jack of all trades, master of none

I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test

I’m in the last 47.33% 

I shouldn’t have taken that test

Am I fucking stupid LMAO

I did alright i think

I got all excited until I saw your score and now I’m like “well shit” 😭

not bad for an idiot tbh

From How to Be Perfect by Ron Padgett

TUMBLR I HAVE JUST LEARNED SOMETHING AMAZING AND MUST INFLICT IT IN YOU

There is a Japanese water beetle called Regimbartia attenuata. It has developed an incredible adaptation to be being eaten by pond frogs.

It walks out the frog’s butt.

The beetles get swallowed whole, and usually that would be considered Kinda Fatal, but this particular species is just like “DID YOU THINK A FROG’S DIGESTIVE TRACT COULD HOLD ME?!” and proceeds to walk through the frog’s intestines, then presumably stimulate the frog’s hind gut with its legs so that the frog poops. The beetles emerge headfirst and 93% of them survive and live on for weeks afterward.

Apparently some beetles can do this obstacle course in six minutes! (Usually takes a few hours, but some people will speedrun ANYTHING.)

Isn’t that COOL?!

How an Armadillo gathers foliage for its nest.

Can I interest you in a

.

…

a…

…

crabonated beverage?

How to tell when your pun has reached both of its intended demographics

cricket finds compliments very alarming

being a jack of all trades master of none is actually so awesome bc i can make the shittest clay sculpture and the ugliest drawing and the sloppiest painting and the worst hand stitches and the wonkiest earrings and it's like. who cares + now im surrounded by lots of different silly things i made with love and care etc

My great uncle, who loved cooking and engineering and traveling and far too many other things, always used to say:

"Among the cooks, I am the best engineer, and among the engineers I am the best cook."

I love that. It's one of the things I try to live by.

“Protect the children” works well as a shibboleth because you can almost guarantee that whenever it’s whipped out it’s as a response to something that doesn’t cause any child any physical harm. It’s a call to preserve some mythohistorical state found mostly in the minds of right wing conservatives.

“Protect the children” generally means something like, “preserve their innocence.” And I can see why someone might earnestly believe this is good. Because integrating new ideas into your worldview is genuinely uncomfortable. I think, uncharitably, that this is especially true if your worldview is conservative; your whole political bit is resistance to new ideas!

The idea that children shouldn’t have to grapple with ideas they may find uncomfortable for whatever reason maps perfectly onto the idea that children don’t get to grapple with ideas that you may find uncomfortable for whatever reason. And I can’t speak in super general terms here, but I can definitely say that my childhood was impoverished because of this.

What I can say in general is that when people don’t have the language to express something they feel, they don’t stop feeling it, they just don’t express it.

Yes! I want to protect the children too! I don’t want any child to come to physical or psychological harm! Obviously! But saying “protect the children” doesn’t mean that anymore, it’s signalling that you want to romanticise their ignorance. Protect the children by giving them robust tools for self-understanding isn’t as catchy as a slogan, but it’s a better position to hold.

There’s this thing that gardeners do when moving baby plants out of a sheltered location (like their house or a greenhouse) into the open yard. It’s called ‘hardening off’. Basically, you take your plant out of its nice, comfortable, windless, temperature-controlled home for a few hours a day, put it outside in a protected spot, and then put it back. Over a week or two, you put them in more exposed places for longer periods, until they’re resilient enough to be planted out.

Not everyone bothers with this step. But a lot of people do it because if you move a young plant out of a sheltered environment into a radically harsher environment with no prep, it had a pretty good chance of dying. They need time to adapt. If you protect them in the greenhouse the whole time so they don’t get any damage on their perfect widdle leaves, you’re not doing them any favours; it’s going to be a massive, potentially fatal shock when they get planted out, and if they die it sure as hell wasn’t the plant’s fault.

Raising a child is just a long period of hardening them off.

