im not even joking rn this fucking painting made me start uncontrollably sobbing. Do you know how long it took to paint? How expensive it was? The cat was content for hours and so loved that the girl held him there and paid for him to be painted with her. Imagine having such a bond… imagine being so loved and loving so much back…

Apparently this is almost a genre of painting. Its human nature to love and cradle cats …. And the bond these cats and their people have. To sit together for hours to get a painting to attempt to immortalize the love you two shared

Let me show you these charming paintings by a French artist Léon Comerre! I like to think these ladies were like "me and my kitty look so cute together, we must get a portrait made of us so that everyone knows how we love each other" 💕

(Also, having matching ribbons with your cat is the loveliest idea ever 🎀)

Meanwhile, I'm a fan of this Gainsborough, where, if you squint, you can see the outline of a furious cat who was not about to be in this portrait:

"Shooting estates are good for wildlife"

"Gamebird shooting is conservation"

"Gamekeepers are conservationists and guardians of the countryside"

This is just a small selection of some of the extreme cruelty, illegal activity and harmful practices common across gamebird shooting estates. This isn't just a few bad apples, it's a systematic problem with the industry. There is no justification for any of this.

This isn't even touching on the huge numbers of foxes, stoats, weasels, crows and other predators killed legally to protect gamebirds, often using cruel methods such as snares and larsen traps. Or the fact that shooting estates are one of the biggest barriers to rewilding and restoring ecosystems in the UK.

50 million pheasants and 10 million partridges are released into the UK countryside every year. All this so that rich people can have a fun day out shooting live birds. Most of the birds shot aren't even eaten but dumped in their thousands and left to rot. It's an extremely corrupt and outdated industry.

I feel the need to emphasize that this is not a reflection of most hunting. The British in particular have a messy streak of cruel practices in the form of baggies (foxes especially) and the game bird fiasco as listed above. They’re also fond of hounding wildlife for hours, literally.

A well-regulated hunt during a given season targeting an animal which is plentiful is fine and dandy. What’s going on in Great Britain is just based off the tradition of old style British hunts. Not so coincidentally there were a good amount of extinctions anywhere the British colonized. This isn’t to say other countries didn’t do their fair share, R.I.P. passenger pigeons, but a lot of the mentality of “shoot the most of this animal to win” was passed down from British imperialism.

I would like to say the majority of people made aware of these acts of animal cruelty are against them, but it’s a rich white mans “sport” and they tend to get their way.

Absolutely this. I wouldn't even class gamebird shooting as hunting.

With pheasants, the birds are captive bred and so tame it's basically like shooting fish in a barrel. With grouse, they're left wild but encouraged to breed into artificially high numbers. Predators are killed in huge numbers to allow this, as well as any other animal that may compete for food or other resources (such as mountain hares). In both events, the birds are driven towards a line of rich people standing around with guns. Most of them never hunt outside of this and barely know how to control a gun. They're often terrible shots and many of the birds end up wounded but not killed. It's not hunting, just idiots having a good day out while firing randomly at animals for fun.

Gamekeepers themselves are just hired by the wealthy estate owner who tells them what to kill to protect the birds. They are easily replaced, so either they do what they're told or lose their job, even if they're told to commit wildlife crime. Naturally a job like this tends to attract some very unsavory people.

Ultimately it all comes from the aristocracy, who invented most of these sports as a way to have fun and pass the time. Poor people hunting for food were often severely punished as game animals were reserved for nobility. It's a messed up system that still continues to this day due to it's popularity with royals and politicians.

everyone has dreams about being lost at school, late to work, cant find bathroom etc but whats yalls most common Uncommon stress dream. ill always have dreams about having various problems with my fish tank

More than a month ago, I decided, in my hubris, to start a poll I had not yet seen on Tumblr. I remembered its success on Twitter a while earlier, and so, bolstered by thoughts of "how hard could it be?" and wanting to know, for some reason, who people thought was twinkier between Luke Skywalker and Leon Kennedy, I chose to initiate

The Twink Poll

My initial selection was simply not enough to fill an entire, entertaining bracket, and so, armed with the innocence of youth and idealism, I created a Google Form for submissions.

The vast majority made perfect sense. Some were a little out there, but ultimately amusing enough to include.

Some were akin to gazing upon the Elephant's Foot in the basement of Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Pripyat, Ukraine).

And thus, this idea was born. Without further ado, I present

THE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT A FUCKING TWINK IS POLL

QUICKFIRE 24-HOUR POLLS TO DECIDE WHAT THE WORST FUCKING POSSIBLE CHOICE COULD BE FOR THE MONIKER OF "TWINK". These are all 100% AUTHENTIC submissions from the original Submit-a-Twink Google Form. Good luck and Godspeed.

labs that are also churches. to me

(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)

The indoctrination never stops.

Conservatives need a minority target to keep their followers focused/unified on hate. As the followers obsess on hate, their lives/emotions are much easier to manipulate.

Conservatives always vow to restore the country to some distant past that never existed.

