KIROKAZE
noise dept.
Color Me Curious
π
Doug Jones
untitled
Misplaced Lens Cap
π©΅ avery cochrane π©΅
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Interview Vampire Daily
d e v o n
Noah Kahan
One Nice Bug Per Day
if i look back, i am lost
Not today Justin
Keni
pixel skylines
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@apocalypse-angel
it's cool how in the 6 years since this tweet was written it's become significantly less useful not because anything has gotten better but because the majority of products on Amazon are now from fly-by-night brands called "ZZPORK" and "GLUM4PANT"
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Upstairs Kevin Is Actually For Real The World's Most Perfect Betta Fish
So for those of you not familiar with my recent descent into fishkeeping, about 2 months ago a friend of mine who does Hazardous Waste cleanup (specifically cleaning up hazardous places like meth labs) called me up and asked:
"You have fish, right?"
"...Why?" I asked, having become aware that the Fish Distribution System is even more aggressive than the cat one.
"I found a fish in the back of an abandoned trap house. Alive." She clarified.
I could feel my fate settling upon my soul.
"...Send me a pic so I can ID the species and I'll see what I can do."
She sent me a picture of a small purplish squiggle in six inches of fetid green muck. But when I arrived to collect the sludge creature he turned out to look like this:
He's difficult to photograph in focus, but he's a deep wine-dark creature with an iridescent blue sheen. The red patches on his fins mirror where the fins of a Plakat/wild Betta splendens would be, and the rest of his fins are a ghostly shimmering white. This fish was in six inches of toxic green shit.
Naturally, he needed the finest tank I could put together that afternoon.
I think I did alright.
He's so fucking cute. He always swims up to watch when anyone approaches. I've got him trained to do a little dance when I feed him. He likes watching me doing anything in front of his tank.
That's all actually pretty typical of Bettas- they're very intelligent and curious creatures and like learning, which is more than I can say for some of my relatives.
Where Upstairs Kevin (so named because his tank is in my upstairs bathroom) really shines is that a lot of Bettas are... Not sociable. They often eat shrimp, attack other fish in their tank (or get stressed out of they can't commit enough violence to maintain their personal space) or constantly harass and nip the snails in their tanks. Most Bettas are genuinely happier being alone.
Kevin fucking loves his snail (Bluebert) and will shimmy as fast as he can over whenever Bluebert falls off something (it's fine, this is a normal way for mystery snails to get from one place to another).
When I had my Nego D'Aguas in the holding tank, I had to put three of the smallest ones in with him because they were being harassed in the small tank, and he was a perfect gentleman with them. He was trying very hard to shoal with them, but they're very zippy. He was visibly upset (lethargic, dulled colors) when I moved them back to the big tank.
Today was the real acid test: I'm going to move him from his 5 gallon to the 10 gallon so I can use the 5 as a hospital/spare plants tank, and I needed to know if I could have shrimp in with him. Even Betta that are cool with other fish can still see a shrimp and decide they're at the buffet. Unfortunately, there's no real way to know without putting shrimp in with the Betta.
So earlier today, I got half a dozen super-discounted Rilli shrimp (LFS has a massive overstock of them for some reason) and added them to his 5 gallon. There are a bunch of hiding places for shrimp in there and if he was aggressive with them I'd move him to the 10 gallon immediately (I don't want to do that just yet because I need to move the furniture around in there a bit).
Friends.
The shrimp are fully swimming in the open and Kevin is just following them around, curious, but only curious. No gill-flaring, no posturing, no lunges or snapping. Some of them are red, a color that normally triggers aggression in Bettas, and he's just. Hanging out, watching them eat biofilm off the moss. One of them accidentally landed on his head and stayed there for 3 seconds and he only went "???" Until it took off again.
My beautiful and perfect and son who is so kind and gentle with his tiny friends.
Congrats on a most excellent fishson! Do you have any resources you'd recommend for learning appropriate betta care? My niece just bought one and is keeping it in a vase.
My mom and I are hoping to get her a proper tank setup, but we don't know where to start looking for actually reliable information, especially for identifying the middle ground between "lies the fish bowl companies told the underpaid teenager at the pet store to say" and "spending thousands of hours and dollars turning half the room into fully native habitat" where an eleven year old is most likely to need to start.
You are right, a vase is a completely unacceptable place to house any animal, especially a Betta. I am not going to shame your niece or her parents because yes, chain stores, and media have fully lied to them about what fishkeeping is actually like and what it takes to keep fish and other tank animals without torturing them. The truth is that Fishkeeping is a TERRIBLE introduction to pet ownership, but a great introduction to ichthyology, chemistry, ecology, pathology, engineering and animal psychology. Places that will give you good (or at least, better) information about fish:
1. Your Local Fish Store- NOT the Petco/Petsmart/Other chain store, the independent small business that probably feels like a fire hazard and is owned by a Weird Old Guy or if you're really lucky, weird lesbians. These people are in it for the love of fish, and will give you very realistic advice and expectations.
2. The following Youtube Channels have good fish husbandry and advice:
SerpaDesign: Tanner is very much the "Turn half a room into a habitat" guy but he gives a lot of good advice about how to design tanks that will suit the needs of their inhabitants, and his videos are very soothing tbh.
