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saw this thread and really loved it but what i liked most is that it taught this kid that if a book isn’t for you, even if you really want to like it, it’s okay to stop reading it and come back to it another time when you are ready. there were so many books i slogged through as a kid because i felt like i had to prove that i could read them since i *loved* reading so i simply had to finish this book or i didn’t actually love to read. silly, really. the more kids who don’t ascribe to that thinking the better. really great of both the dad and the librarian for allowing the kid access to the stephen king book and allowing him make the decision on whether or not it was for him by himself.

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Someone with a huge chunk of their wealth invested in a house and a stock market-based retirement account isn't bourgeoisie. What that literally means is having enough passive income that you don't have to work at all. No, somebody who is depending on that home equity and retirement account to live comfortably is in a hostage situation where the bourgeoisie has an economic gun to their head at all times, ready to fire should the stock market ever dip.

This doesn't mean I have a good economic alternative for stability for the middle class, the alternatives have been very systemically annihilated. But it does mean that before you go assuming that the middle class are benefiting from participation in capital systems of extraction via ownership, even if they assume that too, you should have a real think about what did they are really benefiting from this arrangement or whether they've just started to believe the hostage taker that this is all for the best.

trying to explain to tumblr that the Middle Class in not their enemy

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I want all it/it's users to know that I love and respect you and that I'm sorry that the world don't

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good luck trying to get a million dollars out of my broke ass i'm still not buying your shitty fucking apartheid hummus

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You’re not depressed. You just need $250,000 in your bank account.

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I posted about the Dubai World Islands - the sinking uninhabited artificial islands in the shape of the Earth - and it's vital to note its sister development, the Palm Jumeirah, which is...

Residential

Just dense rows of houses packed along roads into the ocean. All of them with their own little beach.

Wikipedia lists eight "notable residents", six of whom are fugitives in their home country, and the remaining two are a wealthy Russian politician who bought land in Dubai after the invasion of Ukraine & the dictator of Azerbaijan. An exciting life right backed onto the open sea on War Crimes Street could be yours, if you were extremely rich and also did war crimes and/or crypto fraud

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It is also worth noting that while the native cultures of North America that we have cultural information on were unlikely to have hunted animals to extinction on a very rapid time scale, it would be its own form of unreasonable cultural homogenization to assume that the North American people's 10,000 years ago were functionally identical to the North American peoples of 500 years ago. That is a very long period of time.

Very. Very. Very. Very. Very. Long. That is three times as long as the absolute longest cultural through line I know of, ancient Egyptian hegemonic rule, and even the consistency of that gets wildly overexaggerated. It would frankly be absurd to look at near-term pre-colonial indigenous Americans, and what cultural information we can glean from their oral histories, and assume that the people who first made landfall on North America and spread the South America had the same perspectives on ecological balance.

In fact if I may suggest something, anthropogenic mass extinctions leading to serious ecological disruption would be a very compelling reason for a widespread systemic culture of respecting ecological balances. The notion of anthropogenic mass extinctions in North America is not mutually exclusive with non-ecologically rapacious indigenous cultures over the time period we have cultural information for, in fact there's potential for synergy there. Now I'm not saying that's necessarily what happened, we straight up cannot know that. I'm just saying that this is not an either or where we either accept colonialists blindly slapping their own values on Native Americans, or we reject anthropogenic mass extinctions.

Horses are often referred to as prey animals, but what are their natural predators?

Any large grassland predator in the biome, including humans! This is an interesting question, though, because it takes in the axes of time and space. "Wild" horses, the ancestor of domestic horses, are currently extremely rare. The only existing ones in a wild state are Przewalski's horses, also called the Takhi or Mongolian Wild Horses, which live on the Mongolian steppe. Their "natural predators" in that environment would include wolves and snow leopards (which are themselves endangered). However, it isn't an entirely natural setup; they were reintroduced to their native habitat after becoming essentially extinct, through an incredibly complex and fascinating recovery project. In the spacetime pocket in which Earth has wild horses, that's the current state of play: wild horses live in Mongolia and are occasionally eaten by wolves, but are being preserved fiercely for the benefit of humanity.

Meanwhile, we do have things like Dartmoor ponies in England and mustangs in North America and Brumbies in Australia. Dartmoor ponies aren't eaten by anything and are considered feral in the sense that they're domestic animals that live wild, but more or less on purpose, with the moor being treated as a common for keeping ponies on, and the nominal owners can just grab one if they want one at any time. Mustangs are accidental colonists of the American West. They are preyed on by wolves, cougars, and other local large predators, but are not wild. they are feral because they're all descendants of European horses and honestly, if we aren't being sentimental about it, they're invasive.

