they probably cant love me back in a human or even mammalian sense, but my goldfish with their smooth pea-sized brain have learned to trust that i will make them better when they are sick. i feel like crying about this often

Maybe Princess the tarantula never had anything resembling what we as humans know as emotions, but she still came out of her burrow and up to the glass when we’d talk to her and used to stare at the drawing I’d tape to her terrarium. Maybe she couldn’t even comprehend what we were, but she knew we were there to take care of her. And even if she never showed that sort of curiosity or trust we’d still love her.

Idk if Munchie the praying mantis felt love for me, but I do know he trusted me enough to climb onto my hand when offered and was comfortable with allowing me to carry him places despite me being absolutely massive in comparison to him. So that's close enough in my book.

This also applies to wild animals/birds you might encounter in your garden. The feral city pigeon with the distinct white spot on his head will never love me, and will probably never be brave enough to eat from my hand. But I don't feed him in the hope of making him love me. I feed him because I love seeing him, doing his little spiny walks on my balcony, cooing up a storm, and not flying away immediately when I open the balcony door to bring him some seed. His presence brings joy to my heart, and I'm blessed to see him every day.

I'm not naïve enough to believe an animal can love me the same way a human can, but to know it trusts me enough to feel safe in my presence is an honour I strive to maintain as a sentient human.

My tortoise who is older than me just ran up to me when I was bringing her lettuce. Head and forelegs as high off the ground as possible looking at me like :-} I don’t know if she loves me but she recognizes me as the source of food and she lets me scratch her head

Y'all I know that when so-called AI generates ridiculous results it's hilarious and I find it as funny as the next guy but I NEED y'all to remember that every single time an AI answer is generated it uses 5x as much energy as a conventional websearch and burns through 10 ml of water. FOR EVERY ANSWER. Each big llm is equal to 300,000 kiligrams of carbon dioxide emissions.

LLMs are killing the environment, and when we generate answers for the lolz we're still contributing to it.

Stop using it. Stop using it for a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. We need to kill it.

Sources:

can we talk about how this is even more annoying when websites start forcing AI on us even though we didn't FUCKING ASK (@ meta)

like, you stole my art. you stole my writing. and now you're making me fuck up the environment even though i DIDN'T FUCKING ASK

Today I was helping run the booth for the local queer non-profit at the farmer's market and a woman told me that she would like a flag, pointing to our little bucket of flags. So I picked up the bucket and I brought it over and asked her which one she'd like.

"Well, tell me about them!"

"Oh! Okay! This one is the inclusion flag- its for everyone, including allies."

"What's this one?"

"That's the bisexual flag: it represents people who are attracted to two or more genders."

"Hmm... what about this one?"

"That's the nonbinary flag: it represents people whose gender isn't strictly 'male or female.'"

"Hmm... what's this purple one?"

"That's the asexual flag: it represents people who may not feel sexual attraction the way that others do."

She put her hand to her chest and got this really curious look on her face. "Tell me more about that!"

"Oh, happy to! So like if you're out with your bestie and someone real fine walks by and she's like 'omg look at him' and you're like 'girl get a grip?' Or like you just don't get what the 'big deal' is about sex or why everyone is so weird about it? But there's also room for like- you don't fall in love with the way someone looks, you're attracted to the person- their sense of humor and their kindness, or there's something about their personality that just makes it click for you? That's asexuality, too!"

And she got real quiet and seemed to think about it for a minute. So I grabbed our little informational sheet about different queer identities and handed her a copy. "If you want to do some research, this is probably a great place to start."

She thanked me and took an ace flag, stuck it in her hair.

Sometimes when you're online all the time, its easy to think that 'everyone knows about (topic), there's no reason to keep talking about it so much.' But while the people on the internet are real people, the internet ISN'T real life. And there are lots of people who do need to know that they do have community!

One of the jokes is that I'm a lot of people's 'patient zero' for discovering that they're queer. This is why.

sour

I hope it's okay but I animated him a little because the concept is too good thank you for your service 🧎

I can't upload a video with sound for some reason but here's the version with audio

hOLY FUCK!!!!!! HOOOLYYYY FUUUUCCKKKK

THE KIWIFICATION..... AWESOME. I LOVE HOW YOU ANIMATED THE TRANSFORMATION + LOVE HOW HIS SMALL HAT FALLS OFF😭😭THIS IS SO CUTE

I have no idea who Lukas Gage is, but I’m gonna get the ‘they don’t owe you shit bat’ and protect him with a mighty swing.

