My sister had a huge menagerie of critters that were mostly rejected from various homes... One was a pot-bellied pig that came from a home where they didn't realize how big pot bellied pigs get.
okay but you know how people already lie and sell regular pigs or potbelly pigs as babies and call them “micro pigs” and tell buyers they’ll stay that small but then of course they grow to be HugeLarge and the buyers who didn’t do research are like >: O !!!!
Imagine now the added element of the fountain of youth like some pigs ARE eternal tiny babies but there are breeders who cheap out like
“I got my Eternal baby Piglet from a farmer on Craiglist and it’s the real deal I’m so happy.”
“Cool. Brittany’s Baby Hippo ended up being a fake and she’s freaking out”
Y’all it’s okay I know there’s no such thing as micropigs. This post is bouncing of my other post about using the fountain of youth to keep animals Baby forever, in which case micropigs could Become our beautiful new reality
I don’t want to detract from that post, but like- people not learning queer history is genuinely the source of so many of our problems in the queer community today.
It’s why people don’t understand the roots of the word “queer” in the first place, or why it’s important to so many people
It’s why people think “gay” is some apolitical neutral term with zero negative connotations, ever, for anyone
It’s why people actively feed into lesbian separatism, political lesbianism, and TERF movements without even knowing it
It’s why people think “LGBT” is some True Name that has never been changed, challenged, nor shaped over the years to better represent the community
It’s why people feed “who can reclaim which slurs” discourse without giving living human beings older than 25 any real consideration
It’s why people straight-up don’t know what the “drop the T” campaign was/is, or understand the troubled history between the trans community and the rest of the queer community
It’s why people don’t understand what “trans” used to mean, or how that meaning has changed over the years, or why
It’s why people don’t understand the differences between queer communities and identities by country, or often how they’re complicated by race
It’s why people don’t understand what “butch” and “femme” actually mean, the many definitions they can have, or how those labels have intersected across communities for decades now
It’s why people don’t understand the differences between the transfemme and transmascs communitys’ histories, or the differences in struggles they have- and then feed into those struggles without even realizing it
It’s why people straight-up recycle old homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, uncritically and unironically, as if they’ve discovered cool some new bigbrain hot take for the “super smart” gay kids
It’s why people treat these complicated, contradictory-sounding, or lesser-known identities like “trendy new ways to claim you’re oppressed”- without understanding the history behind those labels, and those communities, and that they’ve been here longer than any of these people have been alive.
Like… yes, we’re moving forward now. Things are changing, and in many ways, it’s for the better! But we seem to forget that most of our community was lost in the 80′s and 90′s, and those folks left a massive, gaping chasm behind.
We don’t have the same easy, communal roots to our history that we used to. And in order to rebuild that, we- the entire community- is going to have to do some work to learn it and teach it and move forward with it in mind.
Yeah. How do we start doing that.
Because I really want to learn this.
Thoughts?
Yes! I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve been working on learning this stuff for years now, and some of the things I’ve done or tried to do are:
Seek out older queer folks on social media, and follow them! There aren’t many around, but you can start with activists and look for others. Here’s a few:
If you have the opportunity to take gender studies or queer literature classes, or anything similar- take them! Try to talk to some fellow queer students folks before you choose which classes/professor you take them with, too.
Join local queer organizations! Not just clubs at your school, if you’re in school- though those are also great!- but clubs, in-person meetup groups, online groups, and other organizations where you might meet folks who are older than you.
Seek out material on topics that interest you; be it Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, specific queer artists and musicians (like Frida Kahlo, Keith Harring, or Freddie Mercury), or your country or specific region’s history. There are a ton of documentaries out there, and a ton of articles, books, essays, etc. that can all be great resources.
Also, @makingqueerhistory is a great resource. They have a podcast and do a ton of writing on queer history, and that can be an amazing place to start as well.
Good luck!
This is a very good take, and we also very much appreciate you recommending us. If any of y’all are looking for further direction on where to start with reading/listening to us, feel free to send us a message and we will try to recommend something that fits your interests!
I like to believe that all the dragons in the world were magically cursed and turned into cats. But cats have never forgotten where they come from, hence the attitude.
I nearly didn’t reblog this but the above comment makes more sense than anything I’ve ever heard.
…that’s…that’s actually a story my mom used to tell me when I was little? That a dragon showed up at someone’s cottage so they gave it milk. And the dragon enjoyed the milk, so it kept coming back and got smaller and softer and purry-er until eventually it wasn’t a dragon anymore, it was a cat, and that’s where cats came from and why we keep giving them milk.
She might have gotten the story from Ursula K. Le Guin, or I have confused it with a different dragon story.
That’s also why cats tend to hoard their toys behind the couch!
Actually the story is even older. Written by a woman named Edith Nesbit, first published in 1899, it is called “The Dragon Tamers”. It predates Leguin and other fantasy biggies like Lewis and Tolkien.
Nesbit actually can be credited with being one of the first authors that began to shift myths and legends to more fantasy-like stories (fantasy as a genre how we know it, wasn’t around then because it was just part of literature, especially British literature). In fact, many scholars who study fantasy literature and children’s literature believe that, since her children’s stories were so popular with children in England, the stories and their content prompted Tolkien (the first to coin fantasy as its own genre in his essay “On Fairy Stories”) to take up the stories of dragons and elves and fairies as they’d have been children when she was writing.
