I'm Morgan! Age 26, queer, they/them pronouns. I reblog memes, ,cute animals and other fun interests, along with social justice, queer subjects, and fandom stuff. I dabble in way too many art mediums. I'm the mun behind the Ace Attorney RP blog bodejustice.
toadstool wizard with toadstool robe, toadstool fingernails, toadstool purse, and toadstool wizard hat (top favorite of all time)
low-level mmorpg man with an armored trench coat who paid for his mountain dew and candy with gold coins
my coworker bob who looks incredibly shady when he shops during his off-time
woman whom i helped find a dress for a date while she told me about her c-section and other life events
man with a very sweet and well-behaved pitbull who sits in his owner’s shopping cart and gives kisses (i don’t know how his owner gets a full-sized pitbull into the shopping cart)
couple who shop with their maine coon cat whom they call their son (the man pets his cat too hard and argues with the cat when it complains)
mother with a young son who tells jokes to the cashiers every time they shop
couple with matching black outfits, red hairstreaks, spiked collars, and visible hickies who definitely switch their dom-sub routine on a regular basis
my 24-year-old goth manager’s 40-year-old punk boytoy who keeps coming in to buy vintage tv sets
family of 5 with parents who look like they belong in a hallmark holiday movie
guy who interrupted my work like “hey what would you say would be a good art gift for a mom who’s moving into a new place? you’re on the clock and i don’t want to look through all these canvases-” while his mom was right there telling him this is unnecessary, she can pick something herself, and she doesn’t really need anything anyway
baby who screamed “HI!” at a guy so loudly he dropped a glass measuring cup on the floor
young teen who, when they saw my pride pin, asked if i was nonbinary and opened up to conversing with me
woman who piles her cart almost head-high with clearance-sale clothes to sell at a profit later (HATED)
germanic elderly lady who speaks very little english but i enjoy helping her through basic pantomime and select words anyway
family with a man carrying a bearded dragon lizard in each hand and wearing a backpack containing a tegu lizard (he set the tegu down on the counter for me to meet)
man perusing our DVDs who told me about how he used to have a huge media collection probably worth millions that was destroyed in a house fire, but he’s learned to be chill about it; “we come into this world naked with nothing and we go out of this world naked with nothing”
unseen monster who keeps leaving half-eaten pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream sitting around the store, enraging me further every time i find the evidence
woman who definitely lied about being a senior to get a discount on senior discount day, immediately followed by a woman who said “i could lie about my age but that wouldn’t be nice”
two different senior women who were shopping on their birthdays and wished each other happy birthday when they overheard each other
noticeably gender-non-conforming customer who was buying clothes for a murder mystery-themed queer party hosted by the local kink community
mother who shops for her several children once a year, specifically at goodwill during our memorial day sale, whose 165-item and $400-dollar purchase almost crashed my register’s computer several times and made the computer stall for 6 minutes while it struggled to apply the sale to everything (the receipt was about 9 feet long)
elderly man who asked me for a pen and paper, then spent the next several minutes writing down a song in a language script i didn’t recognize at my register–my best guess is irish gaelic since it looked a little similar and he had an irish type of face
very positive man who told me “i hope you live a radiant life to 101 years old”
“tumblr became bad because of porn ban” “tumblr is bad because of bots” “tumblr is bad because there’s hateful people who post freely” THE AUDIO POST HAS A COPYRIGHT DETECTOR NOW. DOESNT ANYONE REMEMVER WHEN YOU COULD PUT ANY SONG ON HERE AND LISTEN AND SCROLL AND LOVE????????????? STOP SENDING ME TO SPOTIFY APP
People in the BDSM and kink communities are the only people who are normal about sex, actually, and we should all learn from them.
I think everyone should familiarise themselves with the theory for such key concepts as consent, rejecting a sexual practice for yourself without judging it morally for others, sub drop and how it can happen even in the most vanilla sexual encounters, and aftercare and how it’s often needed in even the most vanilla sexual encounters (but often treated as a joke and something to ridicule).
