tgis is so fucking funny to me. they accidentally Rock Lee'd a retired racehorse

imagine youre a fat horse and your new neighbour is a personal trainer

horse that reads Marcus Aurelius

I was wrong. they didnt rock lee him. this horse is literally Gai. and i wish he was my dad

bird post commissions are OPEN!

this has been…a hell of the month for The Bird. outside of trying to care for the 10000 cats dumped at my house, i was put out of work for two weeks due to contract negotiations, and i live paycheck to paycheck…and then my car broke down, making me unable to drive for DoorDash or other services, which is my side income (and how i was planning to make enough for my bills!). so, once again, i’m opening myself to as many commissions as possible!

bird commissions are a fun way to get a post about a bird you love, or have one made for a loved one - posts like this one or this one. the site i use, KOFI, has a minimum tip of $3 - that’s enough to get you a bird! just check my blog with the search tool first to make sure i haven’t already made a post about the bird you’re interested in, and then submit the bird you’d like me to post about with your tip (or other animal, bird related subject, whatever) and i’ll get to work! I’m taking art commissions too if that’s more your speed - take a look here.

there’s no pressure to do this - i greatly enjoy posting birds, and the blog will always remain free for all. however, if you’re in the place to do so (and you want a custom bird post), it’s appreciated! i don’t make any revenue from using tumblr itself/enshittification of the blog, nor will i ever seek that out.

TLDR: Use my KOFI if you’d like a bird post, for as low as $3! :]

dahlia loves putting bertie in situations because he's her favourite nephew. agatha enjoys putting bertie in situations because he's light incarnate and she's evil. anoria loves putting bertie in situations because of the lesbian gay man animosity. the drones love putting bertie in situations because he's the most handsome and rich one of the bunch and they need to bring him down. also they need help. swans love putting bertie in situations because there is an ancient swan-wooster feud likely dating back to before the woosters were even at agincourt. stiffy, nobby, bobby, and pauline just want to watch the world burn. madeline doesnt want bertie in situations... that's her little would-be specific dream rabbit slash galahad that can never be... the poor lamb has suffered enough... florence loves putting bertie in situations because she's doing experiments on how malleable he is. jeeves, though he would never admit it, has exactly the same motivations as florence, with the small addition of feudal spirit bashing against a healthy dose of desire to flip the master servant dynamics in power if not actual appearance. also he loves that idiot and likes to rescue said damsel from the soup.

i dont understand people who never reread a book or rewatch a movie or series. the best art will always improve upon being revisited. girl. let it reveal more of itself to you.

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan

i saw someone say nobody needs to know what a .txt file is anymore. what the fuck is the world coming to

unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school

things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)

[ID. A drawing of Ford, Dipper, Mabel and Stan celebrating the 8th night of Hanukkah.  Ford has constructed a menorah made out of lightsabers, in alternating blue and green colors.  He is replacing the central, shamash “candle”, and is wearing a sweater that says “Axial Tilt: the Reason for the season”; and he is grinning at Dipper.  Dipper is grinning at the menorah, and he is wearing a sweater with a blue cycloptopus whose arms, holding candles, form a menorah. He is holding a mug with two dreidels on it, and the caption “They see me rollin’”.  Next is Mabel, holding a tray of sufganiyot donuts. She is wearing a sweater with a calico cat on it, surrounded by chocolate gelt, with the words “Meowzel Tov” around it.  Finally, Stan is grinning at Mabel, and holding a tray of latkes.  He is wearing a white apron adorned with menorahs and stars of David, and that says, “I love you a latke”. End ID.)

Happy Eighth Night of Hanukkah with the Pines!

Finally finished the piece I started before the first night of Hanukkah, but couldn’t get done… and it’s just as well, because having had the idea for the lightsaber menorah, it looks a lot better when all of them are lit, I think? 

I can’t really take credit for that (my inspiration was the “Keep the Han in Hanukkah” Star Wars sweater, seen in one of @danidery‘s delightful collections, and then I found some refs online); or for the various sweater ideas or Stan’s apron, as I just looked up “tacky Hanukkah sweaters”.  Mabel’s was partly inspired by this wonderful Hanukkah-cats art.  Ford’s “Axial Tilt: the Reason for the Season” sweater calls back to my earlier holiday piece, and while there are many versions for sale if you google it, the one that inspired me is here.

I’m going with the idea that Stan was put in charge of the latkes (made with love and some of his shoulder hair, no doubt), while Mabel made the sufganiyot… and Ford made the lightsabers. 

Tonight is the eight night of Hanukkah. Chag Hanukkah Sameach!

