i see a post talking doom and gloom about how we'll never escape toxic masculinity. i think about back in 2017 when american girl released their first boy doll, and a review for him went viral in the collecting community. the review was written by a mom, who said they went into the store to get their daughter a doll, only to see their son's eyes light up like fire when he saw a doll that looked like him, and now every night he puts his doll in pajamas and rocks him to sleep. i think about the toddler in my daycare room a few years back who was obsessed with baby dolls, carrying them everywhere, and his mom proudly told us he uses his sisters' old baby dolls and wants to be just like them. that toddler saw another toddler crying one day and gave her the doll he had to cheer her up. i think about the eight-year-old boy i saw a few years back, excitedly waving around raya's sword in a target checkout line like all his dreams were coming true. there was a video on my instagram the other day of a little boy at disneyworld crying with joy upon meeting his hero, mulan. i think about the voice actor for bow in the she-ra reboot saying his nephews only wanted adora action figures. celebrity men are wearing dresses on tv now. last halloween i saw a little boy dressed as elsa. i went to go see spiderverse over the summer, and in the line ahead of me was a boy who couldn't be older than twelve or thirteen, bouncing and beaming, giddy with excitement over getting to see the female-led romance movie elemental. i think about the five-year-old boy at my library who breathlessly asked me where the pinkalicious books were, eyes widening when i had more on my cart, his mom explaining that he is all about pinkalicious and fancy nancy. i saw so many pictures online of boys and men dressed in pink to see barbie. teenage boys are gonna open their phones and see the man who wrote fucking game of thrones dressed in pink to see barbie. when i was a kid, a boy dressing in pink was practically a social death sentence. there are boys running around in pink on my street right now.
If a flaming old queen in a cape wants to kill off racists in power I say have at it
That wasn’t even his plan!! His plan was to make the senator a mutant, so he’d have to advocate for mutants or be destroyed by his own policy, and tbh. It’s the best villain plan I’ve ever seen. The goo was the plan unexpectedly failing. 9/10 only bc he was going to kill Rogue. Next time use someone willing to sacrifice herself for the cause, pls. No further notes
I like how his plan in like real world terms, was to turn desantis gay but instead he exploded
like to charge reblog to cast tbh
Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesn't have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you're caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???
My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:
-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s been taken from a poached bird
-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching
-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to
@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅
That's pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.
Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had "found it while exploring an abandoned house."
The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.
If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.
Im surprised every time people think it's a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground
Wait, poaching wasn’t about the meat, it was about the feathers?
The collapse of bird populations in the USA in the late 1800s thru early 1900s was very much about feathers.
At its peak the feather trade had feathers that were worth more than gold. Commercial hunters would shoot birds out of the sky and sell feathers by the pound, in literal huge crates. Egrets were especially sought after for their beautiful breeding plumage, which was used in fancy hats and accessories. This wrought havoc on the poor birds because they only ever had this plumage during breeding season, so not only were the breeding birds dying, they were leaving next generation's chicks and eggs behind to die of neglect.
Beyond hats, the gentleman's art of fly tying was also a popular art form, more for the sake of showing off one's rare collection of feathers and art than for actual fishing.
There was some meat hunting as well before the banning of commercial hunting, mostly ducks and geese, which also drifted close to extinction as they were taken to be sold in markets.
Even white tailed deer, the ubiquitous animal that's found all over north America in truly ridiculous numbers, came dangerously low. But meat wasn't where the money was when it came to birds. It was feathers.
The Lacey act banned commercial hunting in the United States, putting an end to the constant unregulated commercial killing to fill market stalls with meat (which incidentally is why you don't see venison in most supermarkets in the states. Only farmed deer is legally allowed to be sold.)
And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it a crime to not only kill a bird, but to even posess a single feather from one. Most people won't buy a hat that would get them arrested if they wore it outside, so the market for feathers was gutted.
Even though feather hats aren't popular in this day and age, nobody is in a hurry to amend these laws, as birds in general are well loved and popular animals and still very much threatened by other stressors such as pollution and habitat loss.
I know you touched it briefly above but I want to also say that even falconers can't keep raptor feathers. They're legally allowed to keep their living bird, and while the bird is alive they can keep molted wing feathers in case they need to imp damaged ones (basically repair a damaged feather by cutting it and attaching an old, more whole one, fascinating process, you should look it up), but once their bird dies they have to surrender the bird and ALL feathers. No keepsakes from their birds.
There are two exceptions I know of- museums and educational facilities. I don't know what rules are for museums. But I do know that educational facilities are allowed to have collections or displayed taxidermy specimens.
When I was very little (like back in the 80s or maybe early 90s at the latest), my mother found a roadkill great horned owl in actually really great condition. Not wanting it to go to waste, she took it with her to work (at a science lab, with very huge deep freezers) and called a taxidermist to find out what her options were for donating the body. They told her to put it back/throw it away and reluctantly told her if she could find an educational institution to donate to, then it could be taxidermied. The owl is still at my elementary school, BEAUTIFULLY taxidermied into a flying position.
Since I grew up with that, and my college had a collection of bird skin taxidermies, and my roommate in college took the taxidermy class offered so I knew the teacher, I've since donated several otherwise protected birds to them when I've witnessed window kills or vehicular collisions.
