Cause I'm Havin' A Good Time

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.

Yeah that’s also something we’re worried about now! Obviously increased CO2 levels in the ocean are well known to cause acidity issues that can literally dissolve some animal’s shells, but this was one of the first times it’s been observed to directly impact lobster hatching rates. I’m pretty sure my boss is or was writing a paper on it because this could be a big problem in the future if they’re really this sensitive to CO2.

We barely know anything about Madagascar pre-500CE. We don’t even know whether the island had a permanent population before then, despite finding a bunch of much older signs of temporary human presence.

Malagasy mythology makes mention of the vazimba, a “precursor” ethnic group that might or might not be distinct from Madagascar’s current population.

The point is, we do not know.

So you were in Madagascar when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, i.e. during one of the most obscure, most undocumented parts of Madagascar’s human history?

Grace: *Retroactively freaking out about Doing A Misogyny™*

It’s irrefutable that men’s present anger is lacking in sufficient specificity and articulation. As a feminist movement, this should not be alien to us. There was a time, more than half a century ago, when women’s anger and frustration were equally inarticulate. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in search of illuminating what she deemed to be “the problem that has no name,” the problem that “lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women … a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning.” Her words from the ’60s still ring true today: "It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough." Might we now, 60 years later, say the same thing of men? Without a movement to teach them or an analysis to guide them, their present anger lacks the sort of precision that could help us feel comfortable with it. It’s anger that stems from abstract knowledge, a gut feeling that injustice is being done: words on the tip of the tongue, but never quite spoken. Men don’t know exactly what the injustice is, but they perceive it nonetheless. Something is off. A stench without cause. An odor emanating from somewhere. Here’s the thing: paucity of specificity and inadequate articulation do not render men’s current frustration illegitimate; if anything, they bolster the case for further investigation and lay bare the urgency of this historical moment. It’s time we entertain the idea that men might be picking up on something real. There has been hypocrisy, and it is worth being angry about. Men look at the feminist movement and—subconsciously, I think—ask themselves: What is feminism doing to protect me? I need protection, too, you know. In general, we dismiss this feeling. Protect you? After what you’ve spent centuries doing to us? Protect yourself, asshole.  Though I understand where it comes from, I’m afraid this sort of terse reaction stops us from asking the important questions. Namely: If we say we abhor the violence of men and want it to cease, what are we doing to stop boys from being recruited into it? 

We have not embodied gender equality sufficiently. As a feminist movement, we have worked tirelessly to protect women and girls from the violence that is all too prevalent in their lives but have said next to nothing about the violence facing men and boys. We have fought tooth and nail against institutions that predominantly brutalize women but have done little to combat the institutions—institutions like military bases, prisons, and police training facilities—that so often brutalize men, too. I think that’s in part because men operate (and benefit from) these institutions, but that’s no reason to ignore them. Just because a man is in charge, that doesn’t mean the institution is safe for other men. Men and boys need protection from the violence of powerful men every bit as much as women and girls do. Powerful men—men who are used to enacting violence with impunity—are a threat to us all. What’s worse, we seem to have decried men’s anger wholesale. We have labeled angry men as bad men and, in so doing, have lost vital nuance. Because they cannot articulate it to us in sufficient language—because they have yet to locate the precise source of the stench—we have denied any possibility that the anger men feel might be righteous. Here’s the thing: men should be angry, and their anger is righteous, albeit misplaced. If the culture that raised you sees you as little more than a future agent of military, police, or corporate violence, it would be strange for you not to be angry. Men have been ignored. They have been brutalized. They have been told that it is their job to do the policing and soldiering and brutalizing on behalf of us all. They have endured grave gender-based violence, and rather than help them locate it, we’ve mostly told them they’re making the whole thing up. [...]

What if we encouraged men to trust their noses instead of instructing them to relinquish their frustration? What if, instead of spending energy denying that something is amiss, we dedicate our energy to affirming that something is off and join men as they search for the source of the stench? What if we say to men, “We agree. Something isn’t right. Your body and psyche are being exploited to nefarious ends. You were groomed unfairly,” and then rage and scream and investigate alongside them? This is where I am flummoxed and exhausted by contemporary popular feminism, if only because it is so obvious. We will volunteer for hours outside an abortion clinic, helping to protect women who are entering from being harassed. We do so because it is both vital and necessary. We do so because we believe in a world where people have agency over their own bodies. But we do next to nothing about military recruitment centers or police academies, institutions whose primary job is to instill violence in men—to take their bodies and their minds and exploit them for the violent ends of the ruling class. Can we stop scratching our heads and pretending we do not know how America became a nation of such violence? Can we stop acting surprised when, after raising our boys as child soldiers, their violence turns back against us? Can we own up to the truth: that we cannot ask boys to conceptualize ruthlessly killing faraway brown people, then reasonably expect them to turn it off when they come home? That we cannot raise boys to fantasize about guns and war throughout their childhood, then act surprised when they shoot up a school? That we cannot raise our boys to be fine with abusing Afghani prisoners, then expect them not to abuse us, too? As a feminist movement, it’s high time we pick a lane. It’s time we take a stand with veterans and against the military. It’s time we declare that we’re no longer OK living in a violent world. We must decide that the dignity and bodily autonomy of men and boys matter to us enough to fight for them. We must rage against the myriad institutions that insist on making murderers out of our little boys. As a feminist movement, we must categorically decry war, in all its forms.

This article is by Jacob Tobia (they/them), a genderqueer person, and is an excerpt from their book Before They Were Men.

I feel very similarly to Jacob. While people will bring up "feminism helps men too!" as a comeback when relevant, on a large scare (especially with regards to pop feminism, which is a loose and largely useless combination of cultural radical feminism and liberal capitalist feminism), feminism has failed to actually, materially prove this. We have a massive messaging issue, and the failures of feminism for men, all trans people, and women are all interconnected, as are the failures of feminism to be critical of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. It's not that people haven't been talking about these issues - we have for decades - but that hasn't solved anything.

We need to make men's issues feminist issues in the minds of every person who knows about feminism. Feminists need to be the loudest and most passionate on framing war as gendered-based violence for those classed as men, on the lack of awareness for perceived-male victims of sexual violence, particularly forced-to-penetrate rape, on how the patriarchal weaponizes stereotypes of men as having an innate inclination towards physical and sexual violence to dehumanize men of color and all trans and gender non-conforming people.

None of the signup methods require a password. It only takes email and birthday. Minimizing time on the signin or signup screen makes it harder for people quitting to avoid relapse.

"Characters" on the website will send messages "on their own" (prompted by the site) to try to invite inactive users back after as soon as 1 day of inactivity. This is likely to force FOMO, or make users feel more like they owe the bots a response. Unhealthy attachment stuff.

Account deletion is an essential part of every service that should go smoothly, right? Right? Wrong. It takes 1-2 weeks for a Character AI account deletion to be finalized, and account deletion requests have a high chance to not go through if you're not using the app.

Rephrasing: People leaving Character.AI are pushed to download the app in order to delete their accounts, if they haven't already. This makes it harder for people to quit and stay gone. Failing to quit an addiction makes it harder to quit successfully in the future, so this feels like a feature, not a bug. On top of that, the delete account menu reads like this:

Barry is bi because his only reaction to waking up naked to two guys (and a walking talking mannequin) in his home was "WOW must've had a wild night lol better get dressed". No panicking over what this means for his sexuality, just calm acceptance and a request for the clothes Merle is holding.