mutuals do this

fuckin power move holy shit

"ooooo yes I love mirroring, I love talking about [machine] with people who also have [machine]"

...

"wait a minute."

CLADISTICS ruined my life

yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification

The choice is this: 

Birds are reptiles 

Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT 

That’s it, that’s the choice 

What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing

Nope 

Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds) 

So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles 

birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily. 

But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles? I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.

It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification. 

And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals. 

So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing. 

don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.

Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it. 

You are technically a fish.

IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all

hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed

Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this 

The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators. 

This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.

I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.

Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.

…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles

…which evolved from amphibians

…which evolved from fish.

*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken* BEHOLD A LIZARD

you could have left the feathers on this time tbh

It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.

Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.

May I recommend the book “why fish don’t exist” by Lulu Miller

May I recommend

the book “why fish don’t exist”

by Lulu Miller

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

i hate when theres a post where i agree w almost everything then theres a sentence i absolutely despise sneaked in the middle of it like. fuck you now i cant reblog any of that 😑

Loosing my mind over FUCKING Jairs

Holy Shit

My favorite part is kermits legs sticking out from behind her

Back of her jacket says “If you can read this, the frog fell off.”

I was part of the staff of an anime convention all the way through college. We held our meetings on monday nights, and every monday after the meeting, most of us went to taco bell. We would get our terrible garbage food and sit at the tables and hang out until the wee hours of the morning, and sometimes Pat Rothfuss (who lived nearby) would drop by and blow our little nerdy brains. It was a beloved tradition. 

One of our staffers was referred to as the Dapper Man, because he could frequently be found wearing a three-piece suit as he went about his daily business. A button-down and waistcoat was his casual attire, and on truly formal occasions, he would produce a tailcoat, tophat, and monocle. Somehow this worked incredibly well for him. Dapper Man was much lauded for his sartorial choices.

When Halloween rolled around, we held our meeting as usual, but with the addition of a bit of ridiculous cosplay holiday-garb. Since Halloween was not actually on a monday, only a few people were in costume. Dapper Man was.

These were the days before the rubber horse mask phenomenon went mainstream. They had just started to be available. Until Dapper Man arrived as a Formal Thoroughbred, I had never seen one. 

He was quite dashing, though, with white gloves, a black tailcoat, and a monocle on his wide, staring, rubber horse-eyes. There was a strange but alarming dignity to the look. 

We made it through the meeting with the usual chaos expected of ninety nerds left unsupervised with a twenty-thousand dollar budget, and progressed posthaste to TBell.

The local taco bell had a real problem with keeping staff on–for some reason, drug use was prolific among their employees, and they struggled to find consistent workers. But they knew we would be there every monday, and even though we were a big group we were patent and polite, and they generally liked us. So we rolled into taco bell with our usual aplomb. 

We straggled into line and started placing orders, and I watched idly as the employee in back began assembling “tacos.” He was visibly blitzed; if he’d been any higher he might have floated off entirely. 

He stuck his gloved hand into the tub of shredded lettuce, drew out a handful, looked up and caught sight of Dapper Man: the Equine Gentleman. 

He did a double-take and then froze entirely. 

You could see the whites of his eyes all the way around. It was very clear that he had absolutely no ability to comprehend what he was seeing; probably he assumed some sort of genteel victorian old god had come to wreak hoofed vengeance upon his taco-y demesne. Possibly he was just grappling with the possibility of reverse centaurs. 

Either way, he had become a lettuce-bearing statue. 

Taco production ground to a halt.  He stood, trapped by the medusan gaze of Dapper Man’s rubber horse mask, until his manager came to yell at him. 

At that point he dropped the lettuce and fled the taco bell. 

I can only assume he could hear the sound of dress-shoe shod hoofbeats thundering behind him. 