North America has not had a native population of horses since humans arrived on the continent. The facts are often associated. It is commonly held that humans, upon arriving in America, ate the native horses all up. The typical line goes that "when the first humans populated North America, they were so greedy and invasive that they overhunted most of the local large mammals to extinction". but I personally - and in an unhinged I'm-allowed-to-randomly-hold-ONE-fringe-belief-that-I-Made-up-Myself way - don't like that narrative, and there might be evidence in oral myths indicating that First Nations people at least remembered contact with horses prior to European colonisation. At any rate, there aren't wild horses on that side of the planet any more. The mustang - the most classic "wild horse" in imagination - is not wild, but is currently preyed on by everything that WOULD have eaten the OG native horses of America, minus the large predators that have gone extinct since then (sabre-toothed tigers). Whether mustangs are a nice reintroduction that adds a missing element of Horf to the landscape, or agents of ecological devastation, is kind of up in the air. But they are regularly and routinely preyed upon by the same "natural predators" as the wild cousins would have been, albeit in lower numbers. Take-home message: to visualise how interactions of wild horses with predators and the environment would have looked, mustangs are a very good model.

Going back to the "time" element, human interaction has really decreased a lot of the "natural predators" of horses; they were once preyed on by a larger variety, diversity, and number of animals. In the pocket of spacetime when wild horses were common and had a large range, there also used to be a lot more things like hyenas in Europe and Asia. Here's a diagram showing the "prey animals" and "predators" of Pleistocene Europe. Horses are on the bottom shelf on the far right, at a lower opacity, to show they're "prey animals". You can see that there was a greater diversity of predator types, while today there are usually just Your Local Wolf and Your Local Big Cat.

But this diagram puts "people" as "prey animals" - and humans are traditionally The Natural Predators of horses. Looking at that diagram, you can see that the common, smallish-but-not-too-small herd animal, whose defenses are Having Friends and Being Fast, is a delicious-looking proposition. The spectacular depictions of cave horses in Lascaux are showing our kin, but they're also showing our food.

There is a very important Middle Pleistocene site at a lake in Germany called Schöningen 13II-4, with hominin remains dating back to 300,000 years ago (!!!!!) and it's called the Spear Horizon (for the incredibly well-preserved evidence of spears) but a common nickname is the Horse Butchery Site. One of the most ancient preservations of hominin behaviour, culture, skill, tool-making - their/our priorities, their/our methodology, their/our view of the world - is a narrative of eating horse meat. And the hominins at the Horse Butchery Site did it in a way that seems quite rapacious. Entire family groups of horses, coming to the lake to drink, would be butchered at once: Persistent predators: Zooarchaeological evidence for specialized horse hunting at Schöningen 13II-4 - ScienceDirect It seems like the hominins were killing a lot of horses and not using a lot of the meat, because they wanted fat, and horses don't have much of that.

At any rate, human-shaped people and horse-shaped horses have a very, VERY long history of us eating them. WE are their natural predators. And it makes sense. Humans and Equines are all social animals of relatively small sizes and have interacted with each other for an extremely long time. We have observed them, we know them, we grew up together. For quite a lot of that history, we had a simple relationship; we ate them. Now we much prefer to ride them.

Horses have not entirely forgotten this, but appear to have largely forgiven it.

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I like to think that when I am cuddling with my Blahaj, I am spiritually connected to every other trans woman who's feeling lonely and in need of a hug.

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”the internet is an evil place!!” for you. i have a mile long blocklist and the best mutuals ever

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Tyrants view educated citizens as their greatest enemy. Slaveholders stopped the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Dictators censor media. That’s why Trump is attacking education, science, museums, and the arts – to prevent us from learning. It's Fascism 101. [Cartoon by @adamzyglis]

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the "came back wrong" trope except like... they didnt. like this mad scientists wife died, and so he studied necromancy, brought her back, and she came back and it all worked. like she came back exactly the same as she was before with literally no difference. but the scientist guy is like "oh no... what have i done.... shes Different now!!!! she came back Wrong!!!!" and shes just like. chilling. reading a book. cooking dinner. shes just so so normal but in the guys mind hes like "oh shes soooo weird" but shes just normal

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Happy Star Wars Day! I’ve decided to make my Skywalker comic into one easily rebloggable post.

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Hey to the people that are testosterone gel you might want to give this a read. https://www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/pln/news/strides-pharma-issues-voluntary-nationwide-recall-testosterone-gel-due-benzene

"Strides Pharma Inc. has initiated a voluntary Class II recall of 2 testosterone gel products—Testosterone Gel 1% in 2.5-gram and 5-gram unit-dose packets—due to the presence of benzene, a known human carcinogen."

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Oh so when Jonathan Harker rides in a black carriage through the wild Eastern European forests to reach an old man's ancient family castle (which contains a beautiful blonde) it's all "best of luck on your endeavors!" and "have a great visit!!" but when I, Carmilla-