Home is where the game saves

Traditional indigo workshop

This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep.

Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.

So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.

Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.

Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.

Some farmers are less conscientious than they should be about taking care of their stock, and the occasional tiny nick will happen, but no one is going to hire a shearer who is a) incompetent enough and b) uncaring enough to actually injure the animals to the point of bleeding, let alone the kind of horrors the internet claims.

Also, most breeds of sheep will literally die if they go too long without being sheared. PETA (and let’s face it, most of this anti-wool stuff can be traced back to deliberate misinformation from PETA) doesn’t care if sheep die, they have openly stated that they would prefer every domestic species that can no longer survive without humans go extinct rather than live in “"slavery.”“

On the funnier side, ignorance about anything closer to nature than a supermarket shelf can result in gems like this one:

Regular yogurt for me.  Thanks.

(As for ignorance, this post is epic and getting more so every time I see it.)

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Back on topic.

Shearing’s not skinning and it’s not painful, unless some guy getting busy with a manscaping clipper means he’s flaying himself alive.

Shearing is an all-over haircut, call it sheepscaping if need be though expect some odd looks, and good shearers - as @ruusverd​ said, bad shearers earn a bad rep and soon earn no more money - will leave less nicks on an entire sheep than I might inflict on my face if I forget to change my razor-blade. 

That’s pretty impressive when dealing with a notoriously dimwit animal that doesn’t understand “now just sit still for a minute” and finds “see that open gate, go through it” a difficult concept. (Going through an unexpected hole in the hedge, however, is something sheep do with great ease and willingness, especially if there’s a soon-to-be-ex herb garden on the far side…)

“All warm and snuggly in their woolly jumpers…” Oh puh-leeze. A jumper is a garment which can be taken off and put on as required. A sheep’s fleece is nothing of the sort. Ireland’s just had a heatwave, so which of these two would have been more comfortable the other day when it was 30°C / 90°F in the shade?

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But look at the blood! goes the outcry about sheep with red stains. Here’s what that “blood” is. Unless the outcriers believe the front half is royal and bleeds blue, it’s just dye.

Why dye? There are various reasons: to show who owns which sheep in a mixed flock of the same breed, or to indicate if one has been dosed with something, or to mark if a ewe has mated with a ram.

The ram wears a harness - AFAIK not black leather with chrome studs, at least not on any farm near here - which holds a dye-pad on his chest. After he’s done his business, the hopefully-preggers ewe will have a patch of that dye on her rump as in the photo.

Different colours let the farmer know which ram’s been busy if there’s more than one, or with one ram, on what day the mating occurred so they can calculate when to expect lambs. That kit suggests rams get one day a week off…

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Besides shearing sheep to stop them overheating, if the weather is rainy rather than sunny they’ll still need sheared to stop them getting waterlogged.

A waterlogged sheep is a top-heavy sheep, and since rainy weather will have made the ground slippery, a top-heavy sheep can all too easily become a sheep on its back - a broad, flat back that won’t roll - unable to get upright.

Sheep internal organs aren’t meant to be upside down and inversion will eventually kill them, if they’re not gutted by a fox first. Crows will have had their eyes long before then.

Forget deceitful propaganda about fake wool, here’s some REAL advice about how to do a sheep a (literal) good turn.

I’ve done it myself, and though she’d already lost one eye - hoodie crows don’t miss a chance - that ewe survived and next spring produced what I was told were two fine lambs. I felt pretty good about that.

I still do.

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This is what shearing really looks like, and that’s not the behaviour of an animal in distress or pain. Baffled, maybe, but any human whose haircut started with a judo throw would be baffled too..

The end result is a 12lb / 5.5kg load of insulation which the sheep no longer has to carry about. How’d you like being stuck inside that lot on a hot day?

The “shearing is cruel” fruitloops rely on deliberate lies, gullibility and lack of knowledge. Be aware.

 Or maybe…

hare riding a hound with a trained snail of prey

Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, Avignon, before 1390

The Crunchyroll store will be paywall-locked to the top two subscription tiers of paying users only starting in August. Anime physical media will be cut off for purchase without a minimum of a $140/year subscription.

Currently CR is the only place selling Aniplex titles, and those are already horrifically expensive on their own. Now CR (owned by Sony) is saying you can't even spend that money without paying for the privilege of shopping there.

This is 100% another symptom of Sony's monopoly practices. 10 to 15 years ago we had a variety of distributors for physical media. RightStuf, Aniplex, Funimation, and Crunchyroll were all independent of each other and all of them offered different series. In the last decade Sony bought and merged them all, dropped dozens of Funimation titles when porting them to Crunchyroll, closed the RightStuf warehouse distributors, and has been clear-cutting the Crunchyroll store which had turned into the only distributor of all those previous sources. 90% of the stock of physical products has been cleared from the shop and what's left are slim pickings of a few massively expensive popular titles. This is the same Sony that promises that physical discs will not be offered for games for the PS6, so I don't have high hopes for their plan for continuing releasing physical media.

Anime is already harder to source, as buying directly from Japanese publishers often doesn't include English subtitles and certainly won't have dubbed audio. If a US licensing company's license expires, the series will go out of print and vanish from streaming with literally no warning and often never coming back. (Just this month Crunchyroll lost over a dozen titles, including Barakamon and Black Lagoon among others.) Physical media is also one of the only ways that older bonus content is preserved, like dub directors commentary or interviews with the cast, and sometimes if a series is relicensed for streaming, it has to be altered (such as Evangelion's rerelease losing the rights to play the original set of Fly Me To the Moon endings and the original dub).

Where do I get physical media now?

The r/AnimeCollectors and r/AnimeDeals subreddits share resources for sales, deals, and places to look to find a specific series you might be hunting for.

AnimeDeals specifically also has users that highlight ebay stores that often resell deadstock from Walmart/Target at steep discounts, so keep your eye out for those. Recently picked up the full series of Yuu Yuu Hakusho for a total of $35!

There are still some competing distributors of new-print anime. Sentai Filmworks, MediaOCD, and DiabolikDVD are all distributors that sell things CR won't. Sentai is currently running a summer sale and the subreddits will point out good prices when they come around.

Amazon (ugh) does often sell Crunchyroll series that CR's own store doesn't stock anymore. Recently the redditor Aside_Intrepid also released a guide on how to use Amazon's location data to find location-based coupons that apply to blu-ray as well. The same instructions can be found on blu-ray.com

Buy a regionless dvd and blu-ray player and buy Region 2 discs. They're usually still the US dub with English subtitles, but STEEPLY cheaper than US licensed releases.

Keep an eye on secondhand media stores, FB Marketplace, and animedeals for people destashing and selling their collections. Thrifting can land you some great finds, especially for harder-to-obtain older series.

Then for the last 5 years (huge interest rate hikes, tech stock drop-off scare in 2022, US regime change in 2025, blah blah blah) they snapped the trap and decided to activate the money machine, which is rampant enshittification and bleeding everyone dry with higher baseline costs and forced subscription costs and forcibly app-ifying every single thing (needs a login needs a credit card needs an id nees a ) and backing pretty far away from the "your good relatable buddy" tech CEO image. Like it's been the world's most blatant and annoying pig-butchering scheme.