Category: General

solarbird:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Western Canadian Literature: “The prairie is cold and empty, like my marriage.”

Eastern Canadian Literature: “The sea is cold and empty, like my marriage.”

Cultural differences.

A few folks have commented that the preceding post is overly reductive, and I have to admit that I was perhaps a bit glib. Here’s an attempt at a more accurate summary, then.

British Columbia Literature: “The mountains are cold and empty, like – holy shit, a bear!”

Alberta Literature: “The prairie is cold and empty, like my attempts to reconnect with my heritage.”

Saskatchewan Literature: “The prairie is cold and empty, like my marriage.”

Manitoba Literature: “The prairie is cold and empty, like my relationship with my father.”

Ontario Literature: “The hills are cold and empty, like my faith in humanity.”

Quebec Literature: “The River is cold and empty, like my faith in God.”

Newfoundland Literature: “The sea is cold and empty, like my marriage.”

Nova Scotia Literature: “The sea is cold and empty, like my relationship with my son.”

Nunavut Literature: “The tundra is cold and empty, like the legacy of white colonialism.”

I think that about covers it.

holy shit, a bear!

THEY KNOW

reginazelenacoramills:

whittletheworld:

*Miranda Priestly voice*

Lesbian storyline ends in death? Groundbreaking.

“It was a narrative decision.”

tkingfisher:

portablemiah:

smittyv288:

Health care isn’t a human right, thank you for your time.

yeah smittyv288 you tell em! who do those dumbass disabled lower-class people think they are? you want your AIDS medication refilled but can’t afford basic health coverage? yeah, well, how about you stop having AIDS. health care isn’t a human right, you know. and your friend over there with cancer, tell that motherfucker he needs to quit complaining about his “immune deficiencies” and whining about how he “needs chemotherapy or he’ll die in two months”. if he’s so “terminally ill” and “unable to work” why doesn’t he just get a fucking job like the rest of us and pay for these incredibly expensive lifesaving treatments himself? people like him need to understand that they just don’t deserve to live.

This was totally covered in that one parable about the Samaritan Who Kicked The Guy In The Ditch And Told Him To Get A Job Already.

i-peed-so-hard-i-laughed:

myworldoflanguages:

useless-spain-facts:

This is a milestone of the Internet

Port O’ Rico

hermitknut:

dinosaur-discourse:

Since it’s April Fool’s Day, and Tumblr is sending images of lizards screaming across all our dashboards at hyper-light speeds, I thought it would be a good time to talk about a lizard who April Fooled the entire paleontological community, long before the Mop/Wretched Tooth divide threatened to send our sociopolitical infrastructure crumbling to the ground.

Is it a tenuous connection?  Yeah, but I was gonna make this post anyway, so live with it!

Longisquama lived during the Triassic Period, 235 million years ago, in modern-day Kyrgyzstan.  It might have been a lizard, as I asserted above, but its place within Reptilia is actually quite uncertain; the only thing known for certain is that Longisquama is a “diapsid reptile”, meaning it could be a squamate, a rhynchocephalian, a crocodilian, or a pre-dinosaur.

Longisquama is distinguished by the row of strange appendanges growing from its back.  The purpose of these appendages is uncertain, and has long been the subject of much paleontological debate.

The most iconic version of Longisquama depicts it with twin rows of appendages, rather than the single row preserved in the only known fossil specimen, and shows it using these twin wing-like structures to glide.  While this is almost certainly not the case, numerous supposedly serious paleontologists – including Dougal Dixon, speculative evolution writer and long-time peddler of insane made-up garbage – have espoused the theory that Longisquama is the true ancestor of birds.

This makes absolutely zero sense from an anatomical perspective, and was essentially nothing more than a very convenient way for a bunch of die-hard dinosaur traditionalists to deny that birds were the descendants of dinosaurs.  Even so, this debate raged on until the shockingly recent year of 2006.

At that time, new studies of the single Longisquama fossil found that the appendages weren’t part of the animal’s body at all.

It was fossilized in front of a plant.

@the-tao-of-fandom

its-almost-as-if:

cardboardmoose:

on the 28th of april, 2011 ce, shadow chancellor of the exchequer edward michael balls tweeted his own name in a moment of unsurpassed mastery of both metaphysics and social media.

every year, the british public come together to celebrate this momentous occasion. it is customary for brits to greet each other on this day with the ritual greeting, “ed balls be with you”, and to reply “and also with you”.

may this ed balls day bring you peace, prosperity, and ed balls

half a decade of this

justice-turtle:

jimhines:

So much conversation and debate after yesterday’s post about trigger warnings.

Most of the commenters seemed to agree that:

1. No, trigger warnings are not, by themselves, censorship.
2. Stephen Fry was being a complete turd cabbage in his article.

But there was discussion of whether the concept of triggers and
content warnings can go too far, and if we can reach a point where it
all becomes damaging. One individual pointed to an article in the
Atlantic as an example that was “better informed”: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

I started trying to respond to some of the points in that article,
and after 1000 words, had only gotten through the first few paragraphs.
So I’m trying a different approach, and zooming in on just one of their
arguments:

[T]here is a deeper problem with trigger
warnings. According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very
idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear
is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power
outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening
experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an
elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you
should help her avoid elevators.

But if you want to help her return to
normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her
through a process known as exposure therapy.

NO YOU SHOULD NOT, BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A THERAPIST!!!

(If you are a trained and licensed therapist, please replace the previous statement with, NO YOU SHOULD NOT, BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT HER THERAPIST!!!)

Exposure Therapy and Systematic Desensitization are processes. They’re done in a controlled environment, with preparation and planning, which includes letting the patient know what’s coming. I.e., giving them a warning.

You might as well say, “Hey, Electroconvulsive Therapy is still
sometimes used to treat depression, and you’ve been feeling down, so I’m
gonna plug in this toaster and drop it into the bath with you!”

As someone who earned a degree in psychology, has been a rape counselor, has been in
counseling, and married a license therapist, do me a favor and knock it
off with the armchair psychologist crap before you seriously hurt
someone.

THIS

THANK YOU JIM HINES