Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa?
Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now?
On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…
And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.
We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.
As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.
I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.
… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.
Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.
This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.
No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.
I was in 1st/2nd grade grade when the big Pokémon boom of the late 90s-early 00s happened. It was HUGE. Every kid was into it and we’d watch the show and play pretend and collect the cards and bring our game boys to school to trade Pokémon during recess. I was lucky to have supportive parents, but I remember how teachers and other adults would scoff and say how tired they were of Pokémon, how annoying and juvenile it was and how they couldn’t wait for us to “get over it already”. I might have been young, but I still remember how much these kinds of comments bummed me out. Why in the world are we being mean to little kids who like Fortnite
Why are you comparing pokemon to fortnite???
Because… Fortnite is very popular amongst children at the moment? And there are adults who dismiss it in the same way other adults did when Pokémon was big, calling it stupid, saying the dances are annoying, how much they can’t wait for the “fad to be over”, etc. It’s pretty much the same scenario.
Fortnite has a lootbox system that is glorified gambling, and can cause patterns of addiction in even adult minds, and that is in fact its intended goal in order for the game to make money from microtransactions. That’s how all games with lootboxes function. That’s how they draw in their customer base and squeeze more money out of them.
Like, I don’t judge kids who enjoy Fortnite. My little cousin plays Fortnite.
But last week, my little cousin also stole his mother’s credit card and spent about a month’s salary on microtransactions without his parents’ knowledge.
Modern gaming has become vile and predatory in ways that we didn’t have to deal with as children.
And we shouldn’t be mean to children about this, but we should definitely be coming down on these companies like a pile of fucking bricks.
Jesse singlehandedly executed a plan to con Ashe via an anonymous tip into robbing a train FOR him at an EXACT location and time he chose in order to steal Echo in stasis off the train SPECIFICALLY FOR OVERWATCH AND RECALL after he was pinged I’m so I’m so
when you think of unicorns, what do you picture? a sunny forest glade full of snow-white pointy horses prancing around and farting glitter everywhere? well, that’s very Lisa Frank of you and all but YOU’RE WRONG. because (unlike dragons) unicorns actually do exist! but they don’t prance about in the forest harassing virgins.
no, they inhabit the icy waters of the far nothern seas, gorging on deep-sea squid and occasionally getting eaten by Polar Bears!
they may not be magical, but they’re rad as hell! it’s-
they PROBABLY don’t harass virgins, anyway. it’s not like there’s studies on that.
the Narwhal is a toothed whale that lives in the frozen wasteland of the arctic circle. their name is really really fun to say, especially if you draw it out. narwhaaal. try it! narwhaaaaal. fun! their name comes from the Old Norse “Whal”, meaning “Whale”, and “Nar”, meaning “Corpse”.
yup, the name literally means “corpse whale”. this is probably because early viking explorers thought that the Narwhal’s mottled grey back looked like a drowned sailor who’d been in the water for a while. gross! vikings were not even in the general vicinity of messing around.
unless we’re talking about the football team! har! SPORTS.
Narwhals max out at about 18 feet long and 3,500 lbs, putting them firmly in the category “smedium”. (we’re talking about whales here, remember.) they are closely related to the Beluga whale, which will get its own article at some point. but the most remarkable thing about Narwhals is their magnificent and dubiously magical tusk.
the tusk’s gentle spiral and soulful luster make it look exactly like the unicorn horns of legend (more on this later), but it’s actually… a really fucked-up tooth! (surprise!) that’s right, Narwhals have exactly two teeth in their weird beaky mouths, kind of where your canine teeth are in your own mouth. and in males and about 15% of females, one of these two teeth just goes completely fucking nuts and grows straight out of the Narwhal’s face.
and you thought hangnails were bad.
this tooth-turned-tusk is not exactly a compact accessory, either. this dental nightmare can be ten feet long, or over half again the length of the entire Narwhal! (imagine their toothpaste budget. yikes!) this tusk is light, flexible, and fairly sharp, though it’s too fragile for the Narwhal to use as a weapon. (humans sometimes make swords out of them, but these are really just for decoration. “hey, look at me! I have sword made out of whale face! fancy!”)
so what are these tusks actually used for, if they ain’t for stabbin’? well….
we don’t actually know for sure.
take note kids, there are still mysteries at large in the world.
scientists used to think that male Narwhals used these tusks to duel for females, but a) no one’s ever seen two Narwhals stabbing each other, b) the tusks are way too fragile for fighting anyway, and c) why would some female Narwhals have tusks, then? (unless WHALE LESBIANS). but recent studies have revealed that the tusk is just PACKED with nerve tissue, revealing a very surprising possible use for this overgrown tooth.
basically, scientists are now thinking that the Narwhal’s tusk may be an enormous antennae that can sense everything from pressure to water temperature and salinity. imagine if you knew every time the pack ice was about to freeze over because your tooth told you! it’s a pretty weird function, but it works just fine for the Narwhal.
