It’s really great that so many people are abandoning the word hermaphrodite in zoology, but now we have a new problem. That being the misuse of the word intersex in its place.
Referring to cosexed animal species as intersex perpetuates the exact same misinformation that the H slur does.
What misinformation would that be? The idea that intersexuality is anything similar to the reproductive organization of cosexual species like snails and worms.
Intersex refers to a variation-from-typical in the sex traits of individuals. Examples include calico cats with male reproductive organs, humans with ovotestes, does with antlers, bilateral gynandromorphy, etc
Cosexual refers to a species that had dual reproductive function, such as snails, worms, leeches, etc
These are separate and unrelated things and it is ACTIVELY HARMFUL to conflate them. The H slur conflates them because it is a word originally used for intersex people being applied to cosexual animals. Directly calling cosexual animals intersex DOES THE SAME THING.
yeah it’s like… hmmm… what’s that old saying again? treat others as you want to be treated? if you’re an asshole you’re giving everyone else a free pass to be an asshole to you
a few doors down from me my neighbors have a squirrel bar nailed to the tree in front of the sidewalk, not exactly this but something like this:
it’s been there for years and they never “stock” it so it’s just sitting there. anyway, i thought it would be cute to make a little squirrel out of sculpey and leave it on one of the stools in the middle of the night. i also made a little sculpey beer bottle with its own label.
it lasted exactly one day and now it is gone. it didn’t fall off, i stuck it on with tape. what do you think happened to it? your most fantastical and wrong answers only, please
HUGE NEWS HUGE UPDATE
squirrel REAPPEARED today… NOW PAINTED
i wanted to provide another update because there has been more activity at the nut bar
a few weeks ago i sculpted a new patron:
and put him in the bar. the next day he was gone. a couple weeks later he reappeared painted… but with ANOTHER new guest: a 3D printed squirrel based on the first one i sculpted (with a bottle!)
i love ppl who talk in the tags bc it satisfies my deep desire to know ppl’s opinions on everything without needing to have a conversation with them and ask. even better when it’s a side tangent that barely has anything to do with the post, or a personal anecdote, or a joke. tag talker mutuals you’re my favorite. tag talkers rise up
“There are no female aliens in our game because we don’t know how to make a female version of this alien” You know that alien you just designed? That male alien? Give it a female voice actor and have characters refer to it as she. That’s it. That’s literally all you have to do
Make her shorter if you must
Make her BIGGER if you aren’t a coward
Take your male alien bodytype, make her like 4 feet taller, give her an extra set of arms and sharper teeth, and as muscular as shit.
Boom.
Give her natural camouflage and make the man like this
Make them exactly the same size and shape but different colors
Give him a huge flock of babies following him around to show off what a great lay he is
Surprise mPreganté
Exactly the same but one of them has a cool hat (you decide which)
Give her a sensible haircut for successful hunting while he has a big dumb mullet so big and dumb the food can see him coming and book it
Please just for the love of pie do not begin and end with boobs
kinda makes me think of creatures of sonaria on roblox. they often had differences between the males and females
there’s an extremely niche plot in romance fiction wherein our invariably heterosexual leads fall in love after a night of passion leads to an unplanned pregnancy and they’re now bound together by an impending child. I cast no judgment on anyone who enjoys this, but since I’m an evil gay and this is my personal nightmare scenario I want to see a zany romance novel premised on the opposite resolution: a couple falls in love while on a whirlwind roadtrip to obtain a legal abortion
“oh but along the way they realize they actually do want to raise the child together and ultimately keep the baby” no actually they successfully get the abortion and then they get chili dogs or something
neither of them want kids and it’s not because they’re immature or selfish or afraid of commitment or irresponsible or whatever, they just don’t want to be parents and that’s not a flaw they overcome. obviously they have other issues because there has to be some kind of arc to this story but deciding to keep a pregnancy that was unplanned and unwanted isn’t the solution.
some of you are very determined for this to not be a romance, to which I politely say shut the fuck up and get out of my sandbox. these idiots are going on an abortion roadtrip and they are falling in love on the way so help me god.