It's an endless loop of failure.

when i was a freshman in college i wanted to dress up for halloween because i thought surely college students would have the spirit. so i elected to put a whole entire Skull Kid from legend of zelda majora’s mask cosplay together and wear that fucking ensemble to college on halloween.

i step on campus and realize immediately that not one other person is dressed up. not so much as a cat ear headband. so imagine this fucking dude sitting in a class of otherwise normally dressed people looking like this. that was me. this was my 9/11

this happened to me but i was this bitch

#samesies 😔✌️

I am going crazy for the 2023 QuiltCon winners

Alright your Discord avatar and tumblr avatar are locked in a closet for 7 minutes ala 7 Minutes In Heaven. What happens

i think the aesthetic echo chamber created by tumblr is more dangerous than the political one bcs im self aware enough to kno my politics r radical but then me and the girlies are on here reblogging body horror and very weird erotic poetry and i get offline and interact w a real person and jokingly say something like fungus is tangibly divine in the way it facilitates the eternal dance of creation and destruction which is really creation as or by destruction and theyre like what the hell are you talking about freak. the aesthetic barrier between me and a girl in a vineyard vines tee is literally insurmountable. i find the trout to be a very nietzschean fish

This is frankly ridiculous as many fish species can change sex, as well as lizards, amphibians, trees, etc.

How can you be so damn bigoted you get mad at like, facts of base reality? At what point do you take a beat and wonder 'are we the bad guys?'

I really need to talk for a minute about this new mobile update and how much I as a legally blind person hate whatever the hell is going on with the photos and how it's making this app nearly impossible for me to use

I'm not sure the same thing is happening on the desktop version but for those who may not know in the app whenever you tap on a photo it used to just pop up and you could double tap to enlarge it and zoom in and scroll around and all was great.

A double tap now likes the photo and it must be pinched and pulled to zoom in and out. A mild annoyance, and nothing compared to the rest of the update. If you scroll up, which I do frequently when trying to navigate an enlarged photo, it will send you to ANOTHER photo based on the tags of the post.

That's right, a completely different photo!!! A feature no one asked for and no one wants!! This isn't facebook, or instagram, and maybe tiktok but I never had that so this is a guess. When I click on the photo I only want to see that photo (or in the case of multiple photos in a post I want to be able to easily scroll side to side for those). I do not want to be taken to another post!!! Also if you scroll too far to the left you are then sent to the profile of the person who reblogged the post. I do not know why. Who wants this feature? Is it a feature at all?

As someone who only taps on a photo because I cannot see it and I need to enlarge it, this is beyond a simple annoyance. I cannot navigate the photo like I need, there's a hair trigger on whether it sends you to a new post completely or if you are sent to the profile of the reblogger. Neither, again, are things I want. this leaves me having to back track a lot, re-zoom the photo as it reverts back to normal, and hope dearly that this time I can just read the damned text before it freaks out again.

I haven't seen anyone else talk about this outside of the tags, but really this is making the app unusable for me, and I'm sure for many others.

@staff I know you guys haven't cared about your disabled community much in the past (other photo updates that stopped allowing me to zoom into gifs is proof of that) but please don't make this app unusable for me. I would rather not have to leave.

I’m very tired. you probably heard that Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam to slow Ukraine’s counter offensive. here’s something I didn’t quite realize: since this February, the Russians operated the dam in juuuuust the right way so that as much water would build up as possible when the snow melted and spring showers started. and then they blew the whole thing up.

40,000 people may need to be evacuated. I don’t really have the energy to say anything else right now.

Hospitallers Medical Battalion: actual angels can confirm. they’re combat-zone medical services - you know how humanitarian groups like MFS and Red Cross have to pause operations due to the Russians fucking shooting at humanitarian zones? yeah, these guys don’t pause for bullets, they fucking walk into them and they bring out anyone they can.

Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation: you can choose from a number of various fundraiser projects here, if you’re feeling particularly picky. for those of you who balk at the idea of supporting anything military just please remember that things like vehicles and drones aren’t just for military use, they’re also for evacuation and finding the wounded and they’re fucking vital.

KSE Foundation: similar to the above, KSE has multiple projects you can choose from to donate to. looking at it right now, one of the projects with the lowest amounts of money raised thus far - despite being started in April - is Seeds for Ukraine, which will help Ukraine recover from the ecological devastation Russia has been wreaking (and with Ukraine, the countries that rely on Ukraine’s grain exports that Russia keeps trying to steal).

Come Back Alive: do these guys even need the introduction? they’re Come Back Alive. I’m kissing all of them.

United24: Zelenskyy’s brain child, and the official fundraising platform of Ukraine. Mark Hamill recommends the fundraisers for drones in particular.

UAnimals: Nova Kakhovka’s zoo got… pretty much completely swept away. all zoo residents except the birds have drowned. UAnimals has tried throughout the occupation to keep the animals safe, and they’ve been reporting on the status of the zoo. I don’t really know what to say except that I hope they’re able to save the pets and strays in the towns along the river.

You can find NGOs specific to evacuation efforts in this post; please signal boost it as well. I’ve listed them but am leaving the links for the op post.

And another good list, every name here will put your money to good use.

@copperbadge, this is the general “help for Ukraine for ppl that don’t know where to donate outside of Ukraine”.

Had a rare request to reblog outside of RFM and the issue seemed urgent enough I wanted to do so. This is post two of two; thanks for notifying me and collecting these resources!