For all I know, he may still be fleeing Dapper Man’s dread fursona. We never saw him at the taco bell again. 

my dnd party has run into an npc who may or may not be evil and may or may not decide to betray us and the dm was in chat today like “just so everyone knows…not addressing this comment at anyone in particular…his favorite colors are red and black…wink” so now i’m desperately trying to get a real physical friendship bracelet done before session tomorrow in the vain hope that i can somehow stop this npc from trying to do a murder on my party

UPDATE: the npc was in fact a shapechanged adult black dragon with violence and conquest in his heart. however he did let merry put a friendship bracelet on him and then when she was like “hm okay how big is your wrist in dragon form” he was like “you wanna see?” and then turned into a dragon and let merry measure him for a second, dragon-sized friendship bracelet. the dm described him afterwards as being deeply confused as to why he did this or let any of this happen to him. call that the merry effect

this guy is now a recurring npc because merry was SO determined to make him her friend that it actually somehow worked. he cast dream to talk to one of my party members like “hey…how’s it going…how are the tieflings in the party…not that i care…also i’m not lonely. bye” and the player was like “is he still wearing merry’s friendship bracelet in this dream” and the dm was like “yeah…”

fsdfjhskdf the dm just sent us all this image

How to catch a horse

the prase "CD" is a reference to the compact disk

❌False

"CD" is in fact in reference to c deez nuts.

current note count: 26

where am i

its really beautiful.

been sitting on this one for a WHILE

hi everyone im still pissed we never learnt in school that shakespeare was bi and wrote the sonnets about a dude and a woc he was into

hi everyone im still pissed that we were told emily dickinson was a spinster when she spent her whole life writing love letters to a woman

hi everyone im still pissed about the fact that we never got taught any of the super super gay Greek myths. it seems impossible to think they managed to pick all the hetero myths when Greece was just THAT gay but guess what? they did.

hi everyone virginia woolf was also bi im still pissed that so much of literature is queer and has queer coding within it that deserves to be analysed through that lens in the same way that we don’t ignore the gender of an author, but sexuality is never mentioned in highschool literature classes

hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were never taught that da vinci was gay af and that the ideal the western world has of jesus (white, long straight brown hair) was based on one of his male lovers

hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were told sir isaac newton died a virgin when he had multiple boyfriends over the course of his life one of whom he wrote passionate love letters too and lived with

hi everyone i’m still pissed that we never learned about Tesla in high school and how he was asexual aromantic af, also that it was him who invented the lightbulb and not that shitbag of an Edison

Hi everyone I’m still pissed that this post never came up on my dash earlier so I could tell more people about it

Saw this license plate today and I'm still ugly laughing about it

this is by far my favorite safety/warning sign btw. they really went off with this one

No cuz I fucking love this sign. It’s not an actual barrier so it’s not like some sort of challenge it simply says “fuck around and you will find out”

Ohohoho I LOVE “fuck around and find out” signs, especially the really dramatic and ominous (but true) ones

(Context for the last one: it’s a WWII era sign posted around the soldiers’ washroom mirror, warning them to never discuss military plans in places where civilians could hear them and report back to the enemy, e.g. in restaurants and pubs in the country. “Loose lips sink ships”.)

I also love these two, which I would place in the category of “You already fucked around, now you’re about to find out.”

Aerated water is fucking scary. It's water that has a fuckton of gas in it, which reduces the buoyancy to the point where you will immediately start to sink if you fall in.

ive been collecting these recently and wanted to add some of my favorites

“You shall fall dead the day your first child is born!” the young, inexperienced witch had cried casting her curse. Little did she know, to an asexual like yourself, she’d practically granted immortality. Now, every year, on the anniversary of the curse, she tries her best to “fix” things.

You watch as Agatha arranges the thick vine around you in a circle. It’s been forty years since she’s cursed you, and while you haven’t become friends during that time, you have learned more about magic.

It’s a tight circle she’s creating. That means she’s not going for something with a lot of oomph, but something targeted and specific. Spell circles work like lenses. Wide means more light, or magical energy, collection. Close means selectively choosing a target.

This spell attempt has something to do with plants, you figure, as the circle is a vine. That seems to be Agatha’s new angle.

Originally, you’d laughed at the curse. Dying the day you give birth to a child? You have no desire for sex, let alone children. You thought the curse wouldn’t stick. Or that it was too weak to take, coming from a skinny witch in training.

But then you got sick. The whole village got sick. Agatha was the closest witch, no longer an apprentice but in full possession of her hat. She came to the village just in time to ease the passing of its last residents.

Except you. You hovered on death’s door for an hour, and then you got better. You thanked Agatha for her kindness. She responded by looking you in the eye and asking “Is it a kindness, knowing you’re the last one left?”

You didn’t answer and Agatha left, onward to respond to some other need. She returned a year later, to a husk of a village holding only you, and you had a response then. “No.”

