God the dichotomy of Charlie having to rp as a semi-mute green slime egg with anarchistic tendencies preaching about burning down the world and starting rebellion for three hours to him and bad and baghera having a totally straight, in-depth conversation about the philosophies of a representative democracy versus a federation figurehead as a president is so *chefs kiss* god I love it

Tumblr, buddy, listen to me. This is an unprecedented opportunity. You can snap up all of the pie here, and become defacto internet goodguy easy. All you gotta do is... drop the nsfw ban. Unambiguously. Announce that dicks are back on the menu. You want people subscribed the blogs? You want people to actually use your Post+ function? Porn. Let us use it for porn. The youngins aren't joining this site anyway, you're not competing with tiktok. The vaguely horny 20-40 demographic though? You can have that. You can have all of that. Think about it.

Do you know how many pinup artists alone are itching to come back to tumblr, but dont because of the unclear, seemingly arbitrary application of your nsfw policy? These are insanely talented people who are practically begging to give you content. For free. But you gotta change the policy. We can't keep dancing around this. Just think of publicity. The drama. A complete 180. You'd kill it tumblr. You could make it happen. Please.

Lobo nocturno ✨ 🐺

Falinks (#870)

General Information: Holy fuck, the average height of a fully grown adult Falinks is 9’10ft!

Despite their size, each Falink is surprisingly light, with each individual being around 300 pounds at full adult size. They do not have bones, they have exoskeletons. These exoskeletons produce armor-like tissue that Falinks are famous for. With that said, the brass of each group is usually ~1.2x bigger in all capacities than the rest of its squad, even developing additional exoskeleton-armor.

Habitat: Falinks are native to the Old World, with populations endemic to and found throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. They strongly prefer to live in montane ecosystems and steppes, and they do not live north of the Arctic circle. Too cold! This is almost certainly why there are no native Falinks to the New World, since they’d have had to cross over on the Bering Strait—though ancient fossils of other Falinks species have been discovered in the New World. Falinks love to travel long distances. For as long as Falinks spp. have existed, they have always had a strong presence in the lands that would become Africa.

Life Cycle: Falinks are born in a single, rather large egg (think like, 2 feet in diameter) that the parent Falinks tend to for about 6 months. Uniquely, inside this egg are exactly 6 Falinks babies that are all sextuplets of each other—in the same way that certain species of armadillos in our world give birth to exactly 4 monozygotic babies (identical quadruplets). For this reason, sometimes eggs have 8 babies in them instead of 6, but it is extremely rare for an odd-numbered set to be born from any egg. Yes, the 6 Falinks babies share 1 egg together. They are born together, raised together, live together, and travel together. All Falinks are hermaphrodites, but must reproduce sexually. In each set of Falinks, all 6 of them are identical for the first year of their life while they live with their parents (parenting is a 2 year commitment for adult Falinks), but during that time one of them is eventually singled out as the leader of the group. This individual Falink becomes the “brass” of the set, the technical term for the bigger leader in each Falinks set. When the brass is determined, special hormones are released that cause the brass to grow much bigger than the other Falinks in the set, and eventually allows for it to reproduce. Yes, this means that only the brass in a set can reproduce, but since they’re all identical clones of each other, it doesn’t matter. In the event that the brass is unable to reproduce and it’s because of battle damage then the second most dominant of the set will start producing brass hormones, and the set will now have 2 brass, but the original remains as the leader while the new one is the one who reproduces. If infertility is due to genetic problems, then there are no environmental cues triggering hormonal changes in the other Falinks, and almost certainly the others in the set would have the same problem anyways.

Behavior: Falinks are lovers of journeying, a good fight, and hugely loyal to their squad (the group name for each set of 6-8 Falinks). If a member of a squad is killed or goes missing, the others become incurably and extremely depressed. Every so often, orphaned Falinks will band together to form new sets, which mutually help each other feel better, but they forever long for their missing family.

When another Falink joins a squad, it is the brass who makes this decision, and the new individual is permitted to join but will not be allowed to become brass, not even upon the current brass’s death. If the orphaned Falink is already a brass, then it cannot join a squad with an established brass. However, this only applies to an orphan joining a sibling group. Should multiple orphans band together, as does happen, then the dynamics are established more normally (so, it’s beneficial for orphans to band with other orphans, rather than try to squeeze into an established sibling group) with whoever is the most dominant developing into the squad’s brass.

Note: Falinks are not friendly toward humans. They have a shared evolutionary history with us, meaning they are just as intolerant of us as rhinoceroses, zebras, hippos, and other African megafauna because we are literally their natural predators. They are not to be trifled with, but will leave you alone if you leave them alone. While they can make for truly excellent battlers, attempting to tame a Falinks is not for the faint of heart, and should this endeavor be undertaken, it is recommended that you start from an egg.

Diet: Generalist herbivores

Conservation: Near Threatened

Relationship with Humans: DNA and fossil evidence suggests that Falinks originate in Africa, just like humans, but their love of long journeys compelled them to travel outside of Africa and spread to Eurasia. This is a huge reason why scientists speculate on why Falinks can be so big (when humans are megafauna specialists), and that’s because of our co-evolutionary relationship with Falinks and other megafauna endemic to Africa. On that note, this is also why Falinks are not particularly susceptible to domestication. Humans have a long history of hunting Falinks as do we with all other megafauna throughout history. In many older cultures, the hunting of Falinks was/is often a Rite of Passage for men, warriors, etc. (it varies).

During the Roman Empire, the Roman military was inspired by the Falinks that journeyed through the Alps and the Carpathians, which is why there is an aesthetic similarity between the two, and is ultimately what the “phalanx” military formation is based upon.

Modern Pokeballs are specifically designed to catch the entire set of Falinks, much like Exeggcutes.

Classification: Falinks africanus are a distant relative to the Arthropods, and is itself within the clade Panarthropoda (Insects, Velvet Worms, and Tardigrades) as their own equally distinct branch: Oplismosoma (armor body). Based on the fossil evidence available, it seems that Falinks have existed for the past ~100 million years, meaning they existed during the age of dinosaurs and once spanned the entirety of the globe long ago, when the continents were still in Pangaea. Other Falinks species certainly existed throughout time, but only one remains today.  

All slapstick is horror because people get hurt and that’s scary

i cant stop thinking of the gif of the kiwi jumping around its so funny the way that thing moves like gravity doesn’t care about it it just prances wildly and freely it falls over but it doesn’t care it just keeps moving and having fun and just keeps hopping and the party never stops it’s legitimately one of my favorite pieces of media on the internet the joy it brings me is unbridled

look at it again

This is so cool!!!!

A drawing based on a Xisuma thumbnail, because I couldn't resist

This is the thumbnail btw

I finally switched to firefox and I've seen a lot of posts about the effortless importing of preferences from chrome and how it's important to support non-chromium platforms, but nobody is talking about the loss of productivity that happens when beautiful women come to your house to kiss you on the mouth because they heard you use firefox now. nobody's talking about this

[image description in alt text.]

now would be the absolute funniest time for tumblr to unban porn

Reblog to come play this stupid homemade board game we're all making.

Reddit started removing moderators from protesting subreddits, so /r/PoliticalHumor just made all their over one million subscribers moderators.

PvP mode enabled

I love mangoes your honor

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

"Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group."

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