whale baleen moment! From a minke whale that had been beached ( :( ) and died ( :(((( ) (baleen collected by a marine mammologist, cleaned, and given to me) Very small baleen, only about 10cm or so. baleen can be Metres Long though and that is so weird and cool!

Some fun facts about baleen: 1) made of keratin like human hair and rhino horns 2) grows continuously in fairly solid “sheets” which gain the feathery bristles (shown better right below) by grinding against other sheets of baleen (much like rat teeth, this grinding makes sure the baleen doesn’t get too big for the whale’s mouth!)

3) as the baleen grows and wears down continuously, a piece of baleen will have a temporal arrangement of molecules, in terms of when the whale consumed the molecule (and assimilated it into baleen growth) that means a piece of baleen can be analysed to reveal the whale’s diet and where it has been living (though the assimilation rates of isotopes into the whale needs to be considered here) – there have been studies into using this to get a better idea of how much pollution a whale has been exposed to so we can keep better track of their health!

ah… remember how I said this was small baleen? Well, the size of baleen can help you figure out how a whale feeds. there are three main types of feeding in baleen whales: lunge, skim, and sediment. Lunge feeding is when the whale rockets forward, opens its mouth, and takes a big gulp of water. Skim feeding is when the whale swims with its mouth open. Sediment/bottom feeding is when the baleen is used to comb thru the sea floor for critters. Long baleen with a high surface area is useful for skim feeding since it means you can have your mouth nice and wide to catch more things… but long baleen wouldn’t be great for digging around in the mud, so sediment feeders have short and robust baleen. And this size difference can be HUGE! for context, here’s my stylishly-censored hand next to a skim feeder’s baleen. The little one next to it is closer to the minke whale baleen in the first and second image (though a bit bigger)… that’s a sediment feeder’s baleen !

more about baleen whale feeding types here, because lunge feeding is fcked up lmao

you should be nice to people who just annoy you because everyone is annoying to someone, and having people be mean to you sucks. why are there adults who don't understand this

personally if someone doesn't like me i don't want them to be honest with me about it. i did not ask. simply complete the required social interaction with no indication of hostility and then leave me alone

oversharing online is so important cus like what if someone needed to know that

idk if this is a joke but literally so much yes.

I've spoken about the topic before, but as a kid who grew up in an abusive environment, i never would have come across the words to explain what I was going through if not for internet access.

Hell, I'd probably still be trapped in it!

And yeah, I probably talk a bit too much about myself and experiences, but every time I think about holding back I remind myself:

I'd rather be annoying or embarassing or cringe than risk someone feeling alone and isolated like I did.

Making fun of bi women married to men and het trans people makes you a loser btw and it's not going to get you any pussy or clout, it just makes you look like an asshole. Pride month PSA

YUP

When I see important news:

Today's advice from your Goth Auntie

❤️Auntie Jilli

"i cant wait to get home from work so i can do all that stuff i wanted to do"

when i get home from work:

btw I've found these stretches from the WAK blog very helpful when knitting a lot:

Plus make sure to take breaks regularly - and stop if anything starts to hurt!

especially with gift knitting I know it can be tempting to push through it for a deadline, but it's really not worth causing long term injury. (And anyone knit-worthy should be understanding of that, imho.) Stay well :)

tbh the best way that i explain to other people what it feels like to live with an anxiety disorder is the one time when i had to get a fingerprint and background check done for a job and i, someone who has never received so much as a speeding ticket my whole life, spent thirty minutes panicking that i would fail because i might secretly be a criminal and have no idea 

This is the most accurate post on anxiety ever.

More How To Manage ADHD

“I never remember to take out the trash until my trash can is full, at which point the trash bag is really heavy and the stuff at the bottom has been rotting a while, and it’s awful!”

Small brain: “Try to train yourself to take out the trash on certain days at certain times.”

Large brain: “Buy a tiny trash can. Now you HAVE to empty it.”

That’s genius!

