing-prompt-s contributing to like half of these!

I can hardly take any credit for these stories! But I love sharing them. Unfortunately I cannot read all the prompt responses so please tag me if you want me to reblog a story that resonated with you so I can give it a little boost :)

is this orange or yellow.

its yellow you are all wrong i have decided just now

hey op, what does this say?

nice try but i’m not colorblind it says 71

Am I tripping?

Is that not 71?

You’re slightly colorblind, that is 74 and the color of the car is orange.

world heritage post

It’s orange

it’s literally 71

Bestie it’s 74

Y’all it clearly fucking says 21

where are you getting that from?

Babes it’s 81 what r yall seeing

its 74 bestie you might be colorblind

That 81 person can see shrimp colors

I took exactly the same image, increased the saturation, and shifted it to a part of the spectrum most people can see better.

For all your no-YOU-have-the-weird-color-vision argument-solving needs.

Also, the car is orange.

Posting this in case anyone is color blind and doesn’t know it lmao

@cartoondog

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).

Bookmarking this…

Me Giving a Pressed Conference: our advocacy for the disabled must include the addict, the imperfect victim, those we despise; the right to autonomy and life cannot devolve into a popularity contest

Reporter I Hate (Not Sexual Tension): Does that include all the attendees of the Bored Ape NFT event who went blind

Me: *Blood streaming from my nostrils and eyes* david, it includes everyone

can't keep that in the tags

i have not booped half of you as well as i would have liked, and i have booped half of you half as well as you deserve.

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

felt inspired by this tweet so. here are some of my favorite line deliveries from this show

i know you mean on a wider scale but: don’t look up johnny bravo fanart. also this is the funniest bullet on tv tropes

Whoever invented "open in app" links that redirect you to the app store instead of actually opening the app even when you already have the app installed on your phone should be involuntarily turned into a beanbag chair

you’re such a good girl bro

sometimes i go into an ao3 ship tag and im like genuinely devastated by how fluffy all of it is. like. heartbroken about it.

my go-to evening activity for the past few weeks has been watching anime, which is obvious to anyone who's seen my waves of posts when i become obsessed with some new show for a day or two and then never talk about it again. sometimes when i do that, people ask me if there are any websites for free anime streaming, and truth be told i have no idea, honestly.

and the same goes for manga, i wouldn't even know what to use, since manga isn't even a video or an executable. i'd expect it to be very difficult to pirate a book. i don't even own a printer, how would i see it?

YOU hate JK Rowling!

Gollum and yoda sucking each other off while a big steamroller gets closer and closer

This is one of those firing shots in to the air, property value lowering posts that keeps this site utterly unmarketable

CO2 level: Severe

The AI's that are supposed to be learning from Tumblr posts: