wtf drinking is cool again

crabs are literally being forcefemmed by barnacles every day and no one ever talks about it

sacculina makes me go a little insane honestly and not even for strictly transgenderly reasons... its life cycle involves attaching itself to a crab, producing eggs in place of that crab's eggs, and using the female's natural "egg dispersal" technique to, well, disperse its own eggs; but what do they do if they attach to a male host? give up and die? of course not, they simply instigate a hormone cascade that fundamentally changes the crab forever. easy!

and this is just what being an arthropod is like most of the time. bugs get parasitized like CRAZY. theyre the worlds most hijackable machines and you better believe the biosphere is taking advantage of that fact

and, sure, you know what, its yuri. fuck it. theyre raising kids together. this is the ideal liberal family: barnacle mother, absentee barnacle father, and beautiful transgender crab mother

And you know what else? Sure, you can dress like people from this or that music-based subculture without listening to the music and we won’t mind as long as you don’t pretend you’re part of it or spread misinformation about it.

But don’t you want to know the music that inspired the looks you’re so attracted to? Because, that’s the thing, at least speaking regarding goth, the fashion didn’t just occur to us, we started dressing the way we do inspired not only by musicians with an iconic form of dress, but by the music itself. Sound and appearance usually go hand in hand.

In the 90s Medieval and Renaissance inspired clothing was so popular not by mere coincidence, but because Ethereal Wave was at its peak. The girls dressed in long velvet gowns with dripping bell sleeves, who had impossibly long hair, were listening to a lot of Faith and the Muse, Mors Syphilitica, Dead Can Dance, Lycia and Sopor Aeternus.

The girls dressed in babydoll dresses, with pigtails, maryjanes and such are more than likely Switchblade Symphony fans.

The people dressed in leather and latex with a lot of fetish gear are most likely listening to a lot of Darkwave and/or to bands like Two Witches, Athamay or Umbra et Imago.

The people dressed like Victorian vampires are probably listening to a lot of Inkubus Sukkubus, Vampyrëan, Nosferatu, Paralysed Age and Witching Hour UK.

AND SO ON.

You don’t have to like it, if you don’t then you don’t, but if you haven’t given the music a proper chance AND you’re so intrigued by the fashion that is inspired by said music, how come you have such little interest and commitment as to not even dip your toes properly? Again, if it turns out to not be your thing, fine, just don’t spread misinfo. But who knows? You could be missing out on music you would fall in love with if you gave it a chance.

(Before there’s any misunderstandings, this does NOT mean that a goth who dresses a certain way 1) has to prefer goth music that is associated most with that style of clothing, or 2) can ONLY dress in that style, most goths mix and match or dress in different substyles depending on our moods.)

I have a bunch of goth YouTube playlists, by the way!

They’re all 15 songs each, themed in accordance to aesthetic and fashion style, built by a goth who’s by no means an elder, but who has been in the scene non-stop since 2007.

Trad goth 🦇 aesthetic and music

Romantic goth 🌹 aesthetic and music

Fetish goth 🖤 aesthetic and music

Vampire goth 🍷 aesthetic and music

Cyber goth ☢️ aesthetic and music

Deathrock 💀 aesthetic and music

Kinder goth 🍬 aesthetic and music

Witchy goth 🎃 aesthetic and music

Macabre goth ⚰️ aesthetic and music

My tag for these posts is #goth aes series, you can see more of the details there (which songs are in the playlists, basically).

Do y’all wanna hear about some absolutely crazy shit going down in the birding world right now

Okay I warned y’all this would be a lot but here we go. As background you should know that for many birders, the hobby is a lot more than just going outside and watching birds. There is a competitive angle where the goal is to spot as many bird species as possible and record these sightings on your personal “life list”. As some bird species can only be spotted in remote locations across the globe, it takes a decent amount of time, dedication, skill, and money to fill out life lists that number in the thousands. As can be expected, many of the individuals with these mega life lists become quasi celebrities in the birding world. Chief among them is Peter Kaestner, a lifelong birder who has been meticulously recording his life list over decades as the de facto top birder. As he has added to his list bird by bird, thousands of interested avian enthusiasts have been following along and celebrating his milestones. Most exciting in recent months is his intrepid journey towards becoming the first birder to ever record seeing 10,000 different species. The entire birding community has been watching him creep towards 10k with growing excitement. Kaestner is deeply respected in the birding community and there is great trust for his well-documented list.

So now the twist. Just as Kaestner was getting closer and closer to 10k, a previously unknown birder named Jason Mann suddenly joined an app called iGoTerra (not the most common app for birding records) and all at once added observations of close to 10,000 birds. Suddenly, Kaestner being the first birder to reach this milestone isn’t such a sure thing, and both he and mysterious newcomer Mann seem to be scrambling to count as many birds as possible as the race narrows.

On February 9th Kaestner announces he’s hit the milestone and seen his ten thousandth bird, the Orange-tufted spider hunter. The birding world rejoices! As a ~crazy~ coincidence, Jason Mann just so happens to announce on the same day that he has also hit the milestone and he actually did it before Kaestner. He writes an article about himself that is somehow both shamelessly masturbatory and also has that weirdly impersonal AI generated article feel.

Well obviously the birding world is a little skeptical of this random ass dude suddenly swooping in to snag this milestone that has been years in making. Naturally, people started looking a little closer at Mann’s list, and it has some… let’s say interesting observations. It appears from his own reports that Mann has casually rediscovered several species of birds and not bothered to tell anyone. Some of the most ludicrous observations include:

These are just a few examples of many, many fishy recordings. The issue here is nobody knows who Mann actually is, and the only places providing information about him (such as his LinkedIn) are really bizarre in a way I don’t have time to dig into here. Mann (or someone claiming to be him) actually took to BirdForum.net to defend himself, where he offered a long-winded and somewhat fumbling explanation for his life list. He claims that all of these mythical bird sightings were erroneously counted by the iGoTerra app, and he hadn’t meant to include them at all. He assures us that the rest of the recordings are entirely legitimate. Mann said in his post that in light of these mistakes he is ceding his victory to Kaestner, but was quick to say he has still totally seen more than 10k birds- even if they’re not all recorded correctly. He sent Kaestner a vaguely condescending email that Kaestner responded to with, in my opinion, far too much grace.

So now the birding community is left trying to figure out this bizarre and unexpected outcome. Is Peter Kaestner in fact the first birder to record ten thousand birds? A shadow of doubt has been cast on a title that everyone has expected to be his for years. Some birders are sincerely congratulating Jason Mann for his accomplishment in the field, and others are suggesting he isn’t even a real person but in fact some kind of artificial intelligence birding psy op. It is absolute chaos, and nobody in my life wants to hear me rant about this

Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate – it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings – the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages – a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these – how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story – what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? – or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish – tsits – but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication – his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish – Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך –  witsch – נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark – which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) – and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different – like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has – keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here – since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth – that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying – is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is – an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history –  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one – perhaps even the dominant one – but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” – the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” – as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good – we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz – and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch – they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register – “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

Ok i think that’s all the comments i have!

Ok this was fascinating and looks like fun so I tried to translate it to French.

French is my first language but I kinda hate it, it’s complicated and annoying. This took me hours and I’m sure it would’ve been better/easier if I didn’t live my life in English 75% of the time.

Sa femme envahit son chez-lui. Je le mets à l'aise et le baise par terre.

I kept the number of syllables of the original. Apparently French is an unstressed language! Cool.

I chose to use “envahit”, meaning invaded, because “filled his house” really struck me. The speaker emphasizes the (in his eyes) overbearing nature of the wife. I couldn’t work chintz in there because it busted the syllable count.

I wanted to keep the husband in a passive role, so the only reference to him in the first line is “sa” ans “son”, or his, and “chez-lui”, meaning his place.

Keep it real was a pain in the ass. I went with “je le mets à l'aise”, or to put at ease. I like the idea that the speaker makes the husband comfortable and reveals his true self. Se mettre à l'aise can also mean to undress oneself (cheeky) which I liked. I feel like it also implies the narrator seducing the husband, and I liked that too.

Baise is, I think, the perfect equivalent to fuck. It’s vulgar and implies casual and/or rough, quick sex. And it’s only one syllable and every other synonym was like, a whole phrase.

I loooved giving translation a try and I don’t know how people can translate whole books.

yessss, the chintz poem and translation, two things that I love!!! I’ve already seen a couple of german translations in the notes, but I wanted to give this a try myself

Thankfully the jump from one germanic language to another means I can keep the sentence structure practically as is. Now for the word choices:

The rest of the the line (“fick ich ihn am Boden”) is basically just a word for word translation of “I fuck him on the floor” - english “fucking” and german “ficken” stem from the same roots etymologically and are similarly crass words for sex. I used the contracted “fick ich ihn” instead of the proper “ficke ich ihn” both for a more colloquial, vulgar tone and for the syllable count, and “on the floor” is maybe more properly rendered as “auf dem Boden”, but again, “am Boden” fits better vis-a-vis syllables.

Lastly: meter! The original is of course an almost perfect, even iambic pentameter. My version isn’t, but I still love how it ended up - the first line is just four nice little iambs, but the second line consists of SEVEN trochees.

I don’t think I was quite able to translate the extreme tonal shift between the two lines as it exists in English, and the consonantal alliterations didn’t entirely carry over either, but now thanks to the shift in length AND meter, it’s still JARRING to read this and try to jump from one line to the next.

Finally, I’d like to give shout outs specifically to @sympathischeufos for the “am Boden”, because I was definitely inspired by their use and explanation of it in their translation. And also @tainbocuailnge and their translation for the use of present tense in the first line!

HELLO HI.. my goodness… is it my time… i think it may actually be my time. here’s another Yiddish and Russian i hope you like it

Ok Russian first ok..

мишурной дрянью его баба дом набила.

во вкусе лучшем мы ебемся на полу.

(his woman’s stuffed his house with glitzy rubbish.

in better taste, we fuck on the floor.)

I do love and respect that everyone’s instinct in translation is to give agency to the wife or cast light on the violation of the act, but I think that this is a poem about and by a guy fucking someone’s husband (whose wife he clearly disrespects) – this marriage means less than nothing to the speaker specifically, and as a consequence of that I chose to make him as direct and even misogynistic as I could.

Translating across cultural contexts, I don’t think it’s that abnormal for a Russian-speaking (thus plausibly stealth) gay man to be much more abrasive and derisive of women than gay men usually are in English; the stereotypes and context are different. Of course there are flowery and sensitive gay poets and gymnasts, but what if the speaker is exaggeratedly macho instead? There’s no particularly strong implication about his presentational aesthetic in the poem in English (except that he cares about chintz, which I suppose does imply art gay), so translations can take it in all sorts of directions.

So then: мишура isn’t exactly kitsch or chintz, it wasn’t Once In Style and then stopped being for arbitrary reasons of taste – it means “tinsel” but it’s so specifically now a word for gaudy tasteless expensive-looking cheap trash (by analogy to tinsel not being gold, for example) that people mostly call actual tinsel дождик (rain).

Мишурная дрянь then is “glitzy rubbish”, but, obviously, much stronger (дрянь is a quite strong derisive) and much more suggestive of the wife’s womanhood being a cause of the chintz (I’m not sure how else to phrase this, but I think in a spiritually faithful Russian rendering of the poem it should be implied).

Баба is sometimes just a dialect word for “woman”, not particularly derisive, but in urban contexts it’s an explicit contrast with more polite and respectable ways to be a woman. People (even other women) in cities use it almost like a slur. You can’t go very much farther down from here without spending cognitive effort on thinking of an insult, and notably it avoids respecting anything like a bond between the lover and the lover’s wife – it’s a one-way possessive relation, the wife here is reduced to an annoying possession of the lover, so deeply a non-threat that it’s even doing the lover a completely non-objectionable taste-developing favour to introduce some “good taste” into the equation.

