[Video Description: a lynx casually walks down a snow covered bank, onto a log and reaches a frozen river. The lynx takes two steps; the ice cracks loudly. Instantly the lynx stands still. It then looks around and then leaps. The lynx makes a landing on the other side of the river, a faint crack can be heard. It continues on its way unfazed. /End VD.]

That's a guy who's fallen through the ice before, lmao.

IMMACULATE REACTION

Is there a Dom shortage? Or do yall just hate small and/or disabled doms and won't fucking adapt to their needs.

i ended up coloring it lol

There is no good reason to stay in the HP fandom. There is no way to "ethically" keep the fandom alive.

"Just pirate it!" Nope! Piracy still helps JK Rowling!

"But I'm autistic and it's my fixation!" I'm also autistic and once upon a time it was also my fixation. I have some advice for that here and over here.

"I like the aesthetic!" Go watch the works of Guillermo del Toro, or go read my post on copying HP's aesthetic.

"I just want to play in a wizard-themed setting and I'm not good at worldbuilding!" Neither was JK Rowling! In fact, her worldbuilding is so bad that you can probably do better than her without too much trouble! Also I made some random tables to help develop ideas.

... literally anybody who cares about bodily autonomy of legal adults should get mad.

This is literally what the Trump administration is trying to do with trans health care by trying to keep people from starting medical interventions of any kind until age 19 & it is a gateway to eroding the bodily autonomy of all adults faster and more completely.

G-d, y'all so fucking exhausting.

An 18 year old is an adult that can make decisions on what to do with their body.

An 18 year old is an adult who can choose to have sex with any other legal person they please, including people vastly older than them.

Stop eroding adults bodily autonomy!

I hate the way it has become a thing, especially in fandom, to treat 18 year old adults like they are children in need of protection and shepherding.

Genuinely, the long-term effects of the drinking age being 21 in the US should show us that taking away bodily autonomy from legal adults is terrible.

Raising the drinking age had brief positive effects (lowering drunk driving) and immensely deleterious long term effects (raising binge drinking and concurrent assault in teens and low-20s people, more people getting their lives fucked up by underage drinking charges when they're old enough to go get shot in a damn war, etc.). And we lowered drunk driving much more effectively in other ways (the best way, IIRC, was the "friends don't let friends drive drunk" campaign).

Reminder that the only reason "hermaphrodite" is even used in biology is because some zoologists a couple hundred years ago were were too lazy to come up with a new term to talk about how snails reproduce, and instead opted to compare them to intersex people. (Which were, at the time, ONLY called hermaphrodites. The word intersex didn't exist yet.)

Hermaphrodite has referred to intersex people since before we knew what a gamete was.

It wouldn't fucking kill you to use cosexed/cosexual, dichogamous, monoecious, gonosimulite, or whatever else to talk about animal species that have dual reproductive function. You don't need to contribute to a slur for us staying normalized.

The use of the h-word to describe cosexual organisms wasn't (just) a laziness thing. The practice started during the era of scientific racism and must be understood in this context.

European colonists began describing black African genitals with the h-word from the 1600s onwards, describing black men as inherently having monorchidism, and black women as having elongated labia ("Hottentot apron") & clitoromegaly. These supposed genital differences were described as a sign of the "Hottentots' animal origin" (Swarr, 2023).

It was only after the h-word developed this connotation that biologists began using the term to describe cosexual organisms. Because colonists had first used the h-word to make the connection between black intersex traits and nonhuman animals.

(Old timey biologists btw already had plenty of other words in their arsenal for cosexual organisms, like androgyne and bisexual. Bisexual still gets used in botany.)

As eugenics and scientific racism developed, there became more motivation to find ~*~data~*~ to fit the idea that black people were more likely to be intersex (so as to prove the idea they were "less evolved").

But since no data actually supported this hypothesis, in the 19th century biologists just.... redefined the h-word to try and make it work. 🙃

"True" h-words were redefined as cosexual & dichogamous organisms plus humans with ovotestes. At the time, ovotestes in humans could only be determined by autopsy. This was extremely convenient for eugenicists, as it turned the diagnosis of living humans into a question of ~vibes~.

So the scientific racists could then go around calling any black intersex person a "true" h-word based on vibes, and any white intersex person was a "pseudo"-h-word also based on vibes. In order to "prove" that black people are "less evolved". 🙃

The idea that black people are more likely to be intersex has been repeatedly debunked, but really hasn't gone away: it's still cited in the present day as justification for the race-selective sex testing of athletes.

