#bracket: FOUR a

[proton-wobbler]

Main Brackets!

There are four brackets [Fave, Pretty, True, Four] comprising of 32 birds, for a total of 128 birds in this poll! I will reblog a version of this post with every bird listed via text within their bracket, so it is easier to find for those with image issues. It's gonna take a while to actually put the posts together for the first round, seeing as there are 64 battles happening, so expect the polls to go up around July 12th.

Below is a link for submitting any cool facts or info about the birds you want to win. It's not necessary to send info here, but I like to give the option to infodump about birds, and it helps with keeping things organized.

As per tumblr etiquette, you are totally free to reblog the polls themselves with as much propoganda as you want. These submissions are just to help me fill the poll post with some cool facts.

EDIT: for mobile users, this post has all the tags for the round 1 brackets, in place of having another masterpost. Everything is tagged with #Hipster Bird Main Bracket or its corresponding #Bracket: TYPE A style tag. Once we move on there shall be a new post.

[school-of-all-time]

Round Four, Bracket 1

[apollos-boyfriend]

not to get into hashtag discourse but i can’t get over some of these character brackets banning mcrp characters for “crossing the line into rpf” yet nearly always have some sort of dnd character in their polls. do you not see your hypocrisy. do you not see how those are the exact same thing told through different mediums.

[videogamedogbracket]

[mysterycharacterbracket]

Losers semifinal round

We are down to the Final Four!

This is the semifinal round of the losers side of the bracket. The winner of this poll will move on to the final round of the losers side, and the loser will take 4th place overall.

The first contestant is:

Character 67

Whose propaganda is:

Is part horse. Can cause others excruciating pain with their own anger. Joins an illegal rebellion at age 13. 3 elves are all in love with her. One of them is her cousin. A grumpy short man tried to get her exiled from society because she has brown eyes.

And the second contestant is:

Character 246

Whose propaganda is:

Ate glass, got hit by a car, fell from a 40 foot cliff, got hit with a 600,000 volt stun gun, and endured much more and they're perfectly fine

[sexiestpodcastcharacter]

Bonus Poll: AIs from Mod's List

I created a list of podcast AIs to add into the bracket if we didn't get enough submissions. We did get enough submissions for a full bracket, and some from my list were submitted by other people, but here are some that didn't make it!

The only propaganda you get from me is that I commissioned the Wolf 359 writers to write a (noncanon) scene between Enlil and Hera.

[fatehbaz]

Whither the man-eater? This entity was once the prime interest of an entire league of famous sportsmen in colonial India, the engrossing content of many books [...]. [T]he man-eater was first constructed, and then dismantled [...]. This erratic rise and fall of the man-eater is descriptive of changing power relations, the ephemeral yet pervasive axis between the colonial and the post-colonial [...].

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Jim Corbett was a case in point. [Around the time of independence, Corbett authored popular stories of his adventures in colonial India in the preceding decades, including Man-Eaters of Kumaon and The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag]. [...]

The man-eater was destined [...] to shine in all its ferocity at a certain moment in time and not any other.

Thus, [there is special] context within which specific 'meanings' get associated with animals, at certain times, and at the the hands of select actors [...].

[T]he engulfing realm of the printed word, especially the English book, gave astounding shape and clarity to the idea of a man-eater. [...] The man-eater was never thought of as a sub-species of Panthera tigris in the tables of natural history; rather the man-eater [...] was ‘out of nature’, and thus some kind of an addendum to naturalist understandings. [...] The making of the man-eater into a coherent animal category follows an arduous path. [...] [M]otor cars and other gadgets such as hunting lights had arrived on the scene. [...] [A British officer] who had served in the Central Provinces for quite a while after [1909] [...], commented [..] ‘With modern inventions it would be quite easy to be playing cards in the tent [,] and when the tiger turns up, kill him by pressing a button on a tent wall.’ [His] exasperation was evident [among] [...] [s]portsmen in the 1920s and 1930s [...]. [A] single species splits into undefeatable man-eaters and gentlemanly tigers worthy of observation alone. [...] Amid such lesser sportsmen the man-eater thus became a tactic of power which elevated its [colonial] victor over both the hunters of the past and contemporaries of the present. [...] But it is truly a question if this muzzle-loading gun in the hands of the native [...]. The implication was that sportsmen had a fairer sense of restrictions than the non-sporting classes. With the latter classes gaining political mobility, fears of an 1857-like massacre were also in the air. [...] [B]y the 1930s [...] a host of sportsmen [...] might have preferred to see natives handling a rickety muzzle-loader than an elegant express rifle; the man-eater was intended to remain at large for those ["superior" colonial sportsmen] in possession of the latter. [...]

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This development of a sportsman into an author can be located within a history of the book. [...] The English novel as a genre [...] began to acquire greater circulation after [...] 1870. [...] [A] book on which the sportsman laboured was like a trophy [...]. For all such ongoing fuss about size [records], a man-eater was more about qualities: cunning, finesse, stealth [...]. If the difficulty of hunting a man-eater was what gave the sportsman a chance to prove the superiority of his skill [...], then this difficulty was the stuff of a story, not a [size] measurement or a mounted trophy. And [...] an aspect of photography. [...] It authenticated the effort of a sportsman and could not be bought of the market [taxidermy trophies available to simply purchase at local shops] except through a book that bore the author’s name. [...]

