Seated bear-like, a captive 2-month-old kit brings to mind the native legend of the wolverine as the fourth bear cub – the runt of a grizzly’s litter that went off to live alone.
- DANIEL J. COX, in The Wolverine Way by Douglas Chadwick

blake kathryn
Jules of Nature
Monterey Bay Aquarium

PR's Tumblrdome

izzy's playlists!
tumblr dot com
Show & Tell
art blog(derogatory)
YOU ARE THE REASON
Not today Justin

oozey mess
One Nice Bug Per Day

Product Placement

shark vs the universe
Claire Keane
hello vonnie
almost home

pixel skylines
todays bird
seen from Hungary

seen from Austria

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Canada

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Malaysia

seen from Germany

seen from Netherlands
seen from Tunisia

seen from China
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Spain

seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@umuhk
Seated bear-like, a captive 2-month-old kit brings to mind the native legend of the wolverine as the fourth bear cub – the runt of a grizzly’s litter that went off to live alone.
- DANIEL J. COX, in The Wolverine Way by Douglas Chadwick

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
A homo neanderthalensis and a homo sapiens. Happy pride!
by the way (i sadly cant share this document cause it was sent to me personally and i dont think its online) i've been reading a compilation of earliest writings by European settlers about Kentucky and its fucking wild
the main thing they mention is the river cane, everywhere. Cane cane cane cane cane on every page. Canebrakes stretching for miles and miles, dark woodlands of massive trees spaced wide apart with canebrake as the understory
But also they talk a lot about: Huge fields of strawberries that seem to turn red in spring with all the strawberries getting ripe. Raspberries. Groves of American plums, even some AN ACRE big just a huge patch of plum trees. Cherry trees. Huge grape vines growing up one in every four trees. Persimmons and pawpaws. Walnut trees. Hickory trees. Oak trees. And sugar maples. EVERYWHERE. And the canebrakes absolutely TEEMING with turkeys, passenger pigeons and quails
Reading the descriptions of looking out into a valley and seeing herds of 200-300 bison frolicking in the clover and river cane almost makes me want to cry...
It's crazy how much they talk about plum trees because plum trees are so rare now!
Really it's wild seeing how abundant the edible woody plant species and berries just-so-happened to be when Europeans first came. Right?
To me it seems like obvious pieces of evidence that indigenous people were actively cultivating this land. It was a landscape scale agriculture fully integrated with the ecosystem.
Even more so because it started to collapse very soon after settlers came. The sugar maple trees were mostly killed by settlers hacking indiscriminately into them with hatchets for maple syrup making without caring about the trees survival, the livestock running loose destroyed the native clover and cane causing invasive grass to grow back, and the bison...reading about the bison is so sad!
The wasteful slaughter of bison began very early. Lots of writers talk about other settlers killing bison just to say they killed one, or killing several of them and barely taking one horse load of meat from them, or seeing traders killing bison by the hundreds just to take the most valuable parts and leave the body to rot...And the writers knew it was wrong! but they couldn't stop the others from doing it. So bison were basically gone from around Lexington before 1800 :(
Settlers even killed the bison for wool--this was fascinating to me, they described making their cloth out of nettle bast fiber and bison wool. Native Americans also used bison wool for textiles, but as far as I know they didn't kill them for it (tho i reckon they might have used the wool on a bison they killed)...the wool peels right off in big clumps in the spring. Same thing with mountain goats, indigenous peoples would just gather the mountain goat wool when it naturally shed. But the settlers were killing bison to shave the wool off and it said only the young ones had good wool so if they killed a bison that didn't have good wool on it they would just kill another one.
They destroyed the river cane not knowing that bamboo was strong and useful for practically everything. Destroyed the native pastures of buffalo clover, Kentucky clover, running buffalo clover and God knows what other extinct or undiscovered clovers. And now wild strawberries and raspberries are hard to find, American plums very rare, persimmons rare...
The settlers didn't understand this land, didn't try to understand it, they were full of greed and just tried to force their idea of agriculture and their idea of society onto it, and watched in bafflement as the natural abundance and beauty of the land around them fell into decay and ruin from their abuse.
Kestrel-dad not sure how to dad but he’s trying his best.
Dad loves you and feeds you. But he is also dumb and feeds you a wonderfully done wagyu steak. You are 3 days old.
Okay, but check out this video from mid-May 2022 of a Kestrel Dad who just kept piling up voles and mice beside his babies when the mom was injured/killed/mia’d by owls…but then watched one of his babies just swallow a lizard and went “OH. I can feed them small food!” and learned to tear it apart!
EDIT: There’s a not-zero percent chance that this could be the same dad???????? The source is the same–Robert E Fuller–but they could be different birds.
UPDATE: Not only has Mister Kes learned to feed his chicks all on his own…
….the three chicks who were taken out of the nest for intensive care after the mom disappeared were put back in, and he just started feeding them, too.
He’s a single father of six who does not possess the instincts to feed even one of his offspring, but he learned and adopted that behavior without difficulty and is now hunting and providing for six kids all on his own.
Happy father’s day to the Krestel single dad of 6 Who is doing a wonderful job
wolverine in the snowy mountains

