i saw some thread on xitter with some dude asking why drag queens "want to be around children so much" re: story hours and all the replies were either predictably disgusting or very defensive but not a single goddamn one of them answered the question so i will help in case anyone ever asks you this incredibly stupid question: they are clowns!! drag queens are just clowns!! they put on extremely silly makeup and huge wigs and bright clothes and do over-the-top performances that make people laugh and smile and sometimes cry. that is the definition of a clown. they like to perform for children because they are a type of clown and children are great audiences and it is not any deeper than that. god damn.
Why shouldn’t adults want to be around children and do fun things like read them stories?
People should be asking themselves that first.
This weird hysterical paranoia we’ve all more or less bought into where it’s WEIRD to get excited when a small human is delightedly happy about something is… it just sucks.
Kids are great. Hanging out with them is great. If you think the only reason a grown human would do so is sexual… what thing in your life went so wrong that you think that?
Here’s one good thing to come out of 2020:
Paleontologists completed a life-sized replica of Sue, the most complete T. Rex ever found.
And she is freaking GORGEOUS!
As I read more about this beauty, I found out some new details regarding things I thought I previously knew about the beast that was Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I’m going to share them with you.
First, and most obvious, her size:
This is nothing new, we all figured T. Rex was big, but I for one never stopped to consider exactly how big it was. Nobody ever really knows what to imagine when they read about something the size of a whale that walked around and ate everything it could kill.
Speaking of eating things, I just want to remind you all that T. Rex had–by miles–the strongest bite of any terrestrial animal living or dead, somewhere around six and a half tons of force. That’s over six times greater than the current estimate of what Allosaurus was capable of, and three times what was delivered by the highest measured reading of the living title holder–the estuarine crocodile. It didn’t have to waste time swinging its head open-mouthed like Saurophaganax for a little extra oomph, or grow fancy serrated teeth like Carcharodontosaurus to cut pieces out of its prey. It opted for the simplest approach: get its mouth around something and crush it to death; imagine the full weight of an elephant on whatever was between this thing’s jaws.
“How did it find something to eat?” I hear you asking. “It can’t see something if it doesn’t move, right?”
Listen, I love Jurassic Park too, but that’s a big crock of shit.
Notice how both her eyes face forward. That gives her binocular vision (the ability to focus both eyes on one target, like you and I). More importantly it means she has impeccable depth perception due to overlapping fields of vision from each, large, eyeball. Researchers agree that T. Rex not only had incredible vision, but that it was probably better than most modern animals–including eagles, hawks, and owls–and that she could likely spot something three and a half miles away. If something that big can see that well, it doesn’t matter if you move or not, she’d be able to tell if it was an animal trying to hide or a piece of vegetation. So pray she isn’t hungry if she lays eyes on you. And even if by some miracle she didn’t see you, she’d still smell you.
If she decided you looked tasty, you probably wouldn’t hear her coming as much as you’d feel her. Modern science indicates that T. Rex didn’t roar like in Jurassic Park, but rather bellowed or maybe even hissed like crocodilians. If she were on to you, you’d most likely feel this sense of unease creep up your spine as a low-pitched rumble in the air permeated through you. You wouldn’t know what it was or where it was coming from until you hear her footfalls. By then it’s too late–you could try to run but she’d probably catch you. There’s plenty on YouTube that reconstructs what T. Rex may have sounded like, and it’s legitimately haunting.
To wrap all of this up, the one bit of good that came out of the cursed year that is 2020 is that this wonderful child of science and art came into the world, and reaffirmed my respect and admiration for the eight ton slab of muscle and teeth that is this magnificent creature.
…and it is nothing if not magnificent.
I honestly expected like three notes, what happened!?
Palaeontologists are the ones providing the data and advice but don’t give them full credit, this life-sized sculpture was created by ARTISTS, the artist team of @bluerhinostudio
They also created this Quetzalcoatlus that made the rounds online (image credit goes to National Geographic)
As well as many more amazing sculptures and dioramas, so please check them out here on Tumblr and on Instagram
They are currently working on a new Tyrannosaurus again which will be on display in Europe (image credit goes to Blue Rhino Studio)
Please give the amazing team of Blue Rhino Studio the credit they deserve
Not to kill the buzz but where are the feathers??
