If your family ever feels dysfunctional just remember that my parents got divorced and didn’t tell each other where they were moving to so they ended up moving in the same neighborhood and becoming neighbors
why isn’t anyone allowed to be wrong anymore? it’s okay to be wrong. no one should be terrified of every tiny little mistake they might make. being wrong, and realizing you were wrong, is how you learn and grow and change.
I admit I’m a sucker for adorable animals in videos and pictures. With all the troubles in the world today, sometimes it’s nice to vicariously immerse myself in piles of puppies, kittens, and other cute critters. Unfortunately, sometimes the media I’m consuming is a source of troubles itself. Many times ignorance about animal behavior is at the root of the cruelty, though there are situations that are born out of greed for money, prestige, likes, and so forth.
Obviously some of these videos have worse origins than others. The upset gecko gaping its mouth at its supposed rival in a mirror isn’t being nearly as badly mistreated as the loris that’s starving to death due to an incomplete or incorrect diet. What’s important is developing a critical eye for this sort of media and learning more about how to assess whether the animals involved are actually enjoying themselves or not.
Here’s some sauce for those of you who want to read further:
If you need a reputable source of cute, I highly suggest ZooBorns, a collection of pictures of newborn animals at accredited zoos, and usually a blurb about conservation of that animal or some cool information about that species, or how they are cared for in that facility.
Also, seal/sea lion rescues have the CUTEST pictures of their patients while in recovery.
Reblogging for this ^^^ (thanks for a great addition!)
Unless you’re a member of an Algonquin-speaking nation, the wendigo is not your monster. It’s pretty disrespectful to take something that’s a serious part of a living group of peoples’ beliefs and make it a fun, kooky monster aesthetic. That’s just disrespectful.
W*ndigoag are not cryptids or aesthetics for non-Natives to make cutesy tumblr posts and moodboards about. They are sacred and horrifying Algonquian and Anishinaabe spirits, and we do not want outsiders touching them at all. Please leave “Native American myths” and Native spirits alone.
“W*ndigocore” is ridiculous. You really have to turn our sacred spirituality into this?
*points violently* Stop. STEALING. And. BASTARDIZING. Native. American. Beliefs. And. Culture!!!! Keep your hands OFF of other people’s SACRED beliefs!
I mean, FFS, you wouldn’t go waltzing into the Godsbedamned Vatican and start playing with THEIR “holy artifacts” for funsies would you? And THEY’RE a friggin’ colonizing religion! Like, they’re not even a CLOSED religion that belongs to a specific set of people!
Idk how to tell you this man but people use Catholicism as #aesthetic all the time and it literally doesnt matter it’s not real no one is getting hurt by this please care about something that matters.
You really pinged me specifically, huh.
Anyway. Catholicism is what you’d call a dominant religion in the West. It was shoved onto groups all throughout the West, especially indigenous groups in Latin America and North America. People were converted at gunpoint, their own practices banned and criminalized, their spiritual leaders murdered and jailed. A lot of Latin American Catholicism, especially in Mestizo communities, was a result of indigenous people using Catholic traditions to practice their actual indigenous traditions in secret.
My grandma was forcefully converted to Catholicism when she was taken from her tribe and family and sent to a Catholic American Indian boarding school, where she was religiously abused, beaten by nuns, and told that she would go to hell for being Indian. Catholic missionaries still visit tribal reservations with the intention of converting people. Religious intergenerational trauma runs rampant in Native communities, contributing to our rates of mental illness, addiction, and suicide.
Tldr; fuck white Catholics. If they don’t want their religion to be treated as an aesthetic, then maybe they shouldn’t have done everything in their power to make it a staple at the cost of brown lives and cultures.
Also, maybe don’t go around telling indigenous people that our sacred beliefs aren’t real. It’s really not a good luck for you.
Have a lovely day :)
“Ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.”
–
Brian Andreas, Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas (via suspend)