The reason it’s evil for an adult to solicit sex from a thirteen year old isn’t because there’s some Pure Natural Innocence about them that Cannot Be Corrupted. It’s because they are still learning about sex and how to navigate relationships, they don’t have the experience or maturity to make those kinds of decisions yet and won’t for several more years, and soliciting or agreeing to sex with them is inherently dangerous and a gross abuse of power taking advantage of this fact. It is because the thirteen year old is supposed to be safely learning about sex and their relationship to it on their own terms, in a safe way without people taking advantage of them. If you decide that that child shouldn’t have any education about sex until they’re eighteen, that they shouldn’t have sex ed or be allowed to witness any indication of its existence, you’re not protecting them. You’re creating eighteen year olds with a thirteen year old’s understanding of sex (assuming your attempt even works, which it often doesn’t -- often you just create pregnant teenagers). And then throwing them out of the greenhouse into the garden, where other people have no way of knowing how vulnerable you’ve left them until it’s too late.

If you protect children from having to learn about racism, or from seeing disabled people that might make them feel uncomfortable, or from learning about other cultures, or death, or sex, or drugs... you’re not helping them. At all. This is the period where they are supposed to be learning this kind of thing.

There are limits, of course. Exposing an eight year old to graphic gore just because violence is a thing in the world is obviously not something anybody should do, any more than I’d prepare a seedling for winder by sticking it in the freezer. But trying to create a Perfect Puritan Paradise under the guise of “thinking of the children” does them a lot more harm than just... letting them grow up and explore their world normally.

Raising a child is

just a long period of

hardening them off.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Slab of brittle sea star fossils.

The look like the stars from Howls moving castle

Romance isnt dead

I don’t know how to tell you this but they are, in fact, dead

Don Quixote, 1955, Pablo Picasso

i have never understood or played magic the gathering, but i have nothing but respect for it after seeing this tittieless snake woman

you could have gone the easy route. you could have given her titties. but you didn’t. cause she’s a reptile. thank you mtg. thank you.

She is feeling Fresh and Fabulous. 

SHE SURE IS because she is literally finishing up a shed there, look, you can see the last of it clinging to her tail

but she’s already dressed again, after peeling off the skin that would previously have been under that armor

the only logical conclusion here is that she wanted a picture of herself at her SHINIEST and PRETTIEST and hurried to get dressed once enough of her fresh and shiny new skin was uncovered

I bet her bestie took the picture and has been eagerly waiting with the magical fantasy camera for like, hours

“oh my GOD T’sissra your scales are SO VIBRANT this picture is going to be AMAZING”

Extra bonus points because she used that skin as part of her backdrop. Its like a banner behind her head.

‘Out with the old, in with the glam!’

I read “finishing up a shed” and for a few microseconds I was like “sexy AND an accomplished carpenter”

THAT LAST ONE FUCKING KILLED ME OMFG!!!!! 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣

if you’re a new tumblr user from tiktok or IG or something and only like posts and dont reblog them yeah people will think you’re a bot and block you but you will also make this website actively worse. they want “algorithmic” users like you, served recommended posts through likes, not people who just follow each other and respond to the direct chronological feed. there is a reason this website is still better than the rest, even with all its problems, do not ruin this

ok i need to make this clearer: if you do not reblog posts and only like them you are contributing to this site actively getting worse and becoming like all the apps you hate. keep likes to things you just wanna keep off your blog. reblog everything else. ESPECIALLY fanart, which always needs a reblog.

and FYI: what i’m saying here is backed up by tumblr themselves. they admit this publicly.

if you want a good RECENT (as of the end of February 2022) overview of what is going on behind the scenes at tumblr, it is basically what i’ve been saying for years: the core staff is tiny, constantly not being listened to when they advocate for us, the community, and working there is a nightmare:

Reblogging to encourage people instead of only liking is really not that fucking hard if you dont want people to be discouraged cuz their stuff get zero interactions and 99% useless likes and be driven off the Platform.