"You can't be a lurker on tumblr." Yes, you absolutely can. I've been quietly reblogging things since 2014 and I haven't interacted with anyone in years.

Below the poll is a series of animal images labeled A through J. A is the least close to the birds we have today; J is the closest. If you encountered these animals in the wild, which would you call birds? If you pick a higher up option, then that means you consider all the below ones birds as well - so if you pick A, then BCDEFGHIJ are all birds. If you pick J, only J is a bird.

A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

F:

G:

H:

I:

J:

PLEASE REBLOG THIS SO IT CAN LEAVE PALAEOBLR. I NEED PEOPLE WHO DON'T RECOGNIZE THESE ANIMALS ON SIGHT TO VOTE.

I apologize to all of y'all with vision impairments for whom this poll is inaccessible. Alas, this is an experiment, and I cannot name the taxa. Thank you.

All alt text includes artist attribution; I did not make these pictures myself.

I just remembered one time in like sixth or seventh grade (we had the same teachers and class both years so hard to remember which) somehow we got into a debate of “who is better, boys or girls?” and instead of stepping in to stop it our teacher formalized it and egged us on by providing thoughtful prompts and counters to each side and by the end each group had built a barricade of desks on either side of the classroom and we were throwing balls of paper at each other and screaming about personal hygiene while our teacher just watched and enjoyed a Baby Ruth candy bar.

This was the same teacher that got the cops called on our school like three times and would reward us for being good by spraying our hands with rubbing alcohol and setting them on fire.

He was the best teacher I ever had.

STUFF MR ROBINSON DID THAT WAS VERY GOOD:

One time Mr. Robinson closed the door to the classroom furtively and asked a student near the door to keep an eye on the door’s window in case anyone from the administration was coming.

He explained the next curriculum was one he had been explicitly disallowed from, but he didn’t know how we were going to cover the next portion of our history work fairly without covering it first. He said if any of us were offended by it or felt it threatened our beliefs to be discussing it, please talk to him and he would gladly find alternative work for us to do instead. But he asked if we would be okay not broadcasting too loudly to the administration (our parents were fine) about it.

At this point we’re on the edge of our seat. Forbidden curriculum? YES PLEASE.

“All right, do I have a promise from you you won’t tell on me to the principal?”

We, of course, promised.

“Good. Then let’s talk about World Religions.”

-

(A side note here, if you ever have a not-forbidden courseload you want your students to really enthusiastically consume, I think pretending it’d forbidden will up interest levels immensely. The work was informative and we loved it, but the Secret Agent-ness of doing a SECRET ASSIGNMENTS and having SECRET PROJECTS and LOOKOUTS FOR THE FUZZ upped our investment in the material beyond description. Even if you DON’T have secret coursework, PLEASE DO THIS WITH YOUR CLASS SOMETIME. IT’S FUN.)

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At the start of the Great Gender Debate when someone would try to say boys and girls aren’t different and they can do whatever the other does, he’d super respectively ask them if they really thought that, or if they were saying it because they thought that’s what they were supposed to say, and encouraged us being honest about how we actually felt about the difference between between boys and girls and who was better.

Then lots of super fun shouting and throwing paper at each other and making desk barricades and more yelling.

(Keep in mind, this was 1999/2000. A lot of people didn’t even have internet at home. This was a small conservative town. Being trans or nonbinary wouldn’t have even been an option we knew about.)

Then he eventually stepped back into the fray of the Great Gender Debate and made us break down our points, which he had been taking notes of, on the white board and then had us carefully and intentionally refute or discuss them one at a time. Until we had reached a real and honest consensus that actually we’d been tricked into thinking gender was anything at all. Now when we said we thought neither was better than the other and being a boy or girl didn’t mean anything about what you could or couldn’t do, we fucking meant it.

One of our male classmates started wearing nail polish the next week and we told him it looked rad.

-

One time it was a nice day out and even though we weren’t doing trig at that point he was like, “Wanna learn something cool? I’m gonna show you how to calculate how tall something is using shadows” and then we went outside and learned how to find out how tall things are by measuring their shadows and measuring the shadows of stuff we knew the length of, and then for fun we also independently worked out the world was round and how big it was.

-

One of the times the cops were called on us it was because we were having a Hot Air Balloon making contest and people thought there were UFOs or spy planes.

-

Another time we were just setting off dry ice bombs, lol.