Sub drop is basically getting the endrophin high from sex and then crashing hard from it. You just had an amazing, intense experience, so why do you want to cry??? Why do you feel weird and empty and alone?
Even if you don’t get the outright crash, when the horniness fades, it catches up to you just how vulnerable you’ve been, and it’s natural and common to feel a little lost and alone after that. Contrary to what the term implies, you don’t need to be the submissive party to experience this. Note how much vanilla sex culture ridicules this (”crying after sex” jokes, etc.).
Aftercareis the antidote to sub drop, it’s the post-sex affirmation that things are good and you are safe and appreciated. Common forms include cuddling, ice cream, taking a warm shower together, wrapping yourself in your fuzziest softest bathrobe available and general relaxation together. Comfort and reassurance. Note how much vanilla sex culture condemns people as “needy” for wanting this kind of treatment, or for being upset that their partner just walks out on them after sex. (The people being condemned as “needy” are usually women, but I don’t even want to think about how much men certainly need this comfort too but feel like they can’t ask for it without being seen as un-masculine.)
This is what I mean when I say BDSMers and kinksters are the only ones who have this shit figured out. None of these things are actually exclusive to BDSM and kinky sex, vanilla sex for everyone would be SO MUCH BETTER if these things were part of universal sex ed.
We aren’t “differently-abled”, “handi-capable”, or whatever Abled’s call us. We’re disabled. It’s not a bad word.
Image description: [a photo of a young male adult in a yellow and blue manual wheelchair, wearing overalls and red sneakers. He has curly dark brown hair, with stickers on his face. A speech bubble next to his head with the quote “disabled isn’t a bad word” inside. ] End description.
I understand that you guys aren't being totally serious, but birds are categorically NOT dinosaurs. They're BIRDS. Being descended from and very similar to an animal does not make them literally the same.
Bats are mammals. If every mammal except for bats went extinct, bats would still be mammals. This is what happened with birds. They're a type of dinosaur that evolved within the dinosaur evolutionary tree, and existed alongside other types of dinosaurs until all those other types of dinosaurs were wiped out. Surviving when the other dinosaurs went extinct doesn't mean they stopped being dinosaurs at any point.
@arctic-nimbus I am not joking, I am being serious. Birds are living dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are defined as the most recent common ancestor of [Theropods] + [Sauropodomorphs] + [Ornithischians], and ALL OF THAT ANCESTOR'S DESCENDANTS
hence, because birds descend from that ancestor, ALL BIRDS ARE DINOSAURS THE END.
I am a paleontologist and this has been known since 1996 please stop making me play whack a mole. this is googleable. this is on wikipedia. this is in most paleontological sources. this is in the literature. this is in books. this is in jurassic park. this is on this blog in many places. this is on other people's blogs in many places.
Okay, your condescending reply aside, you haven't addressed the elephant in the room which is what I brought up in the other thread. I'm descended from a fish. That doesn't mean I am a fish. You telling me that birds are living dinosaurs doesn't make any difference to me because you haven't made a convincing argument why I should categorize them that way as oppose to another way.
Where do you draw the line between them being living dinosaurs and them being something else?
In biology and paleontology, evolutionary groups (clades) are defined to be monophyletic. That is, a clade contains all descendants of its most recent common ancestor. No lineage ever stops being part of a clade, no matter how much it has evolved. If you're descended from a member of a certain clade, you are in that clade.
Dinosaurs are a clade, which is formally called Dinosauria. Because it's defined as a clade, then everything that is descended from a dinosaur must also be a dinosaur. Ergo, modern birds are a subgroup of the clade Dinosauria.
Think of it this way. Sauropods, ankylosaurs, therizinosaurs, and birds are each very different from their early ancestors, which would have looked kinda like this:
And yet no sauropod, ankylosaur, or therizinosaur ever stopped being a dinosaur, regardless of how much they evolved. So why would birds be any different? By the same standard that Argentinosaurus, Tarchia, or Therizinosaurus are dinosaurs, birds are dinosaurs.
