#and providing Any Link

[blizardstar]

Insane pet peeve I have that drives me nuts is when people are like “Yeah Marcy was confirmed to be Autistic by Matt Braly :3” when like. no. no she wasn’t. I’m not saying I don’t think Marcy is autistic. She’s the most autistic character to ever exist. She’s so autism. Her marshmallow charm might as well be TBH. But that’s NOT what Matt said.

Matt has repeatedly answered the “is Marcy autistic?” question with some variant of “She wasn’t intended to be written that way, but I’m glad people see themselves in her :)”

The defining event people usually are referring to when they say it was confirmed word of god is a fan of Amphibia had some psychologist (psychiatrist? The qualified position) watch clips of Marcy and diagnose her and they agreed she could be diagnosed with Autism according to the DSM-5. This information was presented to Matt during an interview and he again emphasized she wasn’t written that way intentionally, and since he isn’t on the spectrum he doesn’t feel qualified to say for sure whether Marcy is or isn’t autistic. He then said it was “up to you” (you being the fans) whether she was or wasn’t. Basically saying that if you see her as autistic, then she’s autistic! But he’s not going to make it an official statement about the show or the character because he doesn’t feel qualified. He later confirmed that was indeed the intent of his statement once people started to say he confirmed it.

It’s just so hard to argue this when like. Marcy is in fact so autistic. I believe she’s autistic. She goes YIPPEEE!

But I also feel like. So much warmth when I think about how Matt created her. He set out to design a quirky nerdy friend, who struggles socially and makes mistakes but is adorable and lovable and endearing. And on complete accident, just creating a “normal” character, he created a picture perfect diagnosable example of a young autistic girl. And like. I dunno that makes me feel good. Knowing the person who created my favorite show created someone like me, not because he set out to use that as a base, but because he found that kind of person an enjoyable and realistic character he wanted to include in his show.

[druid-for-hire]

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled "immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[paintpanic]

A new batch of drawing prompts for you to play with this coming October! Enjoy!

[tf-bigbang]

hi! two questions.

1. the application: is it a guaranteed acceptance or will we be selected?

2. when it comes to works we can submit, i saw they dont have to be published. however, can we include google doc links to works that are not in any given fandom? i have an unfinished novel (sitting at about 27k iirc) that i would like to submit as a sort of "proof of ability" when it comes to writing longer works. otherwise, i would only be able to submit my 3 finished one chapter tf works that range from 1.7k-4.2k. are either of these acceptable?

- @soundop-central (tagging so i get pinged lol)

Hey there! Big bangs don’t function like professionally published fanzines; there’s no skill barrier to entry, no limit on the number of participants, and no proof of ability required- simply a commitment to adhere to the event requirements and finish your work on time. Once you fill out the sign-up form, you’re automatically in 😊

[boomstab-papa]

"But I could be more efficient" killed me & my friends too many times.

Don't fall for it.

[moonlayl]

X

Mentioning that over 4000 Palestinians have been murdered, including 2000+ children, 1000+ women, and 200+ elderly is a big no no and means you support terrorism

Mentioning that Israel/certain media lied about a variety of things is a big no no and means you support terrorism

Pointing out the power imbalance between Gaza and Israel and the difference in how Palestinians are dealing with war vs Israelis (who have the time to do their nails, idf soldiers doing kpop challenges on TikTok, them being able to shop around, go to school, travel by airplane to a different country, etc…while Palestinian women have to take medication to stop their periods because they’ve ran out of hygienic products. While the smell of hundreds of corpses underneath rubble has become unbearable, where flies are everywhere and they’ve ran out of water to clean themselves, while the bombs’ impact is akin to a quarter of a nuclear bomb in Gaza, and having literal children now responsible for their baby siblings because every adult in their family has been murdered) is a big no no and means you support terrorism.

Pointing out the numerous war crimes breaking international law that Israel has committed, is a big no no and means you support terrorism.

Pointing out the clear genocide taking place and how Israelis are working overtime on propaganda (including creating fake crime scenes with fake blood about nonexistent dead children killed by “Hamas” and tweeting like a 13 year old on Stan twitter by making up lies about Taylor Swift’s backup dancers) is a big no no and beans you support terrorism

Sharing the very real footage of Israeli hostages explaining how they were treated well and in a humane way in Gaza by Hamas, and revealing that Israel initially refused to accept the return of those hostages (despite Hamas having not asked for anything in return for those people specifically) is a big no no and means you support terrorism

Sharing the Israel’s military defence and prime minister’s own discriminatory and dehumanizing words about Gaza and Palestinians, is a big no no and means you support terrorism.

