IF YOU ARE LUCKY, YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE GOOD

jared padalecki and jensen ackles boston con 2026 - main panel

@whumpgifathon Day 19 | Gifmaking!

The Gold Pectoral of Tovsta Mohyla, uncovered in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine.

i don't usually make posts like this, but this is a truly upsetting topic to me as a lifelong cat owner, so i feel i have a duty to share my knowledge with others.

there is a type of automatic litterbox for cats being sold that is EXTREMELY dangerous and has killed numerous cats through blunt force trauma, suffocation, etc. this litterbox is being sold under different brand names and logos, so i will include the picture of the model and two links to informational videos with more evidence and eloquence than i am able to provide.

please consider not having this type of litterbox in your home for your furry friends. me and my 16 year old tortie, puddy, want the best for all your kitty friends

image of litterbox below:

here are my two video links that provide proof and testimonials of this harmful product:

This Scam is Killing Cats by penguinz0

… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.

How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.

The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.

Harvesting honey does not murder bees.

The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.

There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.

Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.

When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.

So.

It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.

I see that most of the questions right now are about The Good Omens (rightfully so, the show is incredible), but I'm doing my recurrent reread of American God, and I have a question. I reread it every 3-5 years and already gave myself several answers, but I would LOVE to know yours. Was it important in terms of meaning that Laura was the one who used a spear in the finale? Or was it just more convenient plotwise? I'm quite hesitant about her place in this story still, honestly. If you already talked more about her somewhere, can you point me in the direction, maybe?

And a huge Hi from Kyiv, Ukraine! Your worlds help)

but very often, people do. dean is either a victim. or he’s an abuser. it’s like it’s hard for people to hold both those facts in their heads at once. dean went through incredible amount of trauma as a child and an adult, is routinely faced with violence, has resorted to alcohol abuse to cope with it. he’s also a violent person, someone who retreats into tactics of emotional abuse and control when he feels threatened, who hurts the people around him constantly and the people who are closest to him (ie Sam, Cas, later Jack) get the brunt of that abuse. these are just facts. they’re things that happened on the screen and cannot be denied.

When I was 16 we would hang out outside and inside the library. We ranged from a group of 20 to a group of 3-4 people on any given day, because us 16 year olds also hung out with whatever other kid was around the area. (Mostly younger siblings and then their friends.) We never did anything wrong, never mind illegal. We were never loud in the library and were always polite to the staff. We sometimes got a little loud outside on the street when there was some contest thing going on, but not very often. We mostly hung out and talked about stuff going on in our lives.

Then one day someone called the cops on us.

And the cops showed up all ready angry, then started yelling at us for doing nothing. They couldn’t even come up with a real reason to be there yelling at us, other than to demand to know if we were a ‘gang’. When one of my friends started crying, I turned to tell her that it would be ok. The cop grabbed me, screamed at me to not look away when he was talking to me, then demand I get in the cop car and go down to the station. It took almost an hour for my mother to find out where I was because I didn’t have a cellphone at the time and the cops had just fucking kidnapped me. For comforting a friend while they screamed at us. And you know what happened?

We never hung out like that again. None of us. We all got banned from the library for a year. Again, all of this for literally no reason. They told us we were ‘misbehaving’ for simply hanging around outside being kids. And then we had no where to go. Some of those kids were forced back into their abusive homes. I literally never saw half of them again. Ever. And I lived in that town for several years after that.

YOUNG SAM (picks up the phone) Dean? YOUNG DEAN (on the phone) Hey. YOUNG SAM Did you ask? YOUNG DEAN Yeah, it’s not gonna happen. YOUNG SAM Come on. You said. YOUNG DEAN Look, I said I would ask. Dad said no, what do you want me to do about it? YOUNG SAM But I’ve been shooting. I can run two miles. I know silver kills werewolves, and... YOUNG DEAN Sammy. YOUNG SAM No fair. You started hunting when you were younger than me.

11.08 Just My Imagination

We also know from 3.08 "A Very Supernatural Christmas" that Dean was "trusted" with the truth when he was younger than Sam.

We know that this "trust" wasn't beneficial to Dean—it took Dean's childhood from him and Dean desperately tried to protect Sam from the same fate (2.22, 3.08). But from the perspective of a child being left alone in silence for days, the conclusion was "I'm the family freak" (1.08). "Dean is trustworthy and noble and good and competent and I am not. There is something wrong with me, and because there is something wrong with me (and I don't even know what it is) I am always going to end up being left behind."

The demon blood gave Sam false clarity—something he could point to and say, "This is what's wrong with me. This is why I can't be trusted. This is why I'm tainted".

