All the L³'s

Oh that's a tumbler or roller pigeon! They're bred to do this! It's believed that the original inclination to tumble in the air was a tactic to avoid being caught by flying predators, then this inclination was bred in favor of doing it more. Some breeds can also fly normally for hours as well, and the most sound breeds are those that can make safe landings still. There's whole shows and competitions around tumbler pigeons!

There's more unsound breeds of course as well, but this one clearly has good control of its flight and landing. Well done pigeon!

tumblr pigeon 🤨

Being the only queer person in a room full of septuagenarians will have you feeling like a snake being passed around a room of elementary schoolers. Nothing makes me feel so much like I'm an ambassador animal as being introduced with, "this is Draconym, she prefers they and them pronouns."

I'm saying this as someone whose full time job involves introducing snakes to rooms of elementary schoolers. I can tell that my elderly friends are excited to present facts about me to their nervously curious audience in very nearly the same way that I am excited to present snake facts to an audience of nervously curious children. It's fine. The snakes and I are comfortable with this.

ffs ....

Additions from my husband: Bakers wear loafers and Zookeepers wear Crocs

Excellent additions.

Angels wear wingtips.

A lumberjack wears Timberlands.

Ice skaters wear slippers

Addition from my mom: delivery drivers wear vans

VERY good addition!

Achilles wears heels.

how is this post from this decade and not like 2012

Assassins wear stilettos

Gymnasts wear flippers

Activists wear platforms

Builders wear flats

Strippers wear thongs

northern usa comes with a secret fifth season, between winter and spring. it’s called “Gross”. everything is muddy and dead. allergies are flaring up but there’s not a green leaf in sight. the landscape is littered with piles of dirty ice. snow rain mix is probably falling. gross.

This is an actual ecological season called prevernal spring, or false spring, when the plants start waking from dormancy, the snow and ice melts into mud to water the waking plants, and insect larva start growing so they can fly by the time flowers are ready to get pollinated, and the warm(er) days and icy nights help stress-proof the plants for the coming hot seasons. It is anticipatory, preparatory, and magical. And gross.

I’m poetic enough to call it “Snowmelt”. It’s the season where the sides of roads slowly reveal the layers of gravel cars have spit onto them. A winter’s worth of trash and useful items alike appear from under the snowbanks they were dropped in. (One year we found my dad’s phone. It still turned on.)

Bone-dry air finally gives back some of its water, as icicles form and acquire cartoonish proportions. The entire world is cloaked in dead brown-gold grass. The world is made of white, and gray, and brown, and brown, and brown, until one day the snow melts enough to leave brown, and brown, and blue, soccer fields standing with startling shocks of water.

It’s not spring. But I’ve lived long enough to know in my bones that it won’t actually last forever. It’s just a step to get there.

Tumblr once again romanticizes the liminal

Thanks to a lovely person re-checking permission, I was reminded of this piece from 12 years ago. A rather big painting of a male Java peafowl, made for the cover of the "Losing Altitude" artbook, which featured endangered and extinct bird species.

I'm still very fond of the paintings I made for that cover, and I feel they were oddly ahead of my skills at the time (or I just regressed lol).

Especially this peacock, with all his endless feathers and textures and colours. It was hell to paint at the time, but now I can still admire the result. I hope you too will enjoy this blast from the past!

When the sun hits the living room just right, Holly Mop will come find me and herd me onto the couch, grumbling and barking at me if I don’t move fast enough for her liking, so we can sit in the sunbeam together. Like, Mama, what are you doing laundry for? There are sunbeams to enjoy.

You know what? She’s right.

Bonus if you tell me if you're right or left handed

via

[video description: a video of a baby fox playing in a graveyard. end description.]

its okay babe i know things are pretty bad but one day a baby fox will frolick over our bones. the rubble, the decay, the decline....it will all be beautiful again

Gossip girls

Jumping on the bandwagon, I made one of those "how many have you heard out of 100" list challenges, based audio dramas I like:

Love the argument "oh but if you transition you'll have to deal with being trans your whole life" because first of all there is nothing bad about being trans and second I'm still gonna be trans even if I don't medically transition I'll just be trans and miserable instead of trans and happy

Every time I hear someone say something like this I remember that one exerpt from that one book in which the author considers Gomez Addams as a trans man specifically because he has the energy of a guy who wakes up every day absolutely over the moon to discover that he gets to be a man with a family and a moustache and a wife who's taller than god yet again, and it becomes painfully apparent that people who say these things don't understand transness at all.

EDIT: I found it! Here it is!

An excerpt from the essay “Powerful T4T Energy in Steve Martin’s The Jerk” by Daniel M. Lavery, from his book Something That May Shock and Discredit You.

