Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
i like being a lesbian and all, but holy shit, men are so cool. i hope all men reading this have a wonderful day.
i like being gay and all, but holy shit, women are so cool!!!! i hope all women reading this have a wonderful day as well!!!!!!!!!
[image description: the epic handshake meme. one arm is labelled gay people and the other is labelled lesbians. in the middle it says “fuck yeah bro”. end id]
hey guys, quick reminder! this post is about uplifting other people!!! tags like ‘ugh, but men are gross lol’ or 'op has never met a man’ are not welcome and will recieve an insta block! men are cool! women are cool! thank you for coming to my fucking ted talk! :-)
Anonymous:
I was wondering, I know phoenix is a mythical creature but is it herbivore or a carnivore or perhaps an omnivore like if it's real what do you think it'll eat but if I look at the beak and claws it's similar to an eagle I think?
great news, phoenixes aren’t actually mythical creatures at all!
in fact, here’s one right now:
that’s right, the myth of the phoenix was very likely started by this actual real bird, in Africa! right on the border of Tanzania and Kenya, actually.
riiight about… HERE.
this is Lake Natron.
Lake Natron is an alkaline salt lake of volcanic origin, where the water is as caustic as pure ammonia and can be hotter than a sauna at 140 F!
what lives here? not much. just the extremophile bacteria that gives the water and salt flats their pink tint, really.
oh, and these guys.
that’s right, if you’re a Lesser Flamingo, this volcanic hellscape is home sweet home! they live in the lake year-round, feeding on the bacteria that they painstakingly filter out of the near-boiling waters with their hooked beaks.
and at some point, some traveling humans presumably noticed a flock of giant pink birds taking flight from a poisonous and hard-to-reach bright-red hellscape, with billowing clouds of steam that might have looked like smoke from a distance, and took word to the nearest settlement. and from there the tale passed on through the old world, eventually growing into the legend of the bird that sets itself alight to be reborn that we know and love today!
bearded vultures are naturally white. Their natural habitat has cliffs covered in red clay, so they take this clay and preen it over their white feathers to become orange or red. It’s believed that the more vibrantly dyed ones have more status amongst bearded vultures, and they tend to be very territorial over richer clay deposits.
I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.
I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”
I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.
And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.
My friend, whom I love dearly, found out that the moon orbits the earth as a 20-year-old in an upper-level political science class, and was utterly and completely flabbergasted. When questioned, her defense was that she doesn’t have anything to do with the moon, so why would she have needed to know?
i was once talking to a friend of mine about how at that point in time you could see mars, jupiter, and venus at the same time, which was pretty cool, and she said “where’s pluto? wait, it was destroyed” and that’s how i found out that my friend, who is in her third year of a medical degree, thought that pluto stopped being a planet because it was eaten by a black hole.
When i was in physics class my sophomore year of high school, the teacher drew a simplified diagram of a person standing on the planet earth as part of the explanation for how it was initially discovered that the earth was round. And one girl sitting in the class said “wait… we live on the OUTSIDE???” she had spent her whole life thinking that the earth was a hollow sphere and that we lived on the inner walls of it
i had a coworker in his early twenties who, when i mentioned seeing admiring how bright mars was that morning on the drive to work, laughed and said ‘mars? like the planet?’ and i was like ‘yeah mars the planet. it looks like a very bright star, it was supposed to be extra bright and close lately.’ and he got quiet and oddly worried and he said, quietly, carefully, ’…are planets… real?’ like he was checking to see if i was completely insane.
i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’
he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’
i said, 'i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’
he said, muttering now, 'well, maybe that’s just what you think.’
the conversation did not get any better from there.
