It's so funny to me that it's possible to have verbal misunderstandings with animals.

This morning I made Ripley (a parrot) a foraging toy, as I often do before I leave for work, by putting a bunch of paper shreds in an old tea box with some peanuts and dried cherries. He hadn't touched it by the time I came home so when he was wandering around the living room restlessly looking for something to do I picked up the box and told him "hey, there's a peanut in here. You can get it out" and then I went back to my office.

After a couple minutes, he walked through the kitchen to where I was sitting at my desk and looked up at me and whispered "I get peanut?"

I said, "Buddy. I think you misunderstood me. The peanut is still in the box."

He tapped his beak on the floor, said "oh" in a really disappointed tone, and then helpfully suggested, "I step up get a peanut?"

Centuripe, province in Enna, Sicily, Italy

I cannot stand these reactionary Christian bitches

Korok Leaf Identification Poster made by AbiToads

Ah, yes, calling a System function.

Also known as calling upon a wizard to use a tiny sliver of their vast, unknowable magicks to System.out.print()

reminder that digital libraries aren’t owned, also why pirating digital content is a necessity

People who weren't gaming in the early 2000s sometimes have difficulty telling the Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter franchises apart, but it's actually very simple: Ratchet is the creature you end up with when a furry can't decide what species they want their fursona to be, and Jak is what you get if you take this creature and shave it.

why don't people in zombie apocalypse stories ever just wear suits of armor? you think any zombie is gonna get their shitty rotting jaws through this?

I'm gonna rip and tear my way through the zombie apocalypse completely unharmed because none of the undead hoards will be able to get through my plate mail

Anyway here’s a poem I wrote about my cat

After “Do not stand at my grave and weep”, author disputed:

Do not stand at your bowl and meow. I gave you food. It’s in there now. I feed you at the dawning light, I feed you at the fall of night. I feed you kibbles mixed with meat And wet food for a special treat. I feed you even though you scoff At all the food within your trough. I feed you and still yet you yell Like as a beast from deepest hell. Do not stand at your bowl and cry. I gave you food. You will not die.

The female goat herders of Hadhramaut, Yemen

Goat herding is traditionally done by females in Eastern Yemen. The women cover all their skin from the heat and sun, protecting themselves from dehydration and skin damage, the socks and gloves keep their hands and feet soft despite the unforgiving desert sun. The hat (made from dried palm leaves) besides being a drip by itself serves an important role, it insulates air on top of their head thus keeping it cool, besides providing the obvious shade. The layered clothing also helps with the desert changing mood, where it can shift from hot days to cold nights.

can't find the post rn but very much in line with the "when you write historical fiction you should give your characters believable ideas for the time" thing, you need to reckon with the fact that basically any scientist you write from the late 19th or early 20th century was likely to believe in some form of eugenics, including and sometimes especially progressive ones. the idea was not originally associated with fascism; it was actually considered by many in the past to be a humane and scientific alternative to mass poverty, health issues, and incarceration. (which it isn't, but that's what proponents used to believe)

take this guy, author of the first medical text on homosexuality in the English language.

he was remarkably progressive about queerness (he wrote on homosexuality and bisexuality as well as "eonism," what we would call transgenderism today), seeing it not as a moral issue or as a disease but simply as a deviation from the norm (and yes, he did still believe that there was a norm, and that deviations were a kind of "defect," but he did not characterize this as a moral issue). This was in the late 1800s when homosexuality was still a crime almost everywhere, and most people viewed it as deeply sinful. his work was hugely influential in the field of sexology, together with the more well-known Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a contemporary of his.

but he was also a eugenicist, though less radical than some of his peers. he believed that, with sufficient education (or coercion) that the "unfit" could be convinced to voluntarily give up procreation. he disagreed strongly with the common idea among his contemporaries that people should be barred from marriage or forcibly castrated, but he was not against doing things like denying people public benefits unless they would voluntarily agree to undergo procedures like vasectomies or tubal ligations. he also, of course, believed in scientific racism. in short, he had some pretty fucking bad ideas, though not nearly as bad as some of his friends. the only reason he didn't believe in trying to coerce queer people into being sterilized was that he thought none of us would want to reproduce and pass on our queer genes anyway if we were allowed to marry each other. which is funny, because his wife was bisexual and he had an open marriage - I shouldn't need to explain why that's funny.

he also had a piss kink and tried to medicalize that, and wrote about it in detail. it's not really relevant, but I couldn't not mention it.

anyway, all that aside, my point to you is that historical figures are fucking complicated. some of the most important and well known scientists from that time period had deeply fucked up and backwards beliefs while simultaneously being luminaries who were decades ahead of their time. you cannot avoid this. you don't have to write or read about people with complicated beliefs like this if you don't want to, of course, because that's difficult as fuck to navigate, but I would suggest a genre other than historical fiction if that's the case.

(also, kill the eugenicist in your head. if you read that article and *any* of his ideas sound reasonable to you, you need to really, genuinely examine why you're agreeing with a eugenicist.)

When you finally won the battle of opening up your WIP to edit but your brain is fighting you on touching the document so you’re in paralysis like