Got to draw this adorable pidgeon for the second of the art raffle winners! For @waterinthegalaxy !
We are going to bake a rainbow cake!
Can you teach us how to bake one??
Of course! But keep in mind, this is only our second attempt!
For the cake we are going to bake, you will need the following:
Step 1) Put the sugar and butter into a bowl and mix together until smooth.
Step 2) Mix the eggs and the vanilla extract into the mixture until combined.
[Here you see Pride Knight Roderick cracking an egg]
A one-handed egg crack and baking while wearing helmets…absolute legends
After seeing Wizard Howl cracking eggs with one hand in Howl’s Moving Castle, I just had to practice it!
Step 3) Mix the flour into the mixture until combined. Then separate the mixture equally into six different bowls. After this, put food colouring into it. You don’t need too much of it! (We used about half a teaspoon of each colour) Then stir the colours into the mixture.
Step 4) Grease up some sandwich tins (we used 20cm/8 inch ones) and put one of the coloured mixtures into it. We used two sandwich tins at a time because we could only fit two tins onto a single tray in the oven. You don’t want to put the tins onto different trays because they will cook at different speeds. Then put the tins with the mixture into the middle of the oven at 160°C or 320°F for 15 minutes, swapping each colour out until you have them all done.
Step 5) Once they come out of the oven, you’ll have cakes that look like the photo below! Don’t be worried if your cake looks a bit discoloured, it’s normal as the cake baked while touching the metal tin. We used a bowl as a template to cut around the cake to make it a bit smaller and to show off the vibrant colour!
Step 6) Now lets make the icing! Mix 350g (1.5 cups) of butter, 700g (5.5 cups) of icing sugar, and 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract together with an electric whisk until nice and smooth. Be careful, icing sugar can be messy!
Step 7) After the cakes have cooled off, place the first cake layer down (purple) and cover the top with icing. Next place the blue cake layer on top and again cover the top with icing. Repeat this step for all the colours, next placing green, yellow, orange, and then red. Finish this step by covering the whole cake with icing.
Pride Knight Gareth is putting on the icing now. Look at how focused he is!
We are almost done! Stay tuned for the big reveal!
Im so excited, ive never been this invested in a cake before
We did it!! Who wants a slice?
This is how i know we’re not in hell because these people exist
I love you guys but the cake….it looks a bit messy 🙈
You are right, but all that matters in the end is what is inside
How did a slice of cake become so inspirational, how do you guys manage to make everything so wholesome and affirming?
It’s been 6 years since the zombie apocalypse started, thousands die weekly, but society hasn’t changed much. Your local news tracks zombie migration. An armored school bus picks kids up every morning. Your local walmart just installed a fancy new bio-scanner. And you still need to go to work.
I am told this meme is two years old and Smaug has since slipped down to #19.
People I met for a few moments that live in my head forever.
I know the hero society sucking ass plot point is important and deserves proper follow up, but man it has really overtaken all the other parts of the villains' issues to talk about on a meta level.
Not enough people on this site talk about how the remaining 4 League members all hate themselves to the core and through their self destructive methods are desperately seeking, waiting, and hoping for someone to give them a reason to stop hating themselves so much.
I know it's not the most desirable way to use the societal failures in this particular manga, but the way I see the macro-scale issues being utilized in the story to support the villain side of the narrative is for all of the League using it to explain how and why they ended up where they currently are. But that's the extent to what I see the villains' characters using it for.
Are they asking for it to be fixed? I'd argue that no, they're not. Not now at least. Because think about it--in their minds there is no hope for them. They have stopped caring about a "fix" and are just looking to get rid of it all. They don't care about fixing it because they don't see a place for themselves in it--no matter what--even if it WAS fixed.
Because they hate themselves and the people they were born as.
The way the story has set this up is this:
If the villains can't stop hating themselves--escape their self-destruction and self-loathing and hopeless mindsets--then offering a fix for society is ultimately pointless.