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
*doctor voice* hmmmm…..have you tried this revolutionary method called painmaxxxing? it is where you do not bother me and adjust to being in agony all the time and we do nothing to resolve the root cause or treat the symptoms. you don’t wish to try painmaxxxing? you’re being non-compliant with the treatment plan I have just provided you?
And they’re right. I’m always exhibiting “drug seeking behavior” rooting around in my bedside table for my extra strength Tylenol.
Still bothered by the US cultural idea that men can only be non-romantically intimate with one another in war-like or competitive circumstances.
I’m pretty quiet about the fact I’m a transman usually, but holy shit I need to tell you about the culture shock I’m going through because it’s blindsiding me.
There’s a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.
It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization—unless, of course, it’s in very specific environments. And the fact I don’t amnbiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.
You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?
It is 4:30am and I’m mourning the loss of a privilege I didn’t even know I had.
Anyway, I’m going to figure out how to navigate this. Don’t know how yet, but I’m gonna.
Absolutely, because it’s an extremely sticky issue.
Frankly, this is something I would’ve never understood without living the experience.
It’s now blatantly clear to me that most cis men probably experience chronic emotional malnutrition. They’re deprived of social connection just enough for it to seriously fuck with their psyches, but not enough for them to realize that it’s happening and what’s causing it.
It’s like they’re starving, but don’t know this because they’ve always been served 3 meals…except those meals have never been big enough.
This deprivation comes from all sides of aisle, by the way.
In the case of women: When I’m out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is—the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.
As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn’t run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren’t just being needlessly guarded.)
But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I’ve experienced female socialization. If I hadn’t, I would’ve thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I’m failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn’t social rejection.
And as for male socialization? Again, it seems taboo for a man to be platonically intimate with men for reasons I have yet to fully understand, but I think it boils down to a) the fact society teaches boys that it’s not okay to be soft with each other, and b) garden-variety homophobia. Our media only shows men being intimate with one another when they’re teamed up against a dire situation, and I’d bet real money it’s a huge reason why men gravitate toward activities that simulate being teamed up against an opposing force.
But men are not machines of war. Yes, testosterone absolutely gives you Dumb Bastard Brain, but that just makes you want to skateboard a wagon down a hill or duct-tape your friend to the wall, not kill someone.
The human species looks so much colder standing from this side.
I can see how men might convince themselves that their feelings of emotional desperation is personal weakness as opposed to a symptom they’re all experiencing from White Imperialism. Because this human connection, this frith, is as essential for our wellbeing as water is.
So sick. How sick. I want to destroy this garbage.
I am reminded of a moment which blew my mind a few years ago.
I was talking to my mum about how difficult it was to make new friends, and how isolated I sometimes felt. And her suggestion was:
“Well, you go swimming, don’t you? Why don’t you try and strike up a conversation with someone at the swimming pool?”
And I was just. Stunned, by this incredibly vivid example of how differently she expected the world to engage with her.
I’m non-binary, but anyone looking at me in a swimming pool is going to see me as a young man. And if I tried to strike up a conversation with a random stranger in a swimming pool, while we’re both mostly nude they would find it creepy and unsettling. If they were a woman, they would certainly think I was trying to hit on them, and possibly feel threatened by it. If they were a man, they would probably think I was trying to hit on them, and possibly threaten me because they felt threatened by it.
And when my mum suggested this, I was struck by a powerful sense of how different the world must look when it’s okay for you to just start a conversation with a stranger in a swimming pool.
