CameoAppearance and the Blog of Many Things

I am the thing that goes blog in the night. Hi, I'm Cameo. Cam for short, Cammy to my oldest friends. I like spooky stuff, drawing, weird words, fancy clothes, and tall buildings. I'm an aficionado of all things surreal, a born Knowledge Sim, a cosplayer whose relationship with the sewing machine is fraught, and a practicing but dubiously competent traceur. I like strange things that nobody's ever heard of. I'm also asexual, hence the preponderance of asexuality-related jargle, and at some point I lost my gender behind the sofa. I haven't substantively changed my blog description in 12 years and I refuse to start now. (They/them.) My art tag is 'camdraw'. I have a ko-fi, if you would like to buy me fast food, cosplay supplies and luridly patterned clothing.

[cameoappearance]

Art Tag ✧ Art Fight ✧ Bluesky ✧ Instagram ✧ Dreamwidth ✧ Pillowfort ✧ AO3 ✧ Klei Forums ✧ ko-fi

[cameoappearance]

Many people are complaining that there are more fanworks shipping Ryland Grace with Simon from Iron Lung instead of with Carl or Stratt, who were all equally not aboard the spaceship when it launched for different but equally solid reasons such as 'busy dying in the blood ocean in another universe' and 'busy launching Grace into space'.* Consider: Crossover-typical spacetime anomaly ripping apart the border between dimensions but it has bad aim and puts Simon on the lightly freezerburned mid-mission Earth and Carl on the Hail Mary. Simon gets to experience More Than One Tree. Carl gets to experience Space Problems with his astrophage parenting bestie from much closer up than he expected

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

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.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[androdragynous]

there is a screen reader / magnification program that is the only one the low vision clinic knows of with these features and it is $650 Canadian Dollars behind specific approved vendors that require you to be geographically close to them and get government approval of a degree that I am only just now reaching after being visually impaired for going on seven years. I feel normal about this

[androdragynous]

if you can code a program that does any or all of the following:

Magnifies a display beyond standard options with keyboard / mouse movement inputs or voice commands,

Can read text on the screen,

Has different color filter options for text / background distinction,

Can change and magnify the cursor beyond standard amounts,

Works on Windows or more than just Windows,

Has a keyboard echo (says the character you've pressed on the keyboard out loud)

... there is a genuine, GENUINE need for you to code this and put it at a more accessible price point than $650 Canadian Dollars which I also just learned is a SUBSCRIPTION FEE AND NOT EVEN PERPETUAL. if you are reading this and able to code I am begging you. would genuinely change lives

[cerebrobullet]

now, i do enjoy the "grace breaks his glasses and is despondent because it's his only pair" head canons because i love drama and misery, but also this is NASA. They sent him up there with like ten extra pairs because a) it's NASA and b) everyone fucking saw how Grace treated his glasses. The original redundancy plan probably called for like 5 pairs but then Stratt took one look at that and was "absolutely not, he's a fucking menace double that immediately"

[ehyde]

Someone who knows more astronomy than me should write a fic about Irina Petrova just trying to finish her nebula research thank you very much but she cannot attend a single conference without getting the "Petrova, huh? Just like--" treatment

[fuckyeahchinesegarden]

Plum blossoms in quyuanfenghe, west lake, hangzhou, china (photos by 炎真，Eclare）

[politijohn]

Source

Some good news

[that-house]

partially-managed mental illness is so fucking funny i'll be sitting around doing my job and suddenly think "wow i hate myself" and immediately get confused because, like, that's not TRUE! i love myself so much. who are you to talk to me like that

[cameoappearance]

Jerry got a cute new outfit for RP reasons, forcing me to decide what it looks like with the hazmat suit peeled and the blood washed off

[teaboot]

hope you are not being too heavily impacted by the wildfires be safe out there friend 💛

I love and appreciate the support but this is the funniest ask I could have received as I am managing a flood zone

[cameoappearance]

[cal3ris]

is this gonna get me fired you think

[catboytitty]

belongs in the post too in my opinion

[neverending-symphonia]

if i see another person basically go "but what if this character who is explicitly neutral nonbinary is actually just a binary trans egg because nonbinary people arent REALLY as trans as binary trans people im so woke actually" i will start killing people

[mari-monsta]

why is it that when im reading fanfic i feel like i have a fairly good metric for if something is characterized accurately but when im trying to write suddenly its like ive never seen this character in my life. would he say that. would he fucking say that. suddenly i have no idea

[jaydotjpeg]

And in case I don't see ya!

Theres probably little to no correlation between the truman show and tsp/tspud but they both have iconic door scenes so I made this

Close up!

( EDIT : Okay I know I said theres probably little to no connection.. I said that bc I gave it maybe a few seconds of thought and went "oh this would be fun to draw" so I didnt say anything with certainty bc i was scared people would flame me for it, especially since I haven't seen truman in a long time

I am happy to find out that other people do think they are similar!!! Yayyy!!!! Also I'm genuinely shocked by how many people like this thank you all so much aaa there is more to come I promise!)

[luna-azzurra]

A non-writer asked me "but where do you get your ideas" and i genuinely did not know how to explain that it's not a place. it's not a website. it's not a folder. it's that i was on the bus and a woman was holding a paper bag very carefully and something about the way she held it made me need to know what was inside and then i needed to know why she was sad about it and then there was a whole person and then there was a whole story and the bus had already stopped and i missed my stop. that's where.

[cameoappearance]

Strange women on buses distributing ideas is no basis for a system of artistic motivation

[draconym]

Coca Cola flavored Oreos taste like if you could eat clipart

[draconym]

These taste like an abstract concept. Summer Vacation flavored. Yankee Candle ass cookie.

[errant-light]

this just keeps being relevant

[thelawfulchaotic]

This skit absolutely slaps forever but I have to tell you guys the secret.

The weird Oreos don’t sell… but the weird Oreos just being around and visible make people buy more regular Oreos.

That’s why.

[draconym]

The weird Oreos DO sell, but my housemate is the one buying them all

[unfavorableinstigation]

I think they add an important element of randomness to the environment. My father in law bought 6 or 7 boxes of the Selena Gomez Oreos so he could set a Selena Gomez Oreo alarm to go off mid workday and then say to his coworkers, "Oh, my Selena Gomez Oreo alarm is going off!" and unearth from his locker his 6 or 7 boxes of Selena Gomez Oreos so he and his coworkers could distribute them around the neonatal ICU ward where they work. He said it livened up an otherwise extremely dreary day.

[backupstardust]

As someone who works in an arts and crafts store, I have sold SO MUCH resin to people who are using the celebrity-themed ones to make jewelry

[draconym]

Wait are they using the packaging or are they trying to freeze an Oreo in carbonite