And I know this started about raptors, but even non-raptors fall under the MBTA. There's also laws against killing a lot of other birds that fall under hunting licenses, like wild turkey and pheasant and quail and partridge. I think crows also fall under it but don't quote me on that one. This makes these birds illegal to kill or own parts of without having taken them or bought them from someone that had a hunting license to do so and did so during the proper season, or that have the permit to keep and breed them in captivity. I had been keeping bobwhite quail, a massive species, and the permit that allowed me to do so required I keep records of every egg, bird, and parts of birds I had and who they went to if I gave or sold any or released them. This went right down to if I gave someone a single feather. So even birds it IS legal to own feathers from may have restrictions.
If you want feathers, just go find people with farm fowl. We're normally drowning in perfectly legal feathers and they come in most shapes and sizes and colors!
A note to all creatives:
Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.
No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.
We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.
Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.
And they especially are not scabs.
*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.
"joel took away ellie's choice"- damn it's almost like he knew they were both gonna just end up killed.. it's almost like he had no choice either and the fireflies were always gonna kill her with or without her knowledge. it's almost like ellie is a child who does not deserve the weight of the world on her shoulders like this. it's almost like her survivors guilt and unresolved trauma is what drives her to feel as if her entire life needs to end to compensate for those she's lost; it's almost like joel indulging ellie's martyrdom is a far worse thing than saving her on the chance she doesn't want to die. it's almost like she genuinely was never in the right conditions to consent to begin with and was never going to have the chance to regardless. idk
why is the conversation always about how joel “took ellie’s choice away” but never about how the firelfies took it away first? the episode literally went a step further and showed that they lied to ellie before putting her under; they made her believe she would be waking up after the surgery!!! she was expecting to wake up and then go back to jackson with joel. being with joel was literally all that she wanted. so marlene telling joel that dying for the cure is what ellie would have wanted was just her assumption, because if she was so sure that ellie would have agreed to it then why did she not tell her? she was afraid of the answer, she was afraid they would have had to drag ellie, kicking and screaming, onto that table. also, marlene telling joel that she has no choice but to do this, and joel responding that he does have a choice was him taking that choice back for ellie. because she never fucking consented to dying, and even if she knew and she agreed to it, she is just a 14 year old girl with a shit tonne of trauma!! she cannot make that decision for herself. i don’t deny that joel’s actions were also messy as fuck, but i will always be on his side with this.
So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom
It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education
602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡
and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up
make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll
So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn't be deterred by the prank calls because they would 'taper off eventually'. It'd be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇
If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.
Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.
Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.
It's actually completely ok to be attracted to a fat person because they're fat. You're not inherently disrespecting them by not ignoring and actively appreciating their fatness. You don't see the same level of scrutiny towards people who have preferences about hair color or height or facial hair. Having a preference doesn't mean you dehumanize people who have the feature you're attracted to.
When you're not forcing them to do or be anything they don't want to be, there's nothing inherently immoral about being attracted to specific physical traits.
Stop treating fatness as a trait that people are attracted to other people in spite of. Stop treating fat people like they're undesirable and any attractions towards them is inherently suspicious. Especially if you're acting like this is somehow for the benefit of fat people.
“The average US president has been charged with 1.54 felonies” factoid isn’t true. The average US President has been charged with 0 felonies. Donald trump, who has been charged with 71, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted
PSA, there's a really nasty Discord scam going around rn. If one of your friends DMs you, starting off with a simple "hello" "how are you", may even joke around a little, and then starts asking you to look at a game/project they're working on, don't click the link, don't download anything. If you can reach that friend through non-Discord means, reach out and let them know they got hacked.
One of my friends said the link takes them to a very convincing video game page that has in-game screenshots and stuff, and then gives you an option to download a playtest zip file or something. That download exploits a weakness Discord apparently has for password protected zip files and steals your Discord log-in and changes your account info to the scammer's account info. Two of my friends lost their accounts. Be careful.
Slight adjustment to this... Apparently the virus scrapes all your passwords and files on your computer, not just Discord... It just uses Discord to gain access... Friend had a picture of his license saved on his computer, and apparently the scammers even got their hands on that... So it's a nasty little hack...
poll time!!
please reblog with your answer and country!!
i, for example, have fired a gun, and am from canada.
enjoy!!
No, USA
in this terrifying world you continuously have the power to offer someone else a little relief . why would you withhold that. do you remember what a little relief feels like? it feels like a lot
excuse me? are you suggesting i frolic directly into someone's emotional space and assume what brings them relief, potentially causing more stress? are you encouraging people to reach past their own boundaries to help, increasing net suffering if it costs more than the other gains? surely not; that would be advocating for emotional self-harm.
this is a post about the woman who waived my late fee at the bank .
good for you, good for her, the wording on the initial post feels closer to blaming people who don't reach out than celebrating those who do by a large enough margin that i feel the need to hit back
you are a tar pit
I know I’ve reblogged this already today but I like. this point
This was only 55 years ago. You can understand a lot of what’s wrong with the US if you realize that the average age of our elected senators is about 63. “Good old days” is a dogwhistle.
Our current Supreme Court might’ve ruled against the Lovings.