today my bf and i were talking about visiting my home for the holidays and i was (sadly) wondering aloud if i should cut my hair and our kid was like “why would you cut your hair??? your hair is cool” and not knowing how to explain it to him i said “my family doesnt think boys should have long hair” to which he went silent, wordlessly pulled out his phone and then swiftly held it out with a picture of keeanu reeves on his phone
^ POV u are me witnessing my 15 year old decimate decades of transphobia in an instant
[ID: an edited Calvin and Hobbes panel where Calvin sits, smiling, at a lemonade stand with a sign taped to the front of the table. It reads: It’s time to retire that other meme and replace it with this template. Change my mind. Next image is the same meme but the sign reads: Steven Crowder does not deserve a meme format. Change my mind. /end]
See this just feels so much better. I’ve read enough of those comics to know that Calvin has some really deep insights rattling around in his head. And look how happy and attentive he looks. You could absolutely have a polite, intelligent, and enriching conversation with this kid. Meanwhile Steven Crowder is so financially incentivized to always look like the smartest guy in any given room that the only way to change his mind is with a 2x4 to the side of the head. Which, I admit, would be enriching in its own way.
ALT
Attaching the blank because the imgur link was being temperamental for me. Saved you a click.
Anyway, no-fault divorce, easy access to birth control, and abortion on demand all serve to make families stronger, healthier, happier, and more robust, because they allow family to be a matter of choice rather than a means of social control and violence.
I know everyone says it’s best to just stick to “said” as a dialogue tag bc it disappears and that’s true and I mostly do but I want to take a moment for my all-time favorite dialogue tag, “lied.” Absolutely nothing hits like “‘I’m here to help,’ he lied.” NOTHING.
i learned this when i was in second grade to when a biologist inevitably corrects me please know its coming from a place of sincere stupidity: kangaroos are macropods which means they are ofc insane mammals that break all laws of reality. they have a cloaca (?!) and no placenta, just 30 days worth of yolk. what is basically a fetus is birthed and then this nasty ass little jelly bean has to climb into the pouch where it finishes like. being a fetus
this sucks ass. thank you for telling me my new favorite horrible fact
[Image ID: 2 tumblr replies from heedra reading: hi. biologist here. the truth is worse. they don’t have a true cloaca bc their reproductive channels are separate from their excretory ones, though the structure is similar. what they do have is three vaginas
the one type of marsupial with a true cloaca is the marsupial mole, a fact which occasionally starts phylogeny fights. /End ID]
….I am so mad I’d never thought about this in the context of vaginal urethral anatomy but yeah uh. Yeah this is accurate. (It’s also why penises are a mammalian thing–mammals route the urethra – wait holy shit marsupials use forked hemipenes, don’t they, what does the urethra do–
right no okay not all of them fork but in those that do, the urethral groove forks with them. groovy.
anyway, basically, the fighting over the definition of cloaca comes from the inconvenient fact that while eutherian female mammals route all the urethral apparatus through a dedicated hole that never conmingles with the vagina itself, and while archosaurs like birds and crocodilians and so forth dump everything–sperm, liquid waste, solid waste, eggs, everything through one cloacal outy hole passage, marsupials have taken a slightly weirder, intermediate option.
which is that they do separate vaginal canals–as OP points out macropods have three vaginas, two for sperm going up and one for joeys going down–and also a separate urethra coming from the bladder. it’s just that all of these things dump into just one short tube at the end, like so:
so you get just one opening. This causes anger in comparative anatomists: is the cloaca defined by the potential contents of the exterior hole/number of dedicated holes, or is it defined by the absence of dedicated pathways for different things to pass through? Marsupials do have anuses, so can they really have a cloaca even if they pee through the same hole??
For comparison, consider the chicken.
See how the uterus/shell gland dumps the completed egg immediately into the cloaca which almost immediately exits the chicken through the vent? And the gastrointestinal tract does the same thing? And they all meet up at about the same place at once? (I cannot find a good diagram that also shows the connection from the kidneys but they empty out directly into the cloaca in pretty much the same way.) Very nice and obviously different to our familiar eutherian mammal system.
so the marsupial system is enraging because they actually do separate the reproductive system from one but not both excretory systems in females. Because eutherian males also dump both pee and reproductive output into the same outgoing passage, though, we lump marsupials with eutherian mammals and declare that it doesn’t count as a cloaca if you’re keeping liquid and solid waste separate the whole way out.
That is: cloacas are defined not by the passage of reproductive outputs but by the commingling or separation of urinary and gastrointestinal waste. But penises (vs intromittent organs, as in ducks, bedbugs, and mosquito fish) are technically defined by the presence of a urinary output within the tissue as well as the reproductive (jizz-excreting, if you will) output.
Whew. I think I’m even angrier now tbh, we should give Patty Brennan some more money to find out more Absolutely Cursed Animal Reproductive Facts and/or delegate to some more people’s research labs. Last I heard she had discovered that camelids engage in transcervical insemination, which still lives rent free in my head.
What do you mean a chickens lungs are on its back wtf
well okay that particular anatomical diagram is highly simplified: chickens, like all birds, don’t have a diaphragm. instead they route all the air they breathe through a unidirectional system of air sacs, like so.
Air goes in through the lungs and then through the air sacs in order. It takes multiple breaths to get all the way through the chicken! The sacs are very thin and delicate, so you often miss them entirely when you’re moving through a chicken carcass. More on that from the source of this diagram. In the interim, have my favorite diagram of a chicken actually breathing!
I love everything about this post. A friend in grad school actually tried to delve into the no-true-cloaca controversy (we joking called her dissertation “Assholes of Mammalia”) but I think she got overwhelmed by The Horrors and ended upndoing something much more straightforward.
if we want to stop the patriarchal concept of surnames being passed down the male line, we have a few options options that i’d be 100% fine with:
children get whichever surname is cooler, to eliminate uncool surnames over the generations
children get whichever surname is rarer, to achieve a utopian future in a few centuries where all surnames are more or less equally common
children’s surnames are randomly generated: say, heads for parent #1’s surname, tails for parent #2’s surname
parents pick the first names first, and then a court decides which surname fits it better. so if a couple named mr. madison and mr. liu want to name their daughter alison, she’ll get the surname liu, because alison madison sounds ridiculous
everyone stops having children right now
6) both parents’ surnames are combined into a new name, in the same vein as portmanteau ship-names
7) We adopt elvish naming customs and have upwards of three names for each individual, none of which are surnames and all of which may be translated to any other language for any reason at any point in our lives. This has no advantages but will really annoy every government on earth and I just think it’d be really funny to watch them figure out the paperwork for that
I once completed a name change for a Miss White, she was getting married to Mr. Black
27 y/o. Hi! Welcome to my little corner of the internet. :D I'm an artist and unpublished authoress. This blog is mostly for reblogging stuff I like. If you'd like to reach me or see more of my personal things, art, musings, and headcanons, check me out at freckledkairi.tumblr
ALT
27 y/o. Hi! Welcome to my little corner of the internet. :D I'm an artist and unpublished authoress. This blog is mostly for reblogging stuff I like. If you'd like to reach me or see more of my personal things, art, musings, and headcanons, check me out at freckledkairi.tumblr