if you ask real nice, they’ll give you the time and temperature.
this ability to sense when seawater is about to freeze would actually be very useful for the Narwhal, because they’re a bunch of ice-spiting daredevils even by arctic standards. Narwhals rely on pack ice to protect them from Killer Whales and Polar Bears, their main predators. And while scooting around under gigantic ice sheets is an effective way to keep predators off your defenseless fleshy tail, it can all go south pretty fast if your breathing holes freeze over unexpectedly.
but Narwhals are well-equipped for this icy lifestyle! aside from their wondrous tusks, they have a thick layer of blubber under their skin to keep them warm. a LOT of blubber. like, up to 40% of their entire body mass! they need the insulation, because they regularly dive nearly 5,000 feet into the frozen depths in search of the squid and deep-sea fish that they eat.
talk about a chilly lifestyle.
but let’s talk about unicorns for a bit! Europe has been obsessed with pointy magical horses since the Middle Ages, and they feature heavily in stories and art even today. of course, unicorns are a fake made-up animal and not real, but Middle-Ages Europeans didn’t know that. and it’s a factor that Norse traders, who damn well knew what a Narwhal was, took heavy advantage of.
Narwhal tusks sold as ‘unicorn horns’ were worth more than their weight in gold to European Royalty. seriously. in the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I was given a carved and bejeweled Narwhal tusk ‘unicorn horn’ that was worth as much asan entire fucking castle at the time. Norse traders made out like bandits for CENTURIES, thanks to the Narwhal. I bet they laughed all the way to the bank.
not that Middle-Ages European Royalty didn’t deserve it.
but Narwhals aren’t doing so well these days, and it’s because they’re incredibly vulnerable to climate change. the sea ice is freezing over later and later every year, leaving Narwhal populations who depend on this ice cover vulnerable to predators and starvation.
there are still over 100,000 Narwhals in the northern seas, but these real-life sea unicorns need protection from climate change to continue to thrive. hopefully, humans can act soon enough to keep the arctic frozen and the Narwhal swimming free. because a world without Narwhals is not a world that I want to live in.
they’re better than unicorns because they’re real.
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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series on my tumblr here, or check out the official archive at weirdbiology.com!
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IMAGE SOURCES
img1- National Geographic img2- imgdealix img3- National Geographic Kids img4- Yandex.com img5- World Wildlife Fund img6- travelandliesure.com img7- Warped Speed img8- eclecticeccentricity
rocky horror is the worst and is also transmisogynistic can we please finally get over this shit movie
ok but like the writer is transgender nonbinary and the language used in the play was the preferred language by trans people of that time can we not deny parts of our history because we’ve evolved since then thanks
So fucking much this.
PS, youth of today: you’ll be saying the same damn thing about art from this time before too long, for good or for ill. Terminology will, in fact, change. Definitions will, in fact, shift. It always does, they always do.
PPS, it is pretty much impossible to overstate how life-alteringly important this movie was to kids who didn’t conform to standard expectations of gender and sexuality, back in the day. Especially when back in the day was the mid-to-late 1980s, when the only queers you saw on TV were neutered AIDS tragedies, Bowie was playing straight, and even Elton John was married to a woman, and midnight showing of RHPS were pretty much the only place that felt like home. It was mental life raft for a lot of people.
ok but why should we nowadays put up with some shit that paints trans women as predatory rapists and was lowkey a blueprint for transmisogynist stereotypes in the media succeeding it. Fuck that, fuck your “history” which has always erased trans women
‘Just because you lop off your cock and then wear a dress, doesn’t make you a fucking woman.’
‘I think I agree with that. I agree with Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries,’ he said. ‘You can’t be a woman. You can be an idea of a woman. You’re in the middle and there’s nothing wrong with that.
btw GG is like one of the most well known terfs so yeah fuck yall
like i’m fully aware of how stupid it seems to be getting ticked off about people who aren’t from southern states talking shit about them, but it’s not because i’m just petty and annoyed by people talking shit about where i’m from when they’ve pretty obviously never actually been here.
you remember those articles about the “dapper white nationalists” and all that bullshit? the image of bigotry as a stupid, drunk old hick from backwards-ass nowhere is so prevalent that it’s genuinely difficult for people to rectify the reality of a lot–if not most–racists being well-dressed, well-spoken, seemingly intelligent, normal people, and bigots use that dissonance to its fullest.
when you push the narrative as people in the south being the source of all the problems in the states, you give those jackasses something to hide behind and a foot in the door to manipulate people who’ve bought into it, and you give a lot of yanks a reason to not to consider their own actions and biases because they think just because they were born in new york instead of alabama means they popped out fully woke with their third eye open before the other two or whatever the shit
not to mention that most of the time yall are just being classist as fuck lmao
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 