yes, that queer person in a straight passing relationship is allowed to bring their partner to pride

yes intersex people are allowed at pride

yes indigenous 2 spirit people are allowed at pride

yes people can and will be discussing kink and if you don’t like that then be a big kid and remove yourself from the conversation

yes that person uses neopronouns is allowed at pride and if you don’t like it then get over yourself because they’re not hurting anyone

yes ace and aro people belong at pride what do you think the “a” in “lgbtqia+” stands for? if you say “the a stands for ally” i’m going to assume you lack critical thinking skills because the whole point of being an ally is that you’re not queer but support us anyway so why would we include you in our acronym that we made specifically for queer people

yes trans people are allowed to talk about their issues, notice how i said trans people and not just trans women because nonbinary people and trans men also deserve to be able to talk about our issues

yes people who identify with micro labels are allowed at pride

yes people who don’t identify with any label are allowed at pride

all queer people are allowed at pride as long as they’re not shitty people

Dandelions

tagging ppl

@therealbitchywitchy, @thatnonbinanry, @evil-tboys, @what-even-is-thiss, @wolfythewitch, @busket, @jess-the-vampire, @killer-official, @transslyblue, @trans-goat-girl, @transfemgal, @transmasc-cat-offical, @tboy-cock, @malwareproductions, @get-more-transmasc, @doberbutts, @silly-lil-guy-offical, @liberalsarecool, @cirrus-grey, @murderandcoffee, @interactyouth, @vague-magnus-archives, @vampirejuno, @your-local-vampire, @theconcealedweapon, @assignedmale, @annabelle--cane, @anarchist-revolution, @homunculus-argument, @questionable-enby-passing-advice, @questionable-mtf-passing-advice, @queen-suzu, @sanguinemoonchild-deactivated20, @salmon-offical, @normaluser-offical, @notsoscarystudios, @no-one-offical, @no-me-hables-del-pasado, @no-head-offical

@i-suggest-transing-your-gender @spookthelilguy @tabris-the-seventeenth-angel @transandrophobia-is

E ho trovato l'invasor.

Woke up one morning, and there were soldiers

Like yes, you could make a valid argument that "death worlds" are probably common or that other species are also batshit and it's honestly pretty likely that we would consider truly alien environments to be as mindblowing as we imagine ourselves being to other species.

But most of the time when I see people posting in the HASO tag, it's just something cool they noticed about themselves or the people they love and celebrating the joy they feel in being human.

Because really? We don't know what aliens will be like. We have no idea. They could look like anything. But we know that humans poison ourselves for fun, risk our lives to save deadly creatures, pack bond like nobody's business. We're the best endurance runners in the as-yet-known universe. Our brains are so coded for tool use they treat cars and planes and cranes as extensions of our bodies; and so coded for social bonds that we see faces in rocks and trees and teach our robots to sing themselves happy birthday.

And our planet? It has so many kinds of spiders and so many kinds of fungi and so many creatures that like to get pets and SO many animals that will get themselves drunk on fermented fruit or jellyfish zaps if given the chance. Dihydrogen monoxide, the universal solvent capable of dissolving more substances than any other liquid we know, falls from the sky and we dance in it. Our world is deadly as fuck and beautiful in its danger and in its wonder.

At our best, we imagine a future in which we are a benefit and a joy not only to our planet but to the universe. We dream of meeting alien species and inviting them home to meet our parents. We make art imagining all the ways we could be part of a galactic community.

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.

Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.

A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.

“A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.”

Did they? Did they really? The archeologists all laughed at the plucky hairdresser and then she proved her theory by simply recreating the styles?

See, what actually happened is that Janet Stephens (the hairdresser/hair archeologist in this post), who published an article about her theory in The Journal of Roman Archeology in 2008, spent about 6 years of research pursuing her idea that perhaps Roman hairstyles were sewn hair and not wigs. She did both hands-on experimentation sewing the actual hair, and more traditional research reading through a ton of sources. This is coming from an interview done with Stephens herself:

“Lots and lots of reading, poring over exhibition catalogs, back searching the footnotes to the reading and reading some more! It helped that I am fluent in Italian and, in 2006, I took a German for reading class. Working in my spare time, the research took 6 years.”

“I am an independent researcher, but my husband is a professor of Italian at the Johns Hopkins University, so I have library privileges there. We are friendly with colleagues in the Classics/Archaeology department and at the Walters Art Museum. They were kind enough to send me articles and clippings, read drafts and help with some picky Latin, though I try not to impose.”

