Arogeoturtle

ibuprofen was first discovered in 1961; phalloplasty and HRT are less experimental

Personally I find Elias sympathetic regardless of what background and personality we can glean from his statement, but I’ve seen a lot of discussion about whether his obvious privilege and entitlement prevent him from garnering sympathy.

It comes down to personal taste, of course! You don’t have to like him or dislike him. But on the subject of disliking…

HELEN

You haven’t looked into Helen-Classic’s past yet? You should try it. I don’t think you’ll like what you find.

ARCHIVIST

What? Lying to real estate clients? Bit of a prick at parties? Secret Tory?

HELEN

Yes.

To all of them, actually.

ARCHIVIST

And that’s the problem. I could have grown to dislike her, but… you made sure that sort of thing could never happen. Now you use her form, see her mind, but they’re just… tools. Michael had nothing you could use but a razor-straight desire for vengeance, but you saw something in Helen that would work on me much more subtly. So you took her. And I’ll never get to dislike her.

I’m stuck disliking you instead.

(MAG 187, Checking Out)

And this is the real tragedy of Elias Bouchard, in my opinion. Just like with Helen, all we have of him are snapshots of the most terrifying moments of his life, before he was eventually replaced with and overshadowed by something else. For good or ill, there was more to him than what we got, and we’re never going to see it. Maybe we could have come around to liking him. Maybe we would have disliked him even more. We’ll never know if we could have loved or hated him.

In regards to Jon

"Re"-domestication of cheetahs?

With reference to This Post In ancient Egypt, Cheetahs were sometimes used as hunting animals like greyhounds, and kept as housepets by the royal family and later, many wealthy households.

Now, there's an argument about how "domesticated" these cheetahs were- the majority of them were captured from the wild as adults and tamed/trained to tolerate humans and obey hunting commands, mostly because back then and still today, cheetahs are extremely hard to breed in captivity. Some were bred and raised from cubs, and there was not a shortage of cheetahs living in and around human habitation for them to replace stock with.

Even today, cheetahs are... weirdly comfortable around humans, if those humans know how to mind their manners. Game wardens in Kruger National Park sometimes sleep next to young cheetahs they are re-introducing into the wild, or have had female cheetahs who are familiar with them drop their cubs off on their feet to 'babysit' while she goes hunting.

Here's a pair of San hunters from the Naankuse Wildlife Reserve in Namibia bow-hunting while a wild local male cheetah hangs out with them (the angle makes him look much bigger and closer to the men than he is, but he's still VERY close). The male's name is Aiko, and is well-known to these men- they're not worried about his presence because they know how to respect his space and he knows not to go after game they've downed. Game they miss is free for him to run down, and game he flushes from the bushes are much easier to shoot- a mutually beneficial partnership. It's extremely similar to how the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea hunt with their dogs, some of the most recently domesticated and most similar to ancient 'proto-dogs' alive today.

So, cheetahs aren't domesticated the way dogs and housecats are- they haven't been selectively bred for generations, they're not dependent on humans, and they can and will attack people that bother them.

But like Coyotes, the remaining cheetahs we have are VERY habituated to humans, arguably even moreso than coyotes are, and we've made a lot of progress in getting them to breed in captivity- Ironically by pairing them up with highly domesticated dogs, who teach them domesticated animal behaviors like "not worrying about everything".

With Coyotes, the obstacle to domestication are mostly practical matters like "getting a coyote farm funded, zoned, built and insured.", whereas with cheetahs the problem is "there are almost no cheetahs left to practice domestication on and the ones we do have are already inbred". There IS a lot of commercial interest in domesticated cheetahs, so I think a good way to get the funding for species conservation and genetic re-diversification of cheetahs would be to frame it as a prerequisite to "Re-Domestication" and pet cheetahs.

I JUST

KATIE TRIED TO SEND US COOKIES OUTTA THE GOODNESS OF HER HEART AND JUST

“OHHHH THESE COOKIES WERE SUPPOSED TO GO TO NEW JERSEY, PHIL? I THOUGHT YOU SAID

THE COOKIES ARE FINALLY ON THEIR WAY TO NEW JERSEY

GO COOKIES GO

@phantomrose96 @cupcakecreeper​ @homebeccer GET READY

@phantomrose96 @homebeccer @cupcakecreeper

holy fuCK HOLY FUCK HOLY FUCK GUYS GUYS GUYS GUYS GUYS

THE THRILLING CONCLUSION

also as a bonus visual here’s a rough approximation of these cookies’ journey

AND 

IT’S

IT’S

IT’S NOT AN OPTION IT’S NOT AN OPTION I CAN’T I-

No one said “hey let’s stop missending things to Nepal” they just said “let’s make a stamp for this” and called it a day.