Can't Steal Happiness

yup!

same general body structure, has hands instead of full wings, has a slight hump, similar beaks

Are you trying to imply that this is batsean mimicry of a big bird looking actually carnivorous species, or is this stretch?

so, an herbivore convergently evolving carnivorous traits means its an herbivore designed to take out potential dangers with the swiftness and lethality of a predator

that is extremely alarming

consider the cassowary. now imagine it more exact and capable. now imagine it the size of big bird.

Brazillian Sesame Street is inhabited by Garibaldo, who judging by beak and leg morphology is likely a different species. Between the sleeker legs and the very sharp beak, I think a stork-like lifestyle is likely for his ancestral population.

Then there's Abelardo from Mexico, who seems to come from a population that convergently evolved several parrot-like traits. An interesting detail about this is that, unlike most other vertebrates, parrots don't absorb their pigments through their diet, but make their own pigments called psittacofulvins. Given that his relatives are quite colourful themselves and can probably obtain plenty of carotenoids from their diet, I don't think that is likely to be the case in Abelardo.

Caponata from Spain looks very different from all her family members, even the more divergent ones. This could be since she is the only female member of the clade I have managed to find so far. However, the very different feet make me think she might hail from a very derived species instead. I can't even imagine what sort of evolutionary pressures could lead to a bird evolving such strange feet.

Other Sesame Street birds are a little harder to find information about, with mostly older sightings. There seem to have been sightings of one named Toccata in Quebec. His shaggier white feather coat covering more of his legs and being thicker around his neck does suggest adaptations of the harsh winters up north.

Portuguese Poupas has different colouration and seems to have some sort of feather puff going on around the ankles as well. The feathers around the head are notably swept backward as well. I think this is a somewhat derived population of the American species. Minik Kuş from Turkey may hail from this population too, or perhaps from some intermediate or interbred population, as they seem to be more morphologically similar to the more typical Big Birds.

Now obviously we don't have genetic material to work with here, but based on morphology and phylogeograpgy, this seems to be a likely family tree. The common ancestor likely had a similar morphology to the North American big bird, but with a more generalized beak, and originated somewhere in Eurasia.

Caponata with her highly derived legs seems to be the biggest morphological outlier. Given her residence in Spain, I think it likely that she branched off early and evolved in isolation on some Mediterranean or Atlantic island, before eventually returning to the mainland.

The major division after Caponata is between the Eurasian and American big birds. Poupas and Minik Kuş are likely to be sister species, with Pino being an outgroup to them.

Caponata is, canonically, a hen:

it did not exist. the idea that children could have PTSD was just starting to be discussed in the late 80s/early 90s at the FRINGE of child psychology, and then trauma therapy even for adults spent an unhelpful 2ish decades dominated by forced-conversation talk therapy. that's a thing that is detrimental to trauma recovery, because if someone doesn't feel safe or in control of the dialogue about their trauma and is repeatedly asked to describe their trauma when they're uneasy, it COMPOUNDS TRAUMA AND FEELINGS OF DANGER.

when bruce was a kid, even the best psychs available would have had training that taught them kids bounce back, that kids don't respond to or handle trauma the way adults do, and that any behaviors post-trauma were almost certainly unrelated mental illness.

i see this esp in fandom circles but a gentle reminder that therapy even when it's good doesn't fix everything. even if bruce had HAD access to good childhood PTSD therapy, he would still have grief, he would still potentially be socially awkward or withdrawn, he might have still decided to be Batman because it's a comic book where being a vigilante isn't as wild as it is irl.

therapy requires honesty, readiness, safety, sound application of theory, an accurate picture of life outside the therapy room (self-reporting is often flawed!), consistency, and more! it can help but it doesn't erase trauma or grief. it's dismissive of the history of trauma therapy to say an adult "should have" had a kid in a therapy approach that didn't exist, and it's dismissive of the actual work of therapy to act like therapy would have made everything ideal. bruce isn't going to be a normal, well-adjusted adult because his parents were murdered in front of him. he could be happy! he could have coping skills! but honestly it would be weirder if he didn't wrestle with residual trauma and grief throughout his life.

and maybe this is just because i love Batman, and love specifically Batman as a symbol/figure of hope and sacrifice and the belief that every life matters, but I don't think the worst ending here is Bruce deciding to give up a lot of his time, energy, and health to work in Gotham AND then choose to parent a traumatized child and actively meet his needs. like you think the alternative is that Alfred is a better parent by getting him into non-existent therapy and then he stays comfortably wealthy at home and is just another rich dude? that's the ideal version? the one who can't help Dick Grayson because Dick Grayson wants to run away and murder a man?

because of the belief that discussing it would process the trauma.

