What they don’t tell you about getting into bird watching is that once you get into it, you do not get to decide when you bird watch. You can be on the beach of some distant tropical country with nothing planned except relaxing. But then you see a Common Fluttering Nut Buster and you’re like fuckkkkkkkk holy shit guys the Common Fluttering Nut Buster is not supposed to life this far west holy shitttttttttt

When someone in my spouses family emailed to ask the company that makes Hidden Valley ranch if there was cinnamon in it because they were reacting, they got back "we're legally not allowed to tell you if there is or isn't, but if you do have a cinnamon allergy you probably shouldn't consume our products" (paraphrased because I've only heard about it second-hand)

But yeah, the allergy and food labeling regulations in this country are fucked

we need to be weirder & so so earnest now more than ever

Going into this bio exam knowing brown eyes are dominant, blue eyes are submissive, and that punettes are square. Wish me luck!

Wait

RECESSIVE RECESSIVE GENES

I love when household beasts are like whoa. You were gonna piss all on your own? No backup or companionship or anything? Babe. I got you. I'm right here. You don't have to be alone during this difficult time (pissing), and you won't be. Ever. This is not a discussion.

this is going to be a generalized take, so please forgive me, but women are an underrated enforcer of femininity.

I’ve noticed this with hairdressers. multiple times I’ve gone to lady hairdressers and said “cut it all off,” and they’ve gone “hmm alright,” and basically just trimmed the split ends. meanwhile I can go to a dude and say “hey, can you make my hair slightly shorter?” and he’ll go “on it boss,” and shave me bald.

twice now, I’ve also had lady tattoo artists add pink to femme up a tattoo, despite that not being on the initial design.

god, also thinking about this brought back a memory. my mom once threw a fit because my shoes were “too masculine” (they were black women’s flats), saying that I’d upset my dad and ruin the formal event we were going to. I wore the shoes, my dad didn’t give a shit.

I dunno. it just feels like the misogyny is coming from inside the house sometimes.

Women are absolutely half of the enforcers of femininity

Today’s Legislative Updates April 16, 2025

Trans rights are still under attack in the United States. Please visit our website linked below to learn about your state and contact your reps. Here's a thread of today's updates:

Bathroom bills deny access to public restrooms by gender or trans identity. 

They increase danger without making anyone any safer and have even prompted attacks on cis and trans people alike. Many national health and anti-sexual assault organizations oppose these bills.

Old Bills:

Arkansas passed bill SB486 through its House committee yesterday and sent it to the House floor.

Texas placed bill SB240 on the Senate floor calendar today.

Tennessee replaced bill HB0571 with its crossfiled version (bill SB0468) yesterday. After a successful final House vote, the bill will only need a successful Senate approval vote to pass and go to the governor.

North Dakota called a conference committee yesterday to reconcile the House and Senate versions of bill HB1144.

Healthcare bills go against professional and scientific consensus that gender-affirming care saves lives. Denying access will cause harm.

Providers are faced with criminal charges, parents are threatened with child abuse charges, and intersex children are typically exempted.

Old Bills:

Arkansas passed bill HB1916 yesterday and will send it to the governor soon.

Texas sent out the House committee report for bill HB778 yesterday and will schedule the bill for a House floor vote soon.

Missouri placed bill HJR54 on the House Informal Perfection Calendar yesterday. The bill will remain there for some time before going to a House floor vote.

Missouri took up the House committee version of bill HJR73 yesterday. The bill is currently awaiting fiscal review before getting a third vote in the House.

Montana scheduled a House approval vote for the Senate version of bill HB682 today.

Montana scheduled a Senate approval vote for the House version of bill SB218 today.

Educational Censorship and Student Suppression bills force schools to misgender or deadname students, ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, and make schools alert parents if they suspect a child is trans.

They remove life-saving affirmation and support for trans youth. 

Old Bills:

Arkansas bill SB362 failed its third House reading yesterday.

Oklahoma passed bill SB796 through its House committee today and sent it to the House floor.

Trans Erasure bills create legal definitions of terms like “sex” designed to exclude or erase trans identity and insert them into various laws. This can have many different effects, depending on what laws are affected.

They can force a male or female designation based on sex assigned at birth.

Some target anti-discrimination statutes, legally empowering trans discrimination. 

Old Bills:

Arizona’s governor vetoed bill HB2062 yesterday, though a veto override attempt may still occur.

Arizona’s Senate passed an amended bill HB2438 yesterday and sent it back to the House for approval.

Digital Censorship Bills describe any legislation that potentially targets Queer and Trans media/material for removal. 

They typically do this by using vague and broad definitions of "Obscene" or "Harmful to Minors" and then banning such content from being accessible to minors, which often either removes the material entirely or requires age verification methods in order to view. 

This includes online censorship bills, library book bans, and other such legislation.

Old Bill:

North Dakota’s House passed bill SB2307 yesterday and sent it back to the Senate for approval.

Most sports bills force schools to designate teams by sex assigned at birth. 

