bemusedlybespectacled:

sourcedumal:

lucyaudley:

smitethepatriarchy:

prokopetz:

It always gets me when MRAs bring up the draft as an example of discrimination against men. Yes, it’s true that no woman in America has ever been subject to conscription in times of war; however, being that the most recent draft was in 1973, most likely neither have you. If you get to drag up stuff that happened before you were born, so does everybody else - and I’m pretty sure the ladies are going to win that particular game of misery poker.

BAM.

Also, considering the draft was voted into law by Congress in 1940 but the first woman was elected to Congress in 1973, men only have themselves to blame. We didn’t decide the rules of the draft. They did.

welp

Actually, the first woman was elected to Congress in 1916 and was in office in 1940. Her name was Jeanette Rankin.

She was also a lifelong pacifist. She opposed every declaration of war bll that crossed her desk, and her vote was the only one against the proposal to go to war with Japan, because “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”

The men in Congress demanded she changed her vote and she refused. She was attacked by an angry mob and maligned in the press.

(via zephindles)

lukeskvalker:

F e a r  not for the future, w e e p  not for the past

(via autodrive)

hollowedskin:

kereeachan:

jadedhavok:

boopboopbi:

megawordstringer:

My kid cousin, all of 11 years old, called me up sobbing today. I had about 50 horrifying reasons popping up in my head when he stopped crying enough to ask one question

“Cap’s not Hydra, right?”

A bit of background on why this made sense to me: My cousin was 3 when me and my brother bought him a cute Captain America hoodie. He was 5 when he first caught sight of his dad’s comic collection. He was 8 when he insisted on dressing up as Captain America for a contest at school. He was 9 when he first got bullied and his mom used Captain America as a symbol to tell him to always be kind in strength, to know that he was a better person. He got his Marvel encyclopedia last year for his birthday and every time we meet, me and him have hours long discussions on the characters. His favorite Avenger is Iron Man but he has always been and will always be a Cap’s boy. Steve Rogers has helped him appreciate his own strengths, has helped him understand that being a good person is much more important than being perfect. He got strength from Cap’s stand against bullying, inspiration from Steve’s ability to be kind and caring about the world even in the worst of situations, and most of all motivation to appreciate his own goodness. To him, he was just like Steve Rogers and I’ve seen that kid be so proud of that.

And today he calls me up, shattered and heartbroken, because his ideals, his dreams and convictions of years have been ripped apart. He felt betrayed and lost, because if Cap, his Cap, could be Hydra, a Nazi organization, then did it mean that he was drawing strength from evil all these years? 

An eleven year old is questioning his life choices. Nick, still think you’re funny?

My six year old godson is crying in his bedroom right now - his Marvel plastered, Captain America bedsheets and poster covered bedroom - because his hero is a bad-guy and apparently has been all along.

Nick Spencer is such a bad writer that the only way he could think of make his mark on a character like Steve Rogers is to steal the hero from thousands of children.

And if I thought I could find them without having to break out a microscope, I’d gladly do the jail time for punching him in the balls.

Tell kids everyone that Nick Spencer is Hydra and he’s trying to convince them to lose faith in Cap. This is what I told my nephew and he accepted that and decided he was going to keep wearing his Cap shirt because otherwise he was letting Hydra win.

This is a good plan. And excellent plan. Everyone do this!

nick spencer is definitely hydra.

(via itsachance)

megatruh:

captain america : flat tire

and sam will fix it.

(via fel-as-in-tumbld)

Anonymous Asked: Wait, what's wine forgery? How would you fake wine?

disintegratedself:

pyrrhiccomedy:

VERY EASILY, MY FRIEND. BUCKLE UP.

First of all, you gotta understand that wine is BIG BUCKS. Old and rare vintages can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even more to wealthy collectors at auctions. A single bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc sold for $300,000 back in 2010. And a lot of 114 bottles of a rare Romanee-Conti sold for $1.4 million in 2014.

And it turns out that high-end wine is dazzlingly easy to fake. Only a handful of people have ever tasted the rarest vintages in the world; and how the bottles were stored, if they were exposed to sunlight or kept in darkness, if the bottle had been opened or kept sealed, or if the environment was humid or dry can affect the wine’s taste, especially after decades or centuries. So who knows what a bottle of 1785 Lefitte actually tastes like? Can anyone actually tell it apart, with certainty, from a hypothetically-much-less-valuable 1784 of the same vintage?

Considering that some of the greatest wine-tasters in the world have also been dupes of some of the biggest wine scams in the world, I’m gonna say no.

