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there comes a point in a musician's discography where you're like "this is a jam but you need to stop dating assholes"

people tagging this taylor swift but like. i specified "jam"

That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.

It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.

The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.

It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.

They like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.

They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.

They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.

It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.

Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile - and for that purpose, you count as a cat.

This all makes me very happy to know.

When was I going to be informed that I was in a PM Seymour video? Was I just supposed to stumble into this information myself?

I'll be damned

Guess you could say you were put in some sort of zone…

After growing up during the I Can Haz Cheeseburger era, I'm glad that we as a society have progressed to the point of understanding that cats' internal narration should be extremely dignified and comically formal for a creature so dumb. They really are like

Sir, I fail to see which part of this situation you could possibly find amusing. Can you not see that I am stuck, trapped onto this couch by my own claw, and shall consequently die?

im trying to go to sleep but i cannotttttt stop thinking about this and laughing

Listen, we have to keep this thing circulating on the internet for at least another two decades, because I have to believe that one day that little girl will be grown enough to stumble upon it and She Will Explain

We’ve made it 5 years folks

Lucky 7

3 more years and she’ll be old enough for tumblr

Now that I finished playing Silksong I hopped on my old Hollow Knight save file to see how the game holds up after a couple of years. And it's great!

However, it's so funny to try Godhome again with Silksong muscle memory. Aside from having my brain rewired to the diagonal pogo, I keep doing stuff like dashing away from an attack and then walking away at a moderate pace because I keep expecting to automatically sprint (and get wrecked), or I keep messing up my heal timings, etc.

But the one thing that keeps cracking me up is trying to airstall with Drifter's Cloak. Which I obviously don't have. So I just keep comically dropping like a stone when I don't expect it lmao and it feels like:

No voice to Wilhelm-scream

in World War 1 around 8 million horses died but in World War 2 it was under a million which can only mean horses started to evolve bullet resistance

im sorry i couldnt just let these slide

predictions are locked in. 2026 is going to be a good one

boot up, Bitch

That reply is unexpectedly inspirational.

spent MONTHS looking for this stupid tumblr post bcuz i constantly want to reference it and it wouldn't come up no matter what i searched despite it being (what i thought) was a popular well-known tumblr post only to find that the original blog turned off reblogs and deactivated and that it only got 12k notes total. but im posting it anyway to preserve its legacy

this website’s easy watch. *dangles a bunch of greek gods like keys*

i know what i’m doing dw

Keep in mind I only know like. Two Greek gods by name. Homer is one of them, and he was good friends with Odysseus I think?

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“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

it’s seasonal lads

IT’S SEASONAL AGAIN LADS

‘Tis the season so I’ll reblog my absolute favorite Terry Pratchett quote ever

Happy holidays folks

welp

#The wisdom#The kind that sits on your chest heavily#And you don’t so much get over it as you learn to keep existing with its weight

Thank goodness it’s time to re-read Hogfather for this year.

Happy Hogswatch

It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.

He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.

Like, look at this stuff????

It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!

Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.

And then there's this one:

The Fantasy

For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.

The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.

But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.

Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.

This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.

"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.

"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.

"We often fantasized about Dick's joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles." - Al Bean, about The Fantasy.

There’s also Alexei Leonov, writer and artist and first person to conduct a spacewalk!

This is his art.

You can't forget this, the first art made in space.

March 1965, Alexei Leonov made this drawing only moments after narrowly surviving the very first space walk.

what is the january mood?

the whole "your [dead] pet got sent to live on a beautiful farm" euphemism used to confuse the heck out of me, bc when i was little my parents actually did send our dog to live on a farm

shutup shutup shutup yes i know it really happened bc WE GOT THE DOG BACK EVENTUALLY. i know i've trained you all not to trust my basic understanding of reality (it's mid at best) but this is not me once again being extremely naive, WE GOT THE DOG BACK LATER

*my autistic ass nodding along sincerely as my classmates sarcastically refer to "being sent to live on a farm upstate"* yeah like when my parents had to move for work and Bingo went to live with my uncle for two years

Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say "the ten hells" or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard "power word:scrunch" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

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