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saw a video about a singer who canceled the fireworks show at her concert because she noticed that a stray dog was quietly watching her performance and she didn’t want to scare him away and maybe maybe there’s still hope for humankind

❝ Brazilian singer Taty Girl left her fans speechless during a concert when she made an unexpected decision: she suspended the fireworks show she had planned to protect a homeless dog who was attending the show. While singing, Taty noticed the presence of a dog she named “Caramelo,” who was calmly watching from a distance. Without hesitation, she told her audience: “We will not launch any more fireworks, Caramelo does not like them. Out of respect for him, we will not use them. You can see that he is there quietly, enjoying the show.” Taty’s gesture was applauded by the audience, who not only admired her sensitivity, but also suggested that she adopt the dog. According to reports, the singer listened to the voices of her fans and decided to take Caramelo home, ensuring him a life full of love and care. ❞ Vía 🎥 tt/tatygirloficial”

— Source

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Pokemon Hanafuda

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Is there beef with the Holstein cows and you or what was that joke lol

It's kind of wild It's just never come up on this blog before, but I HATE holsteins. Bottom 10 cow breeds for me. I hate how they're so common they account for the majority of milk produced. I hate that they're the "default" cow to the point where some don't even know cattle HAVE other colors. I hate their tiny horns (IF THEY EVEN HAVE THAT. LOSER ASS HORNLESS COW) and their painfully massive udders.

Legit I'm trying so hard to not launch into a No Mouth Must Scream style AM speech-- shoot my hand slipped.

(AM speech about why i dont like holsteins below the cut)

For starters, I have to give a brief lesson on what these terms mean; the "Holstein" is the American strain of the "Frisian" breed. Frisians are an ancient breed from Frisia, in the north of what we now consider the Netherlands. Crosses between the breeds are "Holstein-Frisians."

(There’s even more to this but im keeping it as simple as possible. Also one of my friends is Frisian and she is probably going to kill me for describing it like that.)

Historically, livestock was adapted to the environment they lived in. Frisians were bred by the Frisii people for hundreds of years in extremely grass-rich, lush, flat environments. The "polders" of the northern parts of the Netherlands. They're huge and eat a LOT of food.

Traditional Frisians were developed to produce as much meat and milk from a single individual as possible, without compromising the health of the cattle with constant inbreeding to get quick gains. We are talking about a breed that is over 2000 years old. They had the perfect environment to make The Ultimate Food Cow and by god they did it. I can respect that.

So, take that, drag it across an ocean to a place that does NOT have polders, and add the rapid enshittification of capitalism to it. BAM you've got a fucking holstein.

There is ONE goal for "improving" the holstein. Make More Milk. As long as the black and white milkbag leaks enough, nothing else matters. Health? Fertility? Feed ratio? Ability to not die of infection? WHO CARES. MILK LINE GO UP.

Over 90% of holsteins are inbred to start with, because Milk Line Go Up. To the tune of having an average COI of 8%-- where extreme negative effects (think Hapsburgs) start to crop up around 10%

Holstein bulls are aggressive bastards (many dairy bulls are), so no one wants to keep intact males in their herds, meaning most cows are artificially inseminated

Not being limited by the natural lifespan of a living bull means that the same stud can keep having direct offspring for decades after his death

Toystory the bull had 500,000 calves before he died, and hit over 1 million offspring in 2015. That's ONE animal and to put this in perspective, there are 9 million holsteins in the US.

DON'T WORRY IT GETS WORSE

Not only can 99% of holsteins be traced back to just two bulls-- 99% of male holsteins share one of two exact Y chromosomes with those two bulls.

The gene pool is so small that it's equivalent to about 60 individuals. Warrior Cat allegiances are larger than that. That's barely bigger than modern ThunderClan.

"Massive lack of genetic diversity" does not begin to capture the existential dread of this situation. Mark my words, WATCH, when the Bird Flu finally mutates a strain that rips through a mammalian population, it's gonna be in the USA and it's going to be through our dairy cattle.

This is not prophecy or me laying a curse on the land, this is the natural consequence of basing the stability of US milk production on the equivalent of 9 million clones of two classrooms worth of individuals, and then packing them in close quarters

And we don't have to wait for doomsday for the impacts to be apparent on the cattle themelves

Holstein fertility has also dropped by half since the 1960s when the intensive inbreeding really kicked into high gear

Because their whole body is dedicating all of their resources to milk production, they have a notoriously "bony" frame.

Show judges, however, like this because they think that's a very "feminine" look for a 1600 pound ruminant. Very normal thing to think.