Because yeah, someone can promise change on a large scale to them--but at this point in time, right now, that doesn't matter. Because even if you do fix the issues, they still don't see themselves as people worthy of joining it with everyone else--fixed system or broken system.
They hate themselves and that is the very first issue that needs to be handled for their wellbeing and salvation. Nothing can even sort of be fixed until they are stopped. They will not stop until they are given hope.
I'll be one of the only ones in this little corner of the fandom to say that society can take the back burner on this one. It's necessary to be looked at and fixed and changed, but looking at things on an individual character basis--that's actually not what's necessary at this point in time.
Afterward, yes. Now? No.
Indeed, the entire story is built on this idea that the individual is at the core of both saving and destroying.
This is where the fault lies with the Symbol of Peace concept. One person can never reach everyone, fix everyone’s problems with a smile - not even as powerful and as self-sacrificing as All Might.
Conversely, individuals slipping through the net and spiralling because of apathy (Tenko), lack of proper quirk support (Toga), bad luck and an asshole boss (Jin), an abusive family environment (Touya), lack of acceptance (Iguchi) can lead to full-scale destruction if all they ever experience is violence.
But the good news is that saving people on an individual level also creates positive ripple effects. All Might saving Deku and Bakugou, Deku saving Bakugou and Shouto, Shouto saving Iida, etc. creates a multiplier effect, makes the net tighter. Inspirational figures, symbols and ideas are important, but they can never replace individual kindness, caring and good will. Each person is worth saving and fighting for and that’s a big part of how society gets better. Not just through institutional reforms, but by caring for the people you cross paths with and believing that reaching out can make a difference.
The kids are clearly too young and not in the position (yet) to change society as a whole. All they can do is reach out and save the ones in front of them and hopefully inspire others to do the same. At least I feel like this is the message of the story.
So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us.
Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs.
Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.
We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen). My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.
It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.
I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is
ALL OF THIS
And also pigeon poop was a very valuable fertilizer before we had other options, people would hire guards to stop thieves from stealing their flock’s poop.
#LovePigeonsAgain2016
Late night, reblogging, so bear with me here… Thank you for posting much of my thoughts over the past year and a half! I am known by many as “that guy who keeps the raptors”. Yes this is true, I do keep and handle raptors for educational purposes, but what many fail to realize is, I am fascinated with pigeons. My interest with birds began with the obvious, the raptors, corvids, and parrots. Then I discovered pigeons. These wonderful little birds with big attitudes and the incredible ability to thrive among people. The organization I work with got its first pigeon a little over a year ago. She was a rescue with nowhere else to go. I was quickly drawn to her character and attitude about life. We rarely handled her, but we did spend time with her. She grew attached to our volunteers very quickly because their were no other birds she could socialize with in our facility.
We never intended to train her for educational programs. It was a job reserved for our raptors. It was our pigeon who decided she would be a part of what we were doing. One day, when we entered her enclosure to change water and food, she decided to fly to my hand and perch like our raptors do.
No training, no treats, just the reward of being with us.
What we hadn’t noticed for the couple months prior was her watching us. This brilliant little bird had been watching us every day as we trained and worked with our raptors. Finally she decided she didn’t want to be left out any longer. She made her place on our hands.
This occurred several times before we finally put her on a glove and brought her into the public. Needless to say, she was right at home. She fluffed up and preened the entire evening while people gawked and asked us why we had a pigeon on one glove and a hawk on another.
Since then, we’ve added 5 more rescued pigeons to our growing flock. And our pigeon (Tybalt) has become a mainstay ambassador for our programs. Each of our pigeons are incredibly fun to watch and interact with. Pigeons simply don’t get enough love. They are marvelous creatures incredibly suited to life alongside people both physically and mentally.
Raptors my have been my introduction into birds, but pigeons opened my eyes to a new appreciation for them and the fascinating world of bird cognition.
NOT ONLY are pigeons very amazing, worth our respect, and INTERESTING (did you read any of that stuff above?), but they are beautiful too! Look how lovely:
Photo by .jocelyn.
