I have had the honor of working on two different comics projects with Don Hertzfeldt. But this is the story of my first interaction with the man.

Reblog graph of the day is: Wholly organic not reblogged by thousands of pornbots straight from the source butter

IT WXPLODED

listen to both songs fully/as long as you can handle before voting.

OFFENDED LYRICS

LOTTA TRUME CRIME LYRICS

On a border between two States Someone has written, “Fuck your nationalism. We are all Earthlings.”

And on the Mexican border, Someone has ripped through a fence Of reinforced chicken wire With bolt cutters, And erected a hammock By suspending it Between two of the fence’s Concrete pillars.

After swinging gently back and forth, From Texas to Mexico and then From Mexico back to Texas, They doze off; contemptuous Of the security guards Patrolling this artificial demarcation  – For, once upon a time, Texas was Mexico And Texas didn’t exist.

When Eugene Debs was imprisoned For conscientious objection in World War One He said, on September 11th 1915, “I have no country to fight for My country is the earth I’m a citizen of the world.”

– Heathcote Williams, “No Borders”

The Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua

Yes

Pokemon is amazing because it started out being coded with duct tape and prayers by a small team of people. flash forward twenty years and guess what? it's now coded with duct tape and prayers by a medium-sized team of people

if god exists why does anywhere on earth get hotter than 80 degrees f any time of the year. really fucking pushing it.

would you be willing to expand on this hypothesis

same general body structure, has hands instead of full wings, has a slight hump, similar beaks

clearly Deinocheirus' descendants evolved to have more upright postures, a shorter tail, and forward facing eyes over the past 66 million years

This implies Big Bird slowly evolved into a carnivore.

look, it's been a while since I saw Follow that Bird, because it makes me cry every damn time, but I'm pretty sure Big Bird eats grains

that said, this means Big Bird is an herbivore that convergently evolved carnivore-like traits, which should be significantly more alarming to all of us

Ok, I want to know why it should be more alarming. Am I missing something?

Are you trying to imply that this is batsean mimicry of a big bird looking actually carnivorous species, or is this stretch?

I'm not a scientist, just an enthusiast.

So herbivores are more alarming than carnivores in general because carnivores get full. Herbivores are always on alert for predators and either have one of two responses: run (these can trample us) or fight (these will destroy us). This is why herbivores are usually much more dangerous than carnivores - for one quick example, more people are killed by the herbivorous hippopotamus each year than by sharks (yes, all species thereof)

so, an herbivore convergently evolving carnivorous traits means its an herbivore designed to take out potential dangers with the swiftness and lethality of a predator

that is extremely alarming

consider the cassowary. now imagine it more exact and capable. now imagine it the size of big bird.

we should all be glad he is a friendly presence on sesame street and not the unholy terror he should be

To add more to Big Bird's biology, it should be noted that his species is either very diverse in morphology, or his clade contains many species that live in various countries' Sesame Streets. Some of them, like Bibo from Germany, look pretty much the same as American Big Bird, but others are quite different. In the Netherlands we have Pino, who could easily be the same species but has a more pronounced crest, orange beak, and blue feathers everywhere except the area around the eyes. On the rare occasions he has actually met Big Bird, he called him Cousin Jan.

Brazillian Sesame Street is inhabited by Garibaldo, who judging by beak and leg morphology is likely a different species. Between the sleeker legs and the very sharp beak, I think a stork-like lifestyle is likely for his ancestral population.

Then there's Abelardo from Mexico, who seems to come from a population that convergently evolved several parrot-like traits. An interesting detail about this is that, unlike most other vertebrates, parrots don't absorb their pigments through their diet, but make their own pigments called psittacofulvins. Given that his relatives are quite colourful themselves and can probably obtain plenty of carotenoids from their diet, I don't think that is likely to be the case in Abelardo.

Caponata from Spain looks very different from all her family members, even the more divergent ones. This could be since she is the only female member of the clade I have managed to find so far. However, the very different feet make me think she might hail from a very derived species instead. I can't even imagine what sort of evolutionary pressures could lead to a bird evolving such strange feet.

Other Sesame Street birds are a little harder to find information about, with mostly older sightings. There seem to have been sightings of one named Toccata in Quebec. His shaggier white feather coat covering more of his legs and being thicker around his neck does suggest adaptations of the harsh winters up north.

Portuguese Poupas has different colouration and seems to have some sort of feather puff going on around the ankles as well. The feathers around the head are notably swept backward as well. I think this is a somewhat derived population of the American species. Minik Kuş from Turkey may hail from this population too, or perhaps from some intermediate or interbred population, as they seem to be more morphologically similar to the more typical Big Birds.

someone needs to throw together a phylogeny and I recognize that, as a bird researcher, who has done too many phylogenies of birds, I am the prime candidate, but I have too much to do for SVP...

A man walked straight into a bar

And then came out

I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft

Torture the haters to death

Live well, be happy, and thank them in your acceptance speech.

Goofy ass. Hurt people with weapons until they die.

if it did somehow turn out that i had made a horrible mistake and hormonally feminised myself because of the pressure i felt from a highly organised cabal of beautiful and manipulative trans women, i would be so turned on that i wouldnt be able to see

ill be on my detransition book tour like they tricked me and now im all effeminate and weak and i caunt stop thinking about cock and they kept making fun of me for being a dumb pretty boy (passes out)

do fish ever get to repent? or are they doomed to swim around forever bearing the sins we have tossed to them to consume over the many years?

@apocrypals

Often I think about the r/ambien wife guy, not daily or anything, but still often:

Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?

Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.

All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)

But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.

But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.

I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?

It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.

Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.

Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, my Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)

The parrot snitching has got to be the funniest thing here

I was being cancelled because apparently it was classist to put feathers on dinosaurs.

Both dream me and irl me were very confused.

it might have been a dream, but feathered dinosaurs being linked to an ideology isn't that uncommon. Them being viewed as "leftist", "woke" or "gay" has occured several times.

I collect these examples.

reblog if you like dinosaurs, are gay, or just really like feathers

i don't like to yuck people's yum but i have to say that my least favorite thing to come from the current state of Artists on the Internet is the idea of a sketchbook as something nice and pretty and shareable. like i love me a notebook full of gorgeous art don't get me wrong but that is NOT what a sketchbook is. a sketchbook is my friend who i carry around everywhere like a purse chihuahua. it is the physical manifestation of my notes app. it is the container into which i wring my brain out. it is my therapist. and most of all it is filled with absolutely terrible sketches that should never see the light of day.

this post is making the rounds again and the amount of people saying that the pretty sketchbooks phenomenon ruined sketchbooks for them is HEARTBREAKING and i stand by my opinion that sketchbooks should be like a jar you put your OCs in. and then you shake them around in there. that's what they're for

two irish furries fucking call that a celtic knot

The cool thing about the human body is when you have to pee really bad during sleep your brain will interrupt any dream and add a pissing scene to get you to either wake up or wet the bed

You have no choice in how this unfolds btw