Reblogged johannestevans
Reblogged shofarsogood
every single day I think about how american black vultures are known for engaging in interspecific allopreening (preening between different species)
and they have a specific relationship with crested caracaras, in which the black vultures assist them by not only preening them after meals but also leading them to food in the first place, while the caracaras assist the black vultures by acting as a warning signal in case of danger
and while this is more typical of black vultures, this is not common at all for any member of the falconidae family— it’s a special bond!
yet another post in favor of vultures everyone , hope you enjoy:) and I implore you to do some more research on these incredible birds !!
EDIT: I meant interspecific allopreening! excuse my typo!
EDIT 2: black vultures do not have a superior sense of smell to caracaras, sorry for the misunderstanding!
Reblogged fraterrisus
Reblogged shofarsogood
^^^ This. The COMBINED population of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) is only about 2.6 million. That's not small town numbers, sure, but compared to NYC (20.1 million in the metropolitan area)? LA? (12.9 million "")?
Minneapolis is being made an example of because they're the most bitesized target, and if you're doing a shock and awe campaign like this you need to not choke on national tv.
(And they're still having to fight for it. Minneapolis isn't taking this laying down, and more power to them for their courage.)
Just as a side note, ICE raids are currently also happening in Columbus OH- which is double the size of Minneapolis but still much smaller than Chicago or LA.
posts that make you think
Reblogged geminisee
Looking at what national news outlets are up to right now, one might not realize a whole major US metropolitan area is, you know, sort of under attack by paramilitary forces. Wild.
im sorry the What is being What now???
While it's not going unreported entirely, what's been happening in Minnesota and in Minneapolis–Saint Paul in particular since Renee Good was murdered is not getting the attention it should be.
There are already 2000 gangsters from DHS deployed, and "hundreds" or "1000" more are on the way, depending on which Trumpland person you ask. As a point of reference, the Twin Cities' actual police total just under 1200 (600 in Minneapolis and 590 in Saint Paul according to the depts' sites).
The feds there are more or less attacking people at random. They've gone door-to-door for "citizenship checks" (completely illegal). They've knocked doors down when residents haven't complied (obviously also completely illegal). In addition to abducting and brutalizing the immigrants they come across during their rampages, they've done the same to US citizens of color and are also harassing, stalking and physically attacking observers.
Here are some local sources:
ICE intensifies Twin Cities operation after killing of Renee Good, protests (MPR News—link won't embed)
Privacy advocates: ICE using private data to intimidate observers and activists (MPR News—link won't embed)
Below are some videos from observers. I'm linking to Bluesky because that's where I saw them, though many are originally from/also available elsewhere. I apologize for the rancid formatting below but it was the best I could do quickly-ish. The images are previews; click the links in the timestamps to watch.
Elliott Payne (@elliottpayne.org) January 12, 2026 at 10:49 PM
Mickey Kuhns (@mickeykuhns.bsky.social) January 12, 2026 at 10:58 AM
Dumb Meg (@dmbmeg.bsky.social) Jan 11, 2026 at 6:10 PM (You need to be logged in to see this—while it's unclear what happened to the victim in this one, there's no reported death so far; CW for heightened violence)
Dom Ervolina (@dominicervolina.com) Jan 11, 2026 at 8:42 PM (You need to be logged in to see this)
Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 12, 2026 at 4:37 PM
Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 12, 2026 at 7:22 PM
Sundae Gurl (@sundaedivine.lol) January 10, 2026 at 4:39 AM
Sherrilyn Ifill (@sifill.bsky.social) January 12, 2026 at 9:19 PM
SaltyBitchables (@saltybitchables.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 4:19 PM
News2Share has more on YouTube:
I also recommend checking out this guy's work:
Reblogged criminalizegolf
I want to be very clear on this. You can be out drinking with your friends on Friday night and dead on Sunday because of meningitis. Does that sound a little specific? Guess why I have such a specific scenario in mind.
And getting vaccinated is an easy way to prevent that. There is no medical reason to stop recommending that vaccine. There's no new study that shows that it's unsafe, there's no replacement that's better. This is literally the government making its citizenry less safe for no reason.
This is the most accurate vaccine schedule as laid out by the AAP, who have stated that they think JFKjr is bullshit: 
If you have a kid, either download this or print it and confirm with your pediatrician that this is what you want to follow.
