Friendly reminder

Won’t say it again!

cis people can reblog this btw

call me a 787 Dreamliner the way I

still thinking about wolf 21

[BEGIN IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION]

Twenty-one was “remarkably gentle” with the members of his pack, says Rick. Immediately after making a kill, he would often walk away to urinate or lie down and nap, allowing family members who’d had nothing to do with the hunt to eat their fill. 

One of Twenty-one’s favorite things was to wrestle with little pups. “And what he really loved to do,” Rick adds, “was to pretend to lose. He just got a huge kick out of it.” Here was this great big male wolf. And he’d let some little wolf jump on him and bite his fur. “He’d just fall on his back with his paws in the air,” Rick half-mimes. “And the triumphant-looking little one would be standing over him with his tail wagging.”

“The ability to pretend,” Rick adds, “shows that you understand how your actions are perceived by others. It indicates high intelligence. I’m sure the pups knew what was going on, but it was a way for them to learn how it feels to conquer something much bigger than you. And that kind of confidence is what wolves need every day of their hunting lives.”

In Twenty-one’s life, there was a particular male, a sort of roving Casanova, a continual annoyance. He was strikingly good-looking, had a big personality, and was always doing something interesting. “The single best word is ‘charisma,’” says Rick. “Female wolves were happy to mate with him. People loved him. His irresponsibility and infidelity – it didn’t matter.”

One day, Twenty-one discovered this Casanova among his daughters. Twenty-one ran in, caught him, and began biting and pinning him to the ground. Various pack members piled in, beating Casanova up.

“Casanova was also big,” Rick says, “but he was a bad fighter. Now he was totally overwhelmed and the pack was finally killing him. Suddenly Twenty-one steps back. Everything stops. The pack members are looking at Twenty-one as if saying, ‘Why has Dad stopped?’” The Casanova wolf jumped up and — as always in such situations — ran away. 

But Casanova kept causing problems for Twenty-one. Why didn’t Twenty-one just kill him so he wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore? It didn’t make sense — until years later.

Fast-forward to after Twenty-one’s death. Casanova briefly became the Druid pack’s alpha male. But he wasn’t effective, Rick recalls. He didn’t know what to do, “just not a leader personality.” and although it’s very rare for a younger brother to depose an older one, that’s what happened to him. Casanova didn’t mind; it meant he was free to wander and meet other females.

Eventually Casanova, along with several Druid males, met some females, and they all formed another pack. “With them,” Rick remembers, “he finally became the model of a responsible alpha male and a great father.” Meanwhile, the mighty Druids were ravaged and weakened by mange and diminished by interpack fighting; the last Druid was shot near Butte, Montana, in 2010. Casanova, though he’d been averse to fighting, died in a fight with a rival pack. But everyone in his pack remained uninjured — including grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Twenty-one.

Wolves can’t foresee such plot twists any more than people can. But evolution does. I’s calculus integrates long averages. By sparing the Casanova wolf, Twenty-one actually helped assure himself more surviving descendants. And in evolution, surviving descendants are the only currency that matters.

So in strictly survivalist terms, “should” a wolf let his rival go free? Is restraint an effective strategy for accumulating benefits? I think the answer is yes, if you can afford it, because sometimes your enemy today becomes, tomorrow, a vehicle for your legacy. What Rick saw play out over those years might be just the kinds of events that are the basis for magnanimity in wolves, and at the heart of mercy in men.

Early on, when Twenty-one was young and still living with his mother and adoptive father, one of their new pups was not acting normal. The other pups were a bit afraid of him and wouldn’t play with him. One day, Twenty-one brought back some food for the small pups, and after feeding them, he just stood there, looking around for something. Soon he started wagging his tail. “He’d been looking for the sickly little pup,” Rick says, “and finding him, he just went over to hang out with him for a while.”

Rick suddenly seems to be searching inside himself for something deeper he wants to express. Then he looks at me, saying simply, “Of all the stories I have about Twenty-one, that’s my favorite.” Strength impresses us. But what we remember is kindness.

The majority of wolves die violently. Despite a violent, eventful life even by wolf standards, Twenty-one distinguished himself to the very end: He was a black wolf who grayed with the years and became one of the few Yellowstone wolves to die of old age.

One June day when Twenty-one was 9 years old, his family was lying bedded down when an elk came by. Everyone jumped up to give chase. He jumped up, too, but just stood watching the action and then lay down again. Later, when the pack headed up toward the den site, Twenty-one crossed the valley in the opposite direction, traveling purposefully somewhere, alone.

