Bumble-bi-ace - LGBTQA Biromantic Asexual Gamer

My mom bought me this book for Christmas

The Resurrectionist by EB Hudspeth, a fantasy field guide full of anatomical illustrations of monsters and cryptids.

The musculoskeletal systems are fun to look at, but not nearly as in-depth as I would have liked. If you have more than a passing knowledge of taxonomy (or in my case, access to Wikipedia), a lot of the details fall apart under scrutiny

The harpy has four upper limbs connected to one shoulder girdle; it shouldn't have arms, only wings

The sphinx is not classified as a mammal, but is still somehow in the family Felidae with cats (and like the harpy is also drawn with only two girdles despite having six limbs. I will give the author credit for giving the sphinx a keel for the wing muscles to attach to)

It lists the Hindu deity Genesha as a cryptid, which is a no-no.

Cerberus is also explicitly not a mammal, but somehow still a canine (literally in the species Canis with wolves, dogs, and coyotes)

Both mermaids and dragons are listed as members of the order Caudata; the only extant members of Caudata are salamanders, which kinda makes sense for dragons, but not so much for mermaids (also, the author keeps playing it fast and loose with cladistics; both mermaids and dragons are in the same order despite being in different classes, and while dragons are explicitly said to be amphibians, mermaids are given the fictional class mammicthyes, which means mammal-fish. At that point, why not just call mermaids amphibians? Why make up a fake latin hybrid name?)

But what bugs me most of all is the classification of the Minotaur as its own order of mammal when in mythology it is explicitly described as a hybrid of two known species (made possible only by the cruel machinations of the divine, but still)

To use actual taxonomical nomenclature, the minotaur's species would be B. taurus × H. sapiens (specifically B. taurus♂ × H. sapiens♀; there are, to my knowledge, no legends of H. sapiens♂ × B. taurus♀). That's how ligers, tigons, mules, zorses, pizzly bears, narlugas, etc., are described.

If I had written this book, I would have leaned more into evolutionary biology. Most land animals have four limbs because they all evolved from boney lobe-finned fish, which split off from the boneless sharks and rays millions of years earlier, so any six-limbed vertebrates would need to be descended from a fictitious category of six-finned fish which would either be an offshoot of boney fish/tetrapods (I guess they'd be hexapods, though that term refers to insect arthropods), OR a precursor to boney and cartilaginous fish that both clades split away from much earlier (it's easier to lose structures than to gain them, so it makes more sense for a six-limbed ancestor to spawn four-limbed descendants than the other way around).

Think about how different elephants are from humans, and humans are from aligators, and aligators are from penguins, and remember that they all evolved from the same ancestor tiktaalik, an amphibious fish that existed some 375 million years ago. Imagine a precursor six-limbed species and how diverse all its descendants would look after 400 million years. Save for the occasional instance of convergent evolution causing two unrelated species to independently evolve similar body plans to fill the same niche, tetrapods and hexapods would look nothing alike. There would be very little recognizable overlap between the two. A six-limbed "pegasus" would not look like a real world horse, and a six-limbed "dragon" would not look reptilian/dinosaur-ish, for much the same reason that giraffes don't look like frogs; they're just too distantly related. Bonless sharks and boney fish and whales/dolphins all have similar looking bodyplans only because their environment requires the same hydrodynamic shape, while terrstrial vertebrates are much more physically diverse.

Asexuals are forgotten and invalidated a lot. Especially if they identify as men or are masculine presenting. For that matter sometimes men in the ace community are even forgotten and invalidated by the community itself! So, men and masculine presenting members of the ace community, I want all of you to know that you just as valid as every single other member of the asexual community. I'm sorry if someone else has ever told you otherwise. You are a valuable and wonderful member of community and you deserve the space you take up in it. For those of you who aren't ace men yourself but one or more of your family/friends/loved ones is an ace man or an ace masc presenting person, please remind them that they're valid and loved any chance you get to.

I make a post with a reminder like this every year. I started it because I'd seen the way ace men were often left out of the conversation on ace issues and treated like an afterthought and felt that that was wrong.

24/7 christmas!

SEBASTIAN STAN + the exact points at which Bucky Barnes did and did not have chest hair

woo young woo protection sqaud

I’ve developed a pointless headcanon that Gholdengo will casually collapse back into a pile of coins when pouting. like they’ll just get upset over something and

cue some trainer walking into the Pokemon Center, dumping 1,000 pennies on the counter, and being like “yeah they didn’t want to come in today”

CHEWY CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

Source: Happy Kanako’s Killer Life Shiawase Kanako no Koroshiya Seikatsu 幸せカナコの殺し屋生活

by Toshiya Wakabayashi

Whenever the topic of autism self diagnosis comes up, inevitably a comment about "what about people faking it" comes up.

1. Who are you to determine whether they're faking it or not?

2. Is it really worth gatekeeping many people because of the actions of a few?