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They changed the milk at lunch and we hated it and Mr. Robinson may have given us ideas about civil disobedience and direct action that led to the lunch room sit-in the schoolchildren ended up staging until they would switch the milk back. At the time it felt like he was being really cool, and he was, but thinking on it he may have also been using us as props to prank the administration and also give himself an afternoon off while all the administration tried to get a hundred 11-12 year olds to leave the damn cafeteria while we chanted about milk.

-

We grew up in a town that was about 2% black. It was not uncommon for people living there to not know any black people at all.

One day Mr. Robinson told us we were going to be having a very important speaker come talk to us, and that he expected us to treat her with respect and deference. That she was one of the most important people we could be learning from, and we were honored to have her come to us. We all sat up, wondering who this important woman could be.

And he opened the door and it was one of the ladies who worked the front office, accepting our tardy slips and making us wait for the school nurse. A black woman, one of the only black people you’d find in the school.

She then sat down with us and talked to us about the racial history of our town. Explained to us what a Sundown Town was. Explained to us the racism she experienced growing up there. Explained the mistreatment of the police.

She wasn’t even that old. It struck us all. But you’re not even old. Is this still happening? Why didn’t you leave? Did anyone help you?

It was an incredibly powerful day.

When I went home to talk to my parents about it, they had no idea about any of it, even though this was the same town they had grown up in.

-

Mr. Robinson would occasionally repeat this habit of special guests were not academics, just people who had lived in our town for a while, bringing in a lunch lady or a janitor, making us talk to them, learn our town’s history, learn to respect their jobs, learn manners and deference for the working class.

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One time he gave us bread, water, and ziploc bags and set us loose on the school to rub the bread on stuff, drip water on it, seal it, and watch what mold grew. The kid that got the grimiest piece of bread with the most enthusiastic mold would win.

We learned that many of the surfaces we consider the most dirty get the most regular cleaning, and so are in fact the least likely to produce mold. While many of the surfaces we eat off of and touch regularly are nasty as hell.

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Similar to the Great Gender Debate, one time he let class go wildly off course while we debated hotly for over an hour about The Lion King. I do not, for the life of me, remember the substance of this debate. I think The Little Mermaid may also have been a point of conversation? I just remember it got HEATED, and Mr. Robinson always thought these heated debates were REALLY ENTERTAINING and would quietly sit back and egg them on.

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One time he gave me detention and I cried through the whole thing thinking my parents were gonna kill me when I got home and instead when I got home my mom hugged me and told me how he’d called her and said I’d been really honest and showed moral fiber in standing up for a friend and taking the detention in the first place and she was really proud of me for being a good person or whatever and idk if he actually was impressed with my actions or if he saw that I was stressed about my parent’s reactions and wanted to mitigate that, but that was such a good move.

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IDK. I just have a hard time thinking of any teacher I ever had both as capable of chaotic dry amusement and completely upright righteous anger. He modeled for us what it was like to evaluate things based on merit rather than based on rules and expectations, and you felt that energy constantly.

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Plus like getting to set your hand on fire for good behavior is a way better reward than whatever dumb stickers or candies or whatever it is teachers usually use. “Behave and we will play with fire” is the BEST incentive.

Original tweet

I think the logic here is:

>we save people from fires

>fires can kill anyone, including queer people

>we also save queer people from fires

And in an age where paramedics legally refused to save the life of a trans car crash victim, that’s an important sentiment to state

Grabs a sharpie and adds “And Neither Do We”

Don’t worry, it’s there lol.

One 0f the greatest and hardest dance scenes ever recorded......

One 0f the

greatest and hardest dance scenes

ever recorded……

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Cab Calloway and the Nicholas brothers! I don't think I've ever seen the colorized version of this before!

@demilypyro

@demilypyro

How does anyone hate kids they are so funny I sold tickets to incredibles to this little girl and her mom and she’s like mom are we sitting next to each other and the moms like ya and the kid screamed YES so loud it broke my ears

The other day I was bringing an older gentleman up the hill in a golf cart and we drove past this huge YMCA group of kids like 100 kids and driving past the first chunk like 10 of them yelled out “let me on” in unison and then since I’m driving so slowly to be safe, halfway in some kid leaned up and said “do you play fortnite” and I told him I played a little and he just pointed and shouted “THIS GUY PLAYS FORTNITE” and then like 20 kids started talking to me all at once about fortnite

A kid asked me if I lived in the ambulance. I said yes.

