When a ceremonial monarch who largely didn't do anything died, tumblr cheered about it because she symbolised colonialism and imperialism. Not because of anything she personally did, but because of her *symbolism*.
When someone dies who personally presided over mass executions of political dissidents, oversaw as a political leader massive repression of women, religious minorities and ethnic minorities and helped organise genocide and civil war throughout the Middle East, only Iranian and Jewish tumblrs are saying anything.
Skewed priorities much?
I suggest that we start using the term ‘creatives’ instead of ‘content creators’ for authors/artists/gifmakers/podficcers for a few reasons, and chief among them are these;
we can’t always be our most productive, but there’s a terrible trend of fandom folks feeling bad if they don’t have something new to post every few weeks
you’re still a creative person even if you aren’t creating something at a given time, for whatever reason
and something it’s taken me far too long to learn myself: making things is not the rent you pay to be part of a community
What would the UK flag look like if it represented its constituent nations proportionally?
“I tell the landscape where we’re going.”
it's so annoying seeing posts about Jewish culture—cutesy posts about fighting with g-d that appeal to Christian atheists' religious trauma, posts with Jewish music, posts with pictures of beautiful Jews—getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of notes, but the moment someone makes a post about antisemitism—about how it's built in to Western society, about how it's insidious and creeping, about how you've probably internalized it, about the difficulties we face and the grief we feel—they fail to break jumblr containment. Don't get me wrong, I love that goyim are celebrating Jewish culture as something beautiful and wonderful, but that can't be all we are to you. We're real people with real problems that you can't just ignore in favor of reblogging posts about bagels or whatever
Better Ungulate than Never: The Hamtelopes
A small, but abundant and diverse herbivore common across the land during the Middle Rodentocene are the hamtelopes (family Cervimuridae), which are found on most of the continents by this point in the planet's history. Looking a fair bit like small ungulates, hamtelopes are browsers, feeding on higher vegetation such as bushes and shrubs, and thus avoid competition with grazing cavybaras when the two coexist on the same turf.
Among the many species of hamtelopes, the most remarkable is the Rusty Hamtelope (Erythrocervimys bambini), which is unmistakable due to its distinctive reddish-orange hue of its coat. On Earth, such a color for a forest-floor browser would be highly disavadvantageous, sticking the animal out into plain sight and leaving it vulnerable and visible to predators.
However, HP-02017 is distinguished by the presence of a second minor sun, Beta, that orbits further out from the main sun Alpha and for a large portion of the year is opposite the main star, making Beta appear by night and illuminate the landscape in a phenomenon called "Beta-twilight". Beta-twilight is when the rusty hamtelope is at its most active, as well as dawn and dusk: and in the fiery glows of sunrise and sunset, or the red-orange Beta-twilight landscape, the rusty hamtelope demonstrates that Earthly life can adapt even in conditions not normally found in Earth, camouflaging perfectly in the forest floor while the forest is bathed in a faint, scarlet hue.
But as remarkable as the rusty hamtelope is, the clade of hamtelopes is not merely limited to this one genus. Hamtelopes have reached peak diversity in the Middle Rodentocene, spanning several genera and dozens of species. Some, such as the long-legged ratzelles (Cervicricetus spp.) are daytime grazers of the forest floor, and indeed even share habitat with the rusty hamtelope by different times of activity to minimize competition. Others, such as the ramsters (Capramys spp.) are more at home in the alpine tundras and high plateaus, leaving a lifestyle akin to that of mountain goats, agile and surefooted as they climb up steep cliffs to graze on mountainside vegetation.
But by far the most unusual members are the toponies (Microhippoides spp.) which are plains-dwellers resembling tiny, tailless equids. What makes them particularly odd is how small they are, compared to the other genera: this in fact is due to competition with larger, bipedal hopping jerryboas that have usurped their niche out in the open plains. Able to travel longer distances with their more energy-efficient bounding gait and defend themselves from predation with sharp hind-limb claws, the jerryboas very quickly dominated the open grassland and savannah, leaving only the niche of small grazer vacant for the toponies.
As new lineages emerge and diversify in the Middle Rodentocene, their more divergent forms begin to clash with one another in ecological terms. In the end, some families will dominate, others will barely hang on and others will completely die out, as hamster diversity climaxes in the Rodentocene's halfway mark.