They are often one-sided and ban trans girls from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.

Some egregious bills even force invasive genital examinations on student athletes.

Old Bill:

Texas left bill SB2920 pending in the Senate Education K-16 Committee yesterday.

These are other anti-trans bills that either fit multiple categories or stand on their own.

Old Bill:

Montana passed bill HB638 yesterday and will send it to the governor soon.

It's not too late to stop these and other hateful anti-trans bills from passing into law. YOU can go to http://transformationsproject.org/ to learn more and contact your representatives!

Oh.

We're at "traffic tickets are justification for disappearing people off the street and sending them to death camps with no due process" levels of fascism now.

Okay yeah we're like fucked, fucked.

yep. cannot overstate how bad this is, y'all.

so who's going with me to protest again in force this weekend with your local 50501/Indivisible/Women's March chapters? and/or start practicing for a general strike?

let's go, chop chop, democracy sure as hell ain't going to save itself without help from every one of y'all. those of you who refused to vote, you get to protest extra in remedial harm reduction studies, but you can ultimately catch up with the class as we move forward. here's where that gets us! go on, anarchist crust punks, start organizing for a general strike and line up food sources, water sources, etc in case of a strike, this is like the thing y'all are best at. now's your chance to shine.

that reminds me. it's too much to be doing everything and knowing everything at once. that's the point. so how do we make sure nothing gets lost in the shuffle?

we trust one another to be different and have different priorities, and everyone picks something and sticks with it. I am currently sitting here typing to you as someone who is involved in

artists, it's a great time to think about getting into street art as a form of eyecatching resistance; viral moments spread across social media, and our visual artists and our textile artists have probably the collectively best chance to create that organic, all-present social buzz. we cannot sit down and let anything blow over from everyone right now, and y'all are our best defense against that. pick a topic that you care a lot about, get up and watch it and act for it when it needs you, and don't worry too much if you come in on it a day late and a dollar short: that topic's own people will be standing up for it first.

storytellers, comics, we could use you to help draw attention to the political fight for our rights and to shape the narratives that we use to hurl our fury at this bullshit. what images give people courage? what jokes hit the hardest, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? how can you best humanize the many people under attack from this occupation? what are the best things to shout? (singers and poets, we could really use some better things to shout. I was out at the stand up for science march and the slogans were dog shit, we can definitely do better than that.)

scientists, librarians, teachers, museum partisans and scholars, we need so much defense of our higher institutions of learning and of the value of honestly describing the natural world. truth has never been so devalued in American politics, and that is saying something. Make sure we are grounded in the natural world and reality itself. Teach people why we use citation trails to trace the history and the paths taken by ideas over time; not to protect ourselves from accusation of plagiarism, but in order to understand how ideas develop and exactly how a thing we know became known. Sometimes it should not have been. Defend the truth; there can be no justice without truth.

disabled and unemployed folks, stay at home moms, you might not have a lot of resources at your disposal, but many of you have time to spare. this therefore makes you often invaluable to local organizing efforts, because time can be a resource that many other people find difficult to apply.

fellow internet yappers, now is a good time to talk to people and listen during the pauses we aren't talking, because we as chronic yappers are bad at doing that but it is vastly necessary if you're going to put weight on your organizing. if people have concerns when they talk to you, listen and think about them. you will do the best work with people who know, like, and trust you. think about how to foster more connection in your community. also, please get yourself yapping in meatspace at a protest near you soon. protests are invaluable ways to connect to other people in your geographic region who are also spitting mad about this bullshit. make friends and resolve your alienation a little bit by yelling furiously in a group.

our shattering is not fore-ordained. we live in interesting times. who knows what the outcome of this battle will be?

Please call this recession the Trump Slump.

We need to put Trump's name on this.

if ever anything I wrote were to ever go viral, let it be this. Let everyone talk about the Trump Slump. I want to hear this term in the news.

I need you all to be extremely clear about something, when Trump uses shit like Title IX incorrectly, hes trying to also scapegoat it for his actions, taint by association and all that, do not fall for it, Title IX is one of the most important pieces of legislation for equal rights in this country, do not rebrand it in your mind as “the thing trump is using to be transphobic” do NOT, because hes egregiously misusing it and twisting it to be something it was never meant to be, start to believe that Title IX is the problem.

I had to study it in college it’s so fucking vital you don’t even want to know what schools look like without it. You don’t even know half of the horrors faced by those who were black, disabled, women, and or not English speakers of the past before they used it to earn their right to education. Do not let him make you think it’s something it’s not, im begging, you can’t make it harder to try and defend and protect it if you care at all about any minority group in this country of any kind. Do not let him fool you.