The hero we deserve

When I was on register at Kohl’s a little girl came through with her grandma and she was so very excited to tell me the meaning of her name (I think it was like warrior of god) and she begged her grandma for her phone so she could google to find out what my name means too

i wear two spinner rings on one finger and one time at my last job a young girl (probably 6-8) said “your ring is very pretty” and when i showed her it was two rings she GASPED and said “does that mean you’re marrying two people?!”

I have this necklace with a mermaid on it that I wear to work a lot and I got asked by a kid if it gave me magic powers. I leaned in real close and told her in a low voice it gave me magical girl powers but it was a secret. She got this real serious look on her face and said to her mom “that lady has superpowers, don’t tell anyone or the government will take her away”.

The other day i had to give a speech at my school despite my horrific fear of public speaking and afterwards i had kid come up to me and say well done to me. It was so cute.

god I love tiny kids

there was a kid in one of our science camps and he spent the whole week in a lab coat and goggles screaming “CHEMICALS” at the top of his lungs. he wouldn’t even tell us his name for the first two days just screamed CHEMICALS instead.

I was watching these kids at church today and one of them screamed and threw a toy car into the wall and it broke and the other one looked over calmly and said “does your insurance cover that?”

I was taking the drink order for a family at work and I asked their kid what he wanted to drink and he just looked at me with a completely deadpan expression and said “vodka” and me and the parents just fucking lost it

kid I used to babysit asked why my lips were different (she was two), and when I told her that it was because I was wearing lipstick, she yelled, “MAYA, I WANT LIPITZ.”

I work in a school and every time I draw anything on the board (I am a terrible artist and usually resort to stick men), the kids will all go ‘I love your picture, that’s a great drawing Miss’. So blindly supportive.

One time my younger brother ordered a “non-alcoholic fanta” at a hotel bar and the bartender lost his shit and I was never the same man

When I was student teaching, I was taking my fourth graders back from lunch and noticed one little girl looking longingly at the playground, where the younger kids were having recess. She heaved a big sigh and said, “I used to be that free.”

oh my god little kids in the library are the BEST one time i was looking for a book and a little girl tried to help me cause we always help HER find the books she wants. sometimes when i’m helping them check out they’ll tell me about the books they’re getting. i know so much about dog man.

oh man! another hilarious thing kids in the library do! they will straight up TELL ON THEIR PARENTS!

mom: the book was like that when we checked it out

child, innocently confused: i thought (little brother) did that though?

dad: yes that’s our correct address and phone number

child, barely paying attention: we MOOOOVED!! :D

parent: we never checked that book out

child, trying to be helpful: yes we did, that’s the one we lost at grandma’s house, remember?

me, fighting laughter and trying to decide whether or not the enter the child’s testimony as official evidence or not

I know I’ve told this story on Tumblr before, but one of my favorite retail experiences was when I was stocking shelves once and dropped a couple of small plastic toys, and a little girl ZOOMED up, grabbed them, held them up to me, and when I thanked her, said “I’m closer to the floor, so it’s TEAMWORK! :D” and zoomed off back to her mom

I was telling a kindergarten class (4/5 year olds) that we’re hosting a book fair next week and they would need to ask their parents for money. One girl very excitedly told me she has “one money” in her piggy bank. Her classmate, vibrating with excitement, said, “I have TOO MUCH money! I have ten dollars!”

a little boy, maybe around 7, looked at our piano at the museum and asked me very politely, “why doesn’t it have all 88 keys?”

I googled it for him after the tour, because even I didn’t know how many keys a piano was meant to have, or why this one had fewer (earlier pianos were just Like That, seems to be the answer)

we love baby nerds in this house

a marathon route ran past my apartment this morning and from my window I heard a small child yell at the top of her lungs, utterly bewildered, “WHERE ARE THEY ALL GOING???”

we have two niblings, and they like to draw with me when they visit. they’re recently getting into Star Wars and wanted to draw some characters from that.

me: okay, who will we draw?

older nibling, as expected: luke! BB-8!

me: alright, cool-

younger nibling, loudly and with conviction: COUNT DOOKU!!!!!!

TV Executives: “if the strike goes on, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”

Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.

Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.

And the thot plickens….

HOLY FUCK

SAG-AFTRA = Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists

More info:

- The actors walk off at the end of June if the studios don’t sit down with the writers

- Rumor is directors will follow. This will grind everything to a halt.

- Nobody is asking for a boycott. Neil Gaiman has pointed out that making Good Omens S2 a huge hit actually puts more pressure on Amazon to negotiate with the writers

- This implies it’s okay to catch up on old streaming content without breaking the line too

- This is a screenwriter strike; books will keep coming out.

