alxblack17

[alxblack17]

How come semi trucks in Europe look like “toot toot :)” and in North America they look like “HONK HOOOOOOOONK >:|”

[alxblack17]

I have a cat who's all white except for a tiny black spot on the back of his head that you can't see anymore now that he's an adult. The other cats in the house are all more obviously black and white, so it's fun to say all the cats are technically the same color.

i have a fact about that spot! some white cats are born with a spot just like that on their heads that tends to fade with age. the thing with it is that it makes white cats with the spot much less likely to be deaf! the gene that causes dominant white is also linked to deafness because of a very long explanation i don’t really think we need to get into rn, but basically having another white gene at play that sort of tempers that dominant white makes deafness much less common! this is also why white cats with non-blue eyes or odd eyes are less likely to be deaf. here’s a chart with rates of deafness in cats:

[alxblack17]

Important! Your pet's RFID chip number might have been disconnected this week.

Is your pet chipped? They should be. Do you know who made the chip?

Pet RFID chips are so small that there's really only room on them for a serial number. When your lost pet is brought to a shelter or a vet's office, they can scan the chip, read that number, and then type it into a program that draws from a series of linked databases to find your name and phone number. That's how they find you, and tell you that Silly Lilly von Wigglesbottom has gone wandering, and she's safe and sound, and would you come get her, please?

Texas-based Save This Life, which provided chips to vets and shelters all across the US, has all at once and abruptly gone dark; their database is just gone. Their customers were not given warning and so did not know to change their registration to another company. A lot of animals have basically become anonymous now.

If you don't know what company you've been using, call your vet's office and ask what pet chip number they have on file. If the chip number starts with 991 or 900164, it's probably a Safe This Life chip.

If it turns out yours is one of the affected cases, the chip itself will still be fine! There's no need to add another, or anything like that. You'll just need to transfer the number to another company, and your vet should be able to recommend the one that they like the best.

[alxblack17]

A Crash Course to Kendrick's Super Bowl Performance, from a Black Woman

Note: this does NOT go in depth into all of the song's lyrics. I don't have time to recount two decades of his discography. This is just a summary of the performance itself.

Let's start with the first visual we get:

UNCLE SAM - most notably recognized from WWII American wartime propaganda, Uncle Sam is the personification of American patriotism and freedom. The term "uncle" is also evocative of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist book that aided in inciting the Civil War. Uncle is also a very common term (both endearment and derogatory) towards Black men (eg. "unc"). Samuel L Jackson was fantastic.

Uncle Sam also resembles a circus ringleader, notable for my next point:

THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME - no, not Super Bowl. The GAG is us the people being pitted against each other: through late-stage capitalism, through the culture war, through class warfare, through being built of the backs of slaves. We are all players in the GAG because none of us on this site were the oligarchs seated at the inauguration.

This is also seen as Kendrick's stage was a Play Station controller. Not only did it remind of circus rings visually, but it was a game battle stage. The Great American Game is a battle royale of the commoners for the amusement of the rich whites.

Remember the foods / Them color was tin and brown / But now they 100 and blue - For this I'll just say, look what the last election said about lowering the price of eggs... and look at the prices now.

The revolution about to be televised / You picked the right time / But the wrong guy - Election 2024 once more.

THE FLAG DANCERS - yes, the dancers formed the US flag... off of the backs of Black people. Not a single white person in sight, and that's true of the cotton pickers in the fields. Plantations are part of how the US came to economic prominence after being a "backwater" colony. Remember tobacco? Cotton? Our bloodlines do.

The red and blue dancers are also notable for representing the Crips and Bloods, two infamous street gangs. The dance in Not Like Us is the Crip Walk. I recommend researching more on your own time about them, but just know they are a large part of the stereotype of Black people being "ghetto."

TOO LOUD, TOO RECKLESS, TOO GHETTO. Do you really know how to play the game? - This is exactly what Black people, especially Black men, get told all the time. It's why we change our names on resumes if they sound "too Black." It's why we codeswitch in non-Black company. This is especially rich considering how non-Black people love our culture and love to make money off of us, as the latter part of the quote points to. And it's even more profound during the Super Bowl-- the NFL is majority Black players.

STREET LIGHT A CAPELLA -- "thug" stereotype dancers to counteract the a capella connotations, with Uncle Sam then saying that Kendrick figured out "bringing other street guys around being a culture cheat code." Yes, this is a direct hit at Drake (listen to "Not Like Us") but also politically. Look up "model minority". Notably I would point to Candace Owens, or the Miami Venezuelan political group that's been in the news recently, especially as this directly led to Kendrick being surrounded by...