So, I just googled him to see if I saw him in anything, and he filed from divorce from his husband in 2023. So, he’s out now, but he still owes no one anything about his personal life including his sexuality.

Say it louder for people in the back. No one ever owes anyone else information about their sexuality. Behavior like demanding only openly gay people play gay roles and this sort of shit can result in forced outing and that is something no one deserves. No one.

I remember hearing that in the satanic panic of the 80s a preschool (kindergarten?) was accused of making the children all take off their clothes and dance naked in some ritual in the span of an hour. and she, exasperated, was like. (Paraphrasing) “have you ever tried to get ONE toddler dressed? You think I could get a whole classroom undressed and redressed? In an hour??”

you just know when someone in customer service says “thank you for your patience!!!!” they’re fighting for their lives that day

fell asleep while writing and

terrible years really make you understand the point of a new year. i know nothing much will have changed between dec 31 and jan 1, but we need to be able to partition off everything that’s happened to us, we need a moment to say, ‘that’s done, we’re done with it, it’s over’ and have a little hope that the future will be different. we need to be able to stop and take a breath and sing, in the middle of winter, and prepare ourselves for spring.

#humans live life as a story#it doesn’t have real endings and beginnings so we make them ourselves#we need them to make sense of things

Important addition that this would only be for drugs developed with taxpayer money (which it looks like is pretty much anything since 2010 at least) - that’s why the government can do this. The American taxpayer paid for it so they should get what they paid for basically.

Any drug developed without taxpayer money (which is like 0 it turns out because the pharma companies are thieving bastards) would not be subject to this reg.

This is fixing the fact that at the moment the drug companies take less of the financial risk of drug development because the govt is footing a lot of the bill (and therefore taking on all that risk), but then the drug companies keep all the profit by setting absurd prices once the drug is on the market. That’s your money that funded that! You should get the benefits!

socialising the risks and privatising the profits just got a glorious fist straight up its arse

law idea: products that are not currently and will not be purchasable from the parent company for the foreseeable future are not counted as "copywritten" in regard to the sharing, reproduction, and other "piracy" claims in court of law.

if you aren't selling them your customer doesn't have to buy

this is in regards to all copyright, if someone starts a factory producing clones of iPhone and iMac chips for the purpose of repairing devices, that's not copyright infringement, because apple does not sell those chips :)

if they want to keep their copyright they can put their repair chips on the public market, continue matinance of old products, etc

Nintendo will hate this law the most I'm sure.

widows is surprisingly robust to this law as you can actually buy every copy of windows ever produced right now on windows website, albeit you might have a hard time finding it because they'd PERfer you didn't.

streaming companies dropping original content from their service for tax purposes can expect to find it on YouTube the next day for free no ads

I think you all will be able to see how this will have a hotting effect on the market, where as now copyright holders have the power to delete content from the legal sphere, under this law they cannot do that. they can sell it themselves or they can give it away for free.

no more manufactured scarcity for the sake of inflating already inflated prices

thank you for using this hellsite as intended.

reblogs are important, if you liked a post, reblog it! that is how posts are spread, that is how people get to see art and creations and fics. it makes creators very, very happy.

we have a long time until season three, let's make sure everyone feels appreciated.

as always, reblogs on EVERY ACC ARE APPRECIATED 🥹🥹🥹

My work boots are the most expensive shoes I’ve ever owned.

Also the most comfortable. I chose them after trying on several different brands and comparing lifespan vs usage vs comfort - I needed them for a physically demanding job, not the weekend hiking trails. I could have easily chosen cheaper boots that would have lasted long enough to be worth their low price, but I know the Sam Vimes Boot Theory and knew weaker, less comfortable boots would make my life harder in the long run.

So when the outside edge of the heel started wearing down after three years of heavy use I went to the shop I got them from and said “hey this is a common problem for me with how I walk but now it’s affecting my ankles and knees and I don’t wanna have to buy a new pair, is there a way to fix this?”

The salesman at this very fancy upscale boot store said “oh yeah, there’s a shoe repair place that can give you some heel guards - it’ll keep the rubber from wearing out.”

So at 8am this morning right after my 9hr shift ends I went to the shoe repair shop and it is the most hole-in-the-wall, is-this-a-real-business-or-a-mafia-front, am-I-gonna-get-shot tiny cinder block cube I’ve ever seen in my life. I grew up plenty poor and love me a good hole-in-the-wall business, but going from upscale store to this cash-only repair shop gave me whiplash. Wasn’t expecting this when a guy who wears three piece suits to sell boots said it’s the best place to go.

