Extremely good point

As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

1. Are you okay?
2. That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.
3. Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?
4. This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

1. What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.
2. Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.
3. Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?
4. If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.
5. I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)

furry hatred has always been fueled by queerphobia.There was an article maybe a decade or almost ago about a bunch of people that were big in the early 90s and 2000′s furry hatred on the internet (many of them from SomethingAwful, because everything bad comes from SomethingAwful) and how they admitted that yeah, furry hatred was because they were openly and unabashedly and unashamedly queer and that was not allowed.

I've said it many times before- possibly on this blog, despite how new it is. I'll say it again here.

I have a litmus test for whether or not someone has interrogated their beliefs, or whether they may be easily led, unaware, or an outright bigot.

It's furries.

If someone bashes furries just because (As in, the general "ew furries lol" kind of bashing), I know they fall into one of those negative groups- easily led, unaware, or bigot. They, at best, have not examined what they believe in any meaningful way, and at worst, have done so and decided that they like being a bigot.

@inneskeeper tags passed peer review

this is such a beautiful post it doesn't need my dumb addition, but i can't fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I'm only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.

at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child

so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world's oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any "useful" items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios' grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we've all been the same for 30,000 years.

Her bird husband keeps bringing her little green worms to eat and every time she hears him outside she does these happy little chirps ahhhhh

she’s sleeping right now…

UPDATE: all ten eggs have hatched :)

UPDATE:

All ten babies are getting ready to fledge!!!

Boosting this for all the new reddit girlies

Also? We watch out for each other here. My moots (and even a few of my random followers) will let me know if I’ve missed a name because Shinigami Eyes doesn’t work on mobile. It is ALWAYS okay to tell someone you follow “heyo this post turned up red.” 99.9% of the time you’re going to get some variation on a curse word followed by them deleting the post and thanking you, and the remaining .01% of the time you’ve found a new name for your block list.

Doing a little digging, the idea that roaches would survive a nuclear war comes from observations that roaches still crawled the cities in Japan that the US nuked; however, these observations are somewhat disputed.

According to this article I found, roaches are about 6-15 times more resilient to radiation when compared to humans, but other insects often fare even better, and that 6-15 figure is only the point at which roaches drop dead from the radiation; long before that, there are issues with fertility and reproduction that makes sustaining a roach population much more difficult. Meanwhile, fruit flies are ten times harder to kill with radiation alone than cockroaches are.

Let's take a moment to dig into why radiation is so harmful to life. Radiation's primary mechanism of harm on an organism is by interfering with its DNA, its genetic code. The thing is, while the genes do dictate a fair amount of cell operations (most notably protein production), errors in individual cells rarely have knock-on effects that could lead to something as severe as death of the host organism. Where it becomes a problem, really, is cellular reproduction - cell division, cell growth, whatever you want to call it. Human cells are constantly being produced - the commonly cited figure is that about 1% of the body's cells are produced each and every day, which is several billion. All of that cell division means that errors propagate through the system - in the worst cases, the errors have to do with cell division itself as a process, which is where you get things like radiation-induced cancer.

Now that we've covered that, let's get back to the bugs. Bugs, by comparison, have very little cellular growth happening once they reach the adult phase of their life. This is what makes them so much more resilient than humans when it comes to being irradiated - since there's less cell growth, there's less chances for the errors in the genome to propagate.

I've seen a few people say things on the lines of 'it's not bad to be sex negative, it's not just conservative ideas, it's because more people are realising they're ace!' and I think you've missed the whole point if you're defending sex negativity as a whole based on that.

Asexuality is valid. Being sex repulsed in general is valid. You deserve to be seen and heard and to be able to talk about happiness outside of sex/sexual attraction. You deserve spaces to be comfortable in.

But you can have that without, as OP said, regurgitating queerphobic talking points. This is what you may very well be doing without realising it. e.g. by insinuating that any expression of queer sexuality/sexual attraction/affection or even skin showing etc is in some way damaging to minors or other groups of 'vulnerable' people.

The push for purifying the queer experience is not being done for ace or sex-repulsed people. It's being done for homophobic people and stems from queerphobic ideas. Conservative and puritanical mindsets are not your friend and there are ace people regurgitating them as we speak even by accident because they SEEM to be ace positive and therefore 'good' but they're not.