FishForThought is funny and Recently did a Solo Betta Tank Build for a friend's Betta. It's also worth the $2 a month to join the discord with a ton of fishkeepers you can ping for advice whenever.
AquariumStoreDepot has what I'd consider THE best Introductory fishkeeper video. Just watch it, it's a great summary of what makes a good community fish tank, but a lot of the advice is applicable to a Solo Betta tank.
I was writing up an entire materials/costs/instructions on Kevin's 5 gallon speedrun but it got so long tumblr started crashing so I'm going to go finish that post in word and then add it to this tomorrow.
I love characters who are like "I'm a terrible person" but when you look closer it's more like
"I adapted to survive something and now I don't know how to stop being that version of myself."
I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
my friend just had an art show and they were communicating with the gallerist over email. They could clearly tell that the gallerist was using AI to respond to their emails, but just rolled their eyes and moved on.
and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"
gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"
my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."
gallerist: "that isn't true."
and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.
so my friend had done all of this communication about their needs and expectations to be able to make the show possible, and the person whose job it was to read that information and get it done had simply.... not read the information and not done it. because AI.
japanese serow and brown hyena... a bona fide pair of changelings
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writing isnβt hard. i just have to extract 80,000 words from my brain using sheer psychic force
[mola mola has entered the chat] several people are typingβ¦
Being crazy about a piece of media for any amount of time will leave a weird mark on you forever because years later youβll see someone posting something about it like βcan we talk about this frameβ and youβll be like βah that frame. i know all about that frame. I was once a scholar of that frame.β
Never Learned - Gator Days
...the alt text?
It's been a while since I said "this person wins the internet", but today it is merited.
(via bsky)
(The classic XKCD comic)
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Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.
Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.
There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.
i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.
I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case
Important detail: "Utility" is often not the same as actual utility. It's often the presentation of utility.
The trend a few years back for men to wear macrame bracelets and justify them as a way to always carry cordage so they could survive in the wilderness wasn't based on the actual behavior of cord that's been knotted for an extended period of time. It was based on the self-image of being someone who's likely to get into survivalist situations and excel at them. (and possibly on liking the aesthetics of the bracelet but not feeling able to choose to wear it unless it had a "utility" justification)
Friends, romans, people who are nonbinary except at work, lend me your ears,
being an early bird is soooo awesome taking the longest slowest most leisurely start to the day and it is now 8:25am
And this is of course not even mentioning the worm
I cant believe this tweet is how I find out
now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense
holy shit.
You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
i wish my brain were not full of gludge. i would like to be using it & because of the gludge i cannot do that.
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the thing about the concept of gendered socialization is that so many people use it as like another kind of gender essentialism. you know it's not an immutable trait right. you can literally overcome it.
"i'm like this because women are socialized to be shy and quiet and subservient" okay good on you for recognizing it, but that's only the very first step. the next few steps are that you Stop Doing It. feminist thought vs feminist action.
and when ppl see a trans woman being confident and unafraid to take up space and decide it's because of her evil evil male socialization, i'm always like "wait you're saying this woman was raised as a child to be loud and confident and take up space? that's awesome, i thought that's how we WANTED people to raise girls? why exactly is it a problem now? π€"
like WHY are you telling trans women that they literally have to make themselves smaller and conform to the WORST gender exceptations of women to be seen as real women. since when is it evil and masculine to be confident, i thought we were supposed to be doing that. i thought that was feminism.
They also treat socialisation as some indelible artefact of the past, not an ongoing process. Women aren't just more shy and cautious on average because they were taught that as small children; they're like that because of the environment they're still in at forty or fifty. It's not some irremovable childhood brainwashing, it's a reasonable reaction to current circumstances. A great many trans women become more shy and quieter after coming out or transitioning because the people around them socially punish them for not doing so, same as previously shy and quiet cis women become more confident and take up more space when put in environments that don't punish them for it. They act like someone's personality and behaviour are branded into them based on whether they have a penis at eight years old, but that is simply not the case.
Whenever I see people who are like "trans women are all loud and aggressive and uncouth (/negative)" I automatically think "do you think black women are all loud and aggressive and uncouth (/negative) too? Because that's what you sound like. You sound like someone who met two or three women from an oppressed minority that were more confident than you wanted them to be, and decided that the whole demographic was beneath you in a different way for daring to not stay in their place."
for those curious, this is joanne, a 15-year-old sumatran tiger currently living at phoenix zoo. it's very sweet to see her playing and tumbling around like this at her age -- she's got some people taking care of her if she still has this energy at that age.
i did see some users in the notes who were concerned about her looking 'scrawny', or wondering if she's maybe a juvenile -- far from it! at 15, joanne is very much considered a geriatric tiger; she's a grandma. she is, however, a sumatran tiger (panthera tigris sumatrae) -- sumatrans are the smallest extant subspecies of tiger, built more for the sweltering jungles of sumatra than the blistering cold of the amur river or the dense forests and mangrove swamps of south asia.
when you're used to seeing amur or amur-bengal hybrid ('generic') tigers on television or online, most of which are often overfed and overweight, a sumatran is going to look a bit weird, but joanne looks to be in wonderful shape -- look at those muscles flex and that coat shimmer when she moves! that's a healthy old lady for sure. props to joanne's keepers for taking such good care of her.
