If You Know Me, No You Dont

my stance on the trans athlete debate is always and forever going to be that sports should be completely desegregated because humans have one of the smallest levels of sexual dimorphism in the animal kingdom and the disparity we see between male and female performance is entirely caused by social factors rather than anything biological. “should trans women compete against cis women” i think cis men and cis women could compete fairly but that’s apparently a little too spicy for people to wrap their minds around bc they’ve been told their whole lives women are biologically inferior & never thought to question that. or wonder if it’s maybe a self fulfilling prophecy of some kind. are women biologically inferior or do they appear so because patriarchy demands that of us?

You can’t Abstain your way to a Better World.

not to be a joyless hag but I've started seeing genderbent "yuri" shipping Markiplier and Ryan Gosling and I can't help but think of someone I recently I unfollowed for posting that they have an easier time caring about genderbent versions of boy characters than regular fictional women

and I'm also building some connections to that post I made about reading books by Black women (you know the one) and the people who would respond by saying something akin to "joke's on you, I only read fanfic 😜" as if that were some kind of clever loophole and not a demonstration of the exact thing I was talking about

like yes fandom is about fun or whatever but idk man at what point has your desire for no thoughts head empty uncritical consumption left you splashing around in something that's been blended down to an indistinguishable goo for the sake of avoiding anything remotely challenging. with the thing that's "challenging" here being. you know. giving a shit about women and Black people and like frankly anyone but your shippable white men (and honorary Markiplier).

The first photo had me nodding, and then the full shot nearly killed me laughing. Perfection!

Banksy is a really interesting case of an artist being catastrophically overrated without being a complete hack. Like you start to think "oh God, him again" but then he puts up something Actually Good and it's kind of like getting slapped with a fish, but somehow in a positive way.

Why is it that every time I google something like "Are olives poisonous to cats" the top results are always like "Fun fact: Cats are carnivores! This means that they eat meat. There is no reason to include olives in a cat's diet. You should feed your cat cat food, which is dry or wet food especially designed for cats. You can purchase this at a store." like is there a single person alive on the planet who's googled "Are blueberry muffins safe for cats" because they're planning on switching their cat to a muffin-only diet??? No, I'm asking because the little bastard somehow popped open the packet while I was putting away the groceries and dragged one under the couch before I could react and now I need to know if I should call the after-hours vet. "Cats should not eat spaghetti." NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!!!! "Try to keep human food away from cats." i live in a studio apartment with a completely silent and permanently hungry apex predator who has the intelligence of a toddler and the desperate Machiavellian cunning of a creature who spent his formative months on the streets. He can already open doors and he is this 👌 close to learning how to open the microwave. He is stronger than me and covered in knives. So im gonna do my best but for the moment i just need you to tell me whether this yoghurt is going to kill my son y/n

For plants specifically, there’s also a wildly detailed set of posts and listings about toxicity on the old, wonderful, Plants Are the Strangest People blog

happy pride

he was actually a forestry graduate student who was doing research on bristlecone pines (Pinus langaevea) and got his increment borer stuck in the tree. this tool costs almost $800, so he asked the forest service if he could cut down the tree to recover the tool. after cutting it down, it became apparent that the tree was actually the oldest living organism. ever. (around 8,000 years old). so, not just some asshole. the guy feels extremely guilty and has even broken down in tears during an interview about the accident

its so different to know it was an accident and that NO ONE was aware until after. its not like this was one ignorant guy cutting down a fucking relic.

Learning this was an intentional genocide changed me.

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

I strongly dislike how "some museums have unethical practices, and repatriation of stolen goods should be a high priority when applicable" has morphed into "all museums are evil, and museums are an unethical and untrustworthy source of information by nature."

the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.