For more detail on this I highly recommend the book Envisioning African Intersex by Swarr, which is open access and can be read for free here.

no one talks about how much of a fight it is to be butch. i want to say it came naturally but it didn’t. because I spent an entire lifetime learning to be the kind of woman my parents could be proud of and when they weren’t I tore myself apart from the inside looking for love in every corner of the world and came up empty handed. but I remember the first moment I ever felt I could breathe. I sat in a barber’s chair. my hair still wet from the cut. spiky remnants of my mother’s pride clinging to my neck and my cheeks. I remember the gravel of the barber’s voice as he said “stop that now you’re gonna make me cry” when I told him I had been holding my breath my entire life. I’d been holding it in right up until the moment I felt his clipper on the back of my neck.

did this piece yesterday but colored it just now :3

therapy language final boss: the person who is arguing with you that it's desirable to kill civilians and dislikes that you're pressing them to make actual arguments has to "step back from this conversation" for their "own mental health"

i like that people can't reblog this because they don't know which flavor of "person who supports killing civilians" im talking about and don't want to risk accidentally opposing killing the wrong civilians

He is not asking, he is demanding

.

this user just deactivated after posting

average anti-Zionist after realizing stories from Judaism sometimes involve Jews living in/returning to Israel

what's funny about this is that this movie has been loved and accepted for so long and generally seen as apolitical jewish history, and now it's propaganda because ???

And I mean, on a certain level I can even get why it would make them think of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The most climactic confrontation of the film features imagery of aerial bombardment and horrified civilians suffering & fleeing mass destruction, in a sequence that ends with the death of the firstborn.

*I* thought of the Israel/Palestine conflict watching this scene this Pesach.

But I think their reading of this story as “Zionist”—here meaning, to them, genocidally Jewish-Supremacist—partially stems from the exact fundamental misreading of the text (both the story as it appears in the Torah and on screen) that made them like it in the first place—aside from the obvious bigotry.

In this reading of the film, initially it was plainly and only a story of justified retribution & fighting for freedom by any means necessary. The Plagues are The Revolution. Now, this narrative is reframed: it is still a story presenting itself as justified retribution, but it is trying to justify the unjustifiable: innocent civilians and children killed for the sake of a Jewish Return to Zion.

They’re so close to getting the point and yet so far. Rather than engage with the discomfort that this reframing causes them, and questioning either their reading of the film or their understanding of the war in Gaza, they avoid the question & vilify it as “Zionist”.

But The Prince of Egypt defies this simplistic reading, in either direction. The Egyptians’ pain and anguish during the Plagues are not framed as some uncomplicated triumph. The core framing of this film that separates it from the Torah narrative is the emphasis on Moses’ identity and heart being torn between his love for Egypt and the Hebrews.

There is no catharsis in Moses’ eyes as he surveys all this destruction. Only lamentation:

It’s a truly awesome scene, in the biblical sense, but this is not a kick-ass heroic moment where Moses is punishing the bad guys.

In this scene so much attention is payed to the Egyptian experience of the plagues. Look at the confusion and fear on this child’s face as they meet Moses’ eye and tell me this is a black-and-white “Hebrews Good, Egyptians Bad” hero narrative.

The point is not “The Pure & Good Hebrews are mounting a Glorious Revolution/Self Defense campaign against the Terrible Evil Egyptians”.

Moses isn’t a mage casting fireball on Egypt; his staff has no real power on its own. It’s an act of G-d, and G-d is here a force of nature outside of the narrative: fire and storm clouds, water, snakes, frogs, insects, famine, disease, darkness, and death itself. The Egyptians blame Moses for acts of nature, but he is merely a vehicle and a witness to this.

The point is that when a ruler reigns with stubbornness & pride instead of humility & justice, and only doubles down & hardens his heart, the people suffer. Not just the people he oppresses. His own people.

And when confronted with this narrative, does screenshotted OOP internalize it? Do they even engage with it? No. They double down; they let their heart be hardened, and never mind how high the cost may grow.

Poliwhirl (2023) - Scarlet & Violet—151 Illustrator: Gemi

Kuju Flower Park, Japan

astrailor_jp

Favorite bird genre has got to be 'that's literally just a dinosaur'

Groove-Billed Ani

Hoatzin

Pheasant Coucal

OP, how could you forget...

CASSOWARY?

Here's a full image because their feet are terrifying.