fruit

Telepathic aliens enjoy that humans will "play music" for hours at a time. When it's too mentally quiet on deck, they just announce the catchiest song titles they know and the humans will start thinking about it automatically.

The humans hate this so, so much.

Zorf: Human Steve, can you please play that song I like, the one with all the females

Steve: what

Zorf: A little bit of Monica in my life

Steve:

Steve: mother fu--

Before this catches on with miserable adult babies reblogging to only add “KILL IT WITH FIRE” or some other idiotic, unfunny meme:

This is a mature female spider of the Nephila genus. I’m not sure the exact species, but members of this genus are also known as “golden silk orb weavers.” Their yellow-orange silk can be used to make golden cloth, like in this tapestry.

The bite of a Nephila isn’t serious. Wikipedia describes the worst case scenario - localized pain or a more severe allergic reaction - but most bitten will only experience a little itching. Like any spider, they only bite in self defense or when forcibly pressed against skin, and these big females are especially docile. I’ve held a related species on two occasions, they don’t scare very easily.

They’re so laid back, in fact, and so insistent on remaining in the same web, that these are the spiders some cultures have used as mosquito guards, deliberately setting them up to spin webs in open windows or over the top of a baby’s crib.

You can trust spiders with babies. Don’t be an @#!*% about your phobia plz. (By which I mean it’s perfectly okay to have a phobia and be afraid, but you don’t need to hate all spiders and wish they were all dead they didn’t do anything but get born spiders)

one of the most metal things i;ve read in my entire life

i dont smoke cigarettes but they should let me have a smoke break where i burn stuff behind the restaurant

i want my food ONLY prepared by this man

I love how many people there are on the Earth because you can think of any type of person and there’s the possibility that they might exist. There could very well be at 90 year old lady that goes into an Urban Outfitters every Friday and buys every item that has to do with weed. It’s likely she doesn’t exist but there’s also the possibility that she does exist, and that excites me

There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider

So to set the scene, it's the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed 'the Suicide Kid' at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.

On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he's found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he's exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.

However, right when he's half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn't know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.

All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.

So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa's transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.

My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.

And then another say, "Don't bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one's been there in a while."

And they leave.

Because my grandpa didn't swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.

After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.

There's the man himself. Go grandpa!!

There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider

So to set the scene, it's the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed 'the Suicide Kid' at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.

On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he's found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he's exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.

However, right when he's half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn't know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.

All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.

So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa's transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.

My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.

And then another say, "Don't bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one's been there in a while."

And they leave.

Because my grandpa didn't swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.

After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.

There's the man himself. Go grandpa!!

me when a fictional woman decides not to get an abortion

"love is in the air" wrong! that's the buildup of static electricity before the discharge of lightning. you'll want to seek cover. quickly

just saw a post where someone put “detrans dni” and like… hey we should be supporting detransitioned people bc if we don’t terfs will

sometimes you’re wrong about your identity and that’s ok like i used to think i was bi but it turns out i was wrong and i know ppl who thought they were trans but it turns out they were wrong and it should be ok and accepted that sometimes people don’t get it right on the first try

@shadowknight1224 this is an excellent way of putting it thank you

This touches on something I have felt for a long time, which is that one of the reasons rigid queer labels and gatekeeping is so dangerous is because if you want to encourage people to explore their gender/sexuality, there has to be a safe "Actually I was wrong" option.

I went through so very much anxiety coming out, and when I really think about it it was squarely from the fear of being wrong about it all. That I was, at heart, a cishet woman, and therefore I was appropriating a label that didn't 'belong' to me, and I would (somehow) be harming other people by doing so. There's so much more unnecessary pressure if the sword hanging over your head is "But you do have to be right about this, you can't back out once you've even asked the question."

I think that is Bad. I think it makes fewer people ask the question. I think that includes those who need to ask, and would be much happier for it.

to summarize: one of the things the Q stands for is QUESTIONING

and that is as it should be

I’d like to also submit the possibility that some people may be more prone to shifts in their gender identity than others, and that it’s not necessarily even a case of being “wrong,” so much as it’s a case of just changing over time. I know the predominant narrative we see in discourse is that a person who transitions was never their agab—and I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people! But… it’s not true everyone? I remember reading an interview with Danny Lavery after he came out, and he said something along the lines of “One day, I went to bed a woman and woke up not a woman anymore.” So if a person can change once, who’s to say that can’t change again? For example, I know Eddie Izzard (whose labels have shifted a lot over the decades, as terminology and options for gender identities identity have changed many times over since the 1980s) has said she goes through long block periods of being a particular gender, so right now she’s “based in girl mode,” (her words) but she’s previously had blocks of time being based in “boy mode,” too. So like, whose to say other people don’t have block periods like that? Maybe somebody really was non-binary for ten years and now they’re not anymore, y’know? Not feeling something about yourself forever doesn’t have to mean you were wrong the whole time. Of course, being wrong is okay too! But I’d make room for both.

i LOVE this addition, especially because it helps us move away from the "ive always known" narrative that dominates so much trans space. sometimes your gender literally changes, and it's not helpful or healthy of us to act like that means everything that came before was false or mistaken.

Gender Fluid Vibes… Nice!

Oh look, it’s me! Like, my gender has definitely changed over time and while it seems to have settled as queer/indefinable for a decade now, it might change again one day and I could end up identifying with a binary gender again. 

And can I get a shout out for the people who transition more than once and still identify as trans even though the pronouns/gender they ended up in might be somewhat similar to the one that were assigned at birth? Y’all are beautiful. Keep on being great.

I'm so fucking good at characters

I spent several hours writing multi-paragraph descriptions for all the heroes and shit and then I got to THE WIZARD and said "It's a fucking evil wizard, what more do you need than that"

It's a very serious fantasy campaign but also the act one speedbump antagonist is THE WIZARD and one of THE WIZARD's goons is a guy named The Beastlord who is literally a dog that THE WIZARD taught how to walk on two legs and cast spells

2 Sumatran tiger cubs were just born at the Memphis Zoo which is awesome bc they are critically endangered and also I am losing my mind over this image of the cubs and their mom. The babies’ tails make a heart….

'you know nothing of culture, Jon' -something garfield would say probably

‘you know nothing of

culture, Jon’ -something garfield

would say probably

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

It was funnier in my head shshsb

this is that dude from disco elysium innit

I HAVE FOUND THE ABSOLUTE WORST BOOK IN THE HISTORY OF PRINT

The my pillow guy wrote an autobiography and then made the cover a horrifying winky-dink, this exists now

at my job we have to go through a training program that teaches us the library of congress classification system, and when i was first being trained my boss started to boot it up and she gave me a really anxious and guilty look and said “listen, i’m really sorry in advance, there’s nothing i can do about this, just…. just try to get through it” and i was like lol what’s she talking about and then the program loaded and i was greeted with a deliriously funny-looking photoshopped wizard with glowing eyes pointing at some intro message like “AH YES, JUST AS THE PROPHECY FORETOLD… APPRENTICE, YOU COME AT A TIME OF MOST DIRE NEED… YOU MUST LEARN OUR WAYS” and my boss just looked at me helplessly and was like “i’m so sorry. it’s like two hours long.”

thankfully it wasn’t an elaborate fever dream and i have found screenshots