read it again

yuuki | 21+ | they/them If you need me to tag something, just ask! Lucina will forever be in my heart.

[hailed-marys]

get in the hail mary, grace

[anniflamma]

It's the Numbskull and the Funny one!

---

I need to tell you that designing Contrarian was pretty tricky. The first major decision was whether he should be white or the same black silhouette that the other designs have. The idea of him being the opposite from the others isn't that original, but it's a sweet idea nonetheless. But I can tell from here that when (or if) I do an animatic including Contrarian, it will be hard to keep him readable with the same backgrounds as the other voices. Luckily, Slay the Princess is a very dark visual game... Sooooo who knows! But I really wanna push Contrarian's design to be more of a simple shape/silhouette like the others. But from now on, he'll have more outlines to make him more readable on lighter backgrounds. So there is a possiblity his design will change in the future.

For Cheated, it was pretty easy. Making Contrarian and Cheated echos each other's contrasts yet also parallels just makes sense. Cheated being spiky and small, Contrarian being round-shaped and big. Yet they have some similar characteristics, they have the same tail and round wing shapes.

---

Also! I have a sweet headcanon that Contrarian being the only voice that is light is due to him representing the rough tear of TLQ and Shifty. Kinda like, he is the part of the Princess that is inside TLQ. ^^

I also have another visual storytelling design that the Contrarian is the only one who doesn't have a 'void monster' form or whatever you want to call it. I've shown it before with Smitten and Cold in my Burned Grey animation, and now here with Cheated. The monster forms are supposed to show when a voice feels an extreme emotion, (for Cold is like any kind of emotion at all XD ) OR to put it better, is close to their own way of untethering. Contrarian never really has that mental spiral, except in the Fury (kinda...)

[holy-leapin-splits-batman]

[lakemojave]

They. They forgor

[lakemojave]

[hotsoupeymiku]

[grimmtidings]

They were opened in AUGUST 2001. Oh my god. That's both hilarious and tragic.

[predstrogen]

this is a fucking futurama bit

[yakichoufd]

[kosmogrl]

firm believe that not everything happens for a reason, sometimes things are just cruel. and they shouldn’t have happened and it’s not supposed to be a lesson because we never deserved such thing.

[kosmogrl]

hm some people in my inbox got really mad at this specifically. nothing you can say will convince me that some of the pain and suffering we go through is our “fate” no, it isn’t

[beardedmrbean]

Congratulations on the cat

[paper-lilypie]

he hasn’t shut up for 3 minutes straight

[zer0caffeine]

Original post by @morallygrayautisticscientist here, this post was so funny I decided to draw it lol.

Panel by panel below:

[sui-sai]

[snifsnoof]

this in: middle-aged mans first known encounter with flirtatious remark (confused)

[nolsdoods]

map of the world

[great-and-small]

When I was in vet school I went to this one lecture that I will never forget. Various clubs would have different guest lecturers come in to talk about relevant topics and since I was in the Wildlife Disease Association club I naturally attended all the wildlife and conservation discussions. Well on this particular occasion, the speakers started off telling us they had been working on a project involving the conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. Lemurs exist only in Madagascar, and they are in real trouble; they’re considered the most endangered group of mammals on Earth. This team of veterinarians was initially assembled to address threats to lemur health and work on conservation solutions to try and save as many lemur species from extinction as possible. As they explored the most present dangers to lemurs they found that although habitat loss was the primary problem for these vulnerable animals, predation by humans was a significant cause of losses as well. The vets realized it was crucial for the hunting of lemurs by native people to stop, but of course this is not so simple a problem.

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

(Source 3)

[handforthstudy]

Unfortunately, I don’t have citations, but I have heard about the same phenomenon through Nat Geo Live presentations in the Amazon and Serengeti. Most individuals who are poachers or use slash-and-burn farming are doing this out of survival, not ignorance or greed. They have families to feed and children who will starve if they don’t find food or money. As OP said, fixing the human suffering fixes the conservation issue and is a win-win, while preaching conservation to starving people does nothing.

But on top of that, you know who the most ardent conservationists are once security has been achieved? The people who had once been forced to poach or slash-and-burn to survive. You know who’s great at tracking down gorilla poachers? Ex-poachers. Who’s good at understanding and advocating for people forced to do these things to survive? Ex-poachers. Who can convince others to take a chance on finding a better way to survive? Same answer.

It is win-win-win. As ecologists, conservationists, and environmentalists we must get out of our ivory towers of knowledge, stop carrying them into the field, and remember humans are part of the ecosystem too. And that sustainable change will never happen if human needs aren’t addressed.

[buttons-beads-lace]

I also love this story about the arapaima in Brazil. They increased the population of this endangered giant fish literally a hundred times over- from 3,000 to 300,000- by ending the total ban on arapaima fishing and instead creating legal fishing organizations. The fishing organization members get trained on how do population counts and determine how many fish they can take while still leaving enough for the population to grow.

The former illegal fishers are now sought-after experts, because they know how to spot the arapaima and tell juveniles apart from adults. They get to keep practicing the fishing skills that were passed down to them. The actual process of fishing is easier because they can work together and don't have to sneak around. The profits are higher because they can sell the fish openly to restaurants and to the public. The fishing organization members make sure that other people in their communities don't fish illegally. And the numbers of arapaima keep going up and up, so there's plenty to go around even as more people join the fishing organizations.

If you click all the way through to the report from the conservation org that started the fishing organizations project, there are quotes from fishing organization members:

"We built a second house and I'm putting my oldest two kids through college on the money we get from fishing."

"Nowadays you have young people walking around with pockets full of cash saying "I got 6,000 from fishing this year!" It used to be you wouldn't even get 50 reais of pocket money."

"At the first harvest after we started the fishing organization, I saw full-grown arapaima for the first time, really big ones like they're supposed to be. Before, I had only heard about how big they could get. That's when I knew that our work was paying off and we could keep moving forward."

[dudethatsmypillowcase]

Happy pride month to these three goobers

[cloudabserk]

grace is like rocky be honest am i too clingy? and rocky is like grace i would mind meld with you if i could.

[furrypost-generator]

[furrypost-generator]

bitches be sucking farts there

[ravingsockmonkey]

Found the source of the infographic that explains how the results were obtained!

[alexseanchai]

there’s sixteen Colorado counties that their most searched was “wolf furry”, plus thirty-odd counties (not counting either Arapahoe or any of the ones marked here as “Insufficient Data”) which may well have had plenty of searches for “wolf furry”, just fewer than for whatever they’re labeled here

and “skunk furry” searches in Arapahoe County outnumbered “wolf furry” searches in the entire state of Colorado

something tells me Skunks Georg

[headbenzhawk]

we did it, we created furry gerrymandering

[stuckinapril]

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.