A note on pro/anti-shipping, curating your space, and harassment

Hi folks!

There’s been a lot of new people joining the fandom over the last couple of months, which is great. It might not be obvious to them, however, that there’s been a bit of Fandom Drama over the past year and a half, of the kind which can suddenly flare up again in ways that make no sense if you don’t know the history behind them.

I’m not going to get into the personal side of it here, but this is just a gentle reminder:

Arguments on the internet have a way of becoming disproportionately extreme and violent.

If you have strong feelings one way or the other about pro vs anti shipping, please make the effort to curate your own online space, for your own comfort and safety and that of others.

That means checking people’s blog headers / carrds / DNIs / abouts and minimising your interaction with them if appropriate. I also suggest putting something like ‘pro-shipper’ or ‘anti’ in your own blog header.

Whatever your feelings, remember too to be wary of ‘call-out posts’ couched in exaggerated emotive language. This is true even if they come from / have been reblogged by somebody you trust. Outrage is addictive, and very few people stop to fact-check a post that confirms their own biases.

Remember too that harassment, anon hate, and threats/‘kill yourself’ jokes are never okay.

My blog header links to my main, where I have a page explaining my stance on the matter. But in brief, here’s my position.

That said: This blog is meant to be a resource for all of the fandom, relatively impersonal. I don’t mind antis reblogging or using what I’ve collected here, but I will not directly respond or interact.

Reminder that @junkyard-gifs is me. As I say, I have no problem with that blog being used as a resource by people who dislike or disagree with me. That's what it's there for: to be a centre of information and conversation for anybody who’s interested.

But on my main, I do go to considerable effort to avoid interacting with people who aren't comfortable with the 'pro-ship' label, and I'd appreciate the same courtesy in return. I will do my best to make everybody comfortable, but I can't be the only one putting in that effort: you are ultimately responsible for your own boundaries online.

Ever needed to hear about mad dad birds with enormous feet? Try THESE on for size:

What’s that you say? These are clearly the feet of a dinosaur, not a bird? WHY NOT BOTH?

This is Australia’s very own dinosaur, the second-largest bird in the world, the emu. Say hi!

They roam around Australia making ‘wonk-wonk’ noises under their breath and glaring at everything. And the dads take care of the babies! They sit on the eggs…

They look after the tiny stripey adorable things….

They look after the less tiny less adorable things…

And they even look after the great big menacing things that are almost as big as they are.

But here’s the catch. All emus look pretty much alike. Especially when you are a tiny stripey adorable thing. All you can see of your dad is is great big dinosaur feet (see picture #1). So there is one very unrealistic thing about all the adorable terrifying dinosaur family photos above:

I have never seen an emu family in the wild where all the babies are the same size.

Here is the reason!

Emu dad and his emu babies are roaming about wonking and glaring at everyone. Suddenly emu dad sees another emu dad! A threat!

Emu dads do some display threats with dancing and bouncing and fluffing and… look, it’s very serious business, okay?

If this does not work to see off one emu they might progress to actual fighting.

Oops, sorry, you wanted the dignified version. Here, have some ART:

MAGNIFICENT.

Either way, this encounter will end up with one or both adult emus zooming away as fast as he can run. This is very fast.

This is the other thing they do besides wonking and glaring, by the way. They run. Fear the running emu.

Anyway, this leaves all the tiny and medium-sized and semi-large stripey things milling around making confused tiny “cheep? wonk?” noises and basically just following whichever pair of large feet they can find.

HI DAD

And so mostly when you see a male emu with a gaggle of youngsters at heel, they are all different sizes. Who knows whose they are? Not him! But he’s going to look after them anyway.

Fear him.

Maybe I missed it in my research, but as far as I can tell, this is a bastardization of a true fact. Male emus are the ones who raise the chicks, and they may raise chicks that are not their own, but as far as I could find, they don’t raise other emus’ hatchlings.

The reason they may raise other males’ chicks is that emus have social partnerships, but they’re really open about it. Thus, a nest will be composed of half-siblings that one father takes care of. This article explains this better (and longer).

Normally, I would err on the side of caution, my research abilities not being perfect and all, but considering the severity number of unscientific assumptions made here (the bit about how “no emu family has a consistent size among chicks”, which is central to the story, is wrong on sooooo many levels, it’s actually impressive) and the fact that many animals tend to be very homicidal about the offspring of competitors, I’m confident that this post is mostly false

My source: many anecdotes from friends and open-range zoo keepers, things I have read somewhere but don’t remember where and, like I said in the post, the fact that , out of all the emu families I’ve seen in the wild, most have been very variable in size.

Hardly scientific, but not nothing.

This was originally a flippant post for a few friends. Then it blew up. So obviously I didn’t bother citing sources or anything, and it would be a bit belated to do that now .

But I think you’re right - I don’t remember anybody else, over the past however many years, questioning this representation. Mostly responses are about DID YOU KNOW, EMU WAR.