As it stands now, there is no evidence for or against feathers on Tyrannosaurus specifically, so either way to depict it would be equally accurate at the moment, if feathers are present they would be on the back and shoulder region as that is the only spot that doesn’t have preserved skin impressions
Below is a handful guide by Dr. Mark Witton who happens to be both a palaeontologist and an artist:
mezduin
Fun fact! Sue officially uses they/them pronouns! Scientists don’t know if they were male or female. Because of that, and as a gesture of good will to the LGBT+ community, scientists officially use they/them pronouns to refer to SUE the T-Rex!
“(Please, do not body-shame our T. rex. SUE is perfect just the way they are. And, yes, “they” is correct there—scientists don’t know if SUE was male or female, so in the spirit of scientific accuracy and LGBTQ inclusivity, we’ve transitioned to singular “they/them” pronouns instead of calling SUE “she” or “her.”)”
“Please, do not body-shame our T. rex” is the funniest thing I’ve seen in at least 20 minutes
You’ve likely seen this already, but just in case. And, heck, even if so, a good post is worth seeing again!
Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival
please elaborate
Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.
So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.
You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses.
So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding.
Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else.
The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf.
And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it.
And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.
one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong.
but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.
there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today.
qwertybard
This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.
You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.
There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.
Dystopia needs clarity of purpose, it needs to have beef with a particular social problem and go for the throat all the fucking way, or it’s just sparkling YA adventure with a bunch of jarringly genre-inappropriate tropes shoehorned in. You cannot write dystopian fiction that isn’t sincere and have it still be dystopian fiction.
“i can fix him” “i can make him worse”
well i’m trying to get him pregnant
OP is a seahorse
as much as i love the idea of moon being an adorable sweetheart, i can’t help but favor the interpretations of them just being a straight-up nuisance to others around them
them constantly picking fights with the other animatronics knowing they’ll lose, making sun’s job 10x harder than it needs to be by saying stupid shit in his ear, growling and hissing at the employees when they walk past, chasing you on all fours while you’re screaming in fear, hanging out in the vents for hours while staff frantically searches for them, stuffing food in their chest cavity that ends up rotting in there for weeks on end, stealing anything and everything from the employee’s jackets which results in lost badges and no pens in sight, using the wire like it’s a swing until it snaps and drops them from 20 feet in the air
the possibilities are ENDLESS and i think you should consider chaotic moon more
No no please consider-
✨BOTH✨
Like him being mostly an absolute gremlin BUT if you do get on his better side he's a sweetheart? And the more you know him the more he shows it but still remains the same gremlin asshole krksjahsj
Happy 9th birthday, FNAF!!! 🎉
Blearily sitting up in bed with squinted eyes. What year is it
Don't fucking tell me this franchise is almost a year old guys I feel fucking ancient. My bones are withering away as I speak.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you’re at a low point:
If you were a fictional man right now, there would be *at least* ten people if not a large portion of the fanbase that would call you their wet beast poor little meow meow
Unfriendly reminder that all you idiots being like "yeah just pirate media now, fuck corporations!" posting links and just openly telling people where to download pirated media are why it's so hard to find safe, working sites for it anymore.
