Today's Seal Is: Making Contact With An Unknown Beast

I have never seen "wtf" so clearly expressed on an animals face

He looks so fucking upset I can't breathe

yeah man we can tell

he looks like hes on the verge of sobbing

How clearly does the point need to be made that "police officer" is just a fucking job, one with minimal training and minimal monitoring. It is NOT some kind of promise of honesty, truth, or heroism. It is a bunch of assistant managers with extremely powerful weapons. IF you can understand "pedophiles choose to be priests and teachers so they can get to children", IF you understand "arsonists choose to be firefighters so they can be present at their own crimes" - then you can ALSO understand "people who are bigoted, violent, and power-hungry choose to be cops for the opportunities the job presents" and you can ALSO understand "any occupational culture that chooses fraternity over justice - and the allowance of violence in the name of a unified front - is therefore siding with their worst representatives"

by the way. the average time to train to be a police officer? 19 weeks. A little over 4 months. many states only require a high school diploma and no further education. there is often no requirement of any form of previous experience - no interning or observations. it took me 3 years of experience and a master's degree for me to get my job in writing. hell: in my state, it takes at least 6 months with a permit before people are allowed to drive a car.

being a police officer is an entry-level job, and we are handing them weapons. nothing about their occupation automatically makes them smarter, quicker, braver, or in any way elite. there is very little in their onboarding process that would allegedly "weed out" the worst of the applicants - and once they are part of the fraternity, they're not gonna leave.

we have been taught to respect, honor, and worship them by virtue of a job title they barely even had to try for. they sign no contract, swear no vow, and make no promise to the general public. it is a community that is extolled above others and given virtually no oversight. think about the kind of people who would be attracted to that opportunity. the adage: power corrupts. absolute power corrupts absolutely.

circling this back around to say FUCK ICE, and fuck you if you willingly support them just because they're "a federal agent" and therefore "deserve respect".

ICE officers are a fucking privatized militia they do not have authority over united states citizens and none of their so-called "purpose" requires live rounds and weapons. It is entirely made up of fascist racist dickbags with no fucking training. they are lower than scum. they're police-school dropouts with no fucking spine. there is no honor in their position. they accomplish nothing but terrorizing communities they don't even fucking live in.

Any!! occupation or government !! that chooses fraternity over justice - and the allowance of violence in the name of a unified front - is therefore siding with their worst representatives.

Credit: meg_langton_

oh hey i have one for this

tumblr theyre saying that youre dead, again

Source

Beyond parody

As far as these motherfuckers are concerned, we are in excess of requirements and should just get on with the dying in droves.

I don’t like being the kind of person who lives for the day when we’re reading someone’s obituary, but. Apparently that’s who I am.

Just fucking drop dead of your own hatefulness, you piece of shit. I’ll throw a fucking party.

the current state of fandom needs to be old yellered immediately. im loading up the shotgun as we speak

this is the PERFECT addition bunny omg

Oh hai my faves, you must know how much I love youuuu

@pollydoodles @carry-the-sky @ninzied @anogete @bekala @elen-tari2 @grimeysociety @absentlyabbie @bloomsoftly @cinnaatheart @leftennant @mouseymightymarvellous @onebatch2batch @redbelles @ragwitch @shu-of-the-wind @starsandatoms @onbearfeet @yespumpkindoodlesthings @hari-redtoes @taraljc @hannahsfandos @seibelsays-andwrites @sarahbeniel @sachertortes @shireness-says

(List is nonexhaustive)

(ETA yeah I did it again with the tagging everyone ever)

When I told my surgeon that I named my cancerous lump Jeff Bezos, she wrote this on the discharge papers after my second lumpectomy.

Yeah it’s not just oncologists either. The things my gyn/hormone specialist has chosen to record, y’all. Like, when we figured out my persistent lightheadedness was due to low hormones and he put me on estradiol, and then I got diagnosed (spoiler: am cured nao), I told him that in spite of the increased cancer risk he would pry my HRT from my cold, dead hands… AND HE RECORDED IT VERBATIM. People be thinking I’m even weirder than I actually am now, doc. Thanks?

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A customer contacted our team with questions, and then finished their email with: "I am daunted by the complexities and unknowns." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

Reblog if you are daunted by the complexities and unknowns

where in the HELL did that horse come from

I can’t speak for other social media webbed sites but I really enjoy how tumblr seems to just completely spin a wheel on whatever media is hot right now. Like yeah sometimes it’s a new show that’s big and actively coming out but also sometimes there will be a solid month where half my dash is Columbo memes. Defy authority. Get really into an book from the 1800s. Watch shows that haven’t aired in 40 years. Celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. Become unmarketable

oh shit i almost missed it!

Indeed! That was a close shave!

reblog to give prev a fUCKING BREAK in 2026

‘Thoth and the Chief Magician’, 1925. Evelyn Pau

I love tumblr. I fucking love tumblr. Where else am I going to find shit like this

Why is the chief magician on their phone. Bit disrespectful if you ask me

I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?

If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.

In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.

They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.

And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.

It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.

Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.

And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.

Young Justice

Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences

#WhereIsRey (initial)

#WhereIsRey (ongoing)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was designed to be the opposite of The Last Jedi

You’re all sitting on the hot take of the decade tbh

And yet when they fond out that boys were watching MLP:FIM in droves, they had NO PROBLEM with it.

#SONS OF ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!#LITERALLY SONS OF ANARCHY IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF THIS LIKE EVER#kurt sutter wrote that show for MEN and ended up with an overwhelmingly female audience#because he’s actually a good writer and knows how to develop characters well and wrote excellent female characters#but once he realized that his audience was almost entirely women he literally took it out on tara and gemma in the show#but like tara specifically#he resented her character for being a huge draw for female viewers so he tore her development to shreds and killed her#in the most brutal gut wrenching way possible#kurt sutter you will pay for your crimes#i actually wrote a manifesto about this on one of my old blogs i should try to find it sldkjsldfjsdljf#long post (via@m-oonknight)

OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.

The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.

Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”

I think it would be harder for us to find examples of when this DIDNT happen than when it did. It happens all the time.

Doesn’t stop it from boggling the mind

(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)

Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.

Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.

(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)

I think a lot about an interview I heard with Bo Burnham a few years ago, where he talks about this phenomenon with his own work. He gained a large audience of teenage girls, and people in comedy spaces would look down on him for that or say what a shame it was, but he responded differently:

“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”

Instead of trying to change his comedy, he decided to lean into and celebrate the audience that he actually had by making a movie specifically about the experiences of a teenage girl. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how he got there, but also to acknowledge how rare that reaction is.

Slight tangent - all of this is true of the sports (and related entertainment) industry as well. Female fans drive so much of the event attendance, media hype, and revenue, but it’s still viewed as Just For Men.

https://twitter.com/archeometrie/status/1170031822614474752?s=12

Classic rock

BTW I saw this and immediately thought “what if that’s what Stonehenge was for” and then I looked it up and apparently it’s an actual theory that holds up, they sound like massive dull bells that carry for a few miles.

please read this story of a man accidentally discovering his wife is the world's best Tetris player

[image description: an excerpt of text that says:

“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

“Oh, my!”

/end id]

TL;DR on the article

The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.

The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.

They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.

She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.

which, they later find out, is her second-best record

There was a decent but ultimately forgettable fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had a single moment that stuck with me.

The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.

I think about that a lot, and how for every apparently dominant competitor, there might be a fucking ronin out there somewhere capable of destroying them.

Always reblog tetris ronin lady