Honestly, by this stage, this post probably does have the reach to count as disinformation - or at least, a potentially misleading representation of reality. But the facts are consistent with my lived experience of emus, so far as it goes. Maybe there’s some local variation- if the emus where I live are more willing to adopt, that might explain why I couldn’t find any photos of mixed-sized families in my brief shitty google search for images.

(Also it’s worth noting that many birds are considerably more willing to adopt babies who exhibit the right behaviours than are mammals, whose recognition is more scent-based.)

Sure hope there’s no lemon-stealing whores about.

While talking with the Hobbits, Tom Bombadil puts on the One Ring. For a moment, all of the Nazgul burst into merry song. It is never discussed among them again.

I really couldn’t stop my self drawing this lol

Eldritch horrors getting an eldritch horror experience, for a second they experienced something incomprehensible.

Reblog to hug your Jewish mutuals

i cant believe americans on tv really say rock paper scissors like???? its paper scissors rock omg do u irl americans actually say rock paper scissors????

rb this with whether u say paper scissors rock or rock paper scissors

me normally: linguistic differences are so interesting and cool! I love hearing different dialectal variations.

me, reading “paper, scissors, rock” with my own two eyeballs: the lord is testing me

What are you talking about, it’s “scissors paper stone”.

spot on. it bugs me when ppl who are opposed to zionism make it an entirely “white/ashkenazi” problem bc like. y’all. sephardim and mizrahim in israel tend to be extremely zionist. they also tend to hold a lot of anti arab bias bc of their experiences being violently expelled from arab countries. is it right to have those biases? no. but it’s understandable given what they went through, the majority of them within their or their parents’ lifetimes. itamar ben-gvir is not a “white eastern european ashkenazi colonizer” he’s a brown jew whose parents are iraqi kurdish, and he’s arguably one of the most extremist right-wing leaders in israel right now. he’s a straight up kahanist. he makes netanyahu look like a centrist. so all the ppl who are like “just ship all the white jews back to poland and balance will be restored!!” are just revealing how little they actually know about israel and the real issues there, let alone how to fix them. if you want arab-jewish relations in the area to improve, you have to acknowledge the deep seated trauma and resentment that’s been festering in the sephardi/maghrebi/mizrahi jews of israel whose experiences are repeatedly erased, ignored, denied, and still ongoing, and you have to stop thinking of this shit through the leftist american lens of “white people inherently bad and racist, brown people inherently good and righteous.” most of the time trauma does not make you better, it just fucks you up.

#i/p discourse#yeah this#like if you’re drawing a line in the sand and it’s based on skin color I am… suspicious#but if that line in the sand also puts fucking ben gvir on the ‘right side’ then I’m not just suspicious I am laughing in your face#you cannot claim to be pro-Palestinian if you casually make comments that erase the existence of millions of Palestinians#while simultaneously uplifting literal kahanists just because they have the right phenotype and you don’t know enough to understand#that the things that are coming out of their mouths are not just anti-Arab but literally genocidal#I keep thinking about that person who literally thought his name was ‘Benjamin Gvir’#like girl I’m sorry but I don’t think you’re qualified to speak on this issue lol

@penrosesun, your tags pass peer review.

tbh i don’t really recommend that video. it’s not from a jewish perspective, so it’s missing a lot and there are definitely some biases of hers that really show through. if you’re interested in a historical jewish perspective, dr. henry abramson has a ton of videos about jewish history, including the early zionist movements to modern jewish history. obviously he is not without bias, which he is very transparent about, but his perspective is very much the standard jewish historical perspective. and if you want the perspective of an israeli mizrahi jew, i recommend “a mizrahi manifesto” by hen mazzig. also not without bias, and it might be a tough read, but i think it’s an important perspective to understand, whether you agree with him or not. basically, overall, if you’re wanting to learn about zionism (not kahanism, to be clear) your best bet is to go to jewish sources first — and yes, sources you might disagree with.

i frequently think abt how difficult it must be for babies to learn what a dog is. theres so many different shapes and sizes of dog and they're all dog. a chihuahua is dog a greyhound is dog a mastiff is dog. and yet something relatively similar like cat and tiger or sheep and goat is not the same. it seems very unfair.

But you see. Doggo have doggo smile, and doggo is here in house. This makes it easy.

(No seriously though: contextual cues like location , plus facial expressions which we learn so young. So few of us really have difficulty with identifying doggo when doggo smiles at us!)

I feel like "probably won't get physically injured and have to do manual labor while injured" is another benefit to office jobs no one mentions

I don't think people in the notes understand "injured doing manual labor" here is like breaking your leg or getting a concussion or dying of heat stroke

Sauron: Aha, who is now in possession of the One Ring? A common soldier? Perfect; they will be tempted by dreams of conquest, wealth and power! But... wait, what is happening? Why is the tempation not affecting them? What sort of lowly human could possibly resist my power?

Sam Vimes, chucking the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom before striding off to get home before 6pm: Bloody stupid piece of jewelery-

He has to read “where’s my cow” to his son, ok? PRIORITIES.