ZOOS ARE NOT ANIMAL CRUELTY FACTORIES THEY ARE RESEARCH CENTERS, HOSPITALS, REHABILITATION CENTERS, ANIMAL RESCUES, SANCTUARIES, SCHOOLS, AND REPOPULATION PROGRAMS. DONT SAY "ZOOS" WHEN YOU *MEAN* "ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, CIRCUSES, AND POACHERS"

Zoos ARE verified conservation organizations, dipshit

Accredited zoos are held to higher standards than sanctuaries, which are rarely accredited or subject to any oversight. Many of the ‘sanctuaries’ you see, at least in the US, are nothing more than terrible for-profit menageries that milk their animals for cash.

Others bank hard on ‘animal rights’ issues, and end up creating facilities run by folks with little experience, overcrowded and ripe with disease.

Zoos do SO MUCH critical conservation work. Zoos are responsible for saving many species from extinction, and protecting animals in and out of captivity. Zoos are not the enemy.

I worked at a zoo as a student and lemme just tell you. They fund so much research, they're part of international breeding programs, saving and helping animals from near extinction. The people working with these animals are highly educated and so passionate about their job and the animals. They work on enrichment all the time.

There are 'bad zoos' but so many zoos are important and do incredible work

Another former zoo employee here. Please take into consideration that not only do accredited zoos have to meet very stringent guidelines for their animals, but also that the vast, vast majority of animals have either been bred in captivity (and as the previous commenter noted, they are often exceptionally important to growing the species) and thus never could be released or they are animals who were rescued from the wild because they could not have survived there. Many zoos, including my own, commit that none of their animals will be acquired by any method other than the two listed above.

Both of our sea lions were “taken” from the wild. One was born blind and was abandoned by its mother. The other was critically injured after a run-in with a boat propeller. Both would have died except for the fact that they had a place to go.

Are zoos perfect? No. But the “zoos” that have flagrant problems are usually the sideshows and sanctuaries that simply want to capitalize on ignorant people who just want to see some cute animals and put no other thought into why those animals are there. 

Please do not lump accredited zoos that do so much for research, conservation, and educating the public with those places. 

Always do your research, but when you are convinced, please support your local zoos and animal sanctuaries that care about the wellbeing of their animals. They are the last line of defense for many animals and species that would be in great trouble otherwise.

genuinely wild to me that my entire job is being on the phone now. when i moved from my factory job into the office management side i had panic attacks over every phone call. once i had to call a a sales representative for one of our suppliers and left a voicemail for this man (named sam) where i very loudly began with “Hi, Ham!” and i froze for a solid 15 seconds of stomach-to-asshole terror before i hung the phone up with audible force. and that was the day my supervisor told me through tears that if you press the pound key at the end of your voicemail instead of hanging up it gives you the option to re-record.

my one defence against scammers is that I’m stupid. this person called pretending to be my internet provider, and asked who I use for my phone, and I was like “I dunno.” and they were like, you don’t know? how do do you pay bills every month? and I was like “my phone still works so I guess it’s auto??” and then they tried to get me to open apps on my phone and I was like “I don’t have those apps. I dunno.” then after trying to convince me that I did have the apps for a couple minutes they hung up in a frustrated rage. course then I realized that I DID have the apps. and that the apps showed someone trying to log into my email and requesting confirmation. and then I was like ohhhhhh…….a scammer……woaw

when u think about his soulful brown eyes…

him

[ID: a photo of a glaborous fan lobster; a type of slipper lobster that is off white with many red dots, giving its body a pink hue. it has circular brown eyes. end ID]

i’m so glad this post is reaching the marine animals enthusiasts and i’m getting tags adoring this little guy bc i had to sit through a LOT of “ewwww i hate this!!!” for so many years…. thank you for loving him

AWWWWWW!

Polite boy

I think the best most human thing in the world is strangers doing a silly thing together

Examples:

- guy at work "Yes, and -" ing the bit me and my coworker were doing where we pretended to be owners of a fantasy medieval tavern not minimum wage retail staff

- at the gay club when Die Young by Kesha came on and two hundred people, all dancing and drinking separately, jumped up and down to make the "- beat of the drums *STOMP STOMP*" as loud as possible

- person who watched me stomp round the beach singing a made up song about breakfast foods to name a cat after and suggested more breakfast foods that would be good cat names

- guy who started a dance off with everyone across the road while waiting for the lights to change

- very tiny girl at the pharmacy interviewing everyone in the queue and every single one of us in turn sat down and answered this toddler's questions like we were on Letterman

The three pillars of humanity, in no particular order, are Joy, Absurdity, and Sharing

I remember when I first found out the truth about “Somali pirates” I got chills because of how horrific the truth was and how insanely creepily well the media had twisted the situation. Every single fucking article making it seem like these “pirates” were just after money or something holding innocent people hostage and I never gave it a second thought, why would I? There was no indication that people were trying to legitimately fight off disgusting imperialism that left nuclear waste in their waters, that over 300 people have died from radiation sickness, that Europeans have been stealing Somalia’s seafood because they overfished their own waters and the indigenous fisherman are starving and so these “pirates” emerged to deal with those stealing their country’s natural resources. The truth is enough to make anyone sick to their stomachs.

This is a great article about the truth about Somali pirates, in case anyone wants a source.