Stuff I Guess

If you want to help, the two things that will make the most impact are SPREADING AWARENESS, and participating in PUBLIC COMMENT while it is still open.

‼️LINK TO FDA COMMENT PAGE‼️

Document: FDA-2025-P-7321

As of the time this article was written, ALL public comments were from hate groups in support of this registry. Every single comment in opposition will help.

If you click the more details button, you'll see a small section that reads "In some instances, agencies do not publicly post all comments received. You can only access those comments that are posted to Regulations.gov by the agencies. The number of accessible comments, therefore, may be lower than the total number of comments listed in the card below." This basically means that, out of the 6,897 comments that have been recieved, the agency has only decided to post 61 of them. The latest post of those 61 dates back to Febuary 27th. Clearly, that leaves 6,836 comments unaccounted for, and not posted. (Likely, because the 6,836 not posted are in opposition to this petition.) Now, if you go to comment like I did today, you might notice this:

This is a lie! The comment period is still accepting late comments, but what you have to do is click the Docket Document tab, which will bring you to two documents. The acknowledgement letter is closed for comments. THE CITIZEN PETITION IS STILL ACCEPTING LATE COMMENTS.

No-kill shelters TURN AWAY animals. When they’re full - and they often are because most of these no-kill shelters are small - they stop taking them in. While they are “taking their time to find the right homes for every single animal”, many other animals never get in the door. Somehow they don’t count those animals, or track what happens to them. A success for them doesn’t include the ones they turned away. They’re taking their time because they can. 

The No-Kills who brag about 100% adoption rates are the worst, because they tend to reject the most. The animals who will be difficult to adopt out? They just don’t take those. Special needs? Too old? If they’re going to be hard to adopt out, they can claim to be full, even if they’re not. 

They are telling owners they absolutely cannot take their fifteen year old cat because they are full of litters of kittens. Adorable kittens that will turn over quickly, and boost their adoption numbers. So what happens to the fifteen year old cat? After days of being rejected at the shelters they get dumped on the side of the road somewhere, or worse. 

You cannot imagine the VOLUME of animals that a city shelter deals with. The kill shelters are not allowed to turn anyone away. The difficult cases, the special needs, the elderly, the feral. The dog that bites, the cat that pees everywhere. Every animal is going to be taken in and treated with kindness. They are going to be assessed and treated for their fleas and conditions and behavioral problems. They will get their time on the adoption floor. They will get the best chance possible to find a new home. And if it’s not possible, they will be humanely euthanized, and that cage space will go to the next animal who is already waiting for it. It never stops. While you were working on the paperwork to adopt out 1 cat, three people brought in 4 more. It’s a numbers game that you cannot win if you aren’t turning people away.

A lot of times kill shelters get the animals that the no-kill shelters refused to take. Maybe their owners bring them. Or maybe they got literally thrown in the garbage, abandoned, or put in a bag and tossed in the river, when the no-kill shelter said they were full. The police and rescuers will bring these poor injured animals to the city shelter where they will be cared for. The volunteers will spend days and weeks trying to wash the tar out of their fur, or treat their broken bones, or whatever other horrible thing has happened to them. They will feed and house them. They will put most of them in new homes. They will save many many more animals, by orders of magnitude, than a no-kill shelter ever will. A no-kill shelter will brag about dozens or maybe hundreds of  adoptions. Kill shelters are dealing in thousands of successful adoptions, and they still have to euthanize because it just isn’t enough. There are just so many animals to take in.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

The DiVine website says that it's made by Rabble.

If you go to their website you can find this:

if you click that And Other Stuff you're taken to an entirely different website that explains what all that 'other stuff' is: five pillars of building Nostr AI.

You have to wonder why they're hiding it, right? Why is it so hard to find? Why register an entirely different domain (it's andotherstuff.com, not like rabblelabs.com/andotherstuff) just to talk about the AI stuff you're doing if you're so proud of it?

In Australia anybody can make free calls from any phone booth, also most phone booths also provide wi-fi.

So many people benefit, in so many situations.

The free phone booths have been so popular and important that new(fancy) phone booths are being installed.

Making phone booths a free public utility 👍

Ripping them out in the assumption that everyone has access to a phone or internet 👎

For context, I have been open on this account about my chatbot addiction. I developed a parasocial dependency to using Character AI and similar apps despite them being detrimental to my mental health and quality of life in general. I downloaded CAI again today to finally wipe my account and discourage myself from relapsing, and this fucking text came up while I was confirming the deletion.

The developers of these apps are not your friends, they are exploiting you. They are manipulating your emotions and fostering dependency to keep you addicted to their product. No matter how much they claim to care and be “risk aware,” they absolutely do not.

Tabloid media: WOAH HOLY SHIT IT'S A PREGNANT MAN YOU GUYS. Has science gone too far? Medical mystery baffles nation. Since Jerry Springer discovered the transvestite in 2014 we have been dreading this possibility. Now, for the first time ever, a man... Carries a child. We don't know the implications of this. Will the child be a changeling? Will it have a soul? We are Just Asking Questions.

The comments: This evil BIOLOGICAL MALE is NOT pregnant. That is a STOLEN UTERUS. So-called "Trans women" must be stopped with violence.

Trans Reddit front page: Haha look they forgot that trans men exist lmao lol

[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]

OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?

Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.

Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.

What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.

Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.

You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.

When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.

Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.

It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!

I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.

Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.

Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style

UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

talking about long before

anyone else did.