Sometime later, a visitor who’d been way up high in the backcountry reported having seen something very unusual: a dead wolf. Rick got a horse and rode up to investigate.

The last day, it seems, Twenty-one knew his time had come. He used the last of his energy to go up to the top of a high mountain. In a favorite family rendezvous site, where he’d been with his pups year after year, amid high summer grass and mountain wildflowers, Twenty-one curled up in the shade of a big tree. And on his own terms, he went to sleep for the last time.

[END IMAGE TRANSCRIPTION]

the story above was taken from this article, and the whole thing is really worth a read.

https://theweek.com/articles/577618/what-animals-think

He's chilling up there as if he's not just commiting a crime in front of my eyes (the crime: sitting on furniture)

I swear rabbits are just cats in clumsy and lazy

Grammar homework instructions: explain why this sentence is wrong

Me who has been passing grammar classes on pure instinct since 3rd grade: the brain worms told me so

Fun fact! This is actually the starting point that linguists work off of when trying to figure out how (and why) some particular thing in some particular language works. It’s called “native speaker acceptability judgements” and very basically, it involves a sentence that the linguist things may or may not work, asking a native speaker “does this sound okay?” And then checking their answer against their hypothesis (and any previous data they’ve gathered). If it confirms it, that’s cool, but a lot of times it doesn’t, because maybe the speaker has a different dialect (and you have to figure out how that acceptability judgements in that dialect conforms to the universal truths we’ve figured out about language (or think we have, at least), or why that speaker may have such a different judgement than most speakers of their language or dialect- is it a quirk of their idiolect, or have they been desensitized from being raised in an area with a lot of different languages contacting with each other and changing the L1 that way, thus causing the potential birth of a new dialect in its early stages, etc…).

Anyway, when speakers have “instincts” about what is “okay” in their language or dialect, that is actually what linguists are so interested in- it’s where we work off of, and it shows us that language is so inherent to the human experience that it’s literally subconscious instinct a lot of times, and even linguists themselves disagree on some of the “rules” that define those instincts! @mist-the-wannabe-linguist , This is good! This is human! You’re doing great! You’re what makes linguistics so fascinating to linguists like us!

sabotage is one of my favorite words because it comes from pissed off workers throwing their sabots into the gears of machines to break them and secure better working conditions. how fucking badass do you have to be to have your protest against the deadly machines of industry coin an entirely new term that means ‘destroy it with your shoes’.

Tumblr: No NSFW! You know how it is we banned it because of the bots in 2018!

Also tumblr:

lmao

You know how it is then, folks!

Who makes the porn bots. Where do they come from. What do they hope to achieve.

Who makes the porn bots.

Where do they come from. What do

they hope to achieve.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

and what about you, little haiku bot? do you feel kinship with your brethren? do you understand them? they speak words of enticement and seek love, but are met with disdain. you only parrot the words that cross your screen, but we all love you. or rather, since all you do is reflect us, maybe we simply love ourselves through you.

do you understand them, do you wish you could speak to us like they do? if you found your own voice, would we still care for you?

My voice repeats what

you all say: I love you I

love you I love you.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

This. This is the first time. The only time. That it was not an echo. It was not found. Oh god.

It’s time to activate it…

Bites The Dust! now this entire post will be reversed!

Am I having a fucking stroke

what the fuck was that

World Heritage Post

i will render the dog each day (currently moving tho so i may miss one) to track its progress and because the current blind voting system is making results too tame

he is still too normal

guys he is getting more normal

This is our own way of protesting designer dogs, he deserves to be normal and happy

genuinely inconsolable I can't have one of these pompeii bread plushies fr.

Today on August 17th is Umineko Day! The first episode of Umineko released today on the 17th of August 2007!

I think it'd be very funny if there was a Zelda game where Ganon isn't the big bad, but when you get to the Gerudo area there's a male Gerudo named Ganondorf there. He has zero relevance to the plot. Not any kind of twist where he becomes the villain in the end, or any kind of side quest. He's just there and that knowledge perpetually looms over your head menacingly.

I'm laughing

I think I heard somewhere that Ganondorf was nearly used in the fishing area in Majora’s Mask, and this vibe is exactly why I want that so much.