I just put it in front of my door when it’s full so I am physically unable to leave unless I pick it up.

The best advice I’ve ever received about managing my depression/anxiety/adhd is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Accommodations are not about changing yourself to work in your environment — it’s about changing your environment to better work for you.

So yeah, get a tiny trash can and put it by your door. Store your towels in your bathroom so you can immediately change them when they smell funny. Hang a basket by your door for your gloves and earbuds. Leave a box of cliff bars by your door so you never leave without breakfast. Change your environment and change your life!

“Change your environment and change your life”

I learned a long time ago that if I have to remember to pack a fork *every day* for lunch, I end up at work with no fork about 30% of the time.

But if I take an entire 50 count box of forks and put the entire thing in my lunch box? I *always have a fork.*

And I have extra forks for coworkers who forgot to pack a fork, and then I seem SUPER responsible. Lol.

Back in 2011 I attended an event called BMoreFail which was a business seminar on business failure, taught by guest speakers who had all failed at something, and I had a revelation.

If your system would work fine if people Just Would, but it does not work because people Don’t, and you feel very strongly that it works but people are not using it right and if only they Just Would everything would be fine… your system is a failure. Because if people were capable of Just Doing, they would be doing. The fact that people Don’t is an indication that they, in fact, cannot Just Would.

I was thinking of this in terms of workflow systems in business, but it’s just as meaningful in the systems you create for yourself that would work if you Just Would. Because if you Could, then you already Would. The fact that you Don’t even though it would work if you Just Would means that you in fact Can’t and you need to redesign the system.

That doesn’t always make it easier to figure out a system that will work, but it does tell you something about how to deal with the repeated failure of the system. Change it. The system is always what’s broken, not the people in it. Systems exist to serve people; if they cannot serve people because people can’t use them, they are wrong and must be changed.

if your Correct System sucks to use the Right Way, it isn’t correct and that isn’t the right way. redesign it.

Okay so I’ve made about a dozen of these posts in the last month or two, so I’m not going to get as exhaustive as I sometimes do, but here’s the history that my mother and aunties taught me about kink and polyamory as queer.

When I was growing up, I was told that the kink community was the physical space in which the queer community existed and that non-monogamy/polyamory as the concepts that exist today were born directly out of queer culture and the environments that shaped it.

Basically, back in the early years when most of queer culture was an arrestable offense and people mostly only got to meet their partners in the backrooms of old speakeasies and nightclubs, kink spaces were doing the same thing and were one of the only non-mob owned options for gatherings. Kink communities themselves were almost entirely made up of queer folks already anyways because surprise surprise a community made mostly of abuse survivors is gonna have pretty high rates of queer folks in it. And because of the semi-public nature of the spaces and the limited safe dating options polyamory and related non-monogamous practices became common place.

They became so common place in fact that queerness and queer culture completely and foundationally shaped the discussions around consent, relationship needs, emotional connections, and ethical behavior that became central to kink and polyamory as practices. They became so common place in part because it made sense, in part because the cultures all needed each other, and in part because, as my mother always said, “if society had already damned you just for being queer, what did you have to lose by trying all the other things society was going to damn you for as well?” This, incidentally, is also why there have historically been such high numbers of queer folk in illegal occupations like sex work and why my mom and aunties also used to consider sex work as a culture pretty fucking queer too.

But the years went by and your average, “respectable” white gay and lesbian folks with their picket fence day dreams started making progress. They started kicking people to the curb in an effort to make queerness look less “challenging” and different. Bye bye, bisexuals, bye bye drag and trans culture, bye bye non-monogamy what do you mean you actually think the “slippery slope” to gay marriage also leading to polygamy might be a good thing? Bye bye all you sex freaks, sexuality is something your born with and you can’t help who you love, it’s not like all that disgusting talking-about-sex-and-building-the-entire-network-of-sex-ed-information-we-used-to-desperately-try-and-survive-the-AIDS-crisis-ew-you-perverts-our-sex-is-beautiful-and-pure-like-marriage! And so on and so forth.