I genuinely am floored by how hard of a time people are having with the very simple premise “two characters go on a roadtrip to get an abortion and fall in love with each other”
each other. each other each other each other. a person who is pregnant and the person who got them pregnant fall in love with each other on the way to terminate the pregnancy.
there’s something about all the “okay, but what about this unexpected twist!” replies that is pinging weirdly on my brain and I think it’s like…
the point of the ‘twist’ in storytelling is that you’re maintaining interest or raising the states by subverting a baseline state. taking something expected and doing the unexpected with it.
but the scenario as OP describes it, where two people enter in a romance but don’t want and take steps not to have kids, is… not a baseline. this doesn’t happen in media. in all standard instances it’s either they aren’t in love OR they are in love and decide to have the kid. the notion of people wanting to be romantically involved but not wanting kids, the notion of seeing abortion as desirable/necessary healthcare, that already IS the subversion.
the original premise doesn’t need to be spiced up with an Unexpected Twist because it is the unexpected twist. and it’s not going to be boring or played our or cliched until there’s a dozen stories like it and the idea of un-dramatically going to get a healthcare procedure done with someone who loves you is normalized.
i hate to go ummmm, actually - but, ummmm, actually, the movie you’re looking for is Obvious Child with Jenny Slate.
SPOILERS AHEAD
She’s a comedian, he is a good boy, they have a one night stand, she gets pregnant but she doesn’t want the baby. They start spending time together and are really into each other. She realizes that he is a great guy and that they want to be with each other. She gets her abortion on Valentine’s Day, and even though he is not happy at first, they both realize it’s for the best and he accompanies her on the day. By the end, they are together (maybe for now, maybe forever).
It’s a great comedy and the two leads have great chemistry.
where’s the road trip
In a just world with good health care, the road trip isn’t necessary
Like “going on a road trip to a pharmacy” shouldn’t be a thing. If they have time to fall in love on the way to the abortion provider, medical treatment is too far away
(Though i concede roadtrip tropes are fun)
okay, in a just world that’s true. in the world and country where I actually live, many people do not have easy access to abortion services. in the US there are in fact many people who would have to drive pretty far to get an abortion. hence the plot I’m pitching here.
Where’s the OP of the “no make up” post. We have found someone who has suffered as they suffered.
you aren’t gonna believe this but
that was also me
aren’t you also the op of the ‘why would you pin all your little gay hopes on taylor swift’ post? congratulations on being the person having the worst possible pvp experience on tumblr
things that are angels: fungi. computer programming. bioluminescent creatures in the middle of the pacific ocean that have never been seen by people. a weird restaurant server late at night pouring coffee. overgrown things. androids and robots. etc
when i was younger i had a really bad fear of markiplier when i was going to sleep so my older brother gave me a watch that he set to like 8 hours ahead so that it was always daytime on the watch when i was asleep and he told me it would confuse markiplier and he would think it was daytime and get scared of the sun and leave me alone
Your brother is the best
Who the fuck changed this from vampires to Markiplier
the real question is why I was completely ready to accept that this person had a debilitating childhood fear of Markiplier
Same. I wad like “a little weird, but alright, they’re scared of Markiplier”
This post used to be about Danny Devito. What happened. How did it change.
There’s also a version with Seto Kaiba.
Original markiplier deactivated 11’th of May 2014
God i wish i used this shit website when editing other people’s posts was possible
aren’t gorillas gentle giants or something. i stay out of his way, he doesn’t maul me, we have a nice time picking out clothes together in opposite sides of the mall
Male gorillas are super aggressive and territorial. Also they interpret nearly every human mannerism as a sign of aggression or a challenge. Smiling and eye contact are both things that zookeepers have to be taught to suppress when they’re in the vicinity of gorillas.
Well unless the mall is his native territory I think I’m fine, I wasn’t planning on smiling at him
This is all irrelevant because the obvious answer is five black mambas. I mean, that’s not actually very many snakes, and malls are fucking huge. And unlike a gorilla you can definitely outrun a snake if it does show up. Find an open space in the mall where you can see any snake coming and just hangout out there. Fucking easy.
Misguided! I would much rather have a mallmate I can easily see and hear coming. I’m confident I can stay out of the gorilla’s way, but if I step on a snake or one otherwise gets the jump on me, it’s all over.
It’s not just about the physical danger either, it’s about my mental health. One gorilla, unless he’s actively mad at me, I just keep a healthy distance between us and make sure I never get trapped. With the snakes, it requires a lot more constant vigilance
They should substitute “chimpanzee” for “gorilla” in this hypothetical.
if it was a chimp i’m taking the fucking snakes
Black mambas have a reputation build on being very venomous and very fast. I’m not sure why you would think you could outrun one (or five) in an enclosed space like a mall.