Like. I don't know if i can communicate this to people who don't look at cows a lot (it's not quite as obviously dramatic as a pug skull) but here is a comparison of an "ideal" show holstein and an "unselected" holstein from a herd that's been established as a sort of "control group" for what they looked like back in the 1960s;

The way that the artery on the "modern" cow's belly runs to the udder like a big pink worm freaks me out the most ngl

The udder also bulges out from between the back legs

The show cow is so thin

And then compare these both to a Holstein-Frisian cross who leans more on the Frisian side;

Proper weight, developed legs. Its biggest "problem" is actually just the udder shape-- deep udders, which "hang" low like that, aren't optimal for milk-focused breeds because the higher away from the ground the less chance there is of infection. In that department, the "unselected" holstein clearly outclasses the holstein-frisian.

But it probably won't be surprising to hear that the "show holstein," with its massive, swollen udder, is SUPER prone to infections such as mastitis.

But it is also just more prone to getting sick generally

And, to keep up with these insane demands, holsteins need a TON of food. You aren't going to just turn these things out into a pasture and be done with it. Even its ancestor the Frisian needed premium Dutch polder grass to be such a good cow-- crank that up to 11 with these Monuments to Humanity's Hubrice

The Texas Longhorn developed in semi-feral conditions and can eat a bush to become the best thing in a 10 mile radius. The Scottish Highland was iron-forged in upland moors with a steady diet of turf and rain.

Meanwhile if a Holstein has less than 5 homemade meals a day without poland spring bottled water it will die to death.

And the WORST part? You have to use these if you want to make money in dairy farming. It's WAAY too expensive to just run a suboptimal farm. Their milk isn't great, but they sure do make a lot of it.

...so Holsteins and Holstein-Frisians (and other "super efficient" breeds) have absolutely decimated heritage cattle. The American Milking Devon is a deep reddish brown with gorgeous horns and low maintenance; rare. Randall Linebacks are painted with lines of white speckles down the back and can be used for any purpose; critically endangered. The Niata was a pug-faced cow who could fight jaguars; extinct.

And THAT'S what makes me hate them most of all. I LOVE cows, but whenever I see a reference to one, it's a holstein. It's always boring black and white splotches with big pink udders. They're practically synonymous with "cow" when their homogeniety is actually hiding much cooler breeds from you.

Did you know cows can be tiger-striped?

And that England has its own type of longhorn?

Or that cow horns can twist upwards like an antelope?

And that they can have REALLY LONG ears?

And that they can be blue?

And that's not even getting into some of the cows that have gotten a small crumb of attention lately, such as Highlands, Ankole-Watusi, and Texas Longhorns. There's so many cool cows out there! And they're all really different from holsteins! MOST of them are also a lot healthier and produce tastier milk and meat!

TL;DR yeah i don't like holsteins and I like sniping at them. For reasons both legit and petty.

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YOU KNOW WHAT BOTHERS ME

when fantasy books describe the cloth of Quant Farmpeople’s clothing as “homespun” or “rough homespun”

“homespun” as opposed to what??? EVERYTHING WAS SPUN AT HOME

they didn’t have fucking spinning factories, your pseudo-medieval farmwife is lucky if she has a fucking spinning wheel, otherwise she’s spinning every single thread her family wears on a drop spindle NO ONE ELSE WAS DOING THE SPINNING unless you go out of your way to establish a certain baseline of industrialization in your fake medieval fantasy land.

and “rough”??? lol just because it’s farm clothes? bitch cloth was valuable as fuck because of the labor involved ain’t no self-respecting woman gonna waste fiber and ALL THAT FUCKING TIME spinning shitty yarn to weave into shitty cloth she’s gonna make GOOD QUALITY SHIT for her family, and considering that women were doing fiber prep/spinning/weaving for like 80% of their waking time up until very recently in world history, literally every woman has the skills necessary to produce some TERRIFYINGLY GOOD QUALITY THREADS

come to think of it i’ve never read a fantasy novel that talks about textile production at all??? like it’s even worse than the “where are all the farms” problem like where are people getting the cloth if no one’s doing the spinning and weaving??? kmart???

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One time years ago I was in the elevator of my work building and this guy got on. He was breathing hard and looked a little crazed, and he went and stood behind me and took out his cell phone, and when some dude does that and you’re a not very burly femme-presenting person alone in an elevator you tend to go on alert, so I was paying a LOT of attention when he said, “Hi, it’s me. The doctor says it isn’t cancer. He says it’s another spleen.” Then the elevator reached the ground floor and the doors opened and he ran out like he was on fire.

Please go on this journey with me. The doctor said it wasn’t cancer. It was another spleen.