See, when it was all about survival, the distinction that Straight people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, etc was irrelevant. They’d kill us all the same so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive. But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to Straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight. Our labor, our physical space, our intellectual efforts all became irrelevant and all that mattered was when the Straights looked at White Cis Gays they saw Us instead. So the White Cis Gays fixed that by making it clear they thought we were just as disgusting as the Straights thought we were. They abandoned us and took our history and our language and our fucking lives with them and said we weren’t ~allowed~ to have it. And because those of us who were marginalized in many ways or who were doubly or triply damned were more likely to have suffered massive losses during the AIDS crisis and to still be living in poverty, in crime, and in general destitution of social capital, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle not to be erased ever since.

So now you have a whole generation or two or three who grew up being told a sanitized history where a “drag queen” threw the first brick at Stonewall, Pride wasn’t started by one of the bisexual Queens of Kink, and non-monogamy hasn’t been the natural progression of so many of our communities for generations. And they tell us we never existed, we’re just secret straighties thinking our gross sex lives make us queer, we could just choose to be respectable and “normal” like everyone else and then we wouldn’t be “bullied” (because god forbid our actual oppression be recognized) and they completely miss the irony.

And as much as I hate that I have to list my credentials in order for there to be a chance in burning hell for this response to be considered legitimate, I am the nonbinary, bisexual, polyamorous, kinky, intersex child of a bisexual, kinky, polyamorous woman who spent all of my life and most of hers in the heart of Queer culture and politics to the point that she put me on the stand in front of the entire school board and a third of the state at age 10 to fight for our right to participate in the Day of Silence without fear of suspension, expulsion, abuse, or injury/death. I was on my mother’s hip at the state capitol protests with police in riot gear ready to do whatever it took to prevent us from entering the building. I am Queer in so many ways, including ones no one can dare fucking argue and so was my mother before me and my aunties before her, and this is THEIR history I am telling and will keep telling until I’m dead because I will rot before I let people erase their memories, blood, and joy from our history by claiming that kink and polyamory don’t belong.

I apologize for that all sounding angry and upset. It is not aimed at anyone in particular. I am just very very tired and it’s almost Passover which means that my auntie’s are a lot more on my brain than usual and I am just so exhausted by the way I have been mocked and belittled for months now over things that were simply Truth when I was growing up. Please understand how much history is denied and how many ancestors are dishonored by this rhetoric of “who REALLY belongs in the community?”

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.

When I met my “First queer person ™” back in 1990, one of the things she said to me that I spent about 27 years unpacking was this:

“monogamous heterosexual relationships are patriarchal bullshit.”

I took offense at the time. But when you don’t let people use words like “queer” to describe “everyone who isn’t in this Normative Bubble of heterosexual serial monogamy”, you have to get pretty specific about the fact that STRAIGHT refers to this concept of being “normal” which in this culture has meant for many years “Straight, cis, monogamous (or doing your best to fake all of the above)” 

Quit fucking gatekeeping.

The people who hate us hate all of us. Joining them in their hatred doesn’t solve the problem. 

The way they win is if they get us to fight each other. 

I don’t reblog sensitive topics on this blog, but this is exactly what I had a long conversation about recently. I’m not young, and I remember shit like this as it was happening. polyamory is queer as fuck and learn to respect that

Relatedly, also – the legal fights for legal polyamory and kink are fundamentally tied to the legal fights for gay and trans rights.

Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough: even today, most states have anti-kink laws on the books, and will sometimes prosecute consenting kink participants for assault and battery. And in places where this happens, it is pretty much exclusively used to target queer clubs and spaces, in almost exactly the same way that anti-sodomy laws once were.

