Ready to Prosper™

“Hamham getting comfy“

Gilbert Baker added a 9th stripe shortly before his death, with the new stripe representing diversity. He added this stripe in reaction to the 2016 US election. It’s unfortunately not as well known as the 8 and 6 striped versions.

Here’s an image of him sewing together the 9 striped rainbow flag.

hello! if you’re still interested in doing weird cat genetics, i’d love to hear what you think this guy is! a friend of mine posted him on her social media

it took me ages to answer this because I genuinely do not know what is going on there.

that doesn’t look like any existing colouration on my radar. the closest thing would be black smoke (non-agouti black + the silver/inhibitor gene)

you can see that Black Smoke does look pretty similar! but there’s a problem - Black Smoke is a non-agouti colour, and your mystery cat has agouti ticking in the lighter areas:

if you combine the silver/inhibitor gene with agouti, you get a Silver Tabby, which no longer looks anything like your mystery cat:

the other gene that causes that sort of darkening is Charcoal, which originated in the Bengal breed. but there’s a problem with this too. Charcoal DOES cause darkening across the body, but your mystery cat doesn’t have the characteristic “white googles” around the eyes:

your mystery cat with ultra dark face and no goggles:

randombred charcoal cats do seem to have less defined “goggles” than Bengals, but they’re still present:

so what’s going on? I went on messybeast.com, my favourite cat genetics website, and the closest thing I could find was as follows.

there are 3 typical agouti coat patterns in cats: ticked, striped (aka mackerel), and classic (aka blotched, bullseye, marbled). two copies of the ticked gene are required for a ticked tabby, like the one below:

with only one copy of the ticked gene, the masking is incomplete & the other tabby pattern it’s carrying breaks through, like in the cat below:

HOWEVER, it can also present atypically! this is what I found on messybeast, examples of a single copy of ticked tabby incompletely masking the hidden striped/classic tabby genes, resulting in hyper dense patterns, like you see on your mystery cat:

even on this though, the face is too light compared to mystery cat! all that dense patterning seems confined to the body.

I don’t know enough about Chausies/grizzles to say that’s for sure what’s going on, but it sure as hell does look like it!!

Put filler tags for the top 5 tags to avoid a post being collected

Put a fandom tag sandwiched as part of a conversational tag (ie: “I’m thinking about Mad Max Fury Road”) and the post wouldn’t be collected by the search system

Tumblr has now changed it so that any tags applied to a reblog can be viewed by the OP/anyone else.

The changes I’ve also noticed are that:

“the first 20 tags on a post will show up in searches” according to the tags FAQ

Additionally, they seem to have changed it so that long tags / “commentary” tags with a specific “main tag” in it will still show up in searches. Going back to my above example: “I’m thinking about Mad Max Fury Road” might show up in the main Mad Max Fury Road tag, especially if my blog is marked as visible in search results.

These changes could make your posts more visible / subject to attention than you had expected or wanted.