(Source: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/14729)

Wow, so people in the Classics/Archeology department and at the art museum sent her articles and clippings and HELPED her with her research as opposed to laughing at her in their gentleman’s club! It’s almost like people working the archeology/art history these days aren’t all stuffy old white guys from the 1950’s!

Stephens also presented her work at the Archeological Institute of America Conference, and according to the interview I cited above, it was apparently well received: “It seemed to create a a lot of buzz and people said they enjoyed it. It’s not every conference where you go to the poster session and see “heads on pikestaffs”!”

While we’re on that, the story about the leatherworker above is also entirely apocryphal – which is actually proven in the article linked to the entirely fictional paragraph above. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

This claim that “they couldn’t figure out what they were for the life of them. Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker” and all about her taking one look at it yadda yadda is…entirely unsubstantiated.

The story makes no sense if you pause to think about it: it’s new to discover this tool from this long ago. But, if we’re still using them today, then people were probably still using them throughout history from that time until today. So is the idea supposed to be that anthropologists have just been encountering this tool from all different time periods, up to and including the modern day, and just….never bothered to figure out what it was? Until they found a REALLY old one and were like, well, better get on this now? Of course not!

These anthropologists were able to identify the use of this tool, because they have experience, as anthropologists, studying tools. In fact, the risk that they might not have been able to identify this tool was not because they were anthropologists, but because they were anthropologists who studied a time period from which these tools had not previously been discovered. However, because they had experience with other time periods, AS ANTHROPOLOGISTS, they were able to identify this tool.

Here is a quote from that article (unsurprisingly, it does not support the “gosh wow!” conversation in the original post):

“The first three found were fragments less than a few centimeters long and might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools. It is not something normally looked for in this time period. “However, when you put these small fragments together and compare them with finds from later sites, the pattern in them is clear,” comments McPherron. “Then last summer we found a larger, more complete tool that is unmistakably a lissoir, like those we find in later, modern human sites or even in leather workshops today.” ”

To repeat: the reason these anthropologists might not have recognized this tool is not because it’s new to anthropology, or because all anthropologists have just been like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ every time they found it. It’s because they “might not have been recognized without experience working with later period bone tools” because “it’s not something normally looked for in this time period.” Happily, these anthropologists had that experience! However, anthropology as a field has long been familiar with these tools – because “we find [them] in later, modern human sites or even leather workshops today.” Unlike the fake!anthropologist from this post, the real anthropologists, named Marie Soressi and Shannon McPherron, were not shocked that a modern leatherworker was still using these tools – because they knew that already! What they didn’t know was that Neandertals also used that tool, so long ago.

I’ll let them share a little more about their thoughts on this discovery:

“Lissoirs like these are a great tool for working leather, so much so that 50 thousand years after Neandertals made these, I was able to purchase a new one on the Internet from a site selling tools for traditional crafts,” says Soressi. “It shows that this tool was so efficient that it had been maintained through time with almost no change. It might be one or perhaps even the only heritage from Neandertal times that our society is still using today.”

This apocryphal story crediting our fictional she/her leatherworker reinforces the idea that anthropologists and other scholars are a bunch of elites who know nothing about the real world and the lives of people outside the ivory tower, including the people they study. This ends up both erasing the tremendous amount of knowledge that people in these fields hold (I find giving the fictional leatherworker she/her pronouns to be an interesting twist, given that it’s erasing the contributions of the real woman working as an anthropologist who co-made this discovery), and distracting from the real issues of racism, sexism, and exclusion that have shaped these fields and affect the increasingly diverse people working in them today. These issues are real, and the harms that the field of anthropology has and does perpetuate are real, and are best addressed honestly.

Instead of creating parables that scholars know nothing, let’s celebrate what human curiosity has been able to discover about our past; learn about and work to repair the real (not apocryphal) harms perpetuated in anthropology and academia; continue to make academia more inclusive of people with various expertise, gender, race, ethnicity, prior knowledge, and ways of knowing about the past; value multiple types of expertise both in and outside of the academy; and celebrate what is most exciting about this discovery:

'Moon Maiden'

Campfire Fest Day 1 | Prompt - Nomai

Decided on an somewhat angsty Solanum piece for whatever reason, sniles sneetly

All my stuff for the event has been done experimenting with different brushes and rendering styles because ah what the heck lets have some funnn with ittttt ay