Ficus elastica

they get around to talking about WHY humans age and die so soon, and the Eridians are like, oh it's your genetic coding getting gradually mangled? it's your telomeres? fucking telomeres? (also your horrifying atmosphere slowly burning you alive but one problem at a time here)

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.

You can move to scroll in another space (if you haven’t gotten out of bed yet, move to the couch; if you haven’t left the house yet, you can sit outside)

You can make your current space more pleasant to scroll in (if it’s not possible to move spaces, open a window or light a candle in your space)

You can scroll while taking care of your body (change into clean clothes, scroll while brushing your teeth or washing your face, scroll while drinking water or having a snack)

You can stay on social media but avoid depressing or mindless content (try searching for fun facts, hobbies you’re interested in, or good news)

Hard mode: try just making the switch on your phone from short-form to long-form content (from dozens of short posts to an article, a fanfic, or an ebook; from TikToks/Reels/Shorts to a interesting or fun YouTube video, podcast, audiobook, or film) — this can be the first step in transitioning out of being “stuck,” because you can, for example, go on a walk while listening to an audiobook, fold clothes while watching a video, etc.

Expert mode: Set a timer for one minute and put down your phone. Do anything else. (Take deep breaths, go get a drink, pick up a book or craft.) If you can do this, aspire to two or five minutes and keep increasing your time away from scrolling. (Use your phone to play music, a podcast, or an audiobook if this prevents you from picking it up again)

So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.

We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.

And then I look up.

And holy shit.

There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”

And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.