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this game guesses when you lost your virginity and its on point

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banana boy

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The atoms that make up my body aren’t mine, It’s just my time to use them.

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The worst thing abt working in a craft store is that 90% of the time, the woman jokes in some way or another her husband will kill her/beat her for spending money. Or they’ll half the payment in cash so it “looks like less when he checks our account.”

That shit isn’t funny. It isn’t cute and it makes me so sad that these women joke about it. So WHAT if your wife likes to make wreaths or sparkly tumbler cups??? So WHAT if her passion is soap making or painting?? God forbid ur wife have a fucking hobby that isn’t blowing you!!

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So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us. 

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is

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When 17 year old me was at my lowest point in my eating disorder, crying as i spit out food because i couldn’t physically make myself swallow the calories, never did I think i’d be here today at 21, dating a guy who has lived my struggle, weighing ourselves together for the first time in months and celebrating our collective progress by sharing in a little feast of deep fried snacks while playing our favorite video game. Neither of us checking the calories, neither of us restricting our intake, both just enjoying our snacks and genuinely rejoicing in how far we’ve come. There is hope guys, things get better, i never thought i’d be here but I am, and someday i promise, you can get here too.

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In order to live with your higher self, you must do what makes your soul come alive. So please, make time for yourself, regardless of how busy the life gets.

Nicole Addison @thepowerwithin

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So can we talk about the absolutely stunning duplicity going on here?

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i apologize that i couldn’t see the pain in your eyes

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“In 1986 Grandma was worried I wasn’t settling down. So I told her I was having a relationship—with a woman. “I am settling down, in my own way.” And the sunlight settled on the dust on the mantlepiece and the cat settled in Grandma’s lap and Grandma said there were two nurses boarding in her mother’s house in Yorkshire in 1916. And Grandma said she was in love with one of them. 70 years later, she still remembered waiting at the bottom of the boarding-house stairs to blush and smile hello at the funny, dark-eyed nurse she loved. Love between women? Unforgettable.”

— Eleni Prineas, in Finding the Lesbians: Personal Accounts from Around the World (via oikabooks)

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