Quantum Cartographer

Things I hope Tommy Arnold's announcement/merch drop will be:

from the above-linked ebird.org:

groove billed anis are a hilarious cuckoo situation where they ended up laying their eggs in one another’s nests instead of anyone else’s. they hang out together in groups of up to five pairs until a nest gets built (sometimes by committee, sometimes they just hang around hopefully until someone does it all on their own) then they start sneaking over and laying an egg in at a time. the females who lay for the first time will sometimes flip prior eggs out of the nest like ‘oh i KNOW this one isn’t mine! away it goes’ but eventually everyone’s laid a couple eggs in there and is stuck with the mutual hostage situation. then they take turns incubating until all the kids hatch and everyone pitches in on feeding them, because no one knows which of the kids are theirs so they all might as well.

Also their eggs are incredibly beautiful. They’re a very pretty blue color, but covered by a white chalky outer layer that is easily scratched off, so they end up in various stages of in-between.

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

When we were children, my sister had private music lessons at her violin teacher’s house. I only visited there once, but I still remember that afternoon. The teacher had an artificial pond in her yard, a large beautiful thing with lily pads and plant life. And in the pond, there were goldfish. I had never seen such enormous goldfish. 

Reblogged again for this drawing I made for it