It took some casting to figure out what happened. Agatha’s curse, spat out of anger and frustration from a bad day toward a laughing spectator, had actually taken. But in her apprentice-hood, something had gone wrong.

You weren’t just cursed to die. You were cursed to only die a certain way. And as much as living was starting to grate on you, creating the right conditions to die wasn’t going to happen. You were too ace for that. And you refused to leave behind a lover and child. You know the pain of those you love dying. You don’t want to share it.

So Agatha returned to the village, now known for being haunted, once a year to try to break the curse. They’d given up outright breaking it, a circle as wide as the village cast under a full moon hadn’t managed to do it, and so she shifted to alterations.

Maybe the spell could be convinced your child was an adopted stay cat. Maybe it could be convinced to not be your child, but Agatha’s as the caster.

Nothing had worked, and by this point, Agatha has spawned witchlings. You’ve met two.

Lately, she’s been trying variations of plant parenting. You’ve adopted the abandoned gardens, and you care for dozens of plants in your home.

As you watch, Agatha stands up. She places a hand on her back to arch and you hear a soft crack. She’s in her sixties now, and contrary to belief she won’t live to be over a hundred. Magic is hard on a body, ages you. A witch often looks older than she is.

In contrast, you stopped aging the day you were supposed to die. You still look as if you’re in your thirties.

You wonder if Agatha has ten more years in her. Ten more chances to research curse breakers before you’re left to be the hermit of a dead village. Perhaps one of her children would try in her stead.

On the vine circle, you notice dead plants. This is new.

“What are the tokens for?”

“I want to try shifting a different word. We’ve tried child, and the possessives.”

You nod.

“Now, i want to try born.”

“To what?”

She cackles. “Death, of course. So that you’d die when your first child dies.”

“But I’m lacking a child. We’ve never been able to convince the spell I have one.”

“I think it’s because of time. If it’s anything you’ve acquired after its birth, it wasn’t yours at the right moment to kill you and magic can’t off you in the past. So I want to try changing it so that when your plants die, you die. If you stop caring for them, you can pass on.”

You nod but have low confidence in her. Oh, Agatha tries, but it’s been forty years and this would change two parts of the spell when you’re not sure Agatha has ever charged one.

Still, the witch chants and lights her tallow and twists the smoke from the burning plants. You feel zero difference.

“How do we test it?”

“Don’t water your plants for a few days and we’ll see how you feel. I’m old and need recovery time anyway.”

Agatha stays for three days and your garden withers but you don’t feel sick. You don’t start to die. You resign yourself to another year alone, unable to leave the graves of your family. The one you liked to kiss.

On the day Agatha prepares to leave, a girl wanders into town.

She is maybe seven, with bleeding feet and a ripped dress. It’s fine quality, and you peg her as a survivor of a coup against her parents. Small enough to hide. Skinny enough to slip through cracks.

Agatha takes one look at her and beckons her forward. “Looking for a new life, girl?”

“I don’t want to learn how to be a witch.”

Agatha cackles. “No need. But you need someone, and so does she.”

The girl looks at you and you smile. You offer her a meal that she shyly accepts. Agatha stays another day, watching, and you can see her mind working.

“I want to try a circle again,” she says. Why not? Best try as many times as Agatha is willing while she can.

“Girl, come with us.”

Agatha leads us outside. It’s not quite dusk, but the moon is up. She stomps down grass and has you step on it. It’s such a crude circle, she can’t really expect to use it for a spell, can she?

“Girl!” She snaps. “Hold your arms in a circle around her.”

Your eyes widen as you watch Agatha position the orphan between yourself and the moon. You stand still as she puts a candle in the girl’s hand. Pricks your skin and smears the blood on the child. Then she chants, and something ignites in your belly.

It reminds you of when you were cursed. You’d assumed it was a bad cramp at the time, days too early, and that same pain hits now. You grunt and Agatha laughs and when the last smoke from the candle fades away you laugh too.

You sweep the girl, your adopted daughter, into you arms and swing her around. She shrieks, confused, and you set her dizzy on her feet. You kiss Agatha on each wrinkly check. Tears slip down both of your faces.

“Neither of you will be the last one left. You’ll go together,” the witch says.

“Thank you,” you sob out.

EDIT: Man, this story has gotten around way more than I expected! Thank you to everyone who shared it❤️❤️ If you liked it, maybe check out my anthologies?