Malls usually have pretty slick floors, and escalators. I’d choose the gorilla simply because I think that would make an more interesting story (and a better-selling autobiography, I Survived the Mall Gorilla) but I think I’d stand a pretty good chance at avoiding the mamba. They’re fast and aggressive and will chase you but unless we started immediately beside each other I think my sneakers would have the terrain advantage over scutes.
this is too good to leave hidden in the replies
fucking enamored with the implication that this gorilla is fully intelligent but is trying to manufacture plausible deniability like the movie barnyard
“male gorillas are” and it doesn’t even say male or adult so you could loki your way out of this by specifying a two week old female gorilla
𝙹∷ ᒷ⍊ᒷリ ᔑ ᓭℸ ̣ᔑℸ ̣╎ᓵ !¡╎ᓵℸ ̣⚍∷ᒷ 𝙹⎓ ᔑ ⊣𝙹∷╎ꖎꖎᔑ
ok but gorillas actually ARE very gentle. and like it’d be incredibly easy to just avoid the big dude and not piss him off. like many animals he’s not gonna do shit unless you really piss him off. and if you’re that worried you can easily see him and just stay away from him.
also i do agree if it were a chimp i’m going with the snakes. chimps are fucking scary
Wow, now there’s a bot going around on Ao3 telling people that the “moderators” will delete works from “deprecated” fandoms and impose bans.
Fearmongering bullshit, but it’s fearmongering bullshit that seems to be taking advantage of the recent spotlight series in order to trick authors into deleting their fics.
Just. Why.
What the hell does anyone get out of making these bots.
There’s a theory already that this makes it easier for copyright infringers to steal fanfics because you can’t prove the authorship of a deleted work.
This is pure evil
Spread the word
p.s. The comments look something like this:
p.p.s. There’s no “new” policy that bans original works, either. Everything that was allowed, is still allowed. This is a “please read our TOS ffs” awareness campaign - not a surprise rugpull. Don’t delete anything, please. It’s an archive.
A photo of a man reading a neon sign on a tree that says “Healing also means taking responsibility for the role you play in your own suffering”.
End ID]
the rudest most helpful thing anyone ever said to me is “why do you keep hurting your own feelings long after [the person who once hurt you] probably forgot about it” like literally just dear god you’ve split me open so neatly my entire soul is just flopping around on the ground between us now but thank you
Just fyi if you’re autistic/adhd and struggle specifically with this sort of thing, please know what what might be happening is something called perseveration, which is a common neurodivergent behavior that can include, among other things, revisiting emotions repeatedly and being unable to break loose from processing or managing stressful events.
Don’t keep hurting your own feelings. But don’t feel bad if you get stuck there, either. Something else could be going on.
“this is DEFINITELY written by AI, I can tell because it uses the writing quirks that AI uses (because it was trained on real people who write with those quirks)”
c'mon dudes we have got to do better than this
I am big AI naysayer but I think making it into the latest of a series of unprovable accusations that you can use to harass anyone who annoys you slightly for any reason is literally the worst way to push back against its encroachment into our spaces
there are various types of word processors or other text inputs which will automatically convert – to —, meaning its difficulty in being typed out is irrelevant
there are a lot of people on tumblr, including in the notes of this thread, who have actively said that they use the emdash in their writing
the whole point of LLMs is that they train on real people’s writing; they are not just randomly picking characters from the US-ASCII charset to include; AI would not generate text with emdashes if its training base did not also include writings by real people that used them
this is exactly the sort of thing I’m saying is a problem. people saying that they think they can tell that something is an “AI quirk” because “real people” don’t use it, because their personal experience does not encompass its usage
When I last went looking for a new-to-me laptop, I looked specifically for one with a number pad, because I sorely missed typing the accented e in, for example, Pokémon. And then @alexseanchai got me using a proper em-dash instead of a double hyphen or a hyphen-between-spaces, and it’s a bit of a pain, but it’s still not that difficult to do? Just keep Num Lock on, hold down Alt, and press 0151 on the number pad.
(I do miss using ¦ and ¬ for emoticons as well, but at least I still have ° for degrees!)
That em dash accusation argument that claims em dash is proof of AI is like claiming that everyone writing Omegaverse is A. I. because of that one time an LLM scraped Ao3 and started putting Omegaverse references into all sorts of random stuff.
if you are ever writing fantasy and find yourself having a character say something like “oh my gods!” or “by azulath’s beard!” or “by all the saints of blood and smoking jade!,” then you need to stop. hit the backspace key as many times as is appropriate. and then replace that with a good ol’: “motherfucker”
adding this to my album of writing advice from tumblr lmao
Doing this benefits these species tremendously. They can become so rare over such a vast area as people destroy the only plants they can eat, every single one that survives makes a positive difference!