Reblogged criminalizegolf
horror movies are so much scarier when the actors look like an average sampling of the human population. and the house is a little messy
when everyone has veneers and the house is pristine and tastefully decorated: (in the back of my mind) these people were hand-selected for visual appeal. this is a set. this is a story
when the actor has a little acne and there are dirty dishes in the sink: aaaaahhhhh this is just like Me and My House ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!
when everyone has veneers and the house is pristine and tastefully decorated: (in the front of my mind) these people had it coming
Reblogged prismatic-bell
This is one criminally underrated Batman villain.
SERIOUSLY THOUGH SHE WAS MY FAVORITE BATMAN VILLAIN
Her physical condition didn’t allow her to age
No one took her seriously as an actress
And even when she was trying to get into a happy romantic relationship (albeit with another villain) he still couldn’t take her seriously as a consenting, sexually active and romantically interested adult
That’s a lot of blows to someone’s psyche
and Babydoll is both a sympathetic villain and a formidable one
I remember this episode fucked me up a a kid.
And man, do I wish we could see this Batman again: the Batman that consoles his villains, because the majority (if not all) of them are mentally ill people. And Batman knows this and wants them healthy again, not punished and GOD definitely not dead.
poppypicklesticks
Baby Doll is so underrated as a Batman villain
but her episode was perfect
Batman: The Animated Series The story of one fucked up, traumatized little boy, doing his best to help other fucked up traumatized people.
albawrites
The Batman that cares about the inmates is my favorite. He doesn’t put up with their shit, but he does try to reach out here and there and he’s as human as he can be to them.
When Harley was re-institutionalized, he got her that dress she wanted.
In the comics based on B:tAS, there was a time during Christmas that there was snow and it was Mr. Freeze’s fault, and he was making it snow because Christmas was his anniversary with Nora and she LOVED it when it snowed on Christmas, so Batman let him finish mourning before calmly taking him back to Arkham.
He never, ever gives up on Harvey possibly recovering.
Sure, Batman is going to throw punches and do what it takes to take these guys down when they’re hurting or threatening people. And he’s not going be a complete bleeding heart; he has to protect the innocent. He’s going to take them down and take them back to Arkham, but it doesn’t mean he’s incapable of being a bit human to the ones who deserve it.
Batman needs become human again
Because it needs to be here:
lehrastar
Remember that time a young girl with near god-like psychic powers threatened to destroy reality and the only one that could stop her was Batman because he had a previous encounter with her and was tasked with killing her to restore reality.
But instead, Batman sat with her on a swing and kept her company as the girl’s psychic powers slowly killed her.
No?
i-am-the-karkat-media-worldwide
Fuck you people making me emotional
The. Batman.
filbypott
This is MY Batman, not the murderous fascist they’ve made him into.
ace-spacepup
It’s ridiculous to think that this isn’t what studios want from our heroes. This is dark and sad without being grim-dark. We need our heroes to be compassionate. There’s enough darkness in the world already. Give us our heroes who care and truly fight for justice.
It’s like they forgot that batman is, at his core, a Noir character.
And what makes Noir a good style, is that the protagonist never gives up and allows themself to wallow in the darkness around them. The world is dark, and bleak, and cold hearted, yes.
But the protagonist fights against that.
Fights for their humanity.
Claws their way out of that muck, and even if the ending is as dour and bleak as the world around them, the Noir Hero shoulders that burden and carries on.
A battered lantern with a flickering light inside them. Refusing to let it burn out.
That’s what Batman should be.
Reblogged science-bastard
October 30 Crying Madam | Taken By Slipfvst
Reblogged johannestevans
The Butterfly Boy: a Fairytale.
A fairytale about the feeling of waiting on the edge of massive existential societal tragedies you are powerless to prevent, the way that we scapegoat the victims of broader societal failures as if they were the Cause, and the way that we treat children who will never grow into a "conventional" adulthood.
Thank you to everyone who followed along as I was sharing the pages for these past couple months! <3 :_:
Oh it’s lovely!
Reblogged xclowniex
self-awareness check, list five things you like that aren't media pieces in the tags now ‼️
Reblogged madgastronomer
My specialty at work (eg, what I tend to get thrown into) is wrangling clever but extremely poorly behaved children. (The children are adolescent, but children nonetheless.) They tend to be boys. They tend to have ADHD. (It's possible that the focus on the clever rules out the ADHD girls, who have cleverly developed better masking skills by adolescence.)
The current bright and terrible-on-purpose disaster, A, is aware of the ADHD diagnosis but has apparently been told nothing about the disability. So a lot of our conversations go like this:
Me: Well, I'd ask you why you decided to start making richly detailed but extremely inappropriate jokes during class, but I'm pretty sure the answer is that someone started yelling at you for doing it before you realized that you were.