Of course you can’t necessarily fuck someone on the floor in objectively good taste, but our speaker now explicitly values the aesthetic of his coupling with the lover (as something realer, more important, aesthetically more valuable?) above the wife’s contribution to the house. Misogyny, ladies and gentlemen! Can’t translate gay poetry about gay adultery into Russian without it.

Or well you can, probably you should, certainly it’s the moral thing to do, but this angle has now also been done, and I think with reference to at least a certain subset of angry stealth gay man it can be taken as ~representational~. :^)

Also I think I did pretty good making the metre flow less jarring than in the original – to better convey that this person doesn’t think anything is wrong with this.

And now we swerve into Yiddish, where I am so sorry my loves I don’t have a phone keyboard that can do this properly, we have to do it in english letters :) I am also sorry if it is not very literary and maybe even betrays my origins as an icky little Galitzianer, but in my defense I don’t think the original is either :)

Well like, I think you probably can’t achieve as strong and clear an image of that type of thing in Yiddish that we wrote about above. I’m not going to make the adultery heterosexual and the speaker a woman here as is my instinct, because although easier (I have been aware of the scenario described playing out in Hasidland; this type of thing is all a certain type of aunt talks about) it’s just not going to be as fun for people to read about on here. If everyone else is doing this as if it were about specifically gay adultery, nu, then it’s about gay adultery.

What kind of gay adultery? Well let’s see:

zayn vayb hot mit ir tamlozkeyt zayn hoyz gefilt.

(his wife has filled his house with her lack of taste )

We don’t have a directly translating expression for chintz that sounds good here and i didn’t feel quite at home with @mashkaroom ’s “havolim” (which does fuck conceptually i’ve just never heard it either) because it’s not in my idiom. but tamlozkeyt! that in the right rickety old woman’s mouth is a deadly indictment of everything about you. The speaker is implicitly a tactful sort of fellow about his scorn for the wife here, tamlozkeyt is a very general term, he doesn’t specify that it’s cheap or anything.

It could be here that the wife fills the house with tacky objects, or it could be that she “fills the house…” as the saying goes of women creating living space by their presence… except she doesn’t make it livable, she occupies the entire space with her presence, which here we may read as actually without good taste or as distasteful to the speaker personally, which the speaker doesn’t know is personal and universalizes)

tsu zayn basheydn, ikh tren im afn dol

admittedly in my dinky little Yiddish floor is podloge and dol sounds a dot archaic but that doesnt quite scan as forcefully so we will let the literarism stay :) I think it adds something, a little, combined with the preserved original’s thing of the metre being jarring

“to be decent [modest, fitting, i’m doing a wordplay ma are you proud - by implication to spare him the shame of me seeing his ugly tacky wifeguy house, or to do the noble thing and draw attention away from it ], i fuck him on the floor”

basheydn means modest but also has a connotation of decency in the social sense, and then of course there’s whatever you want to read into “sheyd” (demon) being in it

I think the intent of to keep it real in the original is like to cast doubt on the correctness and taste and even the normalcy/rightfulness of the wife’s life with the lover, so here rather than “to keep it..” anything we are rescuing it from its earlier state and making it new :) making it correct and implicitly the normal way to do it, so we can read some like good old fashioned “went to mikdash melech to have repressed gay sex and think about his old chavrusa” type of longing into the speaker here, like babyboy it is cosmically right and totally not even a bit a sin if it’s us)

trenen is a more current Yiddish slang for fucking, shtup is like… People still use it but for its own particular effect you understand, it has a yikhes a history a patina of age … nowadays many people use it for “to stuff” (deep American Yiddish) or “to sew/fix/do halfassedly” (otherwise), it’s lost the air of power it had in the glubinka (though you will still be understood elsewhere where the old slang is still passed down from people’s grandmothers) :^)

you are much more likely to intimidate and impress an enormous hulking balabos who wants to have a word about your parking if you tell him gey tren zikh, rather than shtup zikh, all things considered ! it also has a more forceful sound, and i like it for the immediate contrast with the way the speaker speaks in the rest of this translation

so there you have it, my enrichment of the translation landscape of the greatest work of our time! deeply indebted to everyone in thread for their translation insights :) ciao my doves, enjoy!

