roach-works.bsky.social

formerly roachpatrol

[lizardlicks]

Hi! It's your friendly neighborhood lizard speaking. Coming to you live from your screen! You might be wondering what I've been up to lately, other than being a pest and having fandom opinions. Well, the truth is that I've been really hard at work this summer getting my business up and running. And it worked! I think. I soft launched the online store earlier this month, and vended at my first live event EVER this past weekend. It was scary but also a blast.

What are we selling? Product made from the hard work of our beautiful sheep flock!

My darling boy Bravo

We have soap made from their milk, fiber from their wool, and will soon be stocking finished handspun yarn as well. Everything is hand made right on our farm. If you like fiber crafts, or know someone who does, and you wanna get something unique while supporting a new small business, take a poke around our store and tell a friend!

https://goimagine.com/fishfamilyfarm/

[lizardlicks]

😭 Y'all, the big warm response you've had to my bitty shop is making me choke up a little. I'm so very grateful to the community here. I see you all my oldstuck peeps! Some of you have been a part of my life for more than a decade, and I'm so grateful to you for all the time and love you've shared with me for all these years.

A quick note on how some of the scents work! I dont use premade fragrance blends, you won't find any "our version of [brand scent]" here. Rather, we mix the single element component notes with a goal in mind. Almost every blend is inspired by our experiences growing up in the Pacific Northwest. If you're from the region you might find nostalgia in a bar of soap. If you're not, we hope you'll enjoy experiencing a little piece of our home.

Some scents get swapped out periodically! "Must Be Fall" and "Golden Fields" are both seasonal scents. The current count in the shop is all that will be made this season, and once there gone, they're gone until next year. I'm going to be pouring the winter line in the next week so that it will be ready by the end of October, so check back then!

The other scents are shop staples and will be there year round. I have a couple more in the works that I hope will be hits: PNW Hike and Cowboy Breakfast.

We will always strive to have fragrance free soap in the shop. If you've heard about the benefits of milk soap and want to try it out, but you have sensory issues, senstive skin or allergies, this soap is for you.

About the fiber: shop availability will also change seasonly, mostly based on our supply of wool (ie if I have a fleece sheared, washed, carded or combed, spun, ect). As our flock grows, we have more fleece to process, but that also means more time spent processing! Good news is that a close neighbor actually got a hold of some commercial grade processing equipment and will be opening a fiber mill practically down the road some time next year, so that will hopefully improve turnaround times and keep stock more consistent.

Woo anyway that was a lot of words, here's some cute sheep pic tax for getting through all that.

Evie, our littlest ewe lamb

❤️ THANK YOU!! ❤️

[dappermouth]

A limited run of signed 'Thicket' prints is now available at The People's Print Shop! imo it's one of the loveliest reproductions of my art ever

[dappermouth]

there's been like 3 of these left for a year and they gotta go! someone buy one of these stragglers please omg

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

[marlynnofmany]

I love this for the creativity and the joy in the post. How perfectly these bits of rocks and shells show us two ladies frolicking in delight! At the beach, one might assume. They're having a great time. Good for them.

[montereybayaquarium]

One lump(fish) or two? ☝️✌️🤔

Far below the ocean's waves, a bulbous-looking fish with leathery skin and large eyes slowly swims along. The appropriately named lumpfish live up to this magnificent moniker with their assortment of lumps, bumps, and ridges along their bodies. These denizens of the deep sea can attach themselves to surfaces using their modified pelvic fins like a suction cup to avoid being swept away in the ocean's currents.

Stuck on these bumpy lumpfish? Learn more

[lesbian-archives]

Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening, 1994

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

OH it's a lesbian and her enormous sunflower

I thought she had her arm around the shoulders of her wife, who was dressed as a plant monster for some reason

[scientia-rex]

I am so glad you clarified. I was like “I’m glad that woman supports her wife in making increasingly weird ghilli suits”

[nudityandnerdery]

Many of us saw the picture, thought it was two women, one in a weird costume, and thought, "Hey, good for them."

[inbabylontheywept]

i'm just calling this like i see it. furries get art reblogs. a furry will say something like "i had a dream where pikachu was dressed up like one of the columbine kids" and then someone will post a picture of pikachu in a trenchcoat and the post will have like. 40 notes. furry posts dont have to blow up to get fanart. they can just exist.

and we all know why this is. furries befriend other furries and nobody draws like furries do. nobody. the internet is the device furries use to share art and the rest of us are just allowed to hang out. i'd say you can love it or you can hate, but no, you just have to love it. or else.

anyway this is all to say that the more furries you follow, and the more furries that folllow you, the more likely you are to throw out some random shitpost like "frog but it has only ever done arm day and now it looks like a farm tractor driving backwards" and get an actual drawing back.

[whatbettyread]

Op I have no idea if this is what you meant but I felt possessed by farmer frog

[inbabylontheywept]

THIS POST IS LESS THAN AN HOUR OLD. WHAT THE FUCK.

Also that is what I meant. Except not hot. So you objectively improved upon my idea. Like, of course the frog has to be hot. Obviously. How did I miss that?

I love this website. And I love furries. Thank you for sharing your internet with us.

[inbabylontheywept]

I mean, could the case that I was making be made any stronger than this? No. I scribbled three runes in the dirt, and now an elder god is drawing beautiful frog women. It's like the opposite of a doomsday cult. What a wonderful Wednesday, my dudes.