When I was in undergrad, a queer nightclub near where I went to school got busted because someone was reportedly “hitting a patron with a wooden spoon”. The people arrested were charged with assault with a dangerous weapon – the alleged ‘weapon’ being the spoon – a felony punishable by up to 5 years in state prison and $1,000 fine. Turns out, there wasn’t any play happening in the club at that hour, and there were no wooden spoons found anywhere in the building… but you better believe that the proud queers the cops arrested for it had to find lawyers and make bail and go to court dates anyway. And even if the cops had found a fucking spoon in the club, would that have justified any of it? Make no mistake – this club, like so many other queer kinky clubs across the country, was targeted because it was queer. And separating out the queer from the kinky would do jack shit to help anyone arrested that night.

Anti-kink (and anti-poly) are weaponized in order to target queer people, specifically, and in significant numbers. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough to make them inherently anti-queer as political tactics, even laying aside all of the history above. Don’t do our enemy’s dirty work for them.

god fucking thank you for thoroughly explaining this. i’m so exhausted by this argument and so exhausted explaining these points to people.

i am once again begging the baby gays to LEARN YOUR QUEER HISTORY

just on the flip side of this, since this is also an issue: the kink community tends to forget that its roots are very firmly rooted in queer culture, particularly gay male culture. leather subculture, which most mainstream kink copies to some degree, was very specifically a butch gay male thing (formed out of the cross-pollination of post-WWII military guys, bikers, and gay men). high protocol dynamics? collaring? flagging? the aesthetic of wearing leather clothing or harnesses, or using leather equipment like floggers and handcuffs? the sheer concept of using “topping” and “bottoming” as term at all? that’s all fucking gay, dudes!

and incidentally this is why I get pissed off at heterosexual kinksters who like to act that their dynamic is The Truest Expression of Dominance and Submission because the man is the dom and the woman is the sub and that’s the only true/traditional dynamic. my dudes, the “traditional” kink relationship was a Tom of Finland comic.

Personal peeve but cannot handle seeing the blorbo drawn in a """more attractive way""" and its cause the artist doesn't fucking get it, the "flaws" were always the best fucking part

I wanna take them by the shoulders and shake them like you didn't "make them sexier" you fucking neutered their vibes

Bugs Bunny could have simply walked into Mordor. He would have shown up at the gates of Mordor in a disguise and been like "Evil volcano inspection unit" and flashed a fake ID badge to the confused orc.

Shut up this is holy

@himbohargreeves re. your last post…

This is terrible but today when I was playing volleyball outside with some friends one of their children (18 months) was sort of ambling around on his stumpy little toddler legs and so we were all trying to be careful and like not spike the ball onto the baby but then he wandered over to his father, who picked him up bc dad reflexes, and then the ball got passed over to the dad and he sort of had a no thoughts moment and instinctively used his child to smack the volleyball over to the next person. Like he just swung the kid and used his legs like a baseball bat. I’m never going to forget his face of premature regret mid baby-manuever right when he realized what he was doing AND the instant he realized his wife saw it happen. Anyway the baby was fine he didn’t make contact with the ball all that hard and he was just mad his dad wouldn’t use him as a club again but I had to sit down because I laughed so hard I cried.

Today's advice from your Goth Auntie

❤️Auntie Jilli

Minnesota’s Giant Rainbow and Leather Pride Flags

June 28, 1998. Both flags measured approximately 50 feet wide and 75 feet long.

Friendly reminder that the leather flag predates almost every other flag. We owe this community to leather daddies and kinksters

In the era of corporate sanitization never forget it was leather daddies and S&M folks who protected some of the earliest pride parades.

whenever you ask your friend who’s really into JRPGs “hey which one do i start with is the newest one fine” they always go “no, what you gotta do is head on over to ebay and look up the entry that completely bombed commercially. You’ll see that it goes for $800. Close ebay. Download an emulator for a console no younger than 17 years old. Download the ROM, and also this laundry list of various tweaks, retextures, and QoL tweaks. Pull up this exact spoiler-free guide put up a decade ago from GameFAQs, and you’ll experience the best game this series has to offer.” Like???

And they’re right