I've been doing this shit for over 20 years and the availability has gone down as it's become more mainstream. The more you publicly talk about all these sites the less there are. Shut up. Tell people in private or don't tell them at all.
not for nothing but "chastity until marriage" and "lifelong strict monogamy" is every bit as much kink as piss or free use or knotting is. we just don't call it that because those weirdly specific and highly fetishized sexual practices are institutionalized and considered normative.
what are traditional catholic values if not just an overly elaborate and widely accepted version of a breeding kink
if you guys thought you had a weird middle school experience my whole grade was convinced I was an actual literal werewolf for 3 years to the point where people were afraid of me so come 8th grade the popular girl had a huge Halloween party on her farm that everyone went to that just happened to coincide with the full moon so I staged a whole elaborate ‘transformation’ at the end of the night and scared the shit out of all of them. I don’t think I’ll ever top that
You guys do know you're supposed to reblog things, right
"well i like this post but i'm worried my followers might not" fuck your followers. The entire point of tumblr is to cause irreparable psychic damage to your followers. We are locked in mortal combat on the astral plane. You must win. You Must Win. You Must Destroy Them.
social media is supposed to be PvP
"Should trans women be allowed to compete in women's sports" I don't think there should be women's sports. I think it's a silly artificial construction that only upholds the gender binary while it's benefits are incidental and would be better addressed directly.
Care about giving people with different body types and muscle mass a shot? Split your league by weight categories like boxing, or some other direct physical measurement. Gender is at best a poor proxy for these and we only do it because we still treat women are a different species. "But that still wouldn't be fully fair to everyone?" Sport isn't fully fair, it's about rewarding people with the most biological advantage. That's the whole point of it.
You want to give more sporting opportunity to women and minorities specifically? Okay then do that. Create your own opportunities league, but if we're giving up the pretense that it's about essential biological advantage then you better let trans women in.
What's that, the extra league would be treated as a novelty afterthought and would lack the prestige of the real main event? You mean like how women's events were treated when they were introduced? True! In fact women's leagues are still largely treated as secondary now, and you know how we can fix it? Make the main leagues open to everyone with weight, height or muscle mass categories so that people with different body types can excel. Like I suggested before. Problem solved.
Women's sport is bad actually.
Can't wait for the terfs to find this and be like "mask off!!! The TRAs want to abolish women's sport!" Yeah lol die mad about it. You may be happy with your condescending secondary leagues but not me. Open up sport categories based on attributes that actually matter to the sport, not binarist fiction.
If you are convinced that all woman would still universally lose to all men even when correcting for things like gross muscle mass difference, then you're a misogynist by the way.
Height is a massive advantage on basketball and volleyball. But somehow, with all the people prioritizing fairness in sports, no one seems to be doing anything about that.
It's almost as if fairness in sports never mattered to these people until it became an excuse to discriminate against transgender people.
minos was such a pussy. if my wife gave birth to an epic minotaur baby i wouldn't have locked him in a labyrinth. i would have taken him to the mcdonalds play place (athens) every day and let him eat as many stray mcnuggets (athenians) off the floor as he wanted. i love you hungry son
(pulling a painted vase out of my wallet) and this is my youngest at his first nose ring fitting. isn't he handsome
completely enamoured with this thread
yeah im sold
I don't particularly like the concept of this smell. But I do love the idea that someone DOES like this smell
christfucker-deactivated2023040
whenever I tell someone “I’m tired” and they say “go to sleep” and I say “I’m not that type of tired” and they say “there’s only one type of tired” I always feel amazed. Astounded. How do they not know the different versions of tired.
- Physical exhaustion from the chronic illness. Not drowsy, but needs to lay down. Maybe my Hashimoto’s or bad knees or plantar fasciitis is acting up, but either way, I need to relax with an ice pack and a tens unit.
- emotional exhaustion. The type of “tired” people mean when they say “I’m sick and tired of x.” I’m so numb and usually I’d be about one minor inconvenience away from snapping but the exhaustion of being alive has gotten so heavy that I don’t even notice inconveniences anymore.
- drowsiness. If I’m trying to tell someone I need to sleep, I’ll say “I’m sleepy” or “I want to go to bed.”
- unable to process what’s going on but the closest word I can use to describe how I’m feeling is “tired.”
5. The kind of tired that comes with severe brain fog. You don't mean to be struggling so much just to answer a simple question, but you are. And the effort makes it worse.
6. Mystery Mix, youre not about to fall asleep but what were you doing again? Why? Right. Ow. Would this be a good time to cry?