בהצלחה.

Hey uhh Lyft what the fuck

I get what they're trying to do, but like... how many people who have actually driven Lyft or Uber for any length of time were involved in this? How many people who were AMAB and are non-binary, or who are Just Fucking Sick Of Being Treated Like Women+ or Spicy Cis Women?

For fuck's sake, they literally CALLED IT WOMEN+.

Got shut out from an LGBT programming scholarship because I'm a genderfluid AMAB. They said "it's only for women and nonbinary women." Then they called me a nonbinary man and I wanted to rip out someone's throat

... wow.

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

XKCD

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

@lusus–naturae​

@crystallinethoughts

You can find some fairly decent dinosaur sound reconstructions on YouTube. Based on how a Tyrannosaurus voice box and hearing worked, we can infer that it would have made low rumbling sounds instead of the iconic roars from the Jurassic Park franchise.

Something between the boom of a crocodile and the roll of thunder. It was a sound you would likely be able to feel, perhaps even before it was able to be heard. Far off thunder on a sunny day then the earth begins to shake and the thunder grows loud enough you can feel it in your stomach. That’s what it may have sounded like to be hunted by a T. rex.

love when cats hear that you've woken up even just a little bit and they're like hiiiiiii oh my god oh my god!!!!! i wrote some poems in the night let me recite them for you. this one is called: screaming and knocking your water bottle off your nightstand

happy hanukkah!!!!

[Image: several cats of different colors wearing kippot and doing hanukkah activities such as eating matzo ball soup and latkes, playing with dreidels and gelt, chewing on presents, and gazing at the light of menorah candles. /end ID]

the fact that we as a society have the muppets and they are not everywhere in our cultural consciousness is appalling. why aren't the muppets hosting the oscars. why aren't the muppets commentating the olympics. why aren't the muppets coming to a theatre near me every year with a new adaptation of a classic novel. genuinely what are we doing.

It has been far too many years since I was last able to go see a Muppets movie, I miss these critters ;-;

Sometimes I wish we would start calling out the performative radicalism on this site for the poser bullshit it is. "Remember, it's always morally correct to kill a cop!" "Don't forget to firebomb your local government office!" "Wow, it sure would be a shame if these instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail got spread around!"

Okay. But you're not killing cops or firebombing government offices. You are posting on a dying microblogging website to a carefully-curated echo chamber that has radicalized itself into thinking that taking the absolute most extreme position on any subject is praxis but that anyone discussing the most practical way to effect actual change is your sworn enemy. You do not have the street cred OR the activist cred to be talking about killing cops, babe.

Your posts keep making me think of this and I finally got around to mocking it up

you're telling me yaakov """wrestled""" with a """man""" in the wilderness and then changed his name and had sciatica for the rest of his life???

what else gives you sciatica? pregnancy

what else makes you change your name? 🏳️‍⚧️

who are some people that both change their name and get pregnant? transmascs

wake up the members of my nation i think we're onto something here

Both Abraham and Sarah could be seen as trans. Israel is trans. All we are missing is Yitzhak or Rebecca being trans and we'd have at least one in every generation of the patriarchs. Would neatly solve the inconsistency of why Judaism seems to follow them when it usually follows from mother to child.

Rivka is frequently referred to using both masc and femme hebrew terms, Rivka is 100% genderqueer.

my eyeshadow matches my sweater :~) good shabbos to hozier for wasteland, baby

Rabbi Asher Lopatin

Not the usual fare for my account, but I recently dreamt I met G-d and this is (a lightly embellished version of) what she looked like in the dream

Not part of the Ladies of the Knight Universe, but I often make and sell adoptable character designs, and here’s a selection of the Lady Knight types I made recently that i thought you might like to see. 

Quite often I enjoy messing with merging fashion and armour, perhaps in a way folks might wear armour as a fashion accessory (while the real knights sit back and have a little giggle at the silly socialites)

If you have a knight character of your own I do work on commission, ($70 for something like these feel free to get in touch) or you can keep an eye on my adopts dA for future designs.

a bunch of mushrooms

shanah tovah, y'all

okay yes jews are supposed to wrestle with g-d but we’re also supposed to respect g-d and some of u did not get the memo

how to meld all ur identities into one n not be afraid to exist as a contradiction

I will be posting excerpts

Happy Disability Pride Month!

Here are a few figures from the Tanakh who were disabled:

Yitzchak (Isaac): He became blind either from angel's tears falling in his eyes at Akedat Yitzchak, or from old age. Either way, his blindness made him disabled.

Yaakov (Jacob): He was left with a permanent leg injury after sparring with the angel.

Leah: She was described as being constantly crying and having swollen eyes. This can be interpreted as her having chronic depression, which is disabling.

Chushim: Dan's son, who was deaf. He was the one who ended up killing Esav after he tried to hold up Yaakov's funeral.

Moshe (Moses): He had a lisp since he was a child, and had so much difficulty communicating that he needed his brother Aharon to act as a translator.

Mephiboshet: Yonatan's son who was either bow-legged or had some kind of spinal injury. He was adopted by King David after Yonatan's death.

Disabled Jews have always existed, and have been a part of our history since Judaism was founded.

It's important for both gentiles and Jews to endure that their spaces are accessible and inclusive of disabled Jews.