Cutie… Patootie... Agouti? You Might Know The Capybara, But What About Its Distant Cousin The Red-rumped

gotta say tumblr's little pro-cursive revival has really reactivated early middle school memories of being forced to write up assignments in crabbed horrible cursive and hating it more with every letter whose setup i failed to properly anticipate far enough in advance to connect it smoothly (possibly bc adhd but like. hashtag guy who's only ever had adhd so what do i know.)

Dutch farmer in Marken, 1943.

Oops!... I Did It Again

genuinely wild how often i realize i’ve taken an interpersonal situation where the information i actually have is ‘i’m not having a good time’ and turned it into ‘i’m worried they’re not having a good time with me’

probably ultimately very straightforwardly traceable back to a childhood in which i wasn’t having a good time with my mother and the only variable in the situation that i actually had the power to alter was myself, so that now when as an adult i’m having a bad time with someone my instinct is still to fix myself instead of, you know, removing myself? or alternatively checking in with them about how things are feeling to them and attempting to arrive at a meeting of the minds, or at least a mutually semi-satisfactory compromise?

anyway like. this failure mode probably implies a particular menu of followup actions that i ought to be identifying and instituting, but i’d frankly settle for just ‘recognizing this particular self-abnegating reframing when i’m in the process of committing it’!

[IDs: (1) Nine brands of butter substitute with increasingly desperate names:

is it butter?

isn't it butter

Could it be Butter?

I Think It Tastes Like Butter

You'd Think It's Butter!

What, not butter!

Unbelieveable… This is not butter

who needs butter!

Memories of Butter

and (2) a tag by Tumblr user @‍stripedtabbycat that reads:

#the emotional journey evoked by reading these in order is beautiful

/end IDs]

This is one of my favorites hand down

art by tracy walker; preorder here :)

get ready to see these guys on every envelope i ever mail until i die

Maxfield Parrish, The Young King of the Black Isles, 1906. Reproduced as a frontispiece in Collier's: The National Weekly, vol. 39, no. 8, 1907, p. 8, and as a full-page illustration in The Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales, edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909, between pp. 74 and 75.

The image above was sourced from the latter publication and has been straightened.

it really is true, i think, that no matter where you fall on a moral spectrum you'll be shocked at some things other people are willing to condone, and will seem sanctimonious to them if you disclose as much; and that in turn other people will be shocked at some things you're willing to condone, and will seem sanctimonious to you ditto… 

for context this post is brought to you by my genuine (and unexpressed, ftr, except here!) startlement at seeing a blogger i've historically considered conscientious admit to not recycling their cat food cans

Eurasian Red Squirrels/ekorrar photographed in Värmland, Sweden (April 18-20, 2025).

Day 8, swallow-tailed kite