Plus, you have to think about the fact that, initially, a stressor that met criteria for a diagnosis included things like combat, natural disaster/situation in which your life was in danger, or sexual assault. Although, this wasn’t explicitly stated. The criteria just said ‘Existence of a recognizable stressor that would evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone.’ This was updated in the revised version to specify that a traumatic event included ‘serious threat to one's life or physical integrity; serious threat or harm to one's children, spouse, or other close relatives and friends; sudden destruction of one’s home or community; or seeing another person who has recently been, or is being, seriously injured or killed as the result of an accident or physical violence.’

How old is Bruce Wayne currently? If he’s roughly 30 or older, it’s unlikely he would have had access to treatment with someone who specialized in effective treatment of PTSD in kids. And if he’s younger? What do you think the odds are that a dude two generations older would shatter the stigma norms and take a kid to therapy?

As my elderly father would say: slim to none.

Plus, Bruce was originated in 1915. Talk therapy wasn’t even a thing in the US then. Although there’s evidence that Rhazes, a Persian physician, used a form of psychotherapy based on theory, it wasn’t a thing in the modern ‘west’ until Sigmund Freud in the late 1800’s. And he brought it to the US in 1909, but it wasn’t really popular until the ‘30s/‘40s. And psychoanalysis is not really a peer-reviewed, empirically-supported treatment for PTSD. Even though that standard is not without critique, it’s the one most treatment in the US is currently based on.

And Prolonged Exposure, an empirically supported treatment (that doesn’t mean that it works for everyone, just that it’s better than supportive therapy for the majority of participants in a randomized controlled trial) is based on reversing avoidance. Avoidance is like the lighter fluid of the fire that is PTSD symptoms—while it may help escape pain in the short term, it doesn’t resolve symptoms in the long term.

Being able to revisit traumatic events in a space *where there is objective safety* can help a person reprocess those events in an effective way that wasn’t available to them at the time of the event, when survival was the primary goal. And it’s not the only treatment out there; a person can recover without it (though some studies show that, when added to other emotion regulation skills, it leads to longer-lasting recovery from PTSD than those skills alone).

When I say that I don't mean naming types of airplanes. I mean giving the airplanes names. A lot of airlines do it. Back in the day you had your Clipper This, Flagship That, Star of the Whatsit, so on. Lots of airlines name theirs after places. Aer Lingus names theirs after Irish saints. SAS names their Vikings. FedEx Express gives theirs human names, like Gabriel, Richard, JobEdokat, and Meredith.

The year is 2023 at time of writing. Clipper This, Flagship That, and Star of the Whatsit are now all relics of a distant past where a plane ticket cost more than some cars and airports sold life insurance at kiosks. That age is long past. Delta, United, American...all cowards, their airplanes long unnamed. Though the practice is alive and well elsewhere, for some reason it has largely gone dormant in the United States. There are few exceptions, but there are exceptions, and there is one in particular which stands out from the rest. Just one carrier on a mission and their 289 individually named flying machines.

I would like to present you with a curated selection of things which jetBlue has named their airplanes. There are many more - 289, to be specific. Take a look through them all if you care to. But this is a list of my favorites. Just a bit of appreciation for a true titan of aircraft-naming in an era where the art seems all but lost.

Roses Are Red, This Plane is Blue (N3104J)

Aruba, Jamaica, Blue I Wanna Take Ya (N2016J)

Blue's That Girl? (N997JL)

Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Bluetiful (N996JL)

Don't Mind If I Blue (N971JL)

Blue Kid On The Block (N913JB)

1. Fly JetBlue 2. Repeat Step 1 (N807JB)

Shantay, Blue Stay (N794JB)

#Follow @JetBlue (N334JB)

Enough about me...let's talk about blue (N712JB)

Big blue people seater (N705JB)

Bippity, Boppity, Blue (N565JB)

Blue-yah! (N187JB)

Badda Bing Badda Blue (N534JB)

FuhgeddaBlueDit (N3113J)

Boogie Woogie Bluegle Boy (N3062J)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue A320 (N329JB, an Embraer E190)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue E190 (N793JB, an Airbus A320)

And, my personal favorite:

How's My Flying? Call 1-800-JETBLUE (N715JB)

When I say that I don't mean naming types of airplanes. I mean giving the airplanes names. A lot of airlines do it. Back in the day you had your Clipper This, Flagship That, Star of the Whatsit, so on. Lots of airlines name theirs after places. Aer Lingus names theirs after Irish saints. SAS names their Vikings. FedEx Express gives theirs human names, like Gabriel, Richard, JobEdokat, and Meredith.