A, leaning backward, looking concerned: Are you following me?
Me: Yes, that's what I do with the spare time I don't have during the day, follow aggravating children around. We have so few of them here.
A, put out either because I've called him aggravating or because he's not special and aggravating: Sarcasm isn't very nice, Ms. T.
Me, sarcastically: I'm so sorry. Maybe you looked at the work first, thought boring, and then decided to be an enormous brat.
A: You can read minds?!
--
Me: Clearly we need executive dysfunction strategies for you, because if we don't get in front of it you'll be an adult who sits on their sofa for forty minutes yelling at herself to do the dishes and never does them.
A, trying to politely muffle laughter: Are you doing all right, Ms. T?
Me: Out of dishes, but fine. What's working in your classes? Your Literature grade is good, why are you doing the reading?
A looks left. Right. Up. At his phone.
Me: ... You aren't doing the reading, are you? The other kids ask questions because they don't understand it, and you figure out what it has to be about from the answers and never read.
A: Are you in my Lit class??
--
Me: Okay, look, ADHD brains are weird, and we tend to get them from our families, so these -
A, immediately: My dad.
Me, derailed from my drug interaction speech: Yeah, okay. When your dad has coffee, does he get calmer?
A, backing away: You're stalking my whole family now?!
Reblogged studiosaraeileen
you know who’s gay? paul the real estate novelist who never had time for a wife and davey who’s still in the navy and probably will be for life
New headcannon: everyone in that song is gay except the Piano Man who has no idea he’s playing at a gay bar and the staff and regulars have a betting pool on how long he’ll take to finally figure it out. So far John is ahead.
freshdonus
“The manager gives me a smile ‘cause he knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see” also implies that the Piano Man is possibly an incredibly attractive but oblivious himbo, and if you listen to the rest of it imagining that, this all fits a little too well.
this makes too much sense. Also, the full quote is “Now John at the bar is a friend of mine. He gets me my drinks for free. And he’s quick with a joke or to light up your smoke. But there’s someplace that he’d rather be” Yes, your bed, he wants to be on your bed honey, that’s not a joke, he is flirting with you.
Lighting another man’s cigarette is some old-school gay cruising.
Billy Joel actually addressed this interpretation!
Reblogged tolkienillustrations
To understand what it means to have white privilege, look at what happened to Renee Good.
As you can see, white privilege doesn't mean 100% safety and doesn't mean 100% compassion from society.
It only means that you're able to not notice until you realize that it could happen to you.
Many white people suddenly realize now that they're in more danger than they previously thought. They now know that even if they're not the primary targets of fascism, fascists will still murder them and find some excuse to justify it.
When you look at how black and brown people feel about Renee Good being murdered, they're clearly angry, and they clearly want to abolish ICE. But unlike white people, there's no sudden out of nowhere realization of danger. That's because to them, this has been happening since forever. Police have been murdering them and finding excuses to justify it. This is nothing new to them.
Reblogged cipheramnesia
if any minors are following me
always make sure to start forging parents' signatures on the first day of class. that way, your teachers won't know that you've been forging signatures for the rest of the year
hey I'm seeing some concerned parents and teachers in the notes, and I just want to say:
lmaooooo
Reblogged dragon-in-a-fez
okay so this is what people don’t understand about toph’s arc. when you’re disabled, you don’t want to accept help from anyone; you don’t want their pity, you don’t want to feel like a burden, you don’t want to be belittled, you don’t want to be “special” in all the wrong ways. toph was always closest to sokka, and her putting her full trust in him as she is completely helpless is a far greater sign of emotional growth than had she been able to figure out the situation on her own. keep in mind that toph is still very active and capable and badass in the scenes leading up to the climax, and moments before they crash and fall, sokka praises her for her talent and genius. it’s that balance that makes this important. she knows that when sokka shields her from falling rubble, or guides her across the airship, he still knows her to be capable, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t also recognize her weaknesses. in this moment, toph does need protection, and to ignore that in favor of her pride would be folly. but toph doesn’t feel patronized. she knows that sokka knows that she is a whole human person, which is all she’s ever wanted to be seen as. she’s letting herself be helped, and she’s letting herself be loved.
Reblogged derinthescarletpescatarian
Linguistics question for uou: How does your stance re: changing of a word apply to the instances where a layperson's misunderstanding of a word *does* change its meaning?