They have a complex and fascinating social structure, both within a flock and with other individuals:
Photo by Ingrid Taylar
AND THEY ARE JUST SUPER CUTE, HONESTLY:
Photo by Musical Photo Man
Not chickens, but I feel compelled to spread this gospel.
hmmm. this is making me rethink my new york pigeon hate
and, AND, haven’t you ever wondered why city pigeons come in a magnificent rainbow of unusual colors?
Most wild animals all look alike within a species, with TINY, RARE individual variations in terms of rare color morphs, unusually big or small animals, different facial markings and other subtleties. But there is no evolutionary benefit to having species where everyone looks slightly different, and in fact, it’s beneficial for species to be similar and consistent, with a distinctive aesthetic. Especially if you’re trying to blend into the environment - a black wolf is all very well, but it looks positively silly in the summer tundra, where its grey/brown/brindley cousins blend in. A white deer has a great aesthetic - and a very short lifespan in the forest. Distinctive Protagonist looks are rare in the wild, simply because natural selection usually comes down heavily on them.
To humans, most wild animals are visually indistinguishable from each other.
As a result, most wild animals are like
“Oh it’s obvious - you can tell the twins apart because Kara has a big nose.”
Wild animals usually have a pretty consistent aesthetic within their species. It’s important to them!
SO WHAT IS GOING ON WITH PIGEONS?

Look, in one small picture you’ve got a red color morph in the center, several melanistic dark morphs, a few solid black birds, a few variations on the wildtype wing pattern, a PIEBALD, a piebald copper color morph…
Like, there are LAYERS UPON LAYERS of pigeon diversity in most flocks you see. Pure white ones with black wingtips. Solid brown ones with pink iridescent patches. Pale pinkish pigeons.
WHY IS THAT? When other wild animals consider “being slightly fluffier than my brother” to be dangerously distinctive in most circumstances? BECAUSE CITY PIGEONS AREN’T TRULY WILD.
MANY OF THEM (POSSIBLY MOST OR ALL) ARE FERAL MIXES.
THEY WERE ONCE BELOVED PETS, SPECIAL MESSENGERS, EXQUISITE SHOW-WINNERS, AND PRIZED LIVESTOCK.
THEIR PRETTY COLORS WERE DELIBERATELY INTRODUCED BY HUMANS.
AND NOW THEIR HUMANS DON’T LOVE THEM ANY MORE.
See, pigeon fanciers bred (and still breed!) a huge array of pigeons. And the resulting swarms of released/discarded/escaped/phased out “fancy” pigeons stayed around humans. What else were they going to do? They interbred with wildtype pigeons.
Lots of the pigeons you see in public are feral. They’re not wild animals. They’re citizen animals. They’re genetically engineered. And now that’s what “city” pigeons are.
These “wild” horses are all different colors because they’re actually feral. Mustangs in the American West are the descendants of imported European horses - they’re an invasive domestic species that colonized an ecological niche, but they are domestic animals. Their distinctive patterns were deliberately bred by humans. A few generations of running around on the prairie isn’t going to erase that and turn them back into wildtypes. If you catch an adult mustang and train it for a short period, you can ride it and have it do tricks and make it love you. It’s a domestic animal. You can’t really do that with an adult zebra.
No matter how many generations these dogs stay on the street and interbreed with one another, they won’t turn back into wolves. They can’t. They’re deliberately genetically engineered. If you catch one (even after generations of rough living, even as an adult) you can make it stare at your face, care about your body language, and love you.
City pigeons? Well, you don’t have to like them, but they’re in the same boat. They’re tamed animals, bred on purpose, living in a human community. Their very bodies are marked with their former ownership and allegiance; they cannot really return to what they once were; if you caught one, you could make it love you (in a limited pigeon-y way.) They have gone to “the wild,” but not very far from us, and they’d be happy to come back.
