reblog for a larger sample size pls etc etc i'll pass u a strawberry 🫶🏽

we did it! we formed a statistically significant sample size with a perfectly acceptable margin of error!

Not a single monkey survived the Neuralink experiment. I’ll bet Elmo can’t wait to start torturing and murdering human beings with this.

never getting over how genuinely distressed tai lung looks when po does his shuffling trick. mid fight this man stops and panics because he cant figure out a childrens magic trick

military recruiter: so what got you guys interested in the marine corps

enormous horde of hagfish, ispods and bottom-feeding crustaceans: oh. uh. is that how you pronounce it

whale fall side of tumblr you understand me

@staff if you [change] the [design] of the fucking [dashboard] i will kill you

With Activity now blocking my dashboard when I open it, I have to say that this was a poorly thought-out update. It’s like they don’t do any end user testing or something...

Love the contrast between the Americans’ “Apollo” and the Soviets’ “Sputnik.” You got the Americans naming their rocket after a Greek god trying to communicate the grandness and importance of this rocket. And you got the Soviets naming their rocket “fellow traveler.” Like a friend you go on an  adventure with together. This rocket is our little friend lol 

And they were gay for each other

And they were gay for each other.

DHCJCNDBJWJDJk3@2

bad hedgehog

Hey twitch mutuals:

Tumblr recently nixed the feature where stream embeds will boost your viewcount on twitch. I think we should focus on boosting each other on this site more vigorously since twitch's native discovery is pretty hostile, so I'll reblog your going live posts if you DM them to me. Reblog this post if you feel the same.

Feel free to reblog etc. I'm asking because my roommate had a weirdly shameful response to doing this the other day, and I was like ?????? It's a tap.

you what

I was trying to research the claim that TNR (trap-neuter-return) as a management tactic for stray and feral cats is ineffective, and I found this article very informative, I encourage reading it (if you're not too triggered by reading about awful things happening to cats.)

My main takeaway is that the health and welfare of feral cats is awful. The link reviews various studies on the health of feral cats and basically they're full of worms (an average of 53 tapeworms in one study!) and other parasites and carrying and spreading Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (the cat version of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS), Feline Leukemia Virus, Feline Parvovirus, cat flu, and rabies.

(Ectoparasites aren't covered in the same depth, but I can confirm from casual observation that ticks and fleas do enjoy cats as a food source.)

The article also discusses how common it is for cats to ingest poisons such as Roundup and to eat plastic and other inedible matter when feeding on trash. Multiple studies of feral cat colonies are cited that have found even regularly fed cats eat garbage and ingest great amounts of plastic, aluminum foil and other non-food material.

Death from trauma due to being run over or shot is also very common (the cat from the Croatian study that was brought into the vet with a homemade arrow stuck in its body is going to stay with me).

So if the cats are in horrible health and there's constant efforts to sterilize them, why doesn't their population decrease?

What the paper seems to show, is that feral cat colonies are often maintained by a constant influx of new cats. I have anecdotal evidence to corroborate this. Near where I live there is a place with a large feral colony, popularly called the "cat farm," where people dump unwanted cats. One of the problems I read about (not sure if it was this article or another one) was that areas where a cat colony is established become hotspots for people dumping cats.

(This happens, unfortunately, because other options straight-up don't exist. My family cared for a feral colony for about ten years. Our low-cost TNR program had a nine-month waitlist, no shelters anywhere in the area accepted cats, and spaying one fertile female at the vet's cost $200+. It's legitimately an awful situation to be in, and to this day, my mom's stress dreams always involve kittens popping up all over the place.)

As much as people talk about cats being "independent" animals that don't "need" humans, feral cat colonies really don't seem to establish and maintain themselves without constant human influence. In the studies, feral cat colonies are all in urban areas. In the USA we have actually feral populations of "wild" horses and pigs and some other animals, but we don't have "wild" cats. (Look at iNaturalist and observations of domestic cats are almost entirely confined to cities and towns.)

(Don't look at iNaturalist unless you want to see a bajillion dead cats.)

The linked article discusses how common it is for people to feed and sort-of look after colonies of feral cats (talking about Australia, not USA as my experience references, but similar situation). It can't really be known if some "feral" cats are considered to be "someone's cat" or not. With all the people that have "outdoor" cats, which can be counted as part of "feral" populations, I think calling cats "feral" obscures the problem a little bit: it's not so much a subset of cats that have escaped domestication, as a broad spectrum of cats that are neglected to varying extents.

So you have fully unsocialized cats, and you have friendly strays, and you have "outdoor" cats that may be fed or claimed by various people, but they're all invasive species and they're all reproducing and fighting with each other and they're all getting poisoned, shot, run over, infested with parasites, infected with diseases, and killed by predators. And it's really awful.