The year is 2023 at time of writing. Clipper This, Flagship That, and Star of the Whatsit are now all relics of a distant past where a plane ticket cost more than some cars and airports sold life insurance at kiosks. That age is long past. Delta, United, American...all cowards, their airplanes long unnamed. Though the practice is alive and well elsewhere, for some reason it has largely gone dormant in the United States. There are few exceptions, but there are exceptions, and there is one in particular which stands out from the rest. Just one carrier on a mission and their 289 individually named flying machines.

I would like to present you with a curated selection of things which jetBlue has named their airplanes. There are many more - 289, to be specific. Take a look through them all if you care to. But this is a list of my favorites. Just a bit of appreciation for a true titan of aircraft-naming in an era where the art seems all but lost.

Roses Are Red, This Plane is Blue (N3104J)

Aruba, Jamaica, Blue I Wanna Take Ya (N2016J)

Blue's That Girl? (N997JL)

Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Bluetiful (N996JL)

Don't Mind If I Blue (N971JL)

Blue Kid On The Block (N913JB)

1. Fly JetBlue 2. Repeat Step 1 (N807JB)

Shantay, Blue Stay (N794JB)

#Follow @JetBlue (N334JB)

Enough about me...let's talk about blue (N712JB)

Big blue people seater (N705JB)

Bippity, Boppity, Blue (N565JB)

Blue-yah! (N187JB)

Badda Bing Badda Blue (N534JB)

FuhgeddaBlueDit (N3113J)

Boogie Woogie Bluegle Boy (N3062J)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue A320 (N329JB, an Embraer E190)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue E190 (N793JB, an Airbus A320)

And, my personal favorite:

How's My Flying? Call 1-800-JETBLUE (N715JB)

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.

Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.

Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.

Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:

Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.

The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top

You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.

Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up

You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff

You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.

Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog

Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.

If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.

You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"

Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.

Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.

We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.

Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.

Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.

Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it

You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.

Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.

Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit

You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.

Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.

Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.

If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal

Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension

In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.

You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!

Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs

Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

change your icon/pfp and put something coherent in your blog description or you're going to get blocked bcs people think you're a bot

this site is built around reblogs, so please actually reblog posts(especially art and fics!!)

you can set your likes and follows to private

checkmarks here are a meme and mean nothing

follower counts are private and we like it that way, so get used to not judging people by that metric

drama and discourse is boring, use your blacklist and block button liberally

DON'T CENSOR YOURSELF!! we can swear and say kill and make fun of corporations all we want, and if you tiktok-ify your tags people who have things blacklisted for whatever reason will still see them, and people who want to see that content won't be able to find it!! spell words out normally, you won't get in trouble!!

tumblr live is sketchy as hell and full of fake accounts, if you decide to use it anyway may god have mercy on your soul o7

In case the original goes away:

Text version:

Washington State Department of Natural resources tweets:

(Falling to my knees, begging, pleading)

Please.

Folks, seriously.

PLEASE.

Do not - and I can’t emphasize this enough - set the state on fire this weekend.

Fire danger is abnormally high this holiday weekend.

URGING you to consider firework alternatives:

- screaming “bang! boom!” at the sky

- dropping a stack of large books on the floor

- wrapping a toga around a candle

News sources everywhere-

Why do I keep seeing James Cameron all over my news (I know these are both Insider, but I have been seeing James Cameron in the news for days from several different outlets, I’m just lazy) Listen, I know he did the time and made the movie but how is he any different? Rich white guy? Profited off of the exploitation of the tragedy of the Titanic? Self entitled expert? Bleh I’m over seeing his crusty wannabe Saruman face all over my phone. Go back to the Avatar movies and think about what you’ve done.

Image descriptions- two news articles, one titled “James Cameron estimates he’s spent more time with the Titanic than the ship’s actual captain after 33 voyages to the wreckage” and “The Titan sub was likely trying to surface and the passengers probably knew the hull was starting to crack before it imploded, James Cameron says.”

James Cameron legitimately numbers among the small handful of people most qualified to talk about the Titan disaster. The reason why is because being a filmmaker is almost a side project compared to his very real contributions to submersible design, oceanography, and undersea exploration. Cameron has spent decades in the field of undersea science and submarine engineering. He co-designed a submersible called Deepsea Challenger which he personally took to the Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Marianas Trench and the lowest point on Earth, alone; the first and to date only person to have ever done so solo. His hyperfixation is not the Titanic, it's submersible engineering and undersea exploration in general. Here's him being presented the Nierenberg Prize (for contributions to oceanography) in 2013:

Note that in the above interview he literally says that he made Titanic essentially just to get the funding to go to the wreck site (and to have the funding to continue to do so decades onward). He's made 33 dives to the wreck of the Titanic.