So next time you see a flock of city pigeons, spare a moment to note their diversity. The wing patterns. The pied, mottled and brindled. The color types.
All of it was once meant to please you.
I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF
Always reblog the potato. 😄
Bless me, potato of luck!
Here it comes again, do your thing, Potato.
My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."
He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."
He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"
I did.
"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."
It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.
So my dad and I agreed, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn't made you stronger than you were before, you're probably not done healing. You've got to give these things time to set.
here's a thought. George McFly does eventually put together that 'Darth Vader from Vulcan' was his new friend Calvin Klein. however, incorrectly concludes based on his 1) abrupt disappearance and 2) generally weird behaviour that 'Calvin' was an alien the whole time.
george mcfly watching star trek for the first time in 1966
george mcfly watching star wars in 1977
george mcfly concluding, logically, that george lucas and gene roddenberry were also visited by real actual aliens.
Lorraine also believes that Calvin was an alien. btw. like she took a little convincing but the fact that Old Man Peabody and his family claimed to have seen a UFO on their property right around the time Calvin popped up helped George's case a lot.
Important
Adding this because they’re safe for dogs too
How are turkey skin and bones not safe? Please elaborate.
Dunno about skin, but Turkey bones, and avian bones in general, are really easy to shatter. If a dog eats said shards, it could tear up their insides.
Important for all pet users!!
The skin is very fatty and can lead to diarrhea, vomiting, and/or pancreatitis. Pancreatitis can lead to a very expensive hospital stay, and is quite painful. When in doubt, best not to feed human food.
Important PSA for this (and every) holiday season! As someone with dogs and cats in her life, both of these are nice to have on hand!
It's hilarious to me when people complain about AO3 and its policies, and what they allow on the site - but it's ESPECIALLY funny when people complain like "Why can't the freaks make their own site and just go there?"
Sweetie... AO3 is the site for that. Y'all invaded our space.
Wattpad and FFN still exist. Go there. They're as shitty and G-rated as you want. You can't have the luxuries that AO3 offers if you're gonna be a little bitch about its policies. Imagine walking into a strip club and complaining about the alcohol and naked ladies when there's a god damn Dennys next door you could have gone to. Christ.
this might be weird to ask, but how do I critically look at another person's writing and implement what I like in their writing in my own writing? I've been having trouble improving in my writing, and frankly Im not sure how to go about doing that, even. It's easy to see what I like about another person's writing, but hard to pinpoint exactly why...
THIS IS NOT WEIRD TO ASK. It is, in fact, the most important question EVER.
How to Read Like a Writer
Re-read. If you get halfway into a chapter and think, Wow this chapter is super creepy–I wonder how they did that. Or get to the end of a book and think, I feel the poignancy of the fragility of human life in an inherently volatile economic system–I wonder how the writer made me feel that way… Go back and re-read that shit.
Read slowly. When you read like a reader, you read pretty fast. When you go in for your second, or third, or fourth re-read of a passage, chapter, or book that you want to know more about, read it slowly. Really. Slowly.
Read for technique, not content. Readers read for content (”In this paragraph, Damien gave Harold a classified envelope.”). Writers read for technique. (”In this paragraph, the writer made me feel curious about the contents of the envelope by giving sensory details about its appearance and weight.”)
Ask the right questions. They usually start with HOW: How did the writer make me feel? How did they accomplish that?
Read small. Did a chapter make you feel sad? Find out WHERE EXACTLY. What paragraph, sentence, or WORD did it for you? Was it a physical detail? A line of dialogue? A well-placed piece of punctuation? Stories are made of words and sentences. Narrow it down.
Practice. Reading like a writer is a skill that takes time to develop. Over time, you’ll get better at it!
How about y’all? Anything to add to this list? I made it off the top of my head so I’m sure I’m forgetting something. What have been your experiences with learning to read like a writer?
Hope this helps!