DANCERS IN WHITE -- it's white America. That's... that's the allegory.

NOT LIKE US TEASER -- Kendrick says "Not Like Us" is "their favorite song." -> he means white people specifically here. It comes after he's surrounded by all white dancers, the women around him who are his call and response are also in white (my opinion, they represent the industry). He's saying "Not Like Us" is the favorite of yts because it is about BLACK MEN FIGHTING. This again is reflected in the video game stage and ringleader Uncle Sam.

SZA -- instead of giving what they want, we see SZA. She's one of Drake's exes and Kendrick has always supported her.

ALL THE STARS -- This was in the first Black Panther movie, which I recommend you watch. Rest in Power Chadwick. Notably, this movie was incredibly mainstream as a major Marvel movie, and then we have Uncle Sam say...

"THAT'S WHAT AMERICA WANTS: NICE AND CALM. DON'T MESS THIS UP" -- translation: Marvel (the industry, America, etc.) wanted a safe, semi-pop song because white American likes safe pop songs, not Kendrick's usual heavy rap style about his life as a Black man! Don't mess up what you've got going mainstream for having this "Black rap feud" with Drake, who is an R&B model minority to white people because he's safe.

So what does Kendrick say?

IT'S A CULTURAL DIVIDE / IMMA GET IT ON THE FLOOR -- He was warned not to be political or apologetically Black for this Super Bowl performance, but he is using this big stage opportunity to speak out.

40 ACRES AND A MULE / THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE MUSIC -- 40 acres and a mule are what the freed slaves were promised. Instead, this land went to white sharecroppers. Research Jim Crow laws.

THEY TRIED TO RIG THE GAME / BUT YOU CAN'T FAKE INFLUENCE -- rig the election, rig the industry like with model minority Drake, rig the Great American Game with culture war to distract from active class warfare.

NOT LIKE US -- the only thing I'll mention because it made me holler is Serena Williams crip walking on Drake's metaphorical grave. She's another one of his exes.

TURN THE TV OFF -- exactly like he said! The TV is a distraction, the Super Bowl is a distraction, the mainstream news is often a distraction. Turn it off and get with your people!

GAME OVER — could not see this on my stream but at the end of the performance, the lights in the stadium spelled this out. The world is watching, America…

In conclusion, Kendrick Lamar is a visionary and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[alxblack17]

[alxblack17]

I heard it's Superb Owl Sunday so I have prepared some superb owls for you.

The barn owl is the most widespread species of owl, living on every continent except Antarctica. Their faces are shaped like a disk to help their hearing, giving them some of the best hearing of any owl. They mostly hunt by sound.

Snowy owls are the largest arctic predatory birds, They are born with black feathers and get whiter as they age. Females usually have more dark feathers than males.

Eastern screech owls have a few feather variants that make them look like completely different species.

The southern white-faced owl can increase its metabolic rate during winter to compensate for the cold and lack of food. They lay their eggs in nests built and abandoned by other birds.

The great grey owl is the largest owl by length, but a lot of that is feathers and they're actually very light for their size. Their hearing is good enough to hear rodents burrowing through snow and they can break through hard-packed snow to catch prey.

Blakiston's fish owl is the largest owl by mass and eats mostly fish. Despite the name, they may be more closely related to eagle owls than fish owls.

The elf owl is the smallest owl species, barely larger than a sparrow. They hunt bugs and play dead when caught. They like to live in holes in saguaro cacti.

Burrowing owls live in underground burrows. While they can dig, they mostly take over burrows from other animals. Farmers killing prairie dogs has severely reduced burrowing owl populations. They decorate their burrows with feces to attract bugs to eat.

The barking owl is called that because

Its nice to have a day to appreciate superb owls. Feel free to spread the love by reblogging with some more owl facts.

[alxblack17]

[alxblack17]

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

[alxblack17]

Liz Toohey-Wiese, 2024.

"A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.

“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through."

More here.

[alxblack17]

This is a weird question, but how would you recommend managing worries about an elderly cat’s health? My cat is almost 19 and while he’s just trucking along, at any sign of illness or anything slightly abnormal I get the fear that it’s the start of the end. What are some tips for evaluating whether something is abnormal due to randomness or if it’s a sign of illness?

Keeping in mind this is not a comprehensive list and the real, best answer is "you should have them seen at the vet"...