Absolutely amazing addition I love this and personally I can't wait to be proudly trans for the rest of my life!

The new Hellraiser movie looks great

Trio for Harmonica, Rubber Duck, and Belt in D Minor

The children of the night, what beautiful music they make...

I spent a lot of time handcuffed and in a cage in high school, for a charity bit the grocery store I worked at would do

the bit was that I was "put in jail for having too big a heart" and customers could donate to my bail to get me out (and the money would go to a children's hospital or something)

now. I was very clearly a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a large cage. and I would honestly tell people that I had been in there for hours. and people would say, that's terrible! that's awful! and I would show them my wrists red from the tight handcuffs, and say but I'm sooooooo close to making bail.

and then they would dump some cash in the basket, I'd thank them, and they'd walk away.

and every so often, one of the managers would come by and collect some of the cash, so I could keep being soooooo close to making bail.

I was very good with this bit. Parents with small kids would pay $5-10 if I told their children I had been placed in jail for not cleaning my room/doing my homework, etc. For people in their 20s, I'd threaten that I was very bad at playing the harmonica, but I WOULD play it and we'd all suffer unless they paid me. and for the most amount of money, older men in suits would almost always pay $20s if I avoided eye contact and stammered a lot.

eventually, the managers started to feel bad because I was in the cage so fucking long and often, that I'd need someone to brace me when I got out because I'd have no feeling in my legs. wobbling like a newborn giraffe.

but I would also rake in at LEAST $100 an hour in charity.

so they were like, hey champ. can we, uh, give you a pillow to sit on. in the cage. would you like a pillow so you're not just sitting on a cold metal slab. can we give you a pillow.

and I had to explain to them that if they gave me a pillow, people would think I was more comfortable, so they wouldn't feel as bad, so I'd bring in less money.

the compromise was that they'd bring me a nice coffee every couple hours, which I would have to try to block with my body from the customers.

all this money went to charity. that's what the money was for. it's what was on the sign. but how much they were willing to pay was very contingent on how comfortable I looked, never mind the fact that I was still a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a cage.

and out of the dozens of shifts I did this on, not ONCE did ANYONE say, hey kid I'm going to go talk to your manager because what the fuck is going on here. they would just drop money in the basket, and I'd thank them and sip from my secret drink.

I actually had people get MAD at me that I told them I was far away from bail, they donated like $15, and then 20 minutes I got let out because my shift ended.

again. the money was for charity. it was on the sign that was very clearly placed on the upper half of my cage.

so yeah. even when people think they mean well. people can be really, really fucking stupid.

took me a bit but this is roughly what the cage looked like, without the middle platform

It was something that was originally used in the back for carting boxes, but was repurposed into a teenager cage

they'd wheel it out and the one open side would be backed against either a wall or a large display (like very tall rows of soda boxes or something)

Then I'd get in, they'd push the thing so it would be as flush as possible against the wall, and then I'd stick my hands through the bars for them to handcuff me. there'd be a sign up top explaining the bit, and then a shopping basket tied on front for people to drop the money into.

the handcuffs were fake, and I could unlock them myself for obvious safety reasons. I would get more donations if they were tight, though.

After maybe a month or two, I asked for a harmonica to sell the bit. they also tried giving me a mug, but it was too awkward with the handcuffs. I got kind of okay at playing the harmonica, but the main point was just to do one sharp blast to startle people into looking down, and then I'd threaten that I had no idea how to play, but would do so anyway unless they donated to my bail. managers actually got me a prison jumpsuit to throw over my uniform, but it was really fucking awkward so we stopped eventually. I also got a metric fuckton of mardi gras beads so I could lure small children over, to then mournfully tell them of my imprisonment due to not cleaning my room, etc. parents would be moderately irritated that I'd lured their children over with beads, but would respect the game that I'd given their kids a whole new fear. I had some parents even ad lib what I could have been thrown in prison for. guaranteed donations.

obviously, the prison bit worked best with younger girls. my roughly 50-60 year old manager once congratulated me on doing so well with the donations because I "looked like a cute sad little puppy in one of those RSPCA commercials. like a helpless puppy or a kitten." wearing makeup and earrings also increased the rate of donations.

had to explain to another girl how I regularly got $20s, which was when an older guy in a suit walked by I'd rattle my handcuffs slightly to draw attention. 10/10 times the guy would walk over, and I had to tell this girl like. If you avoid eye contact and sound uncertain you will get at least $20. I am sorry. this is for children's cancer research.

cannot stress enough that the other employees fought to get to be in the cage. customers were so awful and the weather was so shitty. jail meant sitting down with very few expectations, talking and joking with people.

Anyway. Shit was definitely not an allegory, though it could be used as one for about 11 different things.

Still better than customer service.