Dang

But on the internet people describe their ideas in the most shocking and extreme way possible as a way of sifting out people who are "really" on their side

That is bad for forming a movement or sparking any kind of action

it's gotten so outrageous that people will have an idea like "we should have a strong public transportation system that is accessible to everyone" but they will express it like "FUCK CARS! WE SHOULD BAN CARS! IF YOU LIKE TO DRIVE YOU'RE A FASCIST! NO ONE NEEDS A CAR!"

This causes everyone to get into arguments about whether it is true that no one needs a car, and whether banning cars would make places inaccessible for people with certain disabilities.

The whole time we don't need to "ban cars" to have public transportation and it makes no sense why we are talking about it

it's about learning how to talk to people who aren't ready to jump to supporting YOUR stance to get on board with something that makes the world better, like a form of harm reduction. and/or, it's about learning how to reframe something from "I am AGAINST this" to an actionable invitation like "I am *in support* of this other thing, and here's why I think it is *good* or *better than what we are currently doing* and why you should buy in to thay belief with me"

that way, you get more people on board and thinking about how to improve stuff whereas the other approach can be kinda alienating and/or just make people focus on how they feel about your delivery ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it's how human brains tend to work, for better or worse, and we should understand what kinds of appeals actually work if what we're focused on is actionable change rather than just expressing our feelings.

no wait that- no that's not- no.

Unles you've like, poured out ALL OF YOUR BLOOD, used it for a spell, and then somehow SIPHONED THE WHOLE THING BACK IN, that doesn't mean the blood on the inside of you is also used. And even then, if you'd had your sacrifical blood IV'd back into your body-

actually nevermind, I need to draw a graph to illustrate:

There is a decal on the ballerina’s gun’s fore stock that is not present on the toy gun

And the muzzle on the ballerina’s gun is shorter than the toy gun. This could have been cut back, but all visible barrels are an equal length indicating that either extreme care was taken to make sure all the muzzles match, or that these are a different model of firearm.

The closest match to this rifle’s stock decal and muzzle length appears to be the Parris Crockett’s Old Betsy, though it still lacks the fore stock decal displayed by the ballerinas.

it's mouth season

i also think a lot of people aren't really getting the *point* of louis' reaction. it's extremely harsh and judgmental and completely insensitive to the fact that lestat is being abused, but that is the purpose of it. the entire season is lestat attempting to justify it. this is louis saying that you cannot justify it. there is no rational way to justify that happening. and when lestat has a breakdown over it, they both sort of realize at the same time that this means lestat has been suffering incestuous sexual abuse for 200 fucking years.

it overwhelms lestat, and it clicks for louis. that's when he changes tacts, when he comforts lestat, when he gently tries to help him admit that it's been abuse all along in the bar. it's so realistic, such a necessary sequence.

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.