If they do any "mildly unusual" for more than a single day: sleeping in new spots, not wanting to eat as much, pooping or peeing outside the box, vomiting (once), sneezing, low energy, squinting, licking their lips a lot, doing very exaggerated swallows, etc

If they do any of this at all go in right away: any increase in how deep they are breathing or if the breathing looks at all "odd", weakness, coughing, vocalizing while urinating or defecating, seizures, etc

More chronic things to keep in mind and compare: are they drinking more than this time last year, are they eating less/more, have they become *more* active and playful than they were last year, are they peeing more or less, have they started to lose or gain weight in the last few months, are they walking with their heels or or nearly on the ground, are there any lumps or swellings especially on the face and limbs (facial swelling can be subtle but there are cancers that show up this way as well as rotten teeth), are there any little non-healing wounds on the face or ears, etc

Senior animals should, ideally, get exams and bloodwork twice a year. This would let you catch things such as hyperthyroidism and kidney disease earlier and treatment can be started sooner

[alxblack17]

are there names for like. the length of fur? not the color, but texture and length

yes! shorthair, medium/semi-longhair, and longhair:

hairless, lykoi, and wirehair:

rex (curled) - shorthair and longhair:

[alxblack17]

Can't Have Nice Things

The Ketamine King Musk has shutdown the IRS's Free Tax Filing system.

Of all the things a government could off, a way to Freely calculate and file your taxes seems like a good one. But the richest man in the world thinks we shouldn't have that.

[alxblack17]

The epilogue of Like the Cryptkeeper is now live. 💙

The bookstore was quiet, which was one of the reasons Jason liked it.

[alxblack17]

Just a reminder for anyone new here:

Tumblr's policy of selling your posts to AI companies is Opt-OUT, not opt-in. Meaning everything you post gets sold until you go in your blog settings and toggle this switch (supposedly)

[alxblack17]

Thiiiiiis is what journalism is supposed to be. The media shrugs at GOP hypocrisy every fucking day, good for this reporter for calling it out instead.

[alxblack17]

[alxblack17]

So here’s a thing…

Everyone always juxtaposes Will and Davy Jones, because there is  obvious parallelism to be had: They are two sides of the same coin, showing two different responses to love despite enormous odds—one fails and suffers for it, the other triumphs due to a pure, unbreakable bond.

The more enthralling parallel to me occurs when examining James Norrington and Davy Jones, because they are virtually the same side of the coin.

First, both had their livelihoods wrenched from them, and both felt trapped by the conditions they faced.

Where they differ is in how they respond to their circumstances.

James continues to fight for better days, despite things only getting worse for him with every move he makes. He accepts his fate, but pushes onward: “I can get Sparrow. I can best this hurricane.I can get my career back. I can do a good deed.”

Davy Jones, meanwhile, is content to wallow in his fate, giving up entirely. He stops doing the job charged to him, he suffers for it, and as a result vows to bring on nothing but misery for anyone who crosses his path.

Second, both fell in love with an untamable force of a woman. Both did everything in their power to win said woman. Both failed to either win/keep the love of said woman.

But once again, we see a different response in how each man responds to his heartbreak.

James continually grants Elizabeth the freedom she so desperately craves. His proposal to her is offered only once, and is not addressed again until she offers. Even then he offers her a caveat out (in a deleted scene). He lets her break their engagement in favor of Will. And finally, in his final action, he physically frees her from prison and ensures her safe passage.

Jones imprisons Calypso as punishment for the hurt he feels. He suppresses her power and physically binds her to a single form.

In sum, Jones is a fascinating example of what James could have turned into had he stopped fighting for a better tomorrow, had he retaliated in anger out of his heartbreak, and if he had embraced hate. He didn’t. He embraced love.

The one (non-deleted) scene where these two characters stand off is with James’s dying moments, and it couldn’t be more significant. Jones asks if he fears death, which at surface level sounds just like his typical invitation to join his crew. But it means so much more. He’s asking if James will forsake his living world, the world he’s only shown love and compassion, for Jones’s, a world of hatred and dominance. Even then, with a promise of immortality, James denies him this. And he does it nonverbally. Talk about a power move.

It’s moments like this, and many more I have seen analyzed on this weird little website, that prove to me that Norrington is the best character of the Pirates franchise precisely because of the ways in which he’s not a villain (callout post to CinemaSins who dares suggest otherwise). I want to end this TED talk by reminding you that Norrington was originally written as a character named “Dafoe,” and was going to be a surprise villain who had been working with Barbossa the entire time, revealed at the finale of Curse of the Black Pearl. I don’t know who on the writing team changed this, but I will forever be grateful that they did, because James turned out to be a nuanced tragic hero with a brilliant character arc. He’s not a villain. He never was.