The skinny kid behind the counter looks somehow 16 and 25 at the same time, but when I tell him this place was recommended he smiles and says to hand over my boots. I hand him the vaguely warm foot-smelling boots, and stand in my socks in the 3’ square entryway surrounded by every color leather polish you could buy and watch as he turns my boots around in his hands, sizes up a crescent moon bits of plastic, and unceremoniously hammers tiny nails through them before handing them back.

The heels are perfectly level again. I can walk without almost rolling my ankles. They don’t clack loudly on the pavement or feel different. This is gonna fix my knee pain. It cost $10.

This kid had every tool he needed within arms reach, worked fast and smoothly, I was in and out the door in less than 8 minutes, and it only cost $10.

I didn’t think anything could cost only $10 anymore. I’m so used to hyperinflation prices I was spiritually thrown back to the 1400’s visiting the cobbler in town square. This kid might have been that cobbler and just decided to never die.

I’m still reeling from the whiplash, and gobsmacked at the price, and thrilled I didn’t have to go buy new, worse work boots (cuz I don’t have that kind of money for a second pair, I’m expecting these ones to last a decade) and it feels like I just experienced one of the rare little chunks of magic that floats around our world.

You did.

Today on clownery from my fraternity: I started “pavlov training” this guy from my frat as a joke but now it’s actually working

Context: This guy from my frat (I’m in a coed academic frat) is really into geography, and he’s been trying to learn all the state capitals of Brazil. I happen to be Brazilian, so I’ve been helping him learn them along with pronunciations. One day I was eating a pack of m&ms and decided to quiz him. If he got the question right he got an m&m, and if he got it wrong I’d eat it. Thus a tradition between us was born. If I’m eating a snack I’ll quiz him a bit and give him a tiny treat if he’s right.

Anyways, today I was in our frat lounge eating some m&ms by myself, kinda minding my own business. I eventually got really bored and wondered what would happen if I gave everyone in a lounge an m&m except for him, so I did that. He noticed and then started dropping every Brazilian state capital he could think of, getting increasingly desperate until he just started naming random Brazilian cities. A few of them he repeated multiple times to get the perfect pronunciation. It was like watching a dog do every trick it knows in rapid succession, just hoping something would get a treat. I eventually gave him a few m&ms and started wondering what the hell I’ve done

Fic authors deserve more credit.

Story time: I started a book about 23 hours ago and just finished it. Also in that time I slept for 10 hours, spent time with family, was at work, etc. Anyway, I enjoyed the book (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda). But it felt like it flew by, so after I finished I looked up the word count because what are pages? Pages are meaningless. I only function in word counts anymore.

The estimate I found was 58,580. My immediate reaction was “oh, that’s why. That’s nothing!” But what a shitty response. Because no. That’s not nothing. That’s a whole. Damn. Book. An entire novel! And Fic authors regularly bust out 30k, 50k, 100k, 150k words. AND THEY DO IT FOR FREE. WHILE WORKING AND LIVING THEIR LIVES.

So anyway, thank your favorite fic author today because they deserve it. Because they’re amazing. They’re the MVPs.

Some rough word count equivalencies for you, via famous novels, just to give you an idea of what OP is saying:

30k fic = Animal Farm by George Orwell

50k fic = The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

75k fic = Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

100k fic = To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

150k fic = The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

200k fic = Moby Dick by Herman Melville

250k fic = Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling

300k fic = A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin

350k fic = Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

400k fic = Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

I WROTE SOMETHING AS LONG AS MOBY DICK AND I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW

I can’t believe I’ve surpassed Animal Farm.

Holy shit.

This is awesome. With that said, huge appreciation also to fic writers who write shorter fics - 10k, 5k, 1k, 500 words. Because yeah, huge long fics get a lot of love, and a lot of labour goes into them, but the same is true for tiny fics as well. Not everyone is banging out huge great novels, but little ficlets are fantastic and still bring readers a ton of joy.

So if you’re feeling a bit downcast because you can’t write that 50 chapter epic or your latest WIP is “only” 2k and it still took you ages - that’s amazing. Seriously. Not everyone is naturally wordy or prolific. And you can say a ton with just a few hundred or thousand words.

Props to short fic creators - you guys are awesome.

The moment I realized that in the average year, I write and post enough fanfic to equal a novel that falls between To Kill A Mockingbird and The Two Towers was a HUGE moment for me. I’ve only posted one thing that passed thirty thousand words ever in my ~career~, but it all adds up. 

Insurrection is disqualifying. Pretty simple.