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There were dimensions of imagination and power that accompanied this. The idea of a man-eater was such that it helped advance the long held belief that the natives were a hapless lot. [...] Pandian [...] shares how the man-eaters of the colonial period were equated with the ‘arbitrary monarchs’ of a pre-colonial era, which also the British sportsman as a symbol of ‘sovereign might’, would meet on its own grounds. [...] [Consider also] the manner in which the simultaneous depiction of the remaining tigers as ‘large hearted gentlem[e]n’ of the forests (a thing Corbett professed) went to convey the contrary image of a docile, tame and innocent nature that could come to be harmed by natives at the slightest instance.

Protecting the people gave the colonisers power over animals, and protecting animals gave it a power over people.

Notions of animality and criminality intersected at the site of the man-eater.

The entire continuum of man-animal relations was thus canvassed through this tactic, which also the medium of the book in the later colonial periods broadcasted to distant corners of the colony. [...] What perhaps distinguished the man-eater from any ordinary form of game hunting was that it was additionally a form of ‘language-game’. [...] [T]he man-eater was an account in which the ephemeral idea of an ‘India’ glimmered constantly in the background. But it did so largely in English. The man-eater was an English diatribe [...]. The side by side portrayal of the victims of the man-eater as ‘superstitious’, ‘rural’ and ‘ignorant’, only went to establish before the (civilised) readers the proof of an (uncivilised) mass waiting to be salvaged, assimilated or disciplined. [...] [A] mild perusal of Corbett’s My India, published about five years after India’s gaining of Independence, provides ample evidence of the above dynamic. The eventual autonomy of the British administration besides a celebration of the decision making capacities of rural masses (described as ‘real’ Indians) is legend in the pages of this book. The political reality of colonial rule is conflated with a nationalistic pride, which also the sportsman allocates to himself in the describing of his (my?) India. One is left to understand that the man-eater thrived at its best in a colonised India as much as an Indianised colony. As the tension between an emerging nation and an erstwhile colony acquired sharpness in the later colonial periods and a decade thereafter, the narrative of the man-eater came into its own.

The man-eater is thus a veritable creature of timing that shone at its brightest in the 1940s, even if it had been shot down 30 years ago by the likes of Corbett. [...] [Later in the twentieth century, there was a] transformation of the landscape from a designated ‘wasteland’ under colonial administration to a ‘World Heritage Site’ in Independent India. At the peak of such transitions in the 1970s [...], the tiger itself was assuming cosmopolitan proportions and being regarded as a ‘citizen’ by the state. [...] [This was an] emergence of [...] a 'cosmopolitan tiger' [...].

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All text above by: Varun Sharma. "Rise and Fall of the 'Man-eater': The Changing Science and Technology of a Species (1860-present)". History and Sociology of South Asia Volume 10, Issue 1. First published online 8 December 2015. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text in the first paragraph of this post is from the article's abstract. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[xkcdbracket]

Sweet 16 Final Match!

(ignore the multitude of balls. In the real match there's only one ball)

A dog team (the dogs are like Air Bud) with one human VS four kindergartners and (adult) Lebron James

[blueandyellowbracket]

Blue and Yellow Showdown

[destielbait]

ROUND THREE MATCHUP FOUR

[proton-wobbler]

Round 2, Poll 26

Fiery-billed Aracari vs Bell Miner

sources under cut

Fiery-billed Aracari

These birds typically travel in groups of six or more, groups that sometimes include other toucans. They roost communally, and may pack several birds into the same cavity for sleeping.

A cooperative breeder, sometimes birds from the previous season will return to aid their parents in raising the next brood. While the diet of adult aracari is mostly fruit based, they’ll feed the nestlings mostly insects.

Bell Miner

“Their call is such a relaxing tinkling from the tall trees. But also, more importantly, they’re like the saddest looking birds I’ve ever seen. Like who hurt you, buddy.”

Bell miners live in large, complex social groups. Within each group there are subgroups containing several breeding pairs, but also a number of birds not currently breeding. Non-breeding birds will aid in the raising of the nest. These birds defend their colony areas communally and aggressively, excluding most other passerine species, which would compete with the miners on their main source of food: colonies of psyllid bugs called “bell lerps”.

"bell miner are a problem because of how well they protect their psyllid bugs. They lead to trees dying- it's called Bell Miner Associated Dieback, or BMAD (which is a great acronym). But eucalyptus forests are already struggling in a lot of places because of the changes in the fire regime. we need more fire, but BMAD also adds to those issues in some areas! I don't hold it against them tho, look how sad they are"

Images: Aracari (Joshua Vandermeulen); Miner (Bernadett Kery)

Birds of the World: Fiery-billed Aracari

[school-of-all-time]

Round Four, Bracket 7

[the-joker-of-musicals]

frank-n-furter propaganda (by @trashyspaceprxnce)

As someone who is seeing my local shadow cast production of rocky horror for the third time in a year this coming Friday, I need to urge to tell everyone to go vote for Frank-n-Furter. Literally no other character can compare, his introductory song is called “Sweet Transvestite”, he’s an alien, he turns people into statues and dresses them up with fishnets and feather boas, he’s even bisexual Also he looks like this

beetlejuice propaganda

my beetlejuice propaganda is that he's a jewish icon

[videogamedogbracket]

[goodcartoondadshowdown]

Tatsuo Kusakabe vs. Kanan Jarrus

[babygirlpoll]

Babygirl Bracket Round 4