INSANELY POWERFUL ADDITIONS FROM OP

YES EXACTLY the context of the affair is inherently going to include strong (and denied) feelings on the part of the speaker about the wife because she represents the heteronormative social order to him SORRY LONGPOST I’M JUST THRILLED THIS LOCALIZATION WORKED IN TWO LINES here’s a cut

Keep reading

hope is a skill

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

favourite additions

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

would you be willing to expand on this hypothesis

same general body structure, has hands instead of full wings, has a slight hump, similar beaks

clearly Deinocheirus’ descendants evolved to have more upright postures, a shorter tail, and forward facing eyes over the past 66 million years

This implies Big Bird slowly evolved into a carnivore.

look, it’s been a while since I saw Follow that Bird, because it makes me cry every damn time, but I’m pretty sure Big Bird eats grains

that said, this means Big Bird is an herbivore that convergently evolved carnivore-like traits, which should be significantly more alarming to all of us

Ok, I want to know why it should be more alarming. Am I missing something?

Are you trying to imply that this is batsean mimicry of a big bird looking actually carnivorous species, or is this stretch?

I’m not a scientist, just an enthusiast.

So herbivores are more alarming than carnivores in general because carnivores get full. Herbivores are always on alert for predators and either have one of two responses: run (these can trample us) or fight (these will destroy us). This is why herbivores are usually much more dangerous than carnivores - for one quick example, more people are killed by the herbivorous hippopotamus each year than by sharks (yes, all species thereof)

so, an herbivore convergently evolving carnivorous traits means its an herbivore designed to take out potential dangers with the swiftness and lethality of a predator

that is extremely alarming

consider the cassowary. now imagine it more exact and capable. now imagine it the size of big bird.

we should all be glad he is a friendly presence on sesame street and not the unholy terror he should be

To add more to Big Bird’s biology, it should be noted that his species is either very diverse in morphology, or his clade contains many species that live in various countries’ Sesame Streets. Some of them, like Bibo from Germany, look pretty much the same as American Big Bird, but others are quite different. In the Netherlands we have Pino, who could easily be the same species but has a more pronounced crest, orange beak, and blue feathers everywhere except the area around the eyes. On the rare occasions he has actually met Big Bird, he called him Cousin Jan.

Brazillian Sesame Street is inhabited by Garibaldo, who judging by beak and leg morphology is likely a different species. Between the sleeker legs and the very sharp beak, I think a stork-like lifestyle is likely for his ancestral population.

Then there’s Abelardo from Mexico, who seems to come from a population that convergently evolved several parrot-like traits. An interesting detail about this is that, unlike most other vertebrates, parrots don’t absorb their pigments through their diet, but make their own pigments called psittacofulvins. Given that his relatives are quite colourful themselves and can probably obtain plenty of carotenoids from their diet, I don’t think that is likely to be the case in Abelardo.

Caponata from Spain looks very different from all her family members, even the more divergent ones. This could be since she is the only female member of the clade I have managed to find so far. However, the very different feet make me think she might hail from a very derived species instead. I can’t even imagine what sort of evolutionary pressures could lead to a bird evolving such strange feet.

Other Sesame Street birds are a little harder to find information about, with mostly older sightings. There seem to have been sightings of one named Toccata in Quebec. His shaggier white feather coat covering more of his legs and being thicker around his neck does suggest adaptations of the harsh winters up north.

Portuguese Poupas has different colouration and seems to have some sort of feather puff going on around the ankles as well. The feathers around the head are notably swept backward as well. I think this is a somewhat derived population of the American species. Minik Kuş from Turkey may hail from this population too, or perhaps from some intermediate or interbred population, as they seem to be more morphologically similar to the more typical Big Birds.

someone needs to throw together a phylogeny and I recognize that, as a bird researcher, who has done too many phylogenies of birds, I am the prime candidate, but I have too much to do for SVP…

What pokemon game was based in Hawaii and had those dancing birds?

