#please be normal about real people!

[everythingisround]

me smiling devilishly knowing that the amazing digital circus has been successfully converting impressionable queer teens into the raggedy ann fandom

[egophiliac]

(looks at upcoming card releases)

I'm in danger :)

[captainkirkk]

Everytime Batman and Red Hood see each other they end up shouting across the streets of Gotham emotional shit like JUST COME HOME SON and YOU'RE NOT IN CHARGE OF ME ANYMORE OLD MAN and it's just Not Subtle in the slightest

No one knows that Jason is an ex Robin so everyone comes to the very logical conclusion that the Red Hood is Batman's rebellious blood son that ran away from home to pursue a life of crime and they're not even fucking wrong

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Smell Check [Easy: Failure]

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 1 (part 2 - part 3)

[specialagentartemis]

Citizen Science and Contributing To Scientific Endeavor When You're Not "A Scientist"

Comments on some of my posts about science and misinformation express frustration with scientific establishments, and want to see more accessibility and attention given to amateurs participating in the scientific process and having their scientific voices heard.

If being involved in the creation of knowledge and discovery is something important to you, that's something I strongly encourage! It's absolutely possible. Amateur researchers with a passion and an eye for detail have made some fantastic discoveries - but what is often glossed over in stories like these are the years of work, the patient dedication, and the collaboration with university researchers that often underlie such discoveries.

The search for truth and information and the passion for science is present in a lot of people who aren't official "scientists" - curiosity is natural! And if participation in scientific observation, hypothesizing, experimentation, and discovering new things about the world is important to you, there are lots of ways to go about contributing - and the new year is a great time to start.

What are you interested in?

Ecology

Observing the world around you is for everybody. Getting invested in the environment of your hometown is for everybody. And, as the Mythbusters famously said,

Some ideas for a local ecology project:

Record the temperature outside every day at the same time - at sunrise, or noon, or sunset, or midnight. Depending on where you are, the local weather recording station may be miles away or on top of a mountain - measure the temperature yourself and compare it each day to what your app says. When is it accurate? When isn't it?

Record the weather every day. How much precipitation? What time of day? What kind?

Record what animals you see every day, where, when, and how many. Or choose a specific animal, like birds, or bees on flowers, or turtles or frogs in a local pond, or whiptail lizards vs. invasive house geckos, and record the numbers you see each day.

Record when in the year you see the first, or last, of a plant or animal. When the crocuses sprout, when the buds appear on the maple trees, when you see the first clover flowers or prickly pear flowers, when the first robin comes out or the first lizards come out of hibernation.

If you have an outdoor cat or a free-roaming dog, attach a GoPro or similar small camera to its collar to see where it goes and what it does.

Identify the plants growing in your neighborhood, and check in on it regularly to keep track of how each one fares in different weather conditions, or if any animals particularly like or don't like to eat it.

Bulk order some test strips, then take a small sample of soil from a local park or water from a local waterway each weekend and test them for PH, lead, chemicals, or whatever. See if it changes over the year, or after a heavy rainfall, or during drought.

Take a photo of the same spot every day for a year.

Linguistics

The study of how people use language! Everybody uses language in some capacity.

Do you have any small children near you? Talk to them! Record how they pronounce things and what they call new (or even familiar) concepts. Look for patterns.

Ask people you know if "dog" and "blog" rhyme, or if "Alohop" is a good pun for a pineapple beer. My family gets ENDLESS amounts of mileage out of this one with each other. Ask people you know questions about how they pronounce things, or what they call things. Make maps of dialectical differences between generations, neighborhoods, etc. Track linguistic shifts in the modern world.

History

Everyone and everywhere has a history, and accurate history is pressingly relevant always.

See if you have a local historical society, library archive, or history museum that is looking for volunteers to transcribe or translate collections.

Get elbow-deep in local archives. You likely have some sort of local archive near you that has not been fully digitized. Go in with a topic you want to learn about - Black families, Jewish communities, how your hometown transferred from Indigenous hands to settler ones, women who owned their own businesses, immigration, inter-racial relationships, sports, ice harvesting, farming practices, contemporary opinions on a major world history event that now seems so inevitable, sports and people's reactions to sports - and read everything in newspapers, wills, deeds, photographs, or other available records about your topic of choice. See if you can find connections that you haven't seen anyone else talking about.

These are just some things that occur to me immediately as something that anyone can do, if you're sufficiently interested in a question and want to discover more about it. The more local your topic, the less likely anyone has a solid answer to whatever you're wondering - and the more immediately relevant to the people around you your discoveries may be!

Combining it with a New Year's Resolution can also get you more motivated to do the things you want to do. Is your resolution to get more exercise? Take a brisk walk each morning and take a picture of the same area every day for a year. Take a walk every weekend down to the lake and count the turtles and frogs you see. Is your resolution to keep a daily diary For Real This Time? If nothing else, resolve to write down the weather and precipitation each day! Do you want to volunteer more or meet new people? Look for citizen science or local history groups! Feeling like you're working toward something Real is a great motivator.

Henry David Thoreau's detailed descriptions of the nature each day around Walden Pond in the 1840s provides a valuable benchmark for modern ecologists to compare environmental and climatic changes since then on a granular level. Silly rhyming poems and idiosyncratic spellings in letters and diaries help linguists track dialectical and pronunciation changes across time. Amateur science is great and valuable! We all can have a part in understanding and paying deeper attention to the world around us, if we want to.