And yes, humans are lobe-finned fish (Sarcopterygii). The standard applies everywhere.
Perhaps by your definition of reality, humans are lobe-finned fish, if I accept the schema that you so lovingly shove down my throat.
But there is nothing more or less scientific about looking at lobe-finned fish of today, and comparing them to humans, and finding they are completely different things.
So your argument is inherently an opinion! It is a normative statement, not a fact. Stop representing it as a fact.
It is a fact though because that's how common descent works.
Humans evolved from an ancestral ape, and are still apes.
That ape evolved from an ancestral mammal, and it was still a mammal. So we're also mammals.
That ancestral mammal evolved from an ancestral tetrapod, and was also a tetrapod. So we're also tetrapods.
And that tetrapod evolved from an ancestral lobe–finned fish, so it was also a lobe–finned fish. So we're also lobe–finned fish.
This hierarchy of descent is what modern taxonomy is built on. Organisms are classified into groups based on common ancestry, like I outlined above.
A group made up of the last common ancestor and every descendant of that ancestor is called a 'clade'. Clades are the groups that we classify in taxonomy.
Every descendant of a clade is by definition part of that clade, similarly to how you're still in the same family as your great great grandparents. You can be very different from your grandparents but you'll never stop being related to them.
Humans can be very different from other apes, mammals, tetrapods, or lobe–finned fish but that doesn't mean we stop being related to them, and it doesn't mean we don't share ancestors with them.
Because we use these patterns of relatedness to classify organisms we're part of each of those groups by definition.
Ok so, here's a style of diagram that I've found pretty useful for understanding how animals still remain in their ancestral groups. Each group is contained within the wider group, so whales are within ungulates, which are within mammals, which are within synapsids, which are within tetrapods, which are within sarcopterygii. Lungfish and coelacanths are the only other living groups of lobe-finned fish, and are our closest non-tetrapod relatives.
It's a very simplified diagram sure, I've left out many many intermediate groups in service of making my point clearly without clutter. But hopefully it gets the point across that no matter how granular and detailed you get with the groups, they never stop being inside the larger group they evolved from. You can't cut out birds and transplant them outside of dinosaurs, they are by definition a member of dinosauria.
Also just to be clear, this is not some made-up opinion held by a little group of dinosaur nuts. This is literally The Standard Method in modern science of classifying living things, this is just how it works.
Also @arctic-nimbus if you're so adamantly against birds being dinosaurs, do you also not believe that whales or bats or humans are mammals? And if you do why one and not the other? I'm genuinely asking here because I don't understand why people are so selective when it comes to birds being dinosaurs specifically.
The "dinosaurs are a clade" argument is true, but I don't think it's sufficient. You still have to explain why care about the monophyletic group Dinosauria, and not care much about the paraphyletic group of nonavian dinosaurs.
We care about many groups that are not clades, in those moments of life when we're not going genetic studies. Trees are a highly polyphyletic group, but I often talk about trees in general. I have some use for the concepts of lobe-finned and ray-finned fishes, but even more use for the concept of fish, a paraphyletic group defined as vertebrates minus tetrapods — I expect the fishmonger to sell lamprey and salmon but not lamb.
Even when we're doing taxonomy, we often find it useful to group animals by morphology rather than by ancestry. For example, amphibians and non-avian reptiles have enough in common that herpetology is a field, ornithology is a separate field, and few people study amniotes in general. #LetLinnéCook
So why isn't it sensible to talk about non-avian dinosaurs as a group? Of course xkcd has an answer:
ALT
Dinosaurs are a very varied group: they've been around for at least 230 million years; their anatomy ranges from enormous giraffe-like quadrupeds to small flighted bipeds; undergone two mass extinctions.