SAM You used to read to me, um, when I was little, I— I mean, really little, from that— from that old, uh... Classics Illustrated comic book. You remember that? DEAN No. SAM Knights of the Round Table. Had all of King Arthur's knights, and they were all on the quest for the Holy Grail. And I remember looking at this picture of Sir Galahad, and, and, and he was kneeling, and— and light streaming over his face, and— I remember... thinking, uh, I could never go on a quest like that. Because I'm not clean. I mean, I w— I was just a little kid. You think... maybe I knew? I mean, deep down, that— I had... demon blood in me, and about the evil of it, and that I'm— wasn't pure?

i also think it’s important to him to keep these things, these parts of him, just to himself. first, because of the utter lack of privacy that came from living in motel rooms he was almost never allowed to be alone in, and later from the repeated violations of his mind and body.

but i also think there are certain personality traits-and these aren’t quirky ones but still-that a large part of fandom chooses to ignore (for reasons i will never understand). he does have a lot of anger, and he can be stubborn, bullheaded even. he lets his emotions get the better of him and doesn’t always think things through. he is bitchy and sometimes judgemental. he also really likes to make fun of dean and annoy him for little brother reasons. and while dean does see him as endlessly kind and good-hearted (in s1-mid s3 at least) that’s not actually him. sam’s vengeful and he can be cruel when he wants to be. he’s single-minded and it helps him get shit done and see some things clearly but also tends to blind him to others.

he does look up to dean, still, in some ways even if he wishes he didn’t. he wants to be normal but there’s a part of him that absolutely loves hunting, loves the rush, the chase, the mystery, the lore. but he’s also so scared of being evil. and he’s scared of being a freak, cut-off from human society even though he’s very antisocial. he doesn’t really interact that much with other people but he wants the access (for lack of a better word) should he choose to.

and all these are characteristics that by themselves might seem very “negative” (which is why i think certain fans don’t want to acknowledge them) but combined with all of sam’s other “positive” character traits make him a very layered and interesting character. and also very human, which is something i always appreciate in any character but apparently the current trend is to not, unfortunately.

Sam Winchester is incredibly private, but also? The show follows Dean's perspective to the extent we will watch him sneak behind a building to privately punch out a wall or collapse in tears. Even when it's implied well that he's hurting, we as an audience follow simply to witness how deep the wound goes. We see him dorky by himself for no reason. On Winchester downtime, we see him hang with Castiel, Krissy, Claire, Crowley, Charlie, Bobby, Jo, Ellen, much more than Sam. Dean can be funny, heartbreaking, enraged, cruel, and so very vulnerable on the regular as Mr. Tough Guy may recommend bottling emotions... but he sure keeps that bottle on his sleeve.

Unless plot-relevant, similar Sam moments are hidden from us and suggested through the times he ultimately shatters --or, delightfully, the rare instance an episode calls for a Moose detour. Just Your Imagination, anyone? Marshmallow nachos? I mean, what. And yeah, so very lonely, not only excluded from the world, but the third wheel in his very own family. If we take that a step further, ~lonely~ as an outlier of humanity, arguably a branch-off entirely into something not quite natural. The last of his ~species as a special child. To ignore Sam's soul or, uh, blood-deep difference is to miss something foundational about him as a character imo. There is a caged creature beneath his skin that he is constantly warring with himself to drown.

Sam bottles his emotions with remarkable success after their father's passing ( lbr, those two were PURE PASSION in scenes, amazing, beautiful ) and subsequent unsavory discoveries about his being. Where Dean lashes out, Mr. Totally Normal -concerned about his confirmed difference/evil/darkness- lashes inwards, and he becomes quite accustomed to taking the blame for things beyond his control. In him is a gentle brokenness. Notice how often he befriends the misunderstood or outcast, how much easier it is for him to comprehend doing wrong for a good reason and forgive even those that have done him wrong. None of this is particularly ~quirky~ ; it's actually heartbreaking and, er, a bummer? Tough for people to hop on the Sammy-train without sensing a deep ache.

I do wish we learned more of his quirks besides coulrophobia (does this count as a quirk?? poor guy) and his weirdo love for true crime. Also wanted more time with his faith. It was so pure and innocent, and the scene Sam meets Castiel? Phew. Again, more sadness drenches the fact his faith derived greatly from his need to belong to something greater and not be whatever he is. In the end, that, too, ends up tainted by his very existence. Everything about his life is just faintly tinged sad and suffocating. Everything, from his quirks to his joys to his self worth, is restrained by what he views as necessity.