SnowFox102's games and stuff blog

With Dottler's shell done, all that's left is to make the body. I started with some eyes, and then began to work up the body around them in the same piece. (I could have just sewn the eyes on top of a separate body piece, but Dottler's eyes seem to be a little depressed into the face, so I figured this would capture that shape better.)

It would have been simple to continue outwards from here into a nice bun-shaped body nugget, but...

...it saves on yarn and crocheting time if I only make the part that's not hidden by the shell. (I don't have much of this particular orange.) So I did some Crochet Nonsense(TM) to shift into closing off the base as a big flat circle while still having it be the same unbroken piece as the face. With the shell over it, you can't even tell!

Then it's just some simple whiskers and feets. All that's left is to sew it all together - tomorrow's update should be the finished piece!

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Fishkeeping Update!

All of the tanks have been moved into the living room and into the Fish Corner (TM)!

Upstairs Kevin has been moved from the 5 gallon to the 10 gallon, and is enjoying his new friends: Blue Jelly Shrimp, Purple Harlequin Rasboras and Burmese Marbled Catfish (they're hiding in the pic because they're nocturnal).

In Kevin's place, there is now a school of Exclamation Point Microrasboras in with the Rilli shrimps- the Rasboras are the smaller animals in there.

So when I originally put the 40 gallon together, I fucked up and put the fertilizer in wrong and the tank was having High Nitrate issues, so I had to do a fish-in rescape where I removed everything but the fish and about 10 gallons of water because those zippy fuckers are impossible to net. I rearranged the tank (less rock, lowered the driftwood and added a shitload more plants) and tbh the fish are enjoying it a lot more.

I went to visit a friend a few weeks ago and the 20 gallon got CRAZY overgrown, but tbh the neons and the shrimp loved it. I've seen at least two litters of baby shrimps, an attempt by the Neons to spawn (though it's unlikely that any of the eggs will survive to spawn), and I'm seeing my Corydoras more often! But it was getting so overgrown the plants were getting in their own way so I've trimmed everything down and replanted most of it to keep the cover that the fish and shrimp like.

I was talking pond keeping in someone else's post and @xenologues wanted to know more about my smaller "pond" which I refer to as the bird bath, though it's more than that. It has a small solar pump that sends water up to the actual bird bath, which then spills into the lower basin where I have duckweed, hornwort, and a waterlily I evicted from the bigger pond when they were getting too aggressive. It's pretty shallow, only maybe six to eight inches of water, so it's too small for fish to be in year-round. There are bladder and ramshorn snails year-round, and in the summer frogs hang out and sometimes there's a brood or two of tadpoles. The snails alone are enough to feed the plants, even the waterlily which would need fertilizer if it were in a simple water garden.

Setting this up so that it cycled and remained stable was a lot easier than I expected it to be. I didn't intend for it to be anything more than something to look at from my window, but frogs love it and I even had dragonfly nymphs this year! I still wouldn't put fish in something this small (the temperature fluctuates a lot) but it has housed a few broods of tadpoles that grew up just fine. The water stays cool at the bottom thanks to the plants.

Aside from removing excess plant growth and topping up the water now and then, I don't do a whole lot with it. In the fall leaves get in it so I scoop those out in the spring, but otherwise I don't generally need to do anything to maintain it. When there are tadpoles I give them fish food though, just to be sure they have enough. There's a good bit of algae, but I leave it because it's not really a problem and the critters eat it.

there was once a little boy.

he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he can’t walk properly the way the other children do. he doesn’t understand why. he’s a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.

somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.

the little boy is eight years old, and he’s going to be king now. there’s a big ceremony about it. he doesn’t really fully understand what’s going on, because he’s eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! aren’t they great?

he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.

as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. he’s not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.

he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.

and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.

yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesn’t really click. it doesn’t seem real

but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didn’t develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.

tutankhamun was a child and he didn’t make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child

his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.

tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chest… was carved with ducks.

and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.

WITH PLEASURE

(greyscale makes it hard but the duck head is on the right above the toe strap. always takes me a while to find it too)

The patterns between them, to either side of what looks like lilypad/lotus flower petals, could very well be “ducks as seen from above.” There is a beak on the lower edge, a clear “head” shape above/behind it, darker ovals that look like folded wings, and a body/tail. I didn’t see the red circled ducks first, I saw the “swimming on a pond” ducks amongst the lotus flowers.

"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."

"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."

Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars

A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.

He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.

I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.

It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??

No nuance. If you don’t have a mother/are no contact etc this is not a poll for you.

girls after they break their favorite mug that costs 69¢