Birds don't stand out as an isolated exceptional sub-group, the way they do among e.g. living tetrapods. If you draw a line between them and other dinosaurs, both sides of the line have animals that are flighted, flightless, winged, herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous, small, large. One side of the line has every living dinosaur, but also plenty of extinct ones. One side of the line has every sauropod, but also plenty of theropods.
This is not a sensible division. "All dinosaurs except birds" is a strange, arbitrary grouping, just like "all dinosaurs except ankylosaurs".
But people do very often gesture at some concept that excludes birds and includes Tyrannosaurus. What are they trying to get at? It can vary:
All extinct dinosaurs (including e.g. the dodo and passenger pigeon)
All prehistoric dinosaurs (including many birds known only as fossils)
Dinosaur species that went extinct during the K-T extinction (including some birds, and excluding many species that went extinct long before that)
Dinosaurs of some specific era, e.g. the Cretaceous
But I think the most common is: cool prehistoric critters that you want to see in a dinosaur movie and in a box of dinosaur toys.
The last group may not have very much relevance to taxonomy, but it has enormous relevance to cool-onomy, and as a cool critter enjoyer I definitely respect it. But this group was never about dinosaurs in the first place.
It includes Dimetrodon, a genus of guys with a wicked cool sail that's not a dinosaur at all, and more closely related to mammals.
ALT
It includes Quetzalcoatlus, a genus of enormous flying lads with a beak longer than your whole body and an even longer neck.
ALT
It includes pleiosaurs, pteranodons, Deinosuchus, and many more non-dinosaurs. If that's the group you care about, definitely embrace it! I'm not here to take away your mosasaur toys and tell you to play with 100 identical-looking little brown birds.
But I'll be over there looking at the little brown birds and comparing their skeletons with Velociraptor skeletons, nodding, and going "Aw lookit the lil dinosaur".
I will say that I don't think validating that last definition of "dinosaur" is a great idea because it just perpetuates misunderstanding of the actual scientific term, and not calling a mosasaur a dinosaur doesn't make mosasaurs any less sick and awesome. I think it's better to encourage a better understanding of what "dinosaur" means while not subtracting from the enjoyment people find in any non-dinosaur prehistoric creatures.
On the other hand, I do think that while a bird/non-avian dinosaur dichotomy is arbitrary and pretty much useless, something that can be useful is talking about dinosaurs in terms of a Cenozoic/Mesozoic divide. Almost all dinosaurian diversity being wiped out in a geologic instant is very significant when discussing palaeoecology or the diversity of dinosauria as a clade!
Age-old advice which is more relevant nowadays rather than less. This is the second iteration of it though. The original version is: “Never write anything in a letter you wouldn’t want to see in print.” Advice handed down by my mother from her forbears.
The wildfires in Maui aren't natural disasters, they are colonial disasters and a direct result of both the fossil fuel industry and the military industrial complex.
Realtors preying on property in Lahaina- while Kānaka Maoli who resided there for generations are now houseless- is a result of greed and disaster capitalism.
Citizen journalists on the ground are reporting on the devastating cost these fires have on their communities and the untold stories in the media about the tourists still actively extracting land and from already limited resources.
![By any reasonable definition, T. rex is more closely related to sparrows than to Stegosaurus. [Diagram showing that Stegosaurus came earlier than T. rex, along with it showing that T. rex came closer in time to sparrows. Evaluation criteria "separation by time", "phylogenetic distance" and "physical similarity" are highlighted in red.] Birds aren't descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. Which means that the fastest animal alive today is a small carnivorous dinosaur, Falco peregrinus. [A picture of two birds is shown.] It preys mainly on other dinosaurs, which it strikes and kills in midair with its claws. [In red:] This is a good world.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/41635043632b799a02ca5d214d4a86b1/19ea74c1c1303510-26/s640x960/943ceb71d9c2f3401fee26f61a00d4c3258a0c1e.png)