Of course I care about the impacts on wildlife, but holy shit, I also care about the cats.

This is a huge part of why I, 1) keep all my cats indoors, and 2) advocate for humane breakup of cat colonies, by adopting out socially able and relatively healthy cats (with curable or at least treatable problems) and humane culling of the others. TNR, from what I've seen in my own communities, just leaves more cats to die terribly.

It's horribly upsetting on a personal level to know that that means thousands of cats will be euthanized; it's more upsetting to know that those same cats will die in horrendous, awful ways if we don't, along with a great many others.

yup nothing convinced me that cats should be indoors like having outdoor cats as a kid.

People get upset at the idea of killing an animal, and yeah, I get it, but it's so upsetting because you can see/imagine a cat being captured and euthanized.

(or shot—honestly shooting is probably the best option because capture and euthanasia is going to be really scary to the cat and involve non-zero amount of suffering, whereas a bullet through the brain literally obliterates whatever could feel a thing called "pain" or "fear" before it can even exist. It just FEELS more violent and that's why we're squeamish about it, but we can get over it for the sake of the animals, I think.)

Whereas you might not have seen or imagined the much slower and nastier ends that will come to most cats you capture and release in a TNR program

So much of it comes down to misinformation about cats. No, cats are not "less domesticated" than other pets, they've literally evolved their range of vocalizations to be able to talk to us. How cool is that?! They have a communication system specifically for talking to another species. (wildcats sound different than house cats to humans, we've tested it, and cats only meow to each other when it's a mama cat talking to her kittens—which in my observation is a different vocalization than the meows they use to talk to people.)

I was actually thinking about Warriors

Because it's interesting to see the ways Warriors is realistic about feral cat life, and the ways it isn't.

Warriors is an example of a book where the viewpoint or theme explicitly promoted in the book is a strong contrast with what the story actually demonstrates. The cat characters strongly disdain "kitty pet" life and argue that it is a miserable and dishonorable way to live, suggesting cats are better off in the wild, but Warriors is also viscerally realistic about a great array of gruesome deaths that happen to feral cats.

This book series has an insane amount of character death. (I think TvTropes says there are 577 deaths of named characters. This is probably outdated.)

However, the Erin Hunters have still significantly changed several aspects of cat biology to drive down the overall death rate. Most strikingly, cats in Warriors usually have litters of 2-3 kittens, when this is unusually few for real cats—4-5 is average, 6-7 is more common than 2-3, and I've seen litters of eight or nine kittens before.

They also have kittens much, much later in life, in Warriors cats become apprentices at 6 moons of age (iirc) and become warriors some time later, and cats that have kittens in the books are (I think?) full warriors and "adults," but real cats can and do reproduce by 6 months old.

Furthermore, real feral cat colonies are (as mentioned above) often getting new cats from people dumping them or just random strays joining the colony.

Warriors also (understandably) omits intestinal parasites, FIV and most parasites and diseases.

Basically think about how many cats die in Warriors and now think about the fact that the Warriors universe has dramatically altered several aspects of cats in order to keep the amount of characters stable without killing way, way, way MORE cats.

Its butch appreciation day appreciate ur local butch <3

I wasnt kidding btw

THIS POST INCLUDES TRANSFEM BUTCHES AND WAS MADE BY A TRANSMASC BUTCH LESBIAN. TERF LOSERS FUCK OFF

ATTENTION!

FEUDALISM RESTARTING IN 10 SECONDS. CLASSES WILL BE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED

i got merchant

Also, here’s the assigner link for convenience

I have bad news :(

Ooh, a Knight!

Lower church management?

I got merchant, so I guess I’m just like my parents now…

Gotta sell magic bootlegs to gullible idiots. Just gotta hope I’m more convincing I guess

vtubers aren’t very popular on tumblr because their main role in society, in function if not in intention, is to give lonely guys a view into the lives of very weird neet women who turned their terminally online lifestyles into a career. Tumblr however is already 80% terminally online weird neet women but the corporatism doesn’t stick because we do it for the love of the game

Headcanon that Luke and Obi Wan got the money to pay Han Solo by selling the moisture farm at bargain-basement prices in Anchorhead without telling anyone that it was totally torched, and by the time anyone find out they were well off planet. Luke now has a reputation as one of Tattooine’s most famous con men despite the fact that it was Obi Wan who ran the con.