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The Literary Architect is a writing advice blog run by me, Bucket Siler. For more writing help, check out my Free Resource Library or get The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. xoxo
this is SO IMPORTANT for creatives! understand WHY you love things, why they move you, how the writer (or artist or whomever) did the thing that made you laugh or cry or see the world through a fresh perspective
I like to mark passages that really work for me, that reveal some insight into the human experience or deliver a beautiful image that lingers in my mind or a powerful scene our great dialogue or whatever. by marking it, one can go back later for inspiration or insight, especially when stuck in a revision or feeling uninspired
You can do this with writing you don’t like too. For example, sometimes, you can tell a piece of writing is trying to make you feel a certain way, even when it isn’t successful. The character is crying, but you’re not. Why? What’s coming up short?
A practice technique I like to do is rewriting the passage into something that works for me with as few changes as possible.
The Aldera middle school type of bashing fic (+Dadmight)
The authors love to go over the top with it and I’m❤️
i know this is just one post on tumblr but i am BEGGING people who can to be loud about strange world.
it is so fucking unfair for disney to not properly promote this movie at all and for it to bomb so badly in theaters like it’s doing just because it actually had genuinely good poc and queer rep! i am SEETHING about how they intentionally set it up to fail and i can’t imagine how the people who worked on the movie feel!
please be loud about it! please go see it if you can, tell your friends to see it, post about it on social media, get it trending, get as many people to see it as possible!
let the idiots at the top know we WANT better representation in movies!
it's transparently obvious that they did zero promotion on this movie. my entire twitter timeline was people going "I've never heard of this until today?" plus a movie theater employee confirming they never saw any attempt to promote the movie:
After drowning in Encanto and Turning Red and Lightyear promos, and getting a decent amount of Raya promos - all films with prominent characters of color, including black women in Lightyear's case - it kind of seems like a specific slight to the one movie featuring an unmissable black/white interracial marriage and a biracial queer lead who, spoilers! actually gets an (also interracial!) romance on-screen.
I'm sure tumblr will be quick to attribute Disney's mistreatment of the film to the cute teen m/m subplot, but don't sleep on the interracial relationship aspect - it's not a fluke that the Respect for Marriage Act had to insist on protections for both same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. It's both! It's both.
Even looking to Disney's most famous interracial relationship that features a black person - namely Tiana and Naveen - they followed the same pattern as the movie Hitch famously did, by making the black character's love interest neither black nor white - black/black is seen as making the whole movie a "black movie," i.e. alienating white audiences, while black/white would be even more of a source of controversy than a black princess alone had been.
Now here we are, over a decade later, and Disney's still scared to promote a movie where one protagonist is in a black/white marriage and the other protagonist is that guy's biracial kid.
Radio ads, huh? You know... the one type of ad where you can't see what the characters look like.
The only place I’ve seen trailers for this was Youtube- a place where there’s still a “skip ads” button that I assume most people use- and those trailers very much did not give any information about the movie, when I actually let the ad play through. They seemed like just... clips of funny quips with no hint of what the plot was beyond what can be gleaned from the title, and not even a hint about who or what the characters’ relationships are or... any of the things that might tell me why I would want to watch the movie. I think I might’ve seen ONE trailer, months ago, that actually explained anything about the story at all?? And I watch a lot of stuff on Youtube, and get a lot of Disney ads on Youtube, and still only saw a very few ads for the movie. I saw ads for Lightyear approximately every three videos and yet have only seen ads for Strange Worlds... a dozen times since I saw the first one, which was the longer trailer that I only remembered seeing once I heard the movie was doing badly- I hadn’t seen the trailer enough times for it to be memorable, or to associate it with being the same movie as the weird clip show trailers I’d seen recently.
Essentially, even in the places they did actually promote the film visually, they did so very poorly, and they seem to have only promoted it visually in a place almost no one would actually watch the ad.
please tell me im not the only one who remembers that photoset/gif that went around where it has the final scenes of death note where light is trying to defend himself but someone replaced the text so it was him teaching them how to swim

