This reminds me of them

What pokemon game

was based in Hawaii and

had those dancing birds?

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

My little sister's new boyfriend got a tattoo for her about a month ago and he wanted matching tattoos so he decided to get uh. The tattoo on her ankle of her ex boyfriend's name that she hasn't gotten covered up yet

She broke up with him but I also just got the same tattoo

OK my dad also got it

DYLAN!

It took five months but we finally convinced my stepmom to also get it

My fucking manager got it

theyer old enough that they used to connect 

They're older than Florida. The Floridian peninsula is the solidified runoff of the Appalachians that got caught on some coral. It's why we're like this, I think. You don't stand a chance of being normal when you were created by the shed skin of an elder god draping itself over a hollow skeleton. You're always going to be a little Off.

I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.

I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.

Here’s a source:

As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!

An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:

The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:

Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.

And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.

I don’t ... have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.

Another thing; as someone who expects overlap because of my cultural upbringing, when someone doesn't overlap me I just start looping and repeating myself because I'm waiting for them to interrupt and they're "politely" waiting for me to finish speaking.

Okay nobody ever put that into words but the looping is exactly what I do in therapy - I should tell my therapist about this so I don’t need to say the same thing over and over again lol

This is fascinating to me.  I love the recognition of competing needs in communication.  One of the layers that I have noticed is what I think of as conversational pacing.  Enthusiastic discuussion and cross-talking can absolutely work for everyone if the conversational pace allows for it.  This is often the difference between an interactive discussion and someone “sea lioning” relentlessly.  Another layer to this is reading body language;; tone of voice.  Having one or more people in the room (either via Zoom or in person), who feel comfortable saying things like, “Wait - I think Sarah had something to add there.” is much more productive than the “EVERYBODY SHUT UP” model.

Boring old werewolf instincts:

Sexual jealousy

Constant aggression

Rigid hierarchy

Must win sports

Homophobia And Sexism Is Normal™

Eat people

Cool new werewolf instincts:

There is no five second rule

Corvids are friends

Hang out as a pack

Karaoke

Gotta pee

Also consider:

Separation anxiety

Unconditional love and loyalty

Being able to sleep in almost any situation or position

Irresistible urge to chase squirrels and rabbits

Hating the vacuum cleaner

Wanting to do everything with friends

Loudly and repeatedly announcing to housemates that someone is at the door

Long, shouted conversations to other werewolves across the neighborhood (bonus points at 2am)

Taking advantage of any and all free food

Werewolf-vampire solidarity

Fighting any animal that trespasses into the backyard

Boundless energy

Too much energy

Eating out of the trash if it smells tasty

Being bad at sports because you don’t want to let anyone else take the ball from you. Then destroying the ball in front of everyone because you want to make a point

Trying to fight things 10x your size like a fucking idiot

Being unable to hold a grudge for more than a few hours

Trying to make people feel bad for you over mundane things that aren’t actually that bad. And somehow succeeding.

Snoring

Needing to try a bit of your friends’ food, even if you’ve tried it 5645674 times before and have never once liked it

Getting way too friendly with random strangers

Being in a love-hate relationship with water

Digging. For no reason.

Thinking you’re a badass despite being a hyperactive ball of emotions and hedonism

Loud sobbing while pressing yourself up against the sliding glass door at your friends who locked you out because they were tired of your bullshit and wanted some goddamn peace and quiet

Okay this one is a gem:

“ Loudly and repeatedly announcing to housemates that someone is at the door “

No alpha/beta/omega werewolves because science figured out LONG ago that that concept is, for wolves, incorrect.

@margoteve @followmetoyourdoom

So most of these are very dog oriented, which makes sense to me, since dogs are just wolves that have co-evolved with us for thousands and thousands of years BUT I wanted to add a few that are wild wolf based:

I’ve been looking for the one with the wolf-aspects added for a while and I found it again! Reblogging for A+ extra wolfy content!