(orig posted Dec. 2019)

TIL winged eyeliner is equally hard to draw on the computer as it is on your face

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

reblog if you love archive of our own and how they firmly refuse to let censorship have any place on their platform

Controversial opinion, but I think it's good to have stories about how people who have done terrible, horrible things can and should try to become better. Especially in societies/under governments that demonize and dehumanize criminals as a whole. Writing off any group of people as irredeemable is wrong and runs the risk of parroting fascist ideals.

Awwww Cree's are boring, I know of môniyaw, which comes from the word Montreal, and wâpiskwiyâs, which means white meat/flesh.

“Bamboo is antifungal”

Because it’s rayon

“Eucalyptus fabric is cooling!”

Yeah, because it’s rayon

“We make clothing called seacell out of seaweed!”

Yeah I looked on your website it’s made by the lyocell process, which means-

-wait for it-

Listen. There is a list of actual plant fibers that are directly made into fabric: cotton, linen, ramie, some hemp. I’m sure I’m missing a couple.

But if you’re wondering “huh how did they turn that plant material into fabric,” 99% of the time? It’s RAYON.

All rayon is made by putting plant material in chemical soup, dissolving out everything but the cellulose, and turning the cellulose into filaments/fibers.

The source of the cellulose has zero effect on the eventual fabric.

Rayon made from bamboo or eucalyptus or seaweed is not any better than rayon from any other sources.

Don’t let companies mislead you!

Hold on I need to DuckDuckGo something

Damn this was supposed to be a joke but turns out it’s hard to get scientifically rigorous comparisons of environmental impact across textile products from a casual search. “It’s all fucking rayon” appears mostly true but also I’m finding plenty of claims that it’s more sustainable than cotton anyway.

But that’s not what this post was actually about anyway so like

So it's worth separating out two things here:

This post is mostly about the first thing. A lot of companies are giving rayon many many different names as a way of disguising that It's Just Rayon, and claiming the fabric has special qualities.

But cellulose is cellulose. The process of extruding it into filaments and making those filaments into fibers/yarn/fabric is what gives it different qualities: some rayon is silky, some is fuzzy, etc.

It's all great at absorbing sweat, and it all takes longer to dry, and it insulates okay until it gets damp at which point it's worse than wearing nothing, which is why it's often blended into other things. The really nice tops I have from Uniqlo's Heattech line are a blend of a couple of synthetics and rayon. They're warm for being so thin and stretchy, but don't make me sweaty-feeling at all. (In a conversation among people with ADHD I found out I'm not the only one who wears them nearly daily for 3/4ths of the year lol.)

The irony of how often it's compared to polyester in the notes of this post is that polyester can also be made into a billion different textures. I have polyester that feels like wearing a plastic tarp, but I also own polyester that's light and breezy and totally comfy in boiling heat. I also have some very soft polyester fleece, as many people do. It's all a matter of how the filaments are extruded and how they're made into fabric.

But to get into the environmental stuff:

People get really into which fabrics are more "sustainable."

And rayon currently is made, 99% of the time, via one of two processes: viscose and lyocell (Tencel is a brand name for the lyocell process). Viscose is an older method and far more common, to the point that if a fabric doesn't specify that it's lyocell (or cuproammonium) you can probably assume it's viscose. Viscose is, generally speaking, far more polluting and hazardous to the humans working in the factory as well. Lyocell uses what's called a "closed-loop" method, so it puts out way fewer pollutants. It's also more expensive, generally speaking. There is such a thing as "ecoviscose" but I haven't looked into it.

(Modal just means rayon made from beech trees and afaict doesn't differentiate which process. Cupro is made using a less-common process called "cuproammonium," and I'm not sure how polluting it is, but apparently in China it's sometimes called "ammonia silk" which is wild.)

Rayon does have two definite advantages, despite everything I said up there:

BUT THAT ALL SAID: every fabric requires something shitty, quite frankly. Cotton takes a TON of water and usually pesticides. Silk requires a lot of farming of mulberry and then electricity to warm the places where the silkworms live and also you have to cook the silkworms alive so they don't cut the fibers. Linen requires its own chemical soup to be turned into usable fibers unless you're making it from flax the old fashioned way which requires a lot of time and a shit-ton of effort. (Like seriously there's rippling, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling. And THEN you can spin it into thread.) Wool requires a lot of land etc for sheep, but also any wool item you own that's machine washable has had the barbs melted off the fibers with chemicals, and in many cases is also coated with a resin!

And that's not getting into dying. But if you've ever dyed fabric at home you know that it usually requires careful handling and in many cases goggles. Those chemicals are often toxic as fuck.

If you're trying to be sustainable in your clothing choices, the fact is that the absolute best thing you can do is:

"What fiber is it made of" just matters way fucking less than buying fewer items of clothing and using them until they wear out.

But most people don't want to do those things. They want to know which brand of clothes is "sustainable."

The sustainable thing is to buy and throw away less clothes. That's it.

Toy Story 3 (2010) dir. Lee Unkrich