This is me

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i don't know the etiquette for posting other peoples tiktoks but the delivery of this punchline hit me like a FUCKING TRUCK please

people who get what I mean:

people who have found a way to have fun in the corn maze but who I'm a little worried about:

person who we are going to put in the corn:

And they are buying as much as they can right now. Genderweird people, gay men, bi folks in same gender marriages, lesbians, anyone who looks around and realizes that the noose is tightening? They’re buying what they can afford. Sometimes a little more than they can afford.

People are asking about metal purity in our jewelry. This has never happened before, not even during the first trump debacle. People are worried, wondering how they can get out if things go real bad. And I tell them how to sell their stuff for cash if they need to. How to find places that won’t cheat them.

How to get the most out of the jewelry they already have.

They play it off as a joke, most of the time, and I’ll play along to make sure they’re comfortable, but we all know the joke is only funny because it’s true.

I have warned people that they won’t get what they paid back. People who buy jewelry are trying to make money, and they don’t care about the hours put into hand crafting a piece. They care about the metal, the stones, and not much else. Folks I tell this to understand, and sometimes ask if we sell bullion. Or coins. Something that they can use in the emergency they expect is coming.

I wish I didn’t have to do this. I wish more people worried about what it says when people are planning on fleeing their homes with only what they have on their back. I wish I didn’t have a plan for what happens when my genderqueer ass is declared illegal.

In light of some of the many things happening across the world this year, I thought this Pride Month needed a special illustration.

Some kindly person (whose name I can't now find) posted this on Bluesky last March. People here might like it: thought I'd store a copy of it here.

@petermorwood liked this a lot (as he routinely liked anything with ginger in it).

Me: Do you want the real answer or the answer that will make sense to you

Coworker: I guess the real answer?

Me: Do you have three hours and a notepad

Coworker: No

right forgot most of my followers wouldn’t know this so

TW for medical trauma and child abuse

Some nights even filling up the kettle and setting an empty mug out for my morning tea felt hard. But I was always thankful for it in the morning.

Other nights, one thing would lead to another, and I’d wake up in a clean house with everything ready to go.

And, on a rare few nights, the one thing that I could do to make my morning easier was going straight to bed and allowing myself to rest.

Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!

To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.

There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*

And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***

This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.

The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.

Is that cool or what?!

*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.

**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.

First of all, look at it.

That’s a male ruff, specifically. You can see how they get their name. The females don’t have that fancy collar. They just look like sandpipers, which is what they are.

Like other sandpipers, these are wading birds, but they live in wet meadows and marshes instead of by the seashore. During the breeding season they gather together and the males hold territories, called leks, in which they display to attract females.

At least, some of them do.

Some male ruffs do not display in leks. They have plainer, often white, neck ruffs, and they sort of wander around the display grounds courting the females wherever. The interesting thing is that the territorial males tolerate this. Research suggests it’s because females are more interested in a display ground that has both kinds of males. The ladies like variety, it seems.

But it gets even more complicated. In 2006, a third male form was discovered. This form is extremely rare, and doesn’t have male display plumage at all. It looks just like a female ruff in the field. The other birds, however, can tell the difference, judging by their behavior. These female mimics travel with other males when the sexes split for the winter, and during homosexual mountings (which are common, as they are in many other animals), they often top.

What’s really interesting about these ‘cryptic males’, or faeders, is that they are apparently super sexy. Seriously. Females and males both prefer mating with them. And it’s believed that, like the satellite males, the presence of a faeder attracts more females to the area, which benefits all three forms.