@theosartisticthematics

I love love love everything about this

@dserpentes

https://tapas.io/episode/1559785

Crow Time - Statue 2

Please like, comment, follow! Pet a crow!

[PART 1] [Read Crow Time] [Patreon]

I suppose I should have guessed that offhandedly mentioning my father was in several year feud with a parrot in the tags of that post would make my inbox go nova.

Anyway, my dad was involved in a feud with an African Grey parrot for several years. No one knows how said parrot came to be in our Scottish village, it simply showed up one day at the rescue and the local hairdresser, Sharron, adopted it. 

Now if you don’t know much about African Greys, they’re chatty buggers. They’re also wicked smart and incredible mimics. Which was how Marty the Parrot became an infamous feature of our wee town; frequently escaping his enclosure to perch above the barbershop door, hurling Scottish colloquialisms at unsuspecting tourists and whistling the ice cream truck song whenever kids walked past. One time, some construction workers drilled through the water pipe that ran through the village square, and above the roar of water spewing forth into the street and alarmed swearing, Marty could be heard cackling like a demon through the window. Right until the water reached the barbershop door and flooded the ground floor room he was sitting in, and then he started screaming, “help! help! murder murder polis*!”** until he was rescued and offered a plain digestive biscuit. 

After that and many, many more escape attempts and being asked politely by the local tourist board if Marty could stop telling hikers to “away and pish!” Sharron took him to see some sort of bird whisperer who told her Marty was lonely and needed company. So she moved his cage into the barbershop during the day so he could see and talk to her and the customers. 

Which is where my dad comes in.

You should know that my dad is the epitome of a wee auld Scottish granda. He’s had a full head of white hair since his early forties, and wouldn’t look out of place in a Norman Rockwell painting in Norman Rockwell ever took a wander doon the Barras and got swindled into buying a TV that quite-very-probably fell off the back of a truck. He’s got the gift for the gab, and everyone likes him. Sometimes against their better judgement. Everyone, that is, except Marty.

Marty hated my dad.

At some point, Marty picked up the habit of complimenting customers. He’d wait till Sharron was done with their hair, then wolf whistle and demand “who’s a pretty boy then?” in a broad Scots accent that ought to have defied avian vocalities. Sometimes he’d even do it before if he liked the customer. But regardless, he’d always chat with customers, even if it was just nonsense phrases like “Oh aye?” *whistles* “Iz at right?” *click click.* 

Now my dad knew this about Marty. He knew it from local chat and from watching the bird fawn over customers as he and my brother waited their turn. So it came as quite a surprise when my dad sat down in Sharron’s chair and was met with stony silence. The way he tells it, Marty stared at him dead on in silence, methodically cracking seeds between his talons. When my brother was done with his haircut in the neighboring chair, Marty turned and gave a shrill whistle, followed by his customary “who’s a pretty boy then?” before resuming his death glare at my dad, who by now was feeling a bit unnerved by the unwavering eye contact and the nut cracking. The uncharacteristic silence continued, even when my dad was getting ready to leave. There was no whistle, no “who’s a pretty boy then?” just silence and the sound of seeds being crushed. And then my dad tripped over the step on the way out of the shop, and Marty let out a demonic peal of parrot laughter*** like water circling an open drain. And that was the start of the feud.

After that, whenever my dad went to get a haircut, Marty would talk to him, but only ever in insults. The one time my dad tried asking “who’s a pretty boy?”, the bird replied “naw youse!” before cackling himself into a whistling fit. And every time my dad would come away, determined to get that bloody parrot to whistle at him and ask “who’s a pretty boy then?” 

Seeds were bought. Parrot appropriate biscuits were offered up as tribute. All to no avail. But eventually there became a sort of camaraderie in the insults. Like two enemies who know the steps to the dance they’re treading, and who welcome the familiarity of it. Sometimes my dad would just stick his head round the door on his way to work, just to hear the indignant squawk followed by a litany of insults that’d make a tea kettle whistle. And this went on for years, possibly close to a decade. 

Parrot and man locked in an ongoing battle of wills to see who would give up first.