(If you don’t believe any of what I’ve said, I’ll share the proof. I’m just on my phone right now on the bus and and can’t access everything this exact moment. Like Israel is NOT on the side of truth right now. It’s time everyone woke the hell up)

[aggravatedanarchy]

Hello Kind Soul 💕

I am trying to evacuate my family from Gaza to safe area to save our lives ASAP 🙏

I Ask if you could support us by share my blog and boost my campaign?

https://www.gofundme.com/f/Stand-With-AlBalawi-Family

If you are generous enough, you can donate any small contribution, it really helps ❤

Of course!

Anyone who can donate, please consider doing so! It looks like they're currently at just under halfway to their goal.

If you're unable to donate, please consider reblogging this so that it might reach someone who can! (And hey, maybe consider reblogging it even if you did!)

Wishing you the best; I don't generally pray, but I will keep you in mine moving forward.

Here's a photo of my cat to hopefully get this more traction (and so I can put this in more tags)

[lesbianshepard]

r/symbology is the best reddit sub, because it's half people going "Can someone identify this symbol? I want to be sure it's not a white supremacist thing that I should get rid of." and then the other half is like "I saw this symbol in a dream, what does it mean?"

[underthehedge]

CTVT and a weird niche theory I fell down the rabbit hole about - giant transforming retroviruses???

This is a story about how a single line on a wikipedia page sent me down a rabbit hole of finding one scientist's fringe theory that's juuuust plausible enough to make me question everything while almost certainly being absolute fucking bunk.

Some background

So, on parts of tumblr at least we all know about Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour, aka The Immortal Cancer Dog. For those who don't know, it's a cancer dogs get, usually on their junk, that unlike most other cancers, isn't made up of their own cells. The cells are actually all descended from this one dog or wolf that lived like 11,000 years ago and are, arguably, all technically that one dog. A dog that became a single-celled infectious disease.

We have a wealth of genetic, histological and observational evidence for this. As in, we know it what population of canids it came from, we know it's got a weird chromosomal structure compared to normal dogs, we know it's genetically distinct from the hosts. We also know it's not the only one out there: There's a similar thing in Syrian hamsters and also the famous Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD).

Which made me pause when I was reading something on wikipedia about the devil facial tumour and saw a line mentioning that it was now known to be caused by a giant virus, much like CTVT. Which...huh? Oh I hadn't heard that afore.

Giant viruses

Ok so giant viruses are a thing and they're fuckin cool. They're a relatively recent discovery and comparatively huge, i.e. bigger than a bunch of bacteria. They were only discovered in 1981 and we still don't know an enormous amount about them but they're big and have large genomes and because of the way viruses are they're not easy to detect unless you're specifically looking for them.

They show up under microscopy (sometimes) and you can find them with genetic probes but you gotta already be looking for them to see that really. Current research though basically says they're more common than we think, just overlooked, and there's software out there that scans through genomic data to find sequences that might indicate their presence. There's even a possibility that one group might be involved in some cases of pneumonia in humans, though I need to stress that that's extremely not confirmed right now.

The "wait, what?" moment

So I mentioned that it was a line in the wiki article for DFTD that had me going "wait, really?", the line in question was this:

A study found evidence for an infectious agent resembling a giant virus that was capable of turning heathy cells into cancer cells. It was found to be a huge retrovirus with similar viruses being found in human and canine cancer cells.

Big If True.

So of course I check the source, which was a 2020 paper by Lusi et al. titled "A transforming giant virus discovered in Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour: Stray dogs and Tasmanian devils opening the door to a preventive cancer vaccine".

Hang on, CTVT not DFTD? This is where some alarm bells went off because uh, as mentioned at the start, we know a shit ton about CTVT. Including the fact that it's all one specific dog. Which doesn't fit at all with the idea that it's caused by a virus transforming host cells into cancer cells.

So what fucking gives? What is this research that fully overturns decades of pretty conclusive research to the contrary?

Is this another case of Dr Barbara McClintock? Who spent decades being ridiculed by the scientific community over her wild theory that was, in fact, 100% right even if it seemed to fly in the fact of all prior evidence?

Or is this a Dr Donald I. Williamson situation wherein a scientist with appropriate training is just wildly but extremely vehemently wrong?

[undercover-horn-blog]

Oh wow. I saw somebody online ask for advice on whether or not a girl likes him. There was a moment where he asked for a kiss and she declined, saying she had a bit of a cold. Somebody told him that she probably really did have a cold and, from context, it sounded like she actually was interested in him romantically. And he replied saying that she definitely had a cold; they were out together and it was warm, but she was all bundled up, "poor thing".

Strangers online stop being adorable challenge!! 😭🥰🥰

[satansxknitwear]

My most recents, black and white, reuploading over here ✨

My links (tip me ~ treat me)

[hillbilly---man]

Oh?