I've seen ace people actively stating they'd be ok with gay sex being banned or demanding apologies from creators whose adult queer characters are mentioned to engage in consensual sex. That's not right.

We have enough queerphobes wanting to compress queer sexuality into a little sanitised 'child-friendly' 'safe' box and then crush that box. Don't be one of the people with your foot on that box. Especially since these sex negative queerphobes want ace people in that box too.

True Ace/Allo solidarity is allo people supporting ace people however they express their asexuality, supporting their boundaries and acknowledging them as queer/LGBT+ community members AND it's ace people seeing the rise of sex negativity and realising actually that's a very bad thing for the allo part of their wider queer community and shouldn't be allowed to persist.

Side note: Being queer is about more than sex but it is a part of it and part of life for a lot of people. It's natural, harmless and enjoyable to lots of people and queer sex and sexual attraction has been historically repressed for no reason except being seen as abnormal and disgusting. That's why it's such a huge part of our community today and deserves to be.

This is in my notifications again, and I just wanted everyone to know that my great-grandma celebrated her 99th birthday yesterday and is doing well! 💜

My mom is dead so she can’t get in trouble for this.

Many years ago when she was still healthy enough to work, she was the manager at one of those select-your-own-tests labs. They didn’t take insurance, which meant they had no insurance department, which meant it was actually cheaper sometimes than even getting the same test elsewhere WITH insurance, so her clientele often came in with doctor’s orders, and it is about one such patient I’m about to tell you. He was four years old and had leukemia.

At 3am the day my mom did his labs, she got a stat call. “Stat call” means “drop everything, contact the doctor, these numbers are outside the acceptable range and urgency is required.” She woke me to drive her to the lab so she could try to get in touch with the doctor on the way and say “I live five minutes from the lab I want you on the phone as soon as I get those numbers from my email.”

The doctor did not pick up.

Standard protocol at this point is to wait 20 minutes and call again, repeat until you get an answer.

My mom was not allowed to interpret lab numbers. She didn’t have the official credentials. But she was a medical assistant and had self-taught a lot of medicine to make herself a better MA (call it unofficial continuing education), and she took one look at this little boy’s numbers, and she had to make a judgement call. That call ended up being “Mrs. X, this is Catie from [lab name]. I received a stat call for your son and can’t reach the doctor. I’m not legally allowed to interpret these numbers for you. But pick an ER, I will call them and send the numbers and have them waiting for you. Go NOW. Don’t wait. I cannot stress enough how urgent it is that you GO RIGHT NOW.”

Had she chosen law over life, that little boy would have been dead by morning.

Instead she risked years in prison and being stripped of her license to practice. She got cupcakes and a thank-you card instead. As far as I know, the boy went on to make a full recovery.

When I think of my mom, this is what I want her to be remembered for. Nobody could ever know while she was alive. I want everyone to know now.

(And if you’re a 14-year-old on this website in 2023, and this sounds eerily corroborative to a story your mom has told you, and you grew up in Arizona, hi. My mom would love to meet you if she was still alive. But in her absence, will you tell me how you’re doing? I’ll tell her the next time I get up to her grave. She’d like to know.)

To wit:

I want to share some wisdom from my high school art teacher.

In my AP Art class, there was a girl who was just starting to experiment with mixed media. At this point she was still playing around, trying to decide what direction she wanted to go with her portfolio. So one critique day, she brought in an abstract canvas with some rhinestone highlights and painted and real peacock feathers. She loved sparkles and peacock feathers so she thought she’d try introducing them a *little*. And after everyone had given some input, the teacher gave her his advice, VERY roughly paraphrased here:

“So here’s the thing… I do not like this style. These are just elements that do not speak to me personally, but I see that you like them, and you’re doing interesting things with them.

“My biggest critique is, I only merely *dislike* this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.”

Her portfolio was chock full of neon colors and glitter and rhinestones and splashes of peacock feathers and it was a delight. Our teacher despised every piece lol, but she got great marks and I think even won some awards. And more importantly, she was happy and proud of the results. Because she didn’t limit herself by trying to appeal to people who were never going to enjoy what she enjoyed.

Takeaway here: be as cringe as you want. Don’t limit yourself based on other ppl’s tastes. They’re not you, and you are incredible 💕