Note from a graphic designer who has to fix this shit all day: rich black is prettier sure but for the love of the gods don’t use it for text if it’s going on newsprint. If its anything other than solid black it will bleed out and become unreadable.
Half my job is fixing this mistake all day from people who really really should know better. And now you know!
^exactly. Rich black is definitely better for graphics or large hits of black if you want it to be REALLY black and not look washed out. Especially if you’re printing in CMYK only (no spot colors), a rich black can really help tie your art together.
we justifiably give Biden a lot of shit but I think “at least 3” is the funniest possible response to some right wing dipshit asking you how many genders there are
wait it gets better
ok this is objectively the correct answer. everyone should answer the question of how many genders there are with “at least three” the words are not coming to me rn to explain how amazing that is but seriously “at least three” is the correct answer
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
sometimes there’s videos that make me happy to exist on this planet
i’d reblog this even if it was a still image
I know it’s a sesame street clip but seriously, who is the target audience for this?
Parents watching it with their kids, I guess?
literally everyone
Everyone. No, really… everyone.
For adults, the appeal is Sir Patrick Stewart doing a kid’s educational bit in full Shakespearean dress and style; there’s a delightful cognitive dissonance between the very serious presentation and the very simple content.
For very small children, it’s educational: this is the letter “B”; here’s how it’s shaped; here’s some words you know that start with it. Oh, and here’s a word you may not be familiar with that starts with it, so you can recognize that it’s the sound that matters, and not whatever other connection you made between the other two words.
For older kids: you’ve probably heard that “to be or not to be?” speech, or at least part of it, so you can enjoy some of the parody the adults are watching. Also, here’s how to describe how a letter is made - how to teach young siblings who don’t read yet, how to explain both the shape and the sound.
For kids with dyslexia: here’s how you differentiate a “B” from a P or D or E. You may have to go slowly and look carefully at the exact shapes that make up the whole, but there are differences and you can learn to recognize them.
For teens or young college students: In addition to whichever parts of those are relevant to you, here’s what Shakespearean acting sounds like. Here’s how to enunciate clearly and slowly, so your audience can understand terms they may not recognize and still follow the gist of what you’re saying. If you’re reading Shakespeare in school, try sounding it out like this and see if that helps it make sense.
For new RenFaire workers: Here’s how to pronounce “zounds.”
One of the most glorious things in the world is Shakespearean actors doing stuff like this.
He’s taking this performance as seriously as he does when he’s doing actual Shakespeare 🥺
sometimes there’s videos that make me happy to exist on this planet
i’d reblog this even if it was a still image
I know it’s a sesame street clip but seriously, who is the target audience for this?
Parents watching it with their kids, I guess?
literally everyone
Everyone. No, really… everyone.
For adults, the appeal is Sir Patrick Stewart doing a kid’s educational bit in full Shakespearean dress and style; there’s a delightful cognitive dissonance between the very serious presentation and the very simple content.
For very small children, it’s educational: this is the letter “B”; here’s how it’s shaped; here’s some words you know that start with it. Oh, and here’s a word you may not be familiar with that starts with it, so you can recognize that it’s the sound that matters, and not whatever other connection you made between the other two words.
For older kids: you’ve probably heard that “to be or not to be?” speech, or at least part of it, so you can enjoy some of the parody the adults are watching. Also, here’s how to describe how a letter is made - how to teach young siblings who don’t read yet, how to explain both the shape and the sound.
For kids with dyslexia: here’s how you differentiate a “B” from a P or D or E. You may have to go slowly and look carefully at the exact shapes that make up the whole, but there are differences and you can learn to recognize them.
For teens or young college students: In addition to whichever parts of those are relevant to you, here’s what Shakespearean acting sounds like. Here’s how to enunciate clearly and slowly, so your audience can understand terms they may not recognize and still follow the gist of what you’re saying. If you’re reading Shakespeare in school, try sounding it out like this and see if that helps it make sense.
For new RenFaire workers: Here’s how to pronounce “zounds.”
One of the most glorious things in the world is Shakespearean actors doing stuff like this.
He’s taking this performance as seriously as he does when he’s doing actual Shakespeare 🥺