There are definitely flavors associated with old wines, even specific vintages of old wines; but you don’t need to shell out for a pricey bottle to top off your fake. Get a cheap bottle of old wine and mix it with some nice quality, younger wines, and no one will be the wiser. Million-dollar wine forgers like Harvey Rodenstock and Rudy Korniawan do exactly that.

It gets even easier when you think that a lot of the people who buy these ultra-pricey bottles never even open them. They’re not for drinking! They’re an investment, or they’re a prestige item, something you take down from your shelf to show off to your friends once in a while. You could fill the bottle with grape juice, and who would ever find out?

So how are you supposed to tell a real bottle from a fake one? The bottle itself? The label? Wine bottles are nothing special; get one made in the right couple-of-decades as the vintage you’re faking, and there’s nothing to tell them apart. Some of them have etched signatures, but those were done with simple hand tools, that you can still buy today. And the labels are no security at all. They’re just paper, ink, and paste. People today are forging the holograms off of $20 bills; you could convincingly fake a wine label using a standard laser printer.

Wine forgery is a HUGE problem in the wine world today. Tracing the provenance of any particular bottle is next to impossible. And frankly, the money in the business is just too good for anyone to want to ask too many questions. The head of Sotheby’s auction house’s international wine department joked that more bottles of 1945 Mouton were consumed on the 50th anniversary of the vintage than were ever produced in the first place. 

The question isn’t how do you fake wine: it’s how the fraudsters ever get caught. In Rodenstock and Korniawan’s cases, they just overplayed their hands. Rodenstock sold so many bottles of rare wine that a suspicious customer had a bottle carbon-dated, which revealed that it was two centuries younger than Rodenstock had claimed (and it still took years to take him down). 

As for Korniawan, he started selling a vintage so rare that, it turned out, it had never existed in the first place.

There’s a great podcast on this topic in the Stuff You Should Know archives, if you want to hear a whole lot more about this. 

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

This is how I will scam the bourgeoisie out of 1.4 million dollars.

battlerobots:

bird boys

(via fyeahdickgrayson)

Fun animal facts I have learned being a zoo docent

madlori:

1. There are several ways to classify the large cats, one of the more useful ones is into the roaring cats (tigers, lions) and the purring cats (bobcats, lynxes). The puma (also known as the mountain lion) is the largest cat that purrs. I’ve heard it up close, it’s amazing. A cheetah’s purr sounds like an idling motorcycle engine.

2. Kangaroos cannot move their legs independently of each other, they have to move them in sync - when they’re on land. When they’re swimming, they can move them separately. Hopping is their most efficient way to move - a walking kangaroo is awkward as hell. They swing both legs forward using their tail as a third leg to prop up while their legs swing.

3. People often think that flamingoes’ knees bend the wrong way. They don’t - the joint you’re seeing in the middle of their leg isn’t their knee, it’s their ankle. Their knee is up by their body, and it bends the same way ours does.

4. Giraffes only sleep 1-2 hours a day.

5. Bald eagles’ vocalizations are not what you expect. When you see a flying bald eagle in the movies and hear that majestic caw sound? That isn’t an eagle, it’s been dubbed over with another bird, usually a red-tailed hawk. Bald eagles actually sound…not majestic. Kind of like if a kitten could be a bird.

6. Elephants are one of only a handful of animals that can pass the mirror test - in other words, they can recognize their own reflection (and not think it’s another animal, as dogs and cats usually do). They tested this by placing a chalk mark on an elephant’s forehead and then showing it a mirror. The elephant investigated the mark on its own forehead, indicating it knew that it was looking at itself.  The only animals that pass this test are the higher primates, the higher cetaceans (orcas, dolphines), elephants, and weirdly, magpies.

7. One-fifth of all the known mammal species are bats.

8. A kangaroo mother can have three joeys simultaneously at different stages of development: an embryo in her womb (kangaroos can do what’s called embryonic diapause which means sort of putting the development on pause until she’s ready for it to develop further), a joey in her pouch attached to one nipple, and a joey out of the pouch on the ground who nurses from the other one. The amazing thing? Each of her nipples make different formulations of milk for each joey’s different nutritional needs.

9. Bonobos, our closest genetic relative (they are more closely related to us than they are to either chimps or gorillas) are almost entirely non-aggressive, matriarchal, and use sex to solve all their problems. They engage in both same and opposite sex interactions, non-penetrative sex (oral, rubbing, manual) and with any age. That’s an interesting area to work in, lemme tell you.

10. Tortoises have super loud sex. Like, really loud.

11. All grizzlies are brown bears, but not all brown bears are grizzlies (grizzlies are a sub-categorization of the brown bear).

