Gazing into the abyss and waving hello

It’s the two-quart Tupperware colander. The handle is large and sturdy but still comfortable to hold in your hand. The ridge on the end helps it fit on any size pot you need to rest it over. The little feet at the bottom let you drain directly into the sink without leaving the contents sitting in a puddle. It’s got a spout on both sides so you can pour comfortably from the left or right hand, towards or away from yourself as needed. The holes are at the bottom so you can control where strained liquids flow, large enough to drain quickly, small enough to keep from losing bits of food through them. The bright yellow colour is easy to spot in the back of a cupboard or dishwasher.

I am passionate about this specific strainer in a way that I am not passionate about anything else in my life. I would run back into a burning building to rescue this strainer. This strainer is my go-to wedding or housewarming gift. This strainer is my beloved family member. I have shared more meals with this strainer than I have with anyone else in my life. This strainer has never, ever let me down. It is the most perfectly designed item I have ever seen or handled in my life. Every aspect of this strainer is made to maximize convenience and functionality. It is flawless, a form of complete and total perfection. If you told me this strainer was the face of God, recreated on Earth in Their image, I would believe you.

If anyone else is inspired to look up the two-quart Tupperware colander, I'll save you a few keystrokes. Amazon has in stock (in several colors, no less). I imagine some other stores do as well.

As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.

As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.

Please consider commissioning me

My car broke down with some pretty major damages and has cost me the rest of my paycheck that I was going to survive off of this month

I have bills due at the end of this month and I need to get food and I have zero dollars to pay for them

Thank you

this isn't about creators just knowing about fandom in the abstract. this is about creators being deeply involved with their own fandoms. as in, writers of TV shows trawling fansites and using fan theories to formulate plots for their show, or changing plots because fans have pieced together the foreshadowing correctly and predicted the endings. as in, authors engaging in fan forums and discords and discourse on their own works. as in, celebrities reaching out to individual fans to announce that they've been made aware of the fan's work.

this is also about fans inviting those creators deeper into fandom spaces, or pushing fandom spaces at creators, without shame or dignity, all for a few seconds of fame and recognition. all for validation.

when I say "they didn't know we existed" I mean they weren't in it with us. there was a distinct barrier, a separation between the fans and the creators. before journalists and talk show hosts started throwing fanart and fic in actors' faces and demanding reactions. before buzzfeed and its intolerable theft of fan work. before fans were almost expected to have their work found and critiqued by the very people the work was made about.

there has always been a level of communication between fans and creators, and for the most part, that's fine. but when it gets to the point where fans are constantly, relentlessly, pushing fandom content at creators in the hopes that it'll get them noticed, or that it'll sway the creators to their line of thinking, or that it'll mean something, and when creators think themselves entitled to our spaces, or use our work for cheap laughs, or rewrite their own work purely to mock us for getting an ending right, it gets to be too much.

we need that barrier back in place.

I still, to this day, don't tell people that I write fanfic. I don't tell people that I'm in fandom spaces. I don't talk about fandoms outside of fandom spaces at all. a little shame is good for the blood.

Personality hire

This emergency need is compounded by the government mass firing of conservation officials and the pulling of funds from many of the country's conservation organizations.

If you can help please donate here:

Key points from the Amphibian Foundation.

Our building will be demolished in 2026, and we need to identify a new location (or locations) for 7 labs and over 1,000 animals, many of which are endangered and part of critical conservation programs.

We've identified a new location for most of AF, but not our research and conservation programs. We have an amazing lead, but it's not confirmed yet.

Our first fundraising project is the AF Emergency Fund as the minimum cost estimates to move this many labs and animals safely is $50,000. (It costs about 50 USD per animal to move them)

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.