What Does A Viceroy Do?

Someone raided someone's bird feeder. Someone stunningly beautiful, by the way.

- A donor with a scrotum the size of my head. When we opened it up, we discovered it was a MASSIVE inguinal hernia and a good 1.5 ft of intestine were trapped down there.

- A donor with situs inversus totalis, whose organs were a mirror image of what we normally see (ie their heart pointed right and their liver was on the left, just for starters)

- A donor whose right common carotid artery branched off the aorta waaay over on the left hand side of the body and crossed alllll the way back across the thorax to get where it needed to be.

- A donor with 4 lobes for their right lung (should only be 3). We named the 4th lobe the Lisa Loeb, but all of the students were too young to appreciate our sparkling wit.

- A shocking variety of penile and breast implants. Y'all would not believe the number of different ways science has come up to counteract gravity.

- A couple of cases of ectopic kidneys, where a kidney didn't rise to its typical position just deep to the lowest ribs and instead stayed in the pelvis.

My contribution: client co pinched nerve in L side of neck. I asked about health hx; she said, “I've got some extra ribs on that side.”

me: “some?” (!!!!!??!?!??!???)

This is now your Pokémon Partner. Whatever you would want to do in the Pokémon world, your Result goes with you. It would be your Ace in Battles and/or contests or they might just help you around with your regular Not-Inherently-Pokémon Job or just hang around your house as your beloved Pet. If you really really want to BE a Pokémon than this is the Pokémon you just turned into.

For #LoveBirdsArtChallenge2026 : Barn Owls + reruns of other posts - Lovebirds, Puffins, Swans, Laysan Albatross, Whooping Cranes.

#LoveBirds is hosted by:

@megpieprint @kim_ko_design @liseereedesigns @erinsillimandesigns @virgoandpaper @jillian.nichole.illustration @gabrieladachin

I have created a Discord server to, well, do what is in the title of this post. Please join to support this movement, and please reblog for reach. I will not be able to do this on my own.

The way people approach rebuilding the internet is backwards. What people usually do is they start by making a neocities site, or a forum, or something like that, and then they try to attract people to it. Then, almost every time, nobody shows up and they get discouraged and give up (or it ends up being a solo project.)

If you want to rebuild thriving community spaces online, the community comes first. That means the group of people you want to build a space for needs to already exist. Organizing people is always the same, whether it’s a union, a party, or an online community. It comes down to doing the work of talking to individual people, getting them interested, then bringing them together into a space (such as a group chat), and trying to get those people to become a stable group.

It's hard for me to imagine what fandom feels like for people who came to it after the advent of social media. The massive and progressively mainstream state of modern fandom online is so different from even the Livejournal era. It's larger but lonelier than ever. I've always found my way from small subgroup to small subgroup, because that's what I was familiar with from the start, but many newcomers will have never known fandom as something that can be small and intimate or how to approach finding or establishing a subgroup. 

I can see the same inverted approach to community-building when people lament lack of engagement with fanworks. I don't begrudge anyone wanting comments or reblogs, of course! But I think a reduction in engagement is a symptom of the degradation of fandom community rather than the disease. When people feel like they're part of a community, they're more likely to meaningfully interact with creative endeavors shared within that community! Without the context of community, a creative work is just content to consume. Without a sense of community, a fanwork is no different to a person than an original work, and very few people actively review and share every book, movie, or piece of art they consume.

People are creating and posting fan content as a bid for community and getting discouraged and sometimes giving up if they don't receive enough engagement. But engagement isn't community. Comments are encouragement, but they're not community. Reblogs are increased visibility, but that's not community either. For me, posting a fanwork is the endpoint of a community process, not the beginning. For me it starts with bouncing ideas around with my subgroup until something sticks. Then we help each other refine our ideas, cheer each other on, offer constructive criticism, edit for each other, etc. I create for and with my community, so when I post a completed work, any engagement from outside my community is just a bonus.

I think a lot of fan creators these days have lost the community in their creative process and are trying to fill the hole with post-creation engagement. But if you want more engagement then you need to build the community FIRST. And just encouraging people to comment and reblog more is not going to build a community. It's a losing battle.