12. Reindeer are the only deer species where both males and females grow antlers. The males shed theirs the beginning of December, the females shed theirs in the spring. So all of Santa’s reindeer are girls, heh. I love telling little kids that.

13. If a rhinoceros knocks off its horn, it grows back faster than you’d expect. One of ours, Rosie, has knocked hers off twice.

14. Gorillas get crushes on each other. And on the humans that take care of them. Male gorillas also masturbate. I don’t know if the females do, I’ve never seen it. Sometimes it’s like a soap opera up in there.

15. Langur monkeys are silvery-gray in color - their babies are bright orange. Like Cheeto orange, I do not exaggerate.

16. Polar bear fur is not white, it’s transparent, like fiber optics. Also, their skin is black.

(via fel-as-in-tumbld)

bluekomadori:

I haven’t painted anything with a background for so long, it was time to change that!

my art is also on: dA pixiv instagram facebook redbubble

(via soldieress)

lark-in-ink:

spazzbot:

ardatli:

annathecrow:

ardatli:

childrentalking:

itwashotwestayedinthewater:

fabledquill:

killerchickadee:

intheheatherbright:

intheheatherbright:

Costume. Chitons.

Marjorie & C. H. B.Quennell, Everyday Things in Archaic Greece (London: B. T. Batsford, 1931).

Wait, wait…. Is that seriously it? How their clothes go?

that genuinely is it

yeah hey whats up bout to put some fucking giant sheets on my body

lets bring back sheetwares

When you’re carding, spinning and weaving everything from scratch, using the big squares exactly as they come off the loom must seem like a fucking brilliant idea. 90% (or more) of pre-14th century clothing is made purely on squares (and sometimes triangles cut from squares). 

How did they get the fabric so fine it draped like that? Was that something medieval europe forgot? Or do I just have a completely misguided image of historical clothing?

Medieval Europe also had incredibly fine weaves, though the ancient world tended to have them beat. Linen was found in Egypt woven with a fineness that we’re still trying to replicate, and there was a kind of cotton woven in India called ‘woven wind’ that was supposedly still translucent at eight layers, and wool shawls so fine that the entire thing could be drawn through a wedding ring. 

The way they could get away with pinking and slashing doublets in the 16th century was partially because the fabrics were so tightly woven that you could simply cut a line on the bias and nothing would fray. 

Modern fabric machining sucks ass in terms of giving us any kind of quality like the kind human beings produced prior to the Industrial Revolution. 

*yells about textile history*

somtimes I get SO MAD about modern fabric sucking i stg

(via fel-as-in-tumbld)

yaahoooo:

hes been doing this shit all week

(via teakix)

thisishangingrockcomics:

Not taking pictures of myself avoiding mirrors and wearing a bag over my head as a form of empowerment. When no one can see me then I’ll be liberated. Visibility is the enemy.

(via zephindles)

scarlet-xx:

My art: Batman always knows how to deal with these robin boys…

(Source: twitter.com, via fyeahdickgrayson)

batmanisagatewaydrug:

Trends that should stop: having “evil” versions of female characters wear more revealing clothes and act more sexually aggressive than the “good” version, because that demonizes women’s sexuality and ties it to having lower morals and it’s just generally a shitty gross trope

(via devinalh)

gwendolinechristie:

star wars: the force awakens + red/blue

(via autodrive)

unicornempire:

givemealltheowls:

uzumakijpeg:

France’s politicians and community leaders have criticised the “intolerable” violence against Paris’ Jewish community, after a pro-Palestinian rally led to the vandalizing and looting of Jewish businesses and the burning of cars. 

please please please spread this around, please speak up about this, please let everyone know that this is not okay, please please please protect my people from a second kristallnacht, please 

Listen.  I love my followers and my mutuals dearly.  You know how occasionally I post something like ‘every Jew on this site has a list in their head of who reblogs what and who ignores posts about Jews’?  I’m talking about this shit.  I have been seeing things on my dash about the situation of Jews in France for over a year, but it’s coming from other Jews 99% of the time.  Please stop ignoring this.  This is literally history repeating itself and we can’t be the only ones calling it out again.

This is the first I’ve heard of this, and I’m flabbergasted! If you go and read the article it’s even worse; “anti-Jewish violence is seven times higher than in the 1990s, and 40% of racist violence is against Jews, despite them making up just 1% of the population.” I mean, holy crap! I know Tumblr is very US-centric but this definitely needs to be heard about!!

(Source: fenrismp3-hasmoved, via fel-as-in-tumbld)