#I don’t know if you meant it this way but I totally interpreted this as them selling the farm multiple times to different people#luke: *wrestling over selling the wreck of the farm to someone he knows is a complete scumbag*#obi-wan: hello are you interested in buying a farm#complete scumbucket: *interested noises*#luke:  wait didn’t we already-? *gets zapped by R2* ow!#luke: oh#luke: ohhhh#luke: >:)

i haven’t cared about star wars ‘canon’ since i was 3 years old- I LOVE the idea that the reason Luke had to dramatically speeder in and out of Jabba’s without hitting up any of his local connections is he is like, wanted by a bunch of scum in Mos Eisley. Can you- can you imagine Vader or whoever doing a recon in town on ‘the last son of the Jedi who blew up the death star.’ His close friends and family have all a) died b) moved off planet or c) both. 

So the only reputation he has is ‘that bastard con artist who banked 19 years of aw-shucks-wormie-ness and used it to outrageously fleece everyone who’s almost anybody.’ Vader reading the report like…damn you Kenobi did you get HONDO to raise my son??

Jabba’s reaction to Luke’s message is INFINITELY funnier if we consider the idea that ‘Skywalker’ amongst the wretched local villainy (who mostly ignore imperial and rebel propaganda) is actually synonymous with TWO things - that brat who totally messed up the podrace bookies 25 years ago, and the infamous Anchorhead Con. Jabba gets this message about ‘Jedi’ and is like LOL i think the other Skywalker tried to pull some hotshit with that too before wimping out.

Everyone openly laughs like sure you’re a Jedi and I’ve got a bargain vaporator farm I want to sell you. 

AND THEN HE WRECKS THE JOINT WITH A DEBT-RIDDEN HALF-BLIND SMUGGLER A RANDOM SLAVE GIRL ONE GUARD AND TWO BEAT UP DROIDS WHAAAT

I’m imagining some random palace guard telling Vader this, afterwards.

“So this fucking—SKYWALKER, dude, have you ever heard the name Skywalker? You know what it means? A FUCKING ASSHOLE, that’s what it means. Like. The first one was bad enough, this little shit named Anakin who was fuckin’ NINE YEARS OLD and he just WON THE FUCKING BOONTA EVE PODRACE and set SIXTEEN bookies out of business and if I ever meet him I’m gonna set him on fire for it—

“And then this new one, Luke? Fuckin’ nobody, raised by his aunt and uncle out in the Wastes, little aw-shucks hick farm kid, the kind you could give him a five-credit piece and a ten-credit piece and he keeps taking the fiver because it’s BIGGER, that kind of simple, and then he comes into Mos Eisley one afternoon and sells his aunt and uncle’s moisture farm, right, I’ve been out there a few times, several of us have, and it’s a nice place as far as moisture farms go, mildly profitable, and the kid is fucking happy to get like two-thirds its value, so he sells the farm, right? TO NINETEEN DIFFERENT PEOPLE! Do you have any idea how much Jabba’s finance people had to do to get that sorted out? Nineteen fucking mortgages on ONE fucking property, puts every real estate con Jabba the Hutt’s entire CLAN ever pulled and we were on the WRONG SIDE OF IT! We had every pirate and smuggler from here to Corellia laughing at us! And THEN! And THEN—!

“So he pops up via hologram message acting like a DIPLOMAT from the REPUBLIC, claiming a title and rank from an extinct, defunct, ILLEGAL order and wanting to bargain with Jabba—are you fucking kidding me, BARGAIN WITH JABBA for a smuggler who’s up to his ass in debt when he’s responsible for that farm scheme, acting like he doesn’t even fucking REMEMBER it and expects that Jabba’s forgotten it too. Like. Absolute fucking idiot, and anticipating that Jabba’s just as stupid. And he offers a pair of droids as a gift. Like, built-in-the-Republic-era, random-ass droids that he probably picked up from the Jawas that morning for a few hundred credits and a junked ‘vaporator.

“I mean, Jabba’s seething here, but hey, free droids is free droids. Whatever. He takes the droids, throws things, orders a fight to the death between two gamblers who owed him money, killed one of his dancers at some point … and then Boushh shows up with fucking Chewbacca in chains—he’s Solo’s first mate, so Jabba was all happy about that, but not happy enough to pay the full bounty—and what’s Boushh do? Pull some gonads out from somewhere after all these years, and also pull out a fucking THERMAL DETONATOR! Going to blow us all to fuck if he doesn’t get his measley fifty thousand, and, well, there’s no arguing with crazy like that. 

“So now, if you’re keeping score, Jabba’s lost an absolute SHITLOAD of money and had his bookmaking industry fucked all to hell for like three years after the stunt from Skywalker the First, got screwed out of ANOTHER shitload of money in the farm scam by Skywalker the Sequel, got all but called an idiot to his face and insulted six times over by the same dude who’s apparently scammed so many people he’s forgotten who he has and hasn’t scammed, and got threatened out of fifty thousand credits by a second-tier bounty hunter IN FRONT OF HIS ENTIRE COURT.