[reinabeestudio]

Shares some quick studies of my wife when no one's looking

[bonefall]

Moonpaw, I know you are a fictional character, but I am SO sorry people are being cruel to you.

While I'm on my soapbox I want to apologize to everyone who is the product of incestuous abuse who has to sit through shit like this. OH my god. I'm so fucking sorry.

Like, Moonpaw's not real and her feelings will never be hurt. But there ARE people whose parent was a victim of abuse who carried to term, either because of lack of access to abortion or just because they CHOSE to. It's super shitty that people are so casually cruel like this, where they say "your birth doesn't define you" and then turn around and make unfunny deformed cousin banjo jokes.

Sooo often in conversations like this, it's forgotten that there are REAL people who are just. Alive and existing. Incest specifically is a form of incredibly insidious and common abuse, this isn't a hypothetical, y'know??

[breakbeatbun]

y'all have gotta learn to act normal about other people's characters

just bc you think they're hot doesn't mean the person who made them wants to know if, or how, you'd fuck them. i feel like that's common sense. it doesn't make it OK now just because it's not a real person you're sexualizing. you don't know what they mean to the person who made them, and if you do, well what the fuck, then.

[piosplayhouse]

love it when people are so slippery slope pilled that under every discourse about censorship someone will inevitably go "ok but what if someone made birth of a nation 2 and reestablished the kkk" when it could not be more obvious that the original poster's statement was just like. About a teenager's underage bakudeku fic or something

[barbieaemond]

Tempted to turn anons off for the whole premiere week I swear

[welcometoteyvat]

as a chinese person yall need to stop blaming the ccp for everything (read: hoyo is capable of making colorist design decisions and not everything is a result of censorship pls)

[sciderman]

how does one befriend a sciderman u seem really cool and interesting to talk to :]

bless you anon! bless you bless you!! i'm always looking for friends, it's kind of why i do what i do! i know a lot of people are afraid to talk to me, (stinks) but i love talking to people about spider-man. that's why i'm here and why i live and breathe

unfortunately i'm chronically bad with DMs - they fire me up with such an inexplicable anxiety that makes me freeze up. i can't explain it and i wish i was better at it, but DMs are awful for me. i think maybe because it takes me so much time to form a reply and they wind up piling up because of it, and seeing all those messages makes me want to cry and hide underneath my bed. so please no DMs! it's the executive dysfunction.

i'm much much more comfortable in social spaces because i feel less cornered there - i've always functioned better as part of a group because it feels like less pressure on me to know what to say (as much as i love writing dialogue, i'm really very nervous in conversation when i don't know people well enough). in more open spaces i can vibe and just contribute when it feels comfy to do so.

so if you'd like me to get to know you better and to get to know me better then please don't be shy to interact with me more in my replies here on tumblr or on twitter! or i have a discord server that i've met such a great deal of wonderful people through - some i've even wound up meeting in person (insane), and we're bffs for lyfe now! tied our dicks together and everything. i love the gay people in my phone.

[nixiecat]

on the topic of my previous post, I'm also mad about a post I made getting tagged with something along the lines of "not to be bisexual but..... etc"

which like

implying that the only reason you're attracted to me is because you're bisexual? which makes you... a bit of an asshole? especially since I said IN THE POST that I am a GIRL it just. it makes me mad as hell.

sorry to vent so much I've just been seeing more and more stuff like this and the previous post thing that have been pissing me off

[mixedmarxsblogofwisdom]

A moment of silence before the hlvrai fandom bombards the regular Half-Life tags with unintentional mistagging during and after tonight's Wayne stream.

[teenagemutantninjatrauma]

2003//

Oh, I just realized

Y’all remember the Triceraton invasion? And how they showed Donnie on TV while he was having the worst time of his life up to that point?

How many people do you think.. recognized a ninja turtle that they’ve seen before?

Like at that point the turtles hadn’t been involved in that much stuff, relatively speaking, but.. still, right? Still, there had to have been a few people who happened to see a screen and on it a familiar and hardly forgettable turtle face, right??

And I think this could lead to some neat interactions between the New Yorkers, like.. before this event it was just like “nobody is gonna believe me if I talk about a fuckin ninja turtle” but now… now it’s like.. less of a random topic to bring up, now it’s not a “in the middle of the night I got saved during a mugging by a giant turtle,” now it’s “hey so did that green guy on tv that the aliens used for ransom look familiar to you?”

And of course, 90% of the time, the response will be “just another alien,” or even “they must’ve confused another race for an Earth human, fuckin idiots lmao” but…

Do you reckon, once in a while, someone’s eyes light up as they hesitantly tell you that yes, they think they might’ve seen that guy before.

“Could’ve sworn his eye mask was red, though.”

“He was wearing swords.”

“Shared leftover pizza with him because he was dumpster diving behind my house.”

“Two of them dragged me out of a burning house. I thought I was hallucinating from the smoke.”

“I think one time I saw one of them roughhousing with a human? I thought at the time that it was maybe.. their little sibling in a superhero costume?”

Because I refuse to believe Donnie’s appearance on live television had zero impact.

Additionally, after a confirmation that you both saw them, that or you’re both going crazy and separately making up imaginary ninja turtles, a second part of the conversation starts:

“You think he’s okay…?”

[derpinette]

SPERG YOUR HEART OUT