Tolkien was born in 1892. He would have been 7 when “The Dragon Tamers” was first published. Edith Nesbit did a LOT for modernizing myths, legends, and lore as a children’s author, maybe more than we will ever know.
yo why do adults try to tell middle schoolers not to dye their hair or cut it weird or dress strange. Middle school is the most miserable time of anyone’s life, let them have fun and get a mohawk or something. They don’t have colleges to impress or a boss to worry about. They’re 12. Let them be less miserable with their blue hair and bad fashion (so long as it’s weather appropriate! I don’t want anyone wearing only a tshirt and jeans in winter!!!) It won’t kill you to let your kid exercise some control over their appearance that literally will not follow them their whole lives. Who cares if your kid wants to wear unprofessional clothes. They’re a kid, they don’t need to be professional.
if you need me i am going to be binge-reading the archives of my favorite blog on the entire internet which is written by this sweet old man who lives on a farm in the pacific northwest with his husband and a bunch of animals. there are nice pictures of flowers and ducks and the tone is so gentle and soothing:
like… fuck…. i love everything about this blog…. it’s the one good thing left online
sir………i am literally crying right now
LOOK. AT. THEM.
oh to be a chicken eating organic steamed rice on a snowy day…. i mean…. my god
While out on my adventures the other day, I stopped at the farmers market to get some of their exceptional peach cider and a group of four college age girls all got out of an SUV, dressed somewhat identically (white face mask, gray or white top, dark bottoms, uggs) and headed up to the barn.
One of them shouted ‘PUMPKIN’ and pointed to one of the 90lb pumpkins they had out front and all of them ran to see it up close, taking turns with their phones to get a selfie each.
They were absolutely overjoyed to see pumpkins, turning every squash they could find over and over and taking pictures of it. They must have taken a hundred photos total.
It is entirely possible that this was their first time visiting a farm.
So I got my gallon of cider, some honey, and some fudge and those girls were in the line, each with a pumpkin held about belly height like they were six months pregnant with it.
Well… sort of.
Three of them were in line like that and the fourth of them ran up with a package of fudge. “Ladies look! Pumpkin Spice Fudge!”
“Oh my god where??”
So two of them went back to the fudge and got more fudge, got back in line.
Then another one went missing and came back with a bag. “Oh my god! Pumpkin Spice Popcorn???”
“I didnt think you could DO that!!”
“Where???
"Girls, we need a cart!”
This happened ad hominem until I think they had every single pumpkin spice item in the barn: soap, candles, taffy, cakes, breads, mixes… it filled a cart and was easily $300 worth of pumpkin spice stuff plus their pumpkins and they were so excited to have it all. It was treasure. It was a bounty. They had hunted well and their stores would be stocked for the winter.
And on the one hand I’m rolling my eyes because pumpkin spice is just… cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. But on the other hand.. they were so excited.
Like they were so excited to see pumpkins in a place that grows pumpkins and not at a grocery store and I suppose the takeaway is:
May you find unequaled joy in something as simple as a pumpkin in a place where pumpkins grow.
Lincolnshire Wildlife Park | Screenshot from Instagram
They did nothing wrong!!
Parrots are incredibly intelligent birds capable of some truly amazing things, like problem solving and complex communication, and they’re also agents of chaos. They appear in the news more often than most animals because they get up to stuff that, to put it mildly, isn’t very typical. Say, for example, developing an online shopping addiction or getting arrested as an accomplice in a major drug bust. Y’know, just slightly unusual behaviour.
The most recent development in the ongoing chronicles of Havoc Unleashed Upon The World By Parrots comes to us from England, where five African greys had to be removed from public viewing at Lincolnshire Wildlife Park. What was their offense?
According to the Associated Press, the guilty parties, Eric, Jade, Tyson, Elsie, and Billy, all arrived at the park back in August and were placed in quarantine together before being moved into the main outdoor aviary. And, apparently, the time they spent together was enough for them to learn a very, erm, colorful vocabulary from some of the staff, and then from each other.
The five parrots picked up a couple curse words here and there, and every time the park’s keepers laughed, it encouraged them to keep ramping things up — not only by learning more swear words and using them very liberally, but also by laughing at themselves.
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more connected to another species than I do to these parrots who yell “fuck off” at passersby and laugh about it afterward.
Nature is so beautiful.
“Most parrots clam up outside,” said Steve Nichols, the zoo’s chief executive, “but for some reason these five relish it.”
The official word is that these magnificent birds with the mouths of sailors have been separated and moved to different parts of the park so they don’t continue to cuss out the park’s guests, which sucks because, let’s be honest, we’d all pay more to visit parrots who swear like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner.
We have a really cute one that visits the front porch to look for leftover cat food that we put out for the stray boy who lives under our house. The possum doesn't have that split face, but it does have about 3 different colored patches in his coat. Just a few weeks ago it seemed tiny, now it is almost half-grown.
Lincolnshire Wildlife Park | Screenshot from Instagram
