the-emblematic:

One wild thing about Universal cutting up all those trees is I first heard about tree law like, maybe a month ago. One of my mutuals reblogged that one comic and my reaction was sort of mildly amused, but also a little confused as to why tree law seemed to be so popular of all things

It really feels like some great karmic entity leaned down and said hey here’s the set up to a joke that won’t get a punchline for a little while. But when it does you’re gonna love it

sabertoothwalrus:

crossroadswrite:

idk about you but i’m a sucker for the we just had sex and it’s the morning after and i woke up to an empty bed and how could i be so stupid of course you left me alone but wait you’re in my kitchen cooking me breakfast and i’m so relieved trope

catchymemes:

stele3:

only-tiktoks:

Oh look, it’s entirely possible for a cisgender comedian to crack jokes about transgender people without being transphobic.

flowercrownsnstuff:

awanderingpig:

claricechiarasorcha:

meggannn:

how can ppl say cats are heartless tbh

I once stayed at a game reserve in South Africa, and they had three cheetahs – two males and one female. The boys stuck together (they were brothers), but female cheetahs are solitary, save for when they are raising cubs. Which is hard work for cheetahs, because they don’t/can’t den, she’s working constantly to protect/move her cubs, as well as feeding both them and herself.

Now, these cheetahs ARE in a private reserve, but they’re still essentially wild. But they are more or less accustomed to the presence of people. And this cheetah, Ketswiri, got very badly injured in her leg one time, which usually would be fatal to a cheetah. The staff at the reserve helped her. Another time, she was starving, and they provided her a fresh antelope carcass. And she remembered this, because the science officer was telling us how one time he was watching Ketswiri and her cubs, and she wandered over and dumped all her cubs at his feet, and walked off. Like “watch my kids, I need some me time.” And he was panicking like COME BACK I CAN’T BABYSIT YOUR KIDS WTF

Half of the comments are about cats giving birth on top of or next to their owners and I’m not crying at all

it’s so funny though because domesticated cats are aggressively social in raising their young so basically op’s cat was like bitch these are your kids too, where tf you think you’re going???

badwolfkaily:

This.

atlinmerrick:

solarmama:

quote-bomber:

First ever recorded snowball fight (1897)

Happy Holidays And Merry Christmas To All!

Colorized!

Guy On Bicycle gets so smeared he leaves his hat behind to escape!

All Victorian ADULTS. Awesome.

I love this so much. Someone slowed it down so it’s not the old-fashioned herky-jerky of old films, now someone colorized it…the past feels like the present because, well, people. Lookit them having fun! *beams at everyone*

warrior-of-the-runes:

prince-luffy:

I truly hate the word “unalive.” There are so many other euphemisms that fictional Italian mobsters worked so hard to provide you with and you just ignore them.

beautiful compilation from @orc-sign-language

princelabia:

out-of-the-closet gregory house would be such an unbridled nightmare. try telling him what to do? that’s homophobic. that’s a hate crime. he would employ the most twisted queer infighting rhetoric to be the most insufferable person possible. “actually homo sapiens is offensive, we prefer ‘differently sexual’”. if he got fired for malpractice he would sue for discrimination. he would make new employees guess his sexuality and if they didn’t figure it out in a week he would fire them. and everyone would be too distracted by house’s theatrics no one would notice wilson. they’d go to him and be like “I’m not homophobic but house is being kind of bizarre and aggressive about it” and wilson would be like “oh really” and they would say “how do you deal with it, being the straight guy best friend of someone who behaves like this” and wilson would be unable to break it to them that after a long day of wilson doing his job and house harassing every person in the hospital they go home and have horrible old man sex in their shared apartment and then lie awake laughing at how completely fucking clueless the new interns are

theconcealedweapon:

Pride was originally a riot. It’s not supposed to be “family-friendly”. Those who want family-friendly LGBT spaces are free to just create them. Take places that are already family-friendly and make them LGBT-friendly also. If you don’t want to do that, then that’s why Pride is still necessary.

libraryoftheancients:

rockpapertheodore:

headspace-hotel:

cheeseanonioncrisps:

himbofisher:

Sigh.

For those of you who like to visualise these things, that’s roughly enough to fill this bucket:

the content creators are at it again, creating content.

What the fuck does this have to do with Homestuck

cumaeansibyl:

vergess:

lesbian-moon-gf:

obelixetcompagnie:

This meme is inescapable on French insta so I’m posting it here for all to enjoy

there are francophones debating if “can it” properly conveys how strong the french term is

IMO it’s like….“shut your fuckin trap”

This is a “if a classroom heard their teacher say they’d start hooting and hollering” type of curse; nothing to be appalled by but SO unexpected. And definitely a curse.

I don’t know anything about this show but I’m pretty sure this is a deliberate swing at all of the shows and opinion articles that think it’s appropriate to make this into an argument. “This is how to debate trans rights. Hello, trans person, are you happy? Yes? Good. Debate over.”

And the guy who tries to debate the “anti” side receives, not even a denunciation, but a weary, contemptuous dismissal. I would translate the delivery, if not the phrase, as “Oh, fuck off.”

porcupine-girl:

stephaniematurin:

actualaster:

kingdomheartsloversstuff:

looney-toons:

timemachineyeah:

Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This just applies to so many things in life. If you don’t know that you don’t know something, how can you ASK about it?

Also research is a skill, not an innate ability in all humans. Research is actually a variety of skills and they’re not always exactly the same when you’re talking about when and where you’re researching.

Knowing the best way to google something isn’t the same as knowing how to find something in a reference book isn’t the same as knowing how a card catalog works and how to navigate research when you have limited access to physical materials.

Sometimes even when people want to educate themselves, they’re lost and confused.

And then when they ask… They get beaten down for daring to ask instead of “educating themselves” because people forget that asking questions from sources you trust is part of trying to educate yourself.

Ten years ago I tried “educating myself” about trans issues and guess what, pretty much everything was by terves. If I hadn’t already met a very kind trans woman in real life, I could have educated myself into a galloping bigot.

Yes, it sucks when people ask the same basic questions over and over, but do you really want them getting answers from today’s non-tumblr internet?

I teach Intro to Psychology - I get a few nontraditional students (though most of those are still Gen Z), but most of my students are 16-20.

In the chapter on learning, I talk about Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and the fact that since he was doing research in Russia in the 20s-30s and died at the age of 37, his research didn’t get translated and make it to Western scientists until the 60s.

Last year I had one student ask me why. Why did it take so long for Western scientists to read his work? Were they just not paying attention? And I was floored for a moment because to me it’s obvious - then I realized that this student has never lived in a world without easy access to information.

Now, it happens that Vygotsky’s work was actually banned by Stalin even in Russia, but I didn’t go into that. I was like, how would they have found it? Remember, no internet. If you want to find a book, you have to rely on paper records or phone calls to people with paper records. How would these people who don’t speak or read Russian have even known his work existed if it was only published in Russia?

And it was clear that this was a little mindblowing for the students - they’d never stopped to think about how hard it was to access information. When I started my master’s program (less than 20 years ago), card catalogs had been online for years but many scientific journals were still paper-only. I had to go to the actual library and photocopy the articles I wanted - and if my library didn’t have that journal, I had to put in an interlibrary loan request and hope the librarians could find someone who had it. For most of these kids that was within their lifetime, but not within the time they can remember or have been looking for information. It’s changed so fast it can give you whiplash.