My husband and I are extremely clucky (we’ve been friends since forever and so married young) and every time I see a little toddler or baby in public I’ll smile at them are give a little wave. Now sometimes they’ll just blatantly stare at my hubby (he’s quite tall and has a big smile). And as someone who has worked in childcare, I know that positive interactions with adults are really important for little kids so I nudge my husband and say look they’re staring at you. And his response is always heartbreaking, “I know, but I can’t look at kids in public spaces, their parents will think I’m being a creep.”
We were in IKEA the other day, and as it sometimes happens you keep bumping into the same people who are moving through at the same pace. And this 2-3 year old kid is in his parent’s trolley and just obsessively staring at my hubby. And after the third time I pointed it out, hubby got really annoyed and huffed about how he can’t just interact with this child etc etc. Skip to like a half hour later we’re in the line to pay and hubby leans over with this soft smile and says that he saw the kid again a few minutes ago and finally smiled and waved back and the kid (now waddling next to his parents) got excited and ran to his dad and pointed out hubby and the guy just smiled back.
I had to bite my tongue so hard not to say hey see, it wasn’t a big deal. Because I know how hard that perceived fear is, no amount of logic or convincing can make that feeling go away. It’s really heartbreaking.
And as much as there a bunch of terrible men ruining the dialogue, this is what most mean when they talk about men’s issues. Not only can we not start a conversation with a stranger, or talk about emotions without social backlash - most of us cant even talk about not being able to talk, because people jump to the conclusion we’re being misogynists or stealing the air from women’s issues or want to be able to approach others only in a predatory way. But really, we just want to speak without being seen as a threat.
Don’t get me wrong, women and queer folk CERTAINLY have it much worse institutionally, systemically, and financially… But being a man is extremely difficult socially. And it’s the kind of social difficulty you can’t address as a man %99 of the time. It’s extremely lonely. And even though it’s not at all justified, this social isolation and constant perception as a threat, is a big part of what drives so many men to commit terrible atrocities
I didn’t have anything to contribute first time I reblogged, but just remembered seeing that from seeingstuff by neo-nazis and ex-neonazis: and it seemed very obvious to me that preying on this type of loneliness is a huge part of how they indoctrinate people and raise their numbers.
Small thing that breaks my heart:
When I was in third grade, I told this boy that it would be my birthday in four days, and he said, “okay, then I’ll buy you flowers.” Four days later he comes up to me and says, “my mom wouldn’t let me get flowers but I found you this violet in the grass.” That in and of itself was iconic and so so sweet, but it gets better.
A month later, I had to move, and because it was third grade, the teacher made everyone write me letters to say goodbye. His said, “I hope you have so much fun in your new house that you forget about me. I hope that you’re always happy and you never miss us. I’m sorry I never gave you flowers, but I can give you some now.” And he fucking. Drew me flowers.
No, Joey, I never forgot you. You are the reason I have standards in this life, and I’m so grateful to have known you. I hope you’re happy, wherever you are, and I hope that the rest of your days are filled with as much joy as you gave to me. I spilled water on the card about five years ago, and half of it is a a jumbled mess now, but I still have it. It’s the only card I still have.
The funny thing is this dude and I hardly ever interacted. I knew he played football because he was on the town’s kids’ team and my brother was on the middle school team, and I knew he was one of, like, three Joeys in our year. I had a crush on him but obviously never communicated that because it was fucking third grade, but somehow those three interactions imprinted on who I am as a person. I am forever changed by Joey from third grade.
"So the whole ball pit was my idea. I wanted a ball pit."
God, this part...
But I feel like an asteroid. I feel like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I was very, very guilty for years. I had to go to extensive therapy because I was like, “oh my god, I, Lochlan O'Neil, single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?”
She didn't she didn't she didn't. That wasn't it. She wasn't an asteroid.
She was the first skater that fell through the ice of Web 2.0.