So the guy leaves the elevator and I’m just, you know, my day just didn’t recover. And I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. And on my last day at that job, I was in the elevator riding down at the end of my workday with my little box of office supplies, and HE GETS ON THE ELEVATOR AGAIN WITH ME. He looks much less crazed. We were again alone. I may have dreamed the whole thing.

Because, look. I worked in a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. There were hundreds of people in my building, spread across twenty floors. The odds of me seeing him again after that first time were nuts. And I hadn’t stopped playing that conversation over in my mind. So I thought, fuck it.

Me: “Hi, uh, so listen. A couple months ago you were on this elevator? And you made a phone call?”

Him, slightly wary: “Okay?”

Me: “So I didn’t mean to listen in but you know, this is close quarters.”

Him, flat: “Uh-huh.”

Me: “So I heard you telling someone that the doctor said it wasn’t cancer, it was another spleen. And like, it’s none of my business, but today’s my last day in this building and I will never have another chance, so I have to ask. WHO in your life has a second spleen?”

The guy looked at me for a second, and then he burst out laughing, and he said, “Oh, yeah, that was my dog.”

This is the second weirdest thing that has ever happened to me and I think about it every damn day.

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USA Cultural Regions Map

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Eruption 2019

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i like that the name nuzlocke stuck. like the original thing was just called hard mode but it featured a nuzleaf named after locke from lost and to this day its still called a nuzlocke. theres even variations like wonderlocke. like the locke part became a suffix. i like that. i really like how words happen

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Macklemore - Fucked up

It pissed me off that it was age restricted on YouTube so I'm reposting because fuck you YouTube, go watch it there if you can though!

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Lots of ominous news nowadays, but there are good things too! Thailand's Marriage Equality Law took effect today!

This tweet takes you to the top of a thread that lists all the changes, like replacing gendered terms like husband and wife with spouses, same-sex marriages have full legal status, same-sex couples can adopt and use IVF and create pre-nups, just a whole lot of steps to make them equal.

It's all just so amazing and joyous. They hosted a parade for the newlywed couples!

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I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

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if you wanna understand why transmisogyny is so horrifying you have to understand the sorts of social and cultural patterns it takes to abuse someone until they will happily fulfill the role of the fetishized tokenized tranny bc any other option means isolation and death.

patriarchal society needs its sacrificial hypersexualized disgusting living sex-objects, and transmisogyny is how it tries to turn a human into that. i keep thinking abt this 4chan thread i read ~2013 shortly after i came out, in which a chaser talked about how he specifically liked dating trans women because “they have such low self-esteem that you can make them do anything”. he went on to talk about how he specifically looks for trans women with “dead, lifeless eyes” (aka dissociated from ptsd) because “they’re like a doll you can mold into whatever you want, then discard when you’re done, and there will always be more desperate for love”

that’s what transmisogyny is: a systematic pattern of abuse applied to a small sacrificial portion of the population to create a class of women with no claim to community or personhood, who will never be defended or avenged, who can be safely sunk into the attrition of patriarchy’s darker desires to protect the cis women, who after all could one day be mothers or some other kind of person. we are the class sacrificed to men’s violence and cis women’s violence. the socially unimportant. the weird and ugly. the punching bag. the blowup doll that talks. the mad artist that produces something great and then must burn out cause who could support that eccentric through life? the activist who makes huge steps for the better but stumbles on a community that would rather rape and abandon her than admit that it needs her. the queen of the dance who gets beaten with sticks as she’s leaving it and no one helps.

and its easy to do this, by painting the class as predatory, by making us hate and fear our own genitals, by indoctrinating us with an absurd amount of self-hatred, by giving us no out, no safe community, no one we can ever turn to. every cis person becomes a beartrap just waiting to swing shut and take out a chunk of flesh. and with fear and trauma we start to disappear from the world. we commit suicide, we overdose on heroin, we starve quitely in rooms playing videogames, or we become the tranny they want, deadeyed and always compliant and always ready to soak up blame. but whatever happens its the same: over time, we cease to exist. the person we are withdraws from the world until there is little to nothing left.

i don’t know how to stop it, but this has to stop. this is not something anyone ever should have to go through.

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Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.

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tumblr deleted my last confessional post so here’s a new one:

when i was like 6 my grandparents got me an awesome dollhouse (playmobil haus 5301 if anyone needs to know). for some reason, i had in my head that one day, god would shrink a bunch of people until they were the size of polly pockets and the world would be so cruel and scary for them. so every night i would pray to god that if he did that, that he would please put the tiny people in my dollhouse so i could provide for them. and every night, in case it happened, i would put water in a little cup for them and make their little beds so they’d have somewhere warm to rest after finding out they would be tiny forever. i told my friend in school about this and he said “oh my dad’s a wizard dont worry he can make them grow again” and then i felt at ease and never worried about it again.