get some goddamn water, boss

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

"Sorry, I don't mean to offend--"

Which of course, I brace for hell, since he is around 60, and i am a gangly cryptid that people usually struggle only to find the right slur to apply to. But i dutifully keep my work voice and go "nah nah, don't worry, what can I do?"

He hits me with "Are you--uh, I've been saying 'thank you ma'am' but are you... okay with that? What should I call you?"

And i live in a small conservative pocket within one of the most liberal states in the US, so my experience in public is varied. People have guessed, they've gone with she, he. they, they've awkwardly avoided it, but no stranger had ever asked me.

So i panicked and chuckled. This felt kind of like walking into a fake tumblr post. I said "Oh, you can call me whatever you want, its fine."

Any cis person would probably sound a little insulted. i knew i was confirming some kind of gender fuckery, but giving him the out that he didn't have to change anything. Fucker kindly smiles though, and like. Pounces. Asks, much more confidently, "But would you prefer sir? What are your pronouns?"

He's on script now, I'm astral projecting to a different plane where i'm a bug on a well lit microscope and my throat's a little tight all the sudden. I say, "Oh. I uh--I use they/them."

I use they or he, but 'they' is the language curveball. I know this, which is why i usually just let people use whatever. He nods, and I choke out (because its been a bad bad day, autoimmune flare pain on top of record high patient numbers) "Thanks. No one... has ever asked me. Have a good day."

He told me the same, I booked it, because the dim room was hiding watery eyes but not for much longer. Got it together in a nearby closet (ha) and moved on.

Came back later on in the evening because I had promised to visit when his wife was there earlier in the day. She's sweet, he's sweet, I do my usual spiel, he avoids any 'ma'am' studiously, but on me going to head out again, hits the dilemma of having no polite substitute for 'ma'am' or 'sir' that isnt gendered in some subtle way, and he's fucking trying, but this is not second nature obviously.

So what comes out is "Have a wonderful night, Them!"

Beaming, proud, right next to his extremely confused wife, who he seems to have not outted me to (nice) who now thinks he's probably having a stroke (funny, but not nice lmao)

Highlights include:

For your first two years (when you were small) you lived in a foster home with people who raised you into a very polite young man. Two is like you plus me, that's what two is.

Some people adopted you before me and they called you Timmy (which is a stupid name) and they returned your ass almost immediately because you were so annoying at that age.

Like think about how annoying you are right now at seven years old, but way worse.

I'm better than them though, I don't call you Timmy and I wore earplugs to bed for three years because you love to scream at bedtime. Earplugs are like when I roll over and go back to sleep even when you are yelling so so so loud.

I got you at a time in my life when I was really sick (being sick is like when I'm up late because I'm throwing up and you are a very handsome good boy who sits with me) and they had to put me asleep for a procedure. A procedure is like what happened to you when they put you asleep and took your balls away.

yes* the image most people have in their heads of a nonbinary person is someone white, thin, lacking breasts, lacking a visible penis, lacking facial hair, lacking makeup, lacking lacking lacking. but why is it that when people critique this image, they never critique the idea that this is how we are defining androgyny? people loving talking about how this image is neutral-masculine as proof it favors transmasculine/FTX people, but there are plenty of transfeminine/MTX people who also go for this neutral-androgynous look.

meanwhile, many nb/gq/gnc people of all assigned sexes and genders are hairy, fat, have breasts (or give themselves breasts), have penises (or give themselves penises), dresses using both feminine and masculine clothing, etc. hell, just look at how stigmatized the androgyny of intersex people with PMOS & other kinds of hyperandrogenism are. the image of a fat hairy person with large breasts and a deep voice is repulsive in patriarchal culture; this is androgyny, too. to act like "androgyny" is one simple thing is to erase how misandrogyny actually functions.

from "Why Can’t My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid?" by Meredith Talusan (she/they)

for reference, here's photos of Meredith, Jacob, and Alok:

I would argue what is depicted here as "femme" androgyny is (one example of) what I would describe as maximalist/genderful androgyny; it is read as "femme" as opposed to "masc" because minimalist/genderless androgyny focuses on minimizing gendered characteristics to be neutral (non-masculine non-feminine), and neutrality in patriarchal society is read as diet-masculine by default — and perhaps cis by default, because both of those things are more comfortable for people in a patriarchal society to assume of a person who minimizes intensely gendered traits.

But the treatment Alok and Jacob experience, in my opinion, while shaped by femmephobia, is not reducible to femmephobia alone. It is the combination of explicitly masculine traits (like body and facial hair) and feminine traits (makeup, feminine clothing), their failure to pursue and perform a non-masculine femininity, that leads them to be seen as undesirable. This is misandrogyny.

really good tags so far. also. just have to make this point:

meg's music in general is frequently very horny. when she includes her attraction to women in her music its sexual because when she includes her attraction to men in her music its sexual. she's a sexually explicit artist. you know. "your honor i'm a freak bitch handcuffs leashes" "hoes tryna get picked, i'm just tryna get dick" "mandatory that i get the head but no guarantees on the penetration" literally references pimping out men in her music all the time 1/2 of Wet Ass Pussy herself.

she very much depicts herself as a sexual subject and sexual actor in her music, someone who desires and chooses to act upon those desires with confidence and skill. and given how much intense misogynoiristic hate she gets from cishet men i think it should be very very obvious she's not faking being into women to get cis male approval!

protagonists were kind of forced into a flat dichotomy of 'active' (takes actions to further their own goals, thus driving the story) and 'passive' (is acted upon by events beyond their control, moving them through the plot) with 'active' being considered good and passive being considered bad

I think this framework is very locked within a certain cultural viewpoint... specifically of a 20th century western white male. For one thing it assumes a "protagonist" will have a certain level of agency, to have goals and pursue them, overcoming obstacles in the way. It is not very inclusive of characters that don't have much agency.

It also assumes that desire/want = orienting toward or pursuing.

As far as I am concerned, characters don't have goals. They CAN, but these goals aren't actually the functional gears of the plot, and are instead their conscious rationalizations of what's really running the show.

Rather, characters have instincts and drives. I don't like to say "desires" because desire suggests something that is explicit, a thing that the character can attribute their feelings to.

I realized when reading Shakespeare's Othello that interesting characters often can't be understood in terms of "goals" or "desires" because they don't understand what they want or why they want that and they constantly act in ways that are contradictory to what they want or think they want. What a character consciously thinks is a whole layer on top of their actual instincts and feelings, which are primal and buried in traumas and needs and other aspects of creaturehood, and often is a fiction to resolve contradictions and dissonance in the demands of the creature-self. some characters can reflect upon their own thought processes and some cannot.

- it’s fun to be awake & in an upright position

- consciousness is a gift

The hemolymph can be sourced from other “donor” stick bugs! Here is the article outlining the procedure