I was also a teenager who found an amazing world, and My People, and friends I'd still talk to every day, on the internet. I spent years getting my mother to let me go to conventions and meet friends in distant cities. I started ambitious internet communities I didn't have the experience or skills to bring to fruition. I don't think there was a lot of difference between us, in a lot of ways. It's not that I was somehow smart or skilled or suave and she wasn't. She didn't have some awful planet-killing stink or velocity that she brought to the show.
The difference was this:
In 1994, when the Endless September began and the Internet felt perpetually full of stupid newbies, there were 20 million people online.
In 2001, when I got my first LiveJournal account, there were 500 million.
In 2012, when she joined Tumblr, there were 2.43 billion.
When I started out, and you joined a new messageboard or chatroom or mailing list, you had to introduce yourself to the community. Except in the biggest of websites, people expected to log onto the internet, read through all the new things that had been posted to their local bit of it, and then log off again. Older members took it upon themselves to greet the newbies and answer any questions they might have, directing them to the relevant community FAQs. People would say things like, "Oh yes, I remember you. This is only your second Thursday with us, right? I hope you have fun!"
I joined an Internet full of adults who got online through their jobs or their universities, one of the first wave of kids allowed to roam free. And the proportion of adults to kids kept steadily changing, but until DashCon, I don't think people understood how much. I remember a discussion that happened in early 2000s slash fandom, where the very true observation was made that in particular artistic ways, we had all agreed to suspend shame, which created a unique kind of space. As a community we could all admit that we were there to be embarrassingly enthusiastic in unusual ways about absolute nerd shit, and we understood that it wasn't life or death, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it also wasn't going to get broadcast onto the clouds and our bosses didn't know who we were. Everyone was (willing to act like) an adult, and we could hold the circle and create safety there.
That felt like a lot of geek spaces, then. Anime conventions, science fiction conventions, furry conventions, videogame stores, D&D meetups. Images were bulky and pixelated, video incredibly hard to move. When you got to a con, it was like a brief oasis of Weird that sheltered you and screened you from view, and you ended up volunteering because the weary, cynical, intelligent, kind people in the con ops office looked like you were throwing yourself in front of a bullet just for offering to run a clipboard down to the other end of the hotel for them.
The ice was thick enough to skate on. The circle was strong enough to let you be brave and funny and silly and free, and you could buckle down with some friends and clean all the trash out of the ballroom by 11am on Sunday, and you'd see everyone next year.
The bubble was going to burst, but nobody seemed to worry about it.
Things were changing fast for fans, all kinds of fans, in the early 2010s. Conventions that used to get news coverage like "Local Freaks Weird Out Hotel Employees: This Weekend Only" to "#Cosplay: The Hottest New Trend" and from Geocities sites that shut down if you exceeded your page visits for the month to AO3 getting 10 million pageviews a week.
It was great. We could conquer the world together. We could stay safe and together and the circle would hold.
And then the ice broke open and Lochlan fell through. Right through the bottom of that goddamn ballpit into freezing arctic sea. Right into years of people sorting through the churned ice of the wreck, taking years to come to the realization that there really had not been ANY goddamn adults in the room making sure things were okay. The community had not actually failed so much as never been formed in the first place.
Because as it turns out, group-bonding techniques that work for 100 or 1000 people do not work for 10,000. Or 100,000. Or one million. Or one billion.
That line about agreement to suspend shame sticks with me all these years after because the defining feature of post-Dashcon Tumblr has been shame. And scorn, contempt, derision, and hatred. Cringe, in short, and kys. Exactly the kind of bullshit I saw every day in junior high school, and ran to the Internet and fan conventions to get away from.
I got the kind of community and mentorship and support that have made fandom a refuge and a resource my whole life. Lochlan O'Neill didn't. Not because there was anything worse or dumber or less experienced about her.
Because a system built in the 1990s was incapable of bearing the stress of a load fifty times bigger than what was already "way too full."
Just because I'm from one generation, and she's from another.
It was not her fault.
that's me

