*Stutters Agressively*

8,299,156,200 people currently here. More born every second. More die every day. Too soon, too long, inevitable, preventable.

8 billion people on the planet. 8 billion lives that flash across our screens or papers or daydreams everyday. 8 billion reasons to keep working toileously, hoping, demanding, praying, screaming.

We want to live. 8 billion people who just want to live in a world that's worth it.

8 billion people, 52 billion hours from homo sapiens' first introduction.

And somehow,

Some way,

I found you.

I was born with a will to learn, and I chose to learn how to love. And I choose to love you. I choose to love you until I can't- even then, a part of me will still love you anyway.

I'll love you in the way we make our coffee.

I'll love you in the way we still complain about fast fashion that isn't even good.

I'll love you in every single what-if, every if only, every yes, and-, that we deign to think... even if only to ourselves

I'll love the you that you don't talk about. I'll love the you that you cringe at. I'll love the you that you hated becoming. I'll love the you that can't bear to love yourself. And of course, I'll love the you that does, as well.

I was born with a will to learn. And 8 billion lives to love. And 8 billion lives to learn about. And 8 billion lives to cry for. And hopefully, a couple lives that stick close me to remind me what love is. How. Why I still should. And to love myself, because 7.00099 billion doesn't have the jennies (je ne sais quoi)(I love you for that too, by the way.)(I hope you laughed).

I was born with a soul that wants to learn how to love everything I have and will ever see!!

I'm so, so happy I can love you. Thank you!

Thank you that I'm here. With you, loving you until I can't anymore. Don't worry though, death is only as permanent as you think it is. I sigh CO2 into the air like my grandfather did. I smile at a lovely, verdant tree- that will convert it back into oxygen- like my aunt did. I laugh like my sister and I love like my mother and I cry like my childhood friend and I hurt like my other that I still wish I had made myself love just a bit more.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

Okay so. It’s traditional that on the last day of Faire, the show goes a little off the rails due to the cast’s final-day pranks on each other. Faire management hates it, so we’re not technically supposed to do it, but, like…they never quite manage to stop us.

Anyway, last year, I was playing one of the lead villains. I was the second in command of the viking king, and it took approximately ten seconds for everyone to start shipping our characters. There’s at least one ship every year that gets popular, and that year, it was us. The vibe was 100% “Viking Mom and Viking Dad are getting a Viking Divorce and the berserkers are stuck in the middle of a custody battle.” Like, five minutes after opening gate one day, I had a patron strike up conversation with me about how I needed to get a better man, lmfao.

By the end of the show, my character betrayed the king and joined the Good Guys, and I got this epic showdown with him at the end where I kick his ass and get in a one-liner.

So for my last-day prank, I replaced my usual one-liner by just full-volume screaming, “And the divorce is FINAL!!!!”

The audience, and the rest of the cast, lost their absolute shit.

And @borinquenaqueer​ managed to take a picture of the exact moment of reaction, in which my costar later told me he actually broke character for a split second and didn’t know how to react because he was just caught so off-guard:

You know, given how C. lupus, C. lupus familiaris, and C. latrans can all create perfectly viable hybrids, and that the proto-dogs that domestic dogs descended from much more resembled coyotes than wolves, it's not really a surprise that some yotes are experimenting with domestication.

Goddamn that lady must be fucking shredded to be able to chase down a coyote through a swamp.

"Don't let wild animals into your house, you are not going to make Dogs 2.0, you're going to get injured and the animal killed." is probably obvious enough advice that I don't need to put it in the tags as a reminder.

...I know more than four people on this site that have poisoned themselves trying out 'foraging guides' they found online, two people IRL who tried to keep raccoons at pets, and have a family member who got hospitalized for Cat Scratch Fever after grabbing a feral cat bare-handed. This is apparently, not obvious enough.

So I kinda went crazy looking at all the little things in this opening animation and what they symbolise: character positioning, scene layout, etc. I’m not going to go into the basic things, like the animation progressively getting more disturbing (I think that’s a good symbol for the story in general though, LOL) but here are a bunch of things I saw:

The angling of the twins’ eyes:

So when the screen splits to show Shiro with one twin on one side while the teen/current other twin’s eye is in the other side, Rin’s eye widens while Yukio’s begins to shut. Because while Rin has seen his brother as a source of strength since he was young, Yukio believes he’s weak because Rin could always do things he couldn’t. Because he had to fight, learn how to wield a gun, while his brother was allowed to remain ignorant for fifteen years. (Keep this idea of the twins doing the opposite things in mind, it’ll come up again later)