Hm. Okay

[marypsue]

Yes 100%. My other pet peeve is when people claim expensive programs that would benefit society “pay for themselves” like no! On a dollar amount they won’t! But we should fund them anyway because making people happier+healthier? that’s worth spending money on

I mean, the research has been done, repeatedly, and it's my understanding that funding a lot of programs (like Universal Basic Income, or housing-first solutions, or preventative medicine) is actually less expensive in dollars, year over year, than paying for the social programs that prop up the current state of affairs...

...but that also doesn't mean that the current social programs shouldn't be funded, because they help people! Even if they don't solve the problem entirely!

If we can't make everything perfect in the future (we can't, because perfection doesn't exist), but we also can't make things less bad for people right now, then what are we even doing.

[plurdledgabbleblotchits]

The main link provides a good rundown on the current pride flag that tries to be inclusive.

Also, the Canadian pride flag adds the two spirit:

"The Two-Spirit flag represents a unique Native identity, encompassing masculine and feminine spirits. It is rooted in Indigenous culture and celebrates gender diversity, sexuality, and spirituality.

As an umbrella term, Two-Spirit encompasses LGBTQIA+ identities within Indigenous communities. Reflecting ancient teachings, it honours individuals gifted with dual spirits, transcending traditional gender roles. In Aboriginal cultures, Two-Spirit individuals held esteemed roles, challenging gender norms. Women partook in warfare, same-sex marriages thrived, and respect for Two-Spirit members was paramount."

Or this one is a version of the 2S (two spirit): "Flag of Two-Spirit, Two-Spirited, or Indigequeer (indigenous queer) people as a pride flag... Sporting the four directions medicine wheel, this flag encompasses all indigenous LGBT and two-spirit people across the American continent(s)."

[hide-your-bugs-away]

Where did you watch Don't Look Back (1964)? I've been wanting to watch it for a while now because I'm always itching for literally ANY Alan Price content but I don't know where to find it to watch it. I was wondering if you knew?

HELLO AAAAA THANK YOU FOR REACHING OUT TO ASK!! Dont Look Back is constantly playing on loop in my brain... my favorite movie of all time, no contest, and not just because the fruity and moody piano man who changed my life plays the comic relief and emotional linchpin (though, I could honestly write a huge analysis on the significance of his role in the film as a whole)... it's such a great time that perfectly encapsulates why I love that era of music so much - especially that snapshot-existence of early-'65. 🥹

(More under the cut because Connie starts rambling...)

Anyway, the place I originally watched the film was on YouTube (back in 2020!) A full, high-quality upload of the movie was on the platform (miraculously never taken down for copyright) for years... up until that stupid SESAC situation happened on YouTube a couple of months back. A lot of Bob's content was caught in the crossfire, and while most of the music and videos came back, those full uploads of Dont Look Back are all gone now for some reason. There is still one single upload of the movie on YouTube, however, it's AI-colorized and upscaled to... mixed results 😬 Putting aside my own feelings and negative bias towards AI tools being used in that way (especially because the colorization of films can be an expression of art in itself), it just doesn't look super good?? In my opinion?? It just superimposes a lot of oranges and browns to everyone's skin and hair and that's it,, not a lot of those truly striking colors that 60s London was known for, especially in the mod/beat scenes. Not to mention, like a lot of black and white movies from that time period, it honestly feels *best* to experience it the way that people 60 years ago saw it, because the choice to make it black and white in the first place was an artistic decision, in a lot of ways (along with being a practical choice on Pennebaker's part, no doubt).

All of that to say... I have both Dont Look Back and 65 Revisited saved to my Google Drive and I'd be happy to share it with you 👀 Alan's in only a bit of 65 Revisited, but it's the part in the Newcastle tie shop which is 10/10. I also have Snapshots from the Tour saved on my computer - it isn't saved on my Google Drive yet, but I can send it your way as well if you'd like 🙏 There's a great scene in that one where Alan's talking about blues music with Albert Grossman (Bob's manager) and Tom Wilson (Bob's record producer, later for the Animals as well after they ditched Mickie Most) and agghhhgGggh IT'S SO FASCINATING TO WATCH. ALSO. ALAN PRICE CIRCA 1965. AAAAAA. Freshly seperated from the band (and the Eric) who introduced him to that music in the first place... CRIES SO LOUDLY.

SO.... yes!!! Feel free to message me and I'll share that link with you!! 🥹 IT'S SUCH A GREAT AND FUNNY AND INTRIGUING MOVIE whether you're a Bob Dylan fan or Donovan fan or Alan Price fan or just a fan of that era of music in general AAAAA as I said before... IT CHANGED MY LIFE. ALAN PRICE HAS A MENTAL BREAKDOWN AND I HAVE NEVER BEEN THE SAME. /pos