One that comes to mind is "nimrod." Originally meaning a skillfull hunter, its sacrastic use in Bugs Bunny cartoons to mean "idiot" or "buffoon" when describing Elmer Fudd caused it to shift to an almost opposite meaning.
Thoughts?
I’m not a linguist, and I’m all for language evolving.
“Nimrod” is a cute case study. If you think about it in terms of evolution, there were NO pressures on keeping “Nimrod” reserved as a legendary Biblical hunter. It wasn’t being used for a specific working purpose; it wasn’t preserved in communities, anchored to practical duties, part of people’s living vocabs. It was able to drift because it was a literary reference, and found a funnier purpose.
“Favouring an injured limb”, on the other hand, is a descriptor actively being used by communities that talk about injured limbs. It has material utility and meets a need. It has a clear definition and rationale. It’s under continuous practical use. Flipping the definition, or claiming that it has another definition in YOUR head, just isn’t the same linguistic pressure as all the people using it correctly for material purposes. Just because the public aren’t familiar with its use, and are assigning it vibes based on other senses of the word, doesn’t mean that the word is up for drift.
“Teehee, I think it should mean the opposite thing!” is not hugely helpful or useful given the pragmatic gap between “active use” and “misreading”. People are USING it to mean something else. In fact, claiming that “the opposite meaning is just as valid” is clearly causing a lot of confusion in the notes of that post - is this helpful when talking about limb injury?
Further, “Language evolves” means that language evolves.
I do not believe that “language evolves” means:
- Illiteracy wins wherever it secures a majority.
- Vibes-based readings are just as valid as genuine literacy.
- Misunderstandings matter more than material usage.
- Laypeople’s confusion can and should change the meaning of a technical term that a community are actually actively using in a different sense.
- Being genuinely wrong, with sufficient confidence, means you get to declare yourself correct, because of your own personal feelings, and further,
- that this extra-special-double-down wrongness is ESPECIALLY allowed, suddenly, when it comes to processing information, because “it’s how language works.”
- The apparently unchallenged genuine belief that this is how language functionally works.
- The belief that language works on Internet-points rules and “language evolves” is a magical backdoor to making “both sides” arguments.
- The belief that a grandma doing this confers additional respectability, and that respectability is the same thing as being correct.
- That a “definition” of a word that meets no useful criteria for a definition - a vibes-based interpretation that is not defined, observed, recorded anywhere, agreed upon, serving any purpose, or meeting any need (because it’s just vibes and people being wrong) is really BASICALLY the same thing as the existing definition, which actually meets those criteria.
- Because vibes.
- That it doesn’t matter if your personal interpretation is materially unhelpful, not useful, more confusing, directly contradicts the technical use, and is generally materially worse than if you just used the existing word properly - because it’s YOUR personal interpretation.
- That “I feel like this should be the case” is equal to things actually being the case.
- That, in general, “vibes” are as important and valid as actual material professional diagnostic use of a word.
- Both sides of a directly contradictory argument are equally valid and correct - even in a case where one side is bringing evidence, and the other is bringing a misunderstanding based on other definitions of a word.
Those are all things that people on this post seem to think are included in things like “language evolves and meanings change 😌”. I do not agree that they are included. I know that people feel they do. That’s where my stance diverges.
My stance is that I literally don’t approve of the sentiments embodied in those bullet points. I don’t believe they’re rooted in good judgment, or a clear understanding of linguistics. I don’t believe they improve communication or clarity, or meet a material need, or plug a communication gap. I don’t think that “favour” is THAT confusing, when the limb-injury definition is freely available on the same public internet that people are on right now. I don’t believe that “that’s just how language works” is a super-special case where everyone ✨ magically gets to be right ✨ because it’s how their grandma used it, when we recognise that nothing else operates like that. I don’t generally think that being loudly wrong is just as correct as being quietly right.
And I have never seen any evidence that “language evolves,” used by people who work with language, genuinely means ANY of those things. “Language evolves” is stuff like “nimrod” and “chaise lounge.” It is not “myeloma and melanoma are the same thing” or “misreading is just as valid as reading.”
I don’t really have a horse in that fight. but I do think that people who believe in those bullet points are quite dreary, and I do not invite them to my dinner parties.
When I was a child, I thought "the test was positive" meant you didn't have cancer or whatever scary disease the doctors were afraid you might have. Right up until I said something about it out loud and my parents corrected my understanding.
Imagine refusing to update my internal dictionary and running around telling people they don't have cancer when they do, or vice versa, because "that's what the phrase sounds like to me."