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SMH we Israelis blazed the trail for trans people in Eurovision and now people talking about the queer history of Eurovision either erase Dana International or refuse to mention what country she represented. It is clear that the international LGBT movement does not care for LGBT Israelis. The goy queer population of Europe came out to protest Israel at Eurovision for the temerity of *existing* but did not march in solidarity when LGBT Israelis protested against homophobia and transphobia in our government last year. I do not want to hear a single word about the importance of intersectionality or solidarity again from people who believe Jews and Israelis are exempt form either of them.
dana international 💕 israeli queer royalty 🇮🇱👸🏻
the first trans contestant and winner of eurovision !!!! 🇮🇱
Tallest of All: The Girats
The great success of the boingos across the plains and grassland of the Early Therocene would spell bad news for the hamtelopes. While enjoying a brief success in the Middle Rodentocene, they would eventually be outcompeted by the boingos, with a more-efficient means of locomotion and more-specialized teeth for eating tough grasses. As such, the hamtelopes would be pressured into other niches as they were pushed out of the plains: many would become forest and jungle herbivores, others would remain as small hare-like grazers in the plains, and only on isolated environments do the hamtelopes get to dominate with the absence of competition.
But one family of hamtelopes stubbornly stuck to the plains, and despite the abundance of competing boingos grew to megafaunal sizes. However, they reached higher up, into the treetops where the boingos could not reach, and so were selected to grow taller still, and so this trend reaches its logical conclusion in the Early Therocene, with the tallest hamsters ever to walk the planet: the girats.
Towering high-browsers that feed on the sparse trees in the open plains, the girats reach tremendous heights of up to 16 feet, with their long legs and even longer necks. They evolved prehensile lips and long, flexible tongues to grasp and pluck branches and stems from trees, while their incisors served as pruning shears to clip off leaves to be swallowed. With virtually no competition for these high leaves the girats dominate and thrive, managing a coexistence with the other grazers that drove off most of their smaller relatives.
Girats are mostly solitary, though occasionally gather in groups to seek out mates during the breeding season. Male girats are easily distinguished from females by the presence of large, keratinous horns sported on their protruding cheekbones, which they use in headbutting contests with other males, swinging their heads at each other and trying to inflict bruising whacks onto their rivals with their blunt, hammer-like horns.
At least a dozen species of girat range all across Nodera and Easaterra, where they vary in color and the arrangement of their horns. The axehorn girat (Altocervimys securiceros) is the most common species in Nodera, while its relative the trihorn girat (Giraffacricetus triceros) lives further south in the savannah of Nodera. Meanwhile in the tropical forests of central Easaterra lives the splendid girat (Procerocricetus magnificens), one of several species in the genus Procerocricetus that adapted to denser jungles instead of the open plains. Unlike their cousin the axehorn girat, the trihorn and splendid species possess sharper horns, due to the need of extra defenses with the increased number of larger predators further south, and as such are less aggressive toward their own species than the axehorns: with more pointed weaponry, a headbutting contest between two rival males can easily result to death for them both, and such they rarely fight unless absolutely necessary.
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And I unfollowed another person, a game creator I've been interested in. But this time it wasn't surprising, as it's only a more extreme version of what they said in 2021. I pretty much thought that account would say what they ended up saying; only they didn't open their mouth on it until today.
So far unfollowed two people over the war in Israel and Palestine. Thought that after the last conflict I had already sorted out who not to follow. At least none of them are mutuals, but one of them is a conlanger and linguist I've admired for so many years whose insights on PIE reconstruction have been of great interest to me.
I been having way too much fun with one of the Rider-Culture’s many non-war-games, goat-pulling! Inspired by the game of the same name played by many cultures of central Asia throughout history and still popular today! Though because the ‘horses’ in this case have a little more opinion and propensity for wrasslin’ it’s more like football than the real world counterpart. It’s a very popular game with the Rider centaurs as it combines their two other favorite pasttimes- racing and wrestling, depending on who has the goat!
In more organized games the goal is to take control of a stuffed goat/sheep-skin and keep control long enough to get it into the possession of a family/herd mate that’s on the sidelines watching (or doing something else when they get pelted by a goat-pillow) though most casual games wind up just being basically keep-away until everyone’s wore out. There’s two ways it usually winds up going, giant wrestling pile free-for-alls like shown above or all out races after whoever has the goat at the moment, depending on how good the grip the Riders have. While wrestling is usually what it comes down too, a frequent winning strategy is just waiting for your opportunity, having your Rider cling on like a koala and running like hell. Using one of your littlest rider cousins is recommended for their light weight and killer grips, much to the auntie’s dismay.