Sadly, my dad never got his “who’s a pretty boy then?” whistle. Marty was already old when Sharron rescued him and is no longer with us. I’d like to say he’s looking down on my dad, hurling loving insults, but given that bird’s panache for stealing ice cream cones from unsuspecting children and general flare for terror, it’s probably more likely he’s looking up. Either way, he’s fondly remembered. Especially by my wee auld dad, who while never having got a “who’s a pretty boy then?” did get a “see youse later” one time, which probably counts for more.

*Scots for police. **A line from an old Glasgow Street song. ***Not Marty, but this is close to how I remember him sounding.

Happy 2-year-ish anniversary to this post. I need you all to know it’s been literal years, and during one of our recent phone conversations, I brought up Marty and what a terrible pun his name was, and my dad paused mid-sentence, asking what I meant and proclaimed, “Of course! It all makes sense! Marty McFly!”

Rating the birds in my backyard by tendency toward violence

Northern Cardinal, 4/10

I'm sometimes worried the male is sexually harassing the female but I'm pretty sure they're just doing some elaborate public pickup roleplay. The rest of us didn't agree to participate in your kink, guys.

American Robin, 1/10

Literally just some dude hanging out. Never bothered anyone but worms. Big fan of the way you just stand there in the middle of the grass like you forgot what you were supposed to be doing.

House Sparrow, 10/10

You're a gang. You're participating in gang violence. There's ten billion of you living in a single wood pile and it's been civil war for three years now. When will the bloodshed end?

Tufted Titmouse, 1/10

A shy baby. A pretty little guy. I saw you on the neighbor's garage roof and time stopped. There were anime sparkles around you. Come back.

European Starling, 9/10

Why is it always you? Listen, I know, I KNOW the sparrows are the problem, and YET. When the fighting starts, it's always you in the middle of it, provoking them and then screaming like you're an innocent bystander defending yourself. I'm onto you.

Carolina Wren, 3/10

This rating is not for physical violence, which you don't engage in, but for your role as an incurable narc. A tattle tale. I know they're fighting again, okay? I see it. Our yard has been a warzone for years, you don't have to make a big announcement every time someone misbehaves.

Eastern Wood-Peewee, 0/10

If this were "birds who think they're better than everyone else," you'd get 10/10.

Red-bellied Woodpecker, 6/10

It's a utility pole. It's not a tree. You're surrounded by trees that are full of bugs. But there you are, on the utility pole. Committing vandalism.

American Crow, unrated

For who am I to cast judgment on the actions of La Famiglia? I assume you are doing what is best for the neighborhood. If I could, though, without criticism, make a single observation. That when large numbers of you gather in the ominous dead cottonwood - no? No, you're right. None of my business.

Great Crested Flycatcher, 5/10

Frankly, I think you could be doing more. I think your name implies a great potential. I think you should massacre the insects. I think your beak should drip with viscera.

Stay tuned for more criminal activity!

(continued)

Common Grackle, 7/10

La Famiglia does not suffer you to stop in our neighborhood long, and I trust their judgement in this manner. You have the look of a guilty bird.

Tennessee Warbler, 2/10

You keep to yourselves, and I respect that. I get the sense that you could defend yourselves if it came to it, though.

Brown-Headed Cowbird, 3/10

You're not a crow, and eventually they ARE going to figure it out, kiddo.

Gray Catbird, 5/10

Would you. Respectfully. Would you shut the FUCK UP.

Eurasian Collared-Dove, 0/10

You're doing great, sweetie, everyone loves you.

Red-Breasted Nuthatch, 4/10

A comedian. A little jester of a bird. You're so silly. Sure sometimes you incite violence in others but, really, is that your fault? If it is, we forgive you.

Blue Jay, 12/10

If you could learn any human behavior you wanted, it would be how to build a bomb.

Honorable mention:

Turkey Vulture, 5/10

You weren't in my backyard, but you WERE eating roadkill in the street in my neighborhood. I know the animal was already dead when you got there, but you get violence points for frightening the small children that walked past you. Incredible work.