☆ a meydl ☆

I’m not upset or anything, I can kinda see what you mean! If you’re expecting anything cool on the internet these days to probably be fake, yeah, the colors on the meat do look incongruous.

Let’s take a second here and use this as an educational experience for everyone. Fake animal photos are totally an internet scourge these days. If you don’t trust the OP of a post like this saying it’s not AI, how else could you check and try to find out?

Three things to help you verify not slop:

1. There’s a bunch of other photos in series with this one on my website, which allows you to see context for when and how the photos were taken. There’s also other photos of this animal and this habitat in other lighting and weather conditions. That’s generally more work than people will go to if they just want to create a viral photo, and you can look for internal consistency.

2. AI isn’t good enough yet to replicate specific stripe patterns on individual tigers, they get all wonky. The animal and her location are named in this instance and it’s easy to google to see if everything lines up.

3. You can also check to see if the thing in photos actually happens. The meatball throwing demo is a very, very common occurrence at this facility! It’s a regular activity during talks when tigers are in that habitat (it is a multi-species rotational space). They posted a video on their Facebook fourteen hours ago of their curator getting a direct shot into a different tiger’s mouth.

However I do want to note that I don't think @theswordofdamntheseknees was accusing your work of being AI, and did not mention AI at all - I think it was a joke about how painful it is to step on the sharp plastic corners of a LEGO, made with the understanding that the meatballs are the true version of events.

Someone on Bluesky a couple days ago also assumed the site/my account was either AI or a content scraper so seeing that type of commentary twice in two days was like, ah crap, I have not succeeded at my intended transparency and messaging. I must fix this immediately. And therefore I managed to totally miss the joke.

One of the things about fact-checking as a career is that man, it is waaaay to easy to take things super seriously at all times. I am very deep in a major paid project the last few months and my brain apparently only has one setting right now.

Plus like… okay, those meatballs do really look kinda fake! I could see it being genuinely confusing!

ID: A screenshot from the Reddit post linked, with text reading:

"So I'm going to refute some of the more popular myths about trans women's vaginas by directly describing my own fully healed experience. (I had surgery several years ago using a fairly standard penile inversion technique that used some spare internal mucosa to supplement the vaginal lining. Recovery sucked, but it wasn't that bad.)

Yes, all the normal parts of vaginal anatomy are present. I have a vulva with clitoris and labia, a vagina, I can pee normally, etc etc etc.

No, I don't have visible scars. Some of us do, but they're usually not prominent, especially after a few years. Internally, thing must look quite normal too, since I've passed as cis during a pelvic exam with a speculum.

No, it's not an open wound and it won't heal shut if I don't dilate. It's not a piercing, it's a vagina. I don't dilate at all, and not only do I not lose depth, but I can take a fist if I want

No, I don't have to wash my vagina out. It has its own flora, so douching would generally be a great way to get an infection; luckily, it cleans itself. Yes, it smells and tastes normal.

Yes, I have totally normal sensation in my vagina, clitoris, g spot, etc. Yes, I can orgasm. Yes, I can self-lubricate. Yes, I have totally normal vaginal muscles (the vaginal canal transects the pelvic floor muscles, that's why you can grip and do kegels, though my pelvic floor is stronger than most through a lifetime of kegels).

No, I'm neither immune nor unusually prone to STIs, BV, yeast infections, or UTIs.

Yes, I can cis pass while having sex. No, I don't pre-disclose before casual sex, though I also tend to meet partners in trans-positive environments.

Yes, everything feels like it "should"; nothing feels out of place or misaligned, unlike before surgery, and really the only surprise was how unsurprising everything feels.

The Animals - House of the Rising Sun (1964)

Silver Jews - New Orleans (1994)

Please listen to this baby tapir CHEEP and maybe all your sorrows will go away for a precious moment 🩷🩷🩷

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)