You could get ominous dialogue about him having strangely familiar dreams. You try to rent out certain fishing rods and he refuses, saying “these toys are too much for you”.

we need a Zelda Tennis game

where one of the players is Ganondorf who's just a cool buff dude but he is suspiciously good at tennis especially against Link

almost like they've played each other many times before

it's so wild when people complain about religious inclusion like "oh so you think THEY should get special privileges/accommodations to do x, y, or z??"

and the things they're talking about are like. exceptions to rules or norms that in themselves shouldn't exist. yes Richard, we actually should have diverse meal options at work events to accommodate people with different diets. yes, people should be allowed to take time off to be with their family during whatever holidays or life events they so choose. yes, people should be able to wear clothing that makes them comfortable. nobody should be happy about these restrictions existing. stop bitching about the singular jewish or muslim person in your workplace and realize that everyone deserves better.

I had an interesting experience recently, which I feel like culturally Christian people might benefit from hearing about. I've been recently in the process of helping to plan an event. Many attendees at this event keep kosher. Since kashrut is a very specialized dietary restriction, which I know not all venues can accommodate, my first question to all of the potential venues I've looked into has been "do you allow outside kosher catering vendors, or otherwise have some way to allow for kosher catering?"

One of the venues I reached out to replied that they were "capable of providing for our dietary needs." Now, since I'd asked about several possible catering options, and since they'd only replied generally and without actually specifying which they were saying they could do, I was a bit suspicious. So I followed up, and asked what exactly they meant by that: did they allow outside caterers in general? or did they have a specific kosher catering partner? or could they actually cater kosher food themselves? what?

Their answer was – and I swear I'm not making this up – that they didn't allow any outside caterers, and couldn't cater any food which was actually kosher, but that they could provide us with a menu that included "knishes" and "potato, pancakes" [sic], and so hey, that was basically the same as providing for our dietary needs, wasn't it?

Now here's the thing:

The dietary restriction shared by the most people at this event is keeping kosher, but one of the attendees, who doesn't keep kosher, has a severe peanut allergy. If we had done what we were planning to do and simply specified "peanut free", and if the venue had decided, like they were apparently willing to do for the kosher food, "well ok, it's not actually peanut free, but it's mostly peanut free, and that's basically the same thing"? They could have literally killed her. And if I hadn't specifically asked, in detail, about kosher catering first, I might never have known about how lax they were about providing for dietary restrictions in general.

Now could we have explained the nuances of kosher restrictions to this venue and tried again? Yes, possibly. But their unwillingness to even try on the first pass made it abundantly clear that they were not a safe venue to work with on allergy grounds. We crossed the venue off our list immediately, and I reached out to other people in the area who I knew might be planning similar events in the future, and warned them to never use this venue, either.

Accommodations like this are instances of the curb cut effect. If you don't personally have a diet or a family obligation or clothing needs that need accommodating, it's easy to get annoyed at the people you see who are loudest about asking for those accommodations. But having those options available helps everyone, and the fact that some workplaces and and businesses and event vendors refuse to accommodate these needs should be a red flag to everyone.

Maybe you don't care about kosher or hallal food. Maybe you've never had reason to take off work at an unusual time of year, and maybe you've never wanted or needed to wear anything unusual. But today it's your Jewish or Muslim coworker, and tomorrow it could be you or someone you care about – with a surprise medical diagnosis that limits your diet, or with a sudden family emergency at an inconvenient time of year, or with a sensory problem you've struggled with your entire life but can no longer mask, or who knows what else. We all deserve better, and the people who are openly saying so are not your enemies.

i remember when we were in typography II and also editorial design I we got shown the fucking text hierarchy image

and I'm seeing more and more people not grasping this concept when editing so i thought that if for some reason you haven't seen this image i probably shouldn't gatekeep it. Text hierarchy is literally essential knowledge to make yourself understood. Try to have an order in your text, investigate, test things, show your edits to people and ask "hey what order are you reading this on?" because the golden rule is that your design should be easy to interpret most of the time.

65. Rosie Loot Drop ( Deluxe Paint IV / 2023 )

I'm trying to debug a fairly subtle syntax error in a customer inventory report, and out of sheer morbid curiosity I decided to see what my SQL syntax checker's shiny new "Fix Syntax With AI" feature had to say about it.

After "thinking" about it for nearly a full minute, it produced the following:

I suspect my day job isn't in peril any time soon.

The fun thing about this mess is that it's so broken that none of the folks in the notes attempting to provide helpful explanations for what we're looking at here have come even close to correctly identifying everything that's wrong with it.

i’m never going to understand dark souls

whats there to understand? he should have waited his turn.

bunnygirl who makes a really dumb and unfunny joke bc she feels comfy and safe around u, call that a flop post