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I am glad that bee hummingbirds hatch nests of eggs each smaller than a pea. I am glad that there are oceans two miles deep where fishes unknown to science glow like fireflies.
I am glad that the crumbs taken from my bedroom are returned to tiny cities built by ants, and that the thunder of the storms rolling in from the north trembles in my chest when it is still a ways off. Hello, says the world, you are so little. Hello, says the world, you are so big.
something ive noticed after being a hobby cosplayer for years is that in a lot of places the general consensus seems to be that wearing costumes in public is weird and/or socially unacceptable, but whenever I'm in costume in public while on the train to the con venue or having a photoshoot on location or something, people by and large fucking love my costume. they think it's so cool. kids think my costume rocks. their parents are impressed that I made it myself. random grandmas tell me my armor kicks ass. I was at a japanese garden once and barely got around to doing the photoshoot me and my homies came there to do because swathes of visitors who had never heard the word cosplay before were lining up to take a picture with me.
it's the same thing with adjacent hobbies like larp or reenactment or fursuiting, the general image of the hobby is that you're weird nerds (and probably also sex perverts) for playing dressup despite not being a child but when you're actually in costume the response from random normies is categorically positive. I inevitably get weird looks from the kind of people who think having a tattoo is an affront to god but they give me that look for just existing with blue hair and pronouns too and the people who actually talk to me always do because they wanted to tell me they love my costume. and the response that always gets me the most is when they say it looks fun but they would never dare to do the same. it's such a shame. why did wearing a silly little costume have to become an act of bravery.
A couple of years ago, a bunch of Star Wars costumers went to a state park and met for a photo shoot. The organizer notified the park staff that we were coming only to take still pictures, no video, no commercial use items. We gathered together and lugged our stuff into a fairly low traffic location, set up a portable changing tent for those who needed it and got dressed.
Our scout troopers and Jedi and Sith posed against the rock crags and forests and in dappled sunlight. We got great pictures.
And every once in a while someone would come around the bend and find something TRULY unexpected.
Most people scrambled backwards or ducked behind the nearest tree, apparently thinking they'd stumbled into a film shoot of some kind. A few took pictures from a distance.
Once we explained, all of them were delighted. How strange. How wonderous. Two little boys took pictures with every single costumer, a woman sat on a rock and just watched, one guy called home to FaceTime his brother.
The world is mundane and predictable and painful sometimes. And breaks to that are magic. Little bursts of a world turned on its head. In the best way.
Awesome video displaying phenomenal craftsmanship—posted by one of my favorite Tiktok accounts: Tlingit_Haida
Aani (the land known as Southeast Alaska) has been home to the Tlingit and Haida Peoples since time immemorial
Edit: To clarify, this particular video features Git Hoan Dancers, of the Tsimshian Tribe. They say so in the video, but I realize my caption about the Tlingit and Haida Nations might cause confusion.
Growing up is actually all about realizing people don’t inherently dislike you and it’s a bit odd to assume they do
This
there are more tweets in this thread
fucking SLAY
this isnt even the full thread, there are even MORE tweets to this thread that i think are really necessary to read if you do what op is talking about! it is not enough to know that feeling this way hurts the people you love, we already know that.
this rest of the thread continues after the third tweet from the reblog.
like THE FULL THREAD is genuinely so reassuring.
sometimes, it is not enough to just know, sometimes you might need that reassurance of "do you really think of me when i'm away?" and someone reassuring you that yeah, they do. and evaluate that! trust that! just like op did.
and then learning that ykw, it's NOT any of my business really. and finding comfort in that trust that like. whether they are or aren't thinking of me, they really do love me.
this full thread changed my life and i am ALWAYS going to give the full thread because the parts people cut out aren't enough for the people experiencing these things, speaking as someone who does. it, really it just makes us, made me, feel bad about my own capabilities when i saw the unfinished thread.
I can’t stop thinking about this.
I wonder if he was running on instinct… I watched a man die on the subway a few years ago. It’s more common than you think - NYC subways carry millions and millions in the course of a day. People die and there is never a good time for it to happen to anyone.
There was an older gentleman sitting across from me on the M train. It was about 6:30am, so I didn’t think much of it when he started leaning over. It was when he kept going when most people would jerk awake that about 5 of us took action. We asked if anyone knew CPR in our car, and when we pulled into the next station, we held the doors open and shouted for a doctor (there was a firefighter on the train with us who knew CPR, because that’s how things are in NYC). No response during CPR. The older gentleman’s lips were turning blue.
When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics took over and after 2 minutes of no reaction, I watched something that will always haunt my soul existentially, the way this pic does: The paramedic yelled at this man that he had to get up because he’d be late for work. And he got a response. I don’t know if the older man made it, but he had a pulse when they took him up the stairs to the ambulance.
We all got back on the train and headed off to work. And I sat there completely traumatized by the fact that this man was such a slave to his job that the threat of being late to work restarted his heart. It’s been over 10 years and I’m still not sure how or to what degree it affected me. Only that it did. I’m not bothered by not knowing. Sometimes you have to let the heavy sit to understand the weight before you can put it down.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
slightly late to this but happy Indigenous People’s Day!! I already made a whole thread of my formline art on Twitter, so instead I just wanted to share some of my favourite formline artwork I’ve made so far here!!
Guess what day it is!! 🪶🎨
The soft eyes! The forward facing ears! The question mark tail! Not to mention the poise and control! This little dude is having a blast and is SO good at it!!