The reason why he appears in the news is not because he wants to talk about the disaster. It's got little to nothing to do with him having made Titanic (though that is tangentially related). It's because everyone knows that he is an actual, legitimate expert on the issue of submersible engineering (as well as both diving and diving to the Titanic wreck in particular), and so they bombarded him with interview requests and requests for comment. He specifically did not respond to any such requests until after the deaths of the passengers had been confirmed, because he knew that the sub had imploded and they were all dead, and he didn't want to be insensitive and drown everyone's hopes by telling everyone that the search and rescue was pointless. Here's him on ABC News next to his friend and associate Dr. Bob Ballad, the man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, who is probably the only other person more qualified than Cameron to talk about the recent disaster:

“James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does for James Cameron. James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is James Cameron”

He’s basically an oceanographer who went to the wrong school and only discovered his true love for the sea AFTER he had already become a famous Director.

in fact here just observe some of the lyrics of the opening number as the citizens of Oz celebrate the recent death of the wicked witch

On tiktok, you see some godawful opinion and you want a further look at what exact kind of crazy they are? Are the being ironic? Is this satire? Oh, no, they actually do think that... Ex. Women should belong to their husbands. Welp, you're now gonna have tradwife / terf / alt-right / trumpie content on your fyp for weeks because you scrolled that account for a few minutes. You keep pressing 'not interested' but tiktok believes you're a republican now.

Here, you see something crazy - let's say, uh, Human Pet Guy (rip, example would be before he deactivated obviously).

You see a post of his and you're like "Woah, wtf, is this satire or is he just like this?" You go to his blog to check and Tumblr does not assume looking at human pet guy's blog = you want a human pet and does not start bombarding you with human pet content. When you are done trying to understand how someone can think like that you can return to the safety of your dash, which remains unchanged.

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you're inside the car, inside the situation, it's easy not to notice all the extra work you're doing just to maintain the status quo.

There's all sorts of type of work that we think of as "free" that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

People who are culturally Christian don’t fucking understand how fucking AWFUL it is to constantly have the same people, who practice the same religion, that has been shoved in your face and used to threaten you, be treated as some fun harmless thing you should just accept and go along with.

To you, Christmas is fun. Fuck, maybe you’re even one of those people that thinks CHRISTmas is secular.

Christian holidays have long been times when Jews were targeted for fucking violence. Days like Christmas were days when Jews, branded Christ-killers, faced violence and hatred. Christmas, today, is a day when I have had WITHOUT FAIL someone try to bring me to Jesus every year. It’s a day when we all get off from work, no questions asked, while I need to fucking argue to get my days of religious observance off. It’s fucking MONTHS of seeing people brand Channukah, a holiday centered on the resilience and survival of my people in the face of those who would force us to assimilate or die, as “Jewish Christmas”.

I actually do not give a single shit if you celebrate Christmas in your house, or at church, or at some private event at like a restaurant or mall or something, or even in public places so long as it’s not disruptive to others using the space. Because that’s how the rest of us celebrate our holidays.

A high school choir in my area used to carol in nursing homes or other places that had a pretty connected community of people all living in one place. They just put up a couple of fliers in the weeks prior that said when they would be coming by the neighborhood to carol, and gave some contact info so that anyone who wanted them to stop by their room/apartment/house could let them know. It let the residents who responded plan ahead and have something to look forward to that day, and it ensured that all the other residents didn’t have to be disturbed by the carolers if they didn’t want it.

short answer: yes.

long answer, there is an etiquette to it, and I think it's a longstanding thing that just ended up ingrained in a lot of users, which comes off as cold/shy/outlandish or maybe even standoffish to people from other sites and apps. there's no be-all end-all of how to act online or on here but i think in terms of most* people (*speaking broadly, making this up) who've used tumblr for a while it feels like this:

tumblr is a theater, the dashboard is a stage, each post is a performance. (a joke, a dramatic act, a story, a movie, a picture, etc.) you have a variety of ways to interact with the performance, but some of them are going to be more frowned upon--based purely on how the long standing visitors of the theater are used to acting, honestly.

depending on how far the reblog chain went, the original post – the thing you were, in theory, responding to – would be so far indented that it was practically unreadable, or (this happened automatically, but no one liked it) all of the posts above a certain point would be turned into a link to the lowest blog's comment, and treated as reblogs of a link rather than reblogs of a post. so no one would even see the original post, just the reblogs.

The people who follow me have signed up to see my thoughts. They WANT to see my cheeky Critical Role commentary or my linguistics jokes or my hot takes on Glee or Teen Wolf (or at least, they have decided that they can put up with them and they follow me anyway). Anything I put in the tags is visible to them — they get to see my jokes, think “heh lol”, but when THEY reblog their followers only see THEIR tags. I see them continue the conversation, but anyone who follows them doesn’t have to see my particular brand of commentary unless they look for it.