“And then the next morning, what the fuck? Jabba’s favorite sculpture is gone, the one with Solo as its main ingredient that Boba Fett brought him. And Boushh is gone. And Jabba’s got a brand-new dancer chained up next to him. Night duty guy tells me Boushh unfroze Solo, and the new dancer girl IS Boushh, which, okay, you’re dealing with people like that and you look like that? You definitely need a helmet, but I feel like pretending she didn’t breathe oxygen was overkill. Anyway, then Skywalker shows up. All alone, no weapons, nothing, like he really believes in this Jedi shit. Arrogant little bastard, and we’re all laying bets on how Jabba’s going to kill him.

“So he talks a little, and fwoop! goes the trapdoor, and okay, everybody who bet on “Rancor” is doing a little happy dance, but then! BUT THEN! He fucking KILLS THE RANCOR! Drops its own cage door on its head and punches right through its skull! And—fucking NOBODY bet on that, which is a damn shame because everybody else would’ve just torn the winner apart out of sheer rage at that point and we coulda used some good bloodshed then, y’know? I mean, I dunno if you’ve ever met Jabba the Hutt, but he’s the kind of boss that’ll just go off and kill you for failing him or just because he’s angry at something. Just complete fucking asshole. I mean, he was pissed enough that everybody was worried for their safety, and so somebody dying messily right then would’ve calmed him down a bit.

“So Jabba’s big mad, and he gathers Skywalker and Solo and Chewbacca all together and says he’s gonna feed them to the Sarlacc, which is a nasty tentacled carnivorous plant out in the desert, so we all board the sail barge and have a nice little pleasure cruise—have you ever been to Tattoine? I’m fuckin’ kidding, it’s brutal. But hey, we get to see Skywalker executed, right? Wrong.

“Jabba offers them the chance to beg for their lives, and Solo calls him a slimy piece of worm-ridden filth, which, I mean, I could do better, y’know? If I’m about to die? Anyway, Skywalker goes up first, gets prodded to the edge, flips a salute off to who-knows-where, and does this little twist in midair, catches the fucking plank, and fucking SPRINGBOARDS himself back onboard, CATCHES HIS LIGHTSABER FROM MIDAIR where the one DROID shot it to him, and starts sending guards over the side, usually in pieces.

“So more guards rush forward to help, and there’s this huge fight, and fuckin’ BOBA FETT falls in, and while that’s going on? The fucking dancing girl has grabbed her chain and is FUCKING STRANGLING JABBA WITH IT! Like, I look over and he’s bucking and struggling and she’s pulling on that chain like anything, and then somebody hits me over the head with a bottle of Corellian brandy, and by the time I look again he’s pitched over dead! And nobody freaking bet on that!

“And then? Off they fucking go, Skywalker and Solo and Chewbacca and the dancing girl and the droids and one of the guards who I played sabacc with the other night and he owes me twenty credits! And that fucking Skywalker just cost me my job, and if I see him again I’m going to burn him to cinders myself!”

The man subsides, eyeing the gigantic ebony figure in front of him who, except for a couple of momentary starts as though he might say something, has been silently listening to him all this time.

Size-wise, Darth Vader has nothing on Jabba the Hutt, but somehow, he is scarier.

Finally, the dark form speaks. “You said you could do better.” A moment’s silence, and he clarifies. “If you were about to die.” He gets the impression that whatever monster lurks behind the helmet is smiling. “You are about to die now. Because you are a criminal, and because of what you have said about my son, Luke Skywalker. You have an opportunity to do better. Use it.”

The so-condemned criminal, late of Jabba’s palace guard, lets his jaw hang open unflatteringly for a moment while his brain catches up with events. HIS SON, which means …  

“YOU’RE Anakin Skywalker’s HUSBAND?”

The steady, hissing rhythm of Darth Vader’s rebreather actually stops dead as the Dark Lord straightens up as if stabbed with an electroprod.

In the instant before the man’s brains, blood, and spinal fluid coat the far wall, he has the momentary satisfaction of having, indeed, done much better than Solo.

“You know, taking the 5 credit piece is smarter than taking the 10 credit piece.”

“… Excuse me?”

*robotic breathing* “If you take the 5 credit piece every time, everyone will think you’re stupid, so they’ll keep doing it. If you ever take the 10 credit piece, the game is over.”

“…. WHAT?”

“I used to pull that one all the time. ‘Oh look, it’s Little Ani, the slave boy who can’t do math, ask him if he wants the 5 credit piece or the 10 credit piece!’ I almost bought out my mother’s slave debt doing that, and then Qui-Gon showed up.”

“Okay you’re definitely a fucking Skywalker.”

This just keeps getting better

her favorite lipstick

babe are you ok you reblogged eunnieboo’s “her favorite lipstick” again

Women light up the world. That's why it's called Broad daylight.