- Movies already made will keep coming out for months. Again, actors have not called for a boycott; you aren’t breaking the line if you go see a movie.

- I don’t know where this puts podcasts but none of them have studio funding or platforms so they’ll probably keep going.

- Substack/Tumblr book club are all public domain works and will keep going. In addition to Dracula Daily there’s Whale Weekly, Dickens Daily, My Dear Wormwood (The Screwtape Letters), Letters from Watson (Sherlock Holmes) and more.

- Your local library always needs love. With the Libby app you don’t even need to physically go there.

THE WAY WE WOULD HAVE LOST OUR SHIT IF THIS CAME OUT FIVE YEARS AGO

I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test

I’m in the last 47.33% 

I shouldn’t have taken that test

Am I fucking stupid LMAO

!!! Top 0.01%!!!

Here’s an oldie but a goodie: (please note, for best recommended results, try at liberal arts institutions known for being fans of theater)

As seniors, my friends and I greeted freshmen students (no one asked us to). One of us held a clip board and pen. One held a tailor’s measuring tape. And one had a sharpie and a small stack of “Hello my name is _______” name tags. Here’s how the prank goes.

1) Cheerfully greet each student as if you’re an official greeting team of some sort. Clip board holder says “Friend, let’s get you a name tag”

2) Measuring tape holder proceeds forward, holding out tape-measures something random about the person (something where you don’t actually need to be up close and personal, like the length of their shin from 2 feet away, or I suppose you could try asking “please may I measure your wrist” or some such). Measuring person calls out a number. Possibly two.

3) Clip board person studiously records the number on a chart. Nods gravely/excitedly/smoothly/suspiciously/enthusiastically/whatever at Name tag person.

4) Name tag person writes down something utterly totally random in the tag blank. Like “peanut butter” or “ aerodynamic jellyfish”. With great ceremony, tag person hands tag to new student. All prankers bow, or offer waves, while saying “Pleased to meet you (name tag name), welcome to college! We hope you have a great year!” And walk away in whatever style suits you best.

Done correctly, this can happen so fast and flawlessly that parents, new students and onlookers will all be awed and confused by the time you’re out of earshot and if they see you later, will simply go “hey, it’s the welcoming committee!” and laugh. And it’s so much fun.

I’m obsessed with the idea of doing this but ONE person just gets named Steve.

If their actual name is literally anything other than Steve, it’ll still be funny and everyone will wonder why this one person got a regular name on their nametag while everyone else is labeled as Jubilation or Injket-1098 or whatever.

If their actual name is really Steve, they will spend the rest of their life wondering how the hell you knew that by measuring the length of their pinkie.

You. You get it. Carry on.

Here you go. The Good Omens S2 Episode 1 title sequence, by Peter Anderson Studios, music by David Arnold. We warned you it was madder than the S1 titles, and it is. I think it's really good.

I know it’s post pride, but consider

Happy Pride! People still hot

getting a wikipedia page really does feel like you’ve made it into the library of alexandria

The Good Place season one: Haha, what if someone was sent to heaven by accident and had to pretend to be a good person!

The Good Place by the end: Morality cannot be measured in a vacuum. While people should be held accountable for their actions, people are a product of their environment and the results of our actions are often beyond our control. Bad people can improve when they loved and supported. Also, the reality of death is essential to the enjoyment of life.

Pay heed to Klaudia Amenábar's words! Don't let the executives weaponize fandoms. WGA Strong.

My guys it is starting to work, I've seen some people I know complaining about the writer's strike and turning against them because their favorite shows and/or movie got put on hold. Please do not be fooled like this, this is exactly what the corporations want. It can wait, I promise you will find other things to focus, but writers need this.

Reword every headline they put out. “Due to not wanting to give writers money, Marvel has shut down pre-production on…” You can end this strike any time you want to, pal.

"Marvel too cheap to pay writers, production shuts down"

"Disney too greedy to pay residuals, deletes shows/movies"

"Studios cut corners on safety, production values, writing, acting, etc. in order to make more money; won't share with anyone below CEO level"

This.

100% this.

I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is "if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in."

"These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends." Okay, so you'll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald's or Starbucks on your lunch break.

"They can get a roommate." For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?

"They can live farther from city center and just commute." Are there ways for them to commute that don't equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.

If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.

You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There's only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.

"Nobody wants to work anymore" doesn't hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.

The Addams Family (1991) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld + trivia

thank you @fangirl-ofrandomness for including @slickshoesareyoucrazy ’s tags!