[ymutate]

Alison Friend

UK

"Douglas Made A Portrait Of His Best Friend Paul"

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i'm actually not prepared at all for trump to kick the bucket. what flavor cupcakes do i buy? what meal do i pick for the celebratory dinner? what playlists should i have saved? luckily im so brave and ready to wing it

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

wait i've got it. mexican desserts, crab dinner, rave music.

[nobodyhorse]

many reports coming in if you die a warriors death you go to a different part of the underworld where you can just wrestle and race chariots for eternity . apparently it also sucks

[yudrilsthira]

this policy was implemented for purposes of "to own the libs"

[waowpuppy]

a perfect world where people go to play minigolf and say to each other "so. if this is minigolf, then whats golf?" and no one knows because golf hasnt existed for hundreds of years by that point

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

They reinvent golf from minigolf and what they come up with involves rolling beach balls through a theme park

[girlnextvore]

this sims 2 ad has like such deep gay energy to it. Like this feels like queer history to me

[boingmann]

[hoodiegal]

The funny thing is that it wasn't even an intentional stance taking. They just forgot to code a check to make sure characters genders "matched", resulting in that characters could get into relationships regardless of gender.

[fungaljungal]

What the hell are you talking about? They didn't forget anything. A programmer for the sims 1 was a gay man who programmed gay relationships into the game and they kept adding it back, intentionally, in each game.

[json-derulo]

Actually, you’re both correct. It was an accident and a deliberate decision by one gay developer:

“During The Sims’s protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. “No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before—at least, to this extent—and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. really didn’t want to begin with,” Barret told me. “It felt to me like a fear thing.” After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code.

When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. A fortnight into his new job, he found himself with nothing to do when his supervisor, the game’s lead programmer, Jamie Doornbos, took a short vacation. Jim Mackraz, Barrett’s boss, needed a task to occupy his new employee, and he handed Barrett a document that outlined how social interactions in the game would work; the underlying rules for the game’s A.I. that would dictate how the characters would dynamically interact with one another. “He didn’t think I could handle it with Jamie off on vacation, but he figured that at least I’d be out of his hair,” Barrett told me. “Neither he nor I realized that he’d given me an old design document to work from.”

That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships. “In hindsight, I probably should have questioned the design,” Barrett, who is gay, said. “But the design felt right, so I just implemented it. Later, Will Wright stopped by my desk,” Barrett said. “He told me that liked the social interactions, and that he was glad to see that same-sex support was back in the game.” Nobody on the team questioned Barrett’s work. “They just pretty much ignored it,” he said. “After a while, everyone was just used to the design being there. It was widely expected that E.A. would just kill it, anyway.”

In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenes—not a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. “I had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didn’t have time to put them all on rails,” Barrett said.

On the first day of the show, the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press.”

- from The Kiss That Changed Video Games by Simon Parker

[2well2water]

it's so fucking crazy how defensive people get when you criticize like anything to do with the beauty industry. you point out that it's predatory and sucky to sell women new insecurities and people come crawling out of the woodwork screaming "well i LIKE wearing makeup every day i LIKE shaving i LIKE freezing the muscles in my face" okay well that's so awesome for you that you don't want to examine why you do the things you do or who benefits from you doing them. you are a BEAUTIFUL tar pit congratulations

[should-be-sleeping]

I keep fish and sometimes breed them (free fish hack). At the moment I have some beautiful fellows that are getting up there in age, so it's time to create more.

I separate all of my fish by their gendies as soon as you can possibly tell them apart to keep the population of my tanks where I want it, and to prevent inbreeding (and all of the complications that stem from that). These lads have effectively never seen a girl.

When I added the female to continue their legacy, they didn't know what to do. So they did what any respectable man might do in that confusing situation: ignored her and continued having sex with each other.

So preoccupied with one another are they that I'm honestly not sure if they will ever include her in any way that matters. Their bloodline ends with gay sex, and tbh, I kinda love that for them.

The g in lgbtq stands for guppy. 🌈

[should-be-sleeping]

As if to mock me directly, they are now going out of their way to have sex in front of her while she just floats there like

[should-be-sleeping]

I've turned off the light so that maybe they'll include her by accident. 🤫

[should-be-sleeping]

Free fish!

(Created by accident in the dark.)

[should-be-sleeping]

I need you all to know, I sat on this news for 72 hours, closely monitoring, waiting for more to be born and this is it. There are 4 of them. 😂

[stevishabitat]

[should-be-sleeping]

Asdfghjkl

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

"Accidentally discovered straight sex while confused in the dark" is like. The opposite of a porn premise.

[iamthemaestro]

one time I was complaining to my reenactment friend about some housing issues I was having as I was getting stuff sorted out at my job and I was frustrated that I wasn’t being put where I wanted to be, and he was like “hm… maybe it’s because it’s a men’s living space? but honestly I think of you more as a guy anyway” and I nearly stopped in my tracks, because this guy is a blue-collar-job-working, MAGA-parent having firearms enthusiast who didn’t go to college and doesn’t really Get the whole gender thing, which I have never specifically talked to him about. but in that moment he got it. like, hit the nail right on the head. and I understand why—it’s not because I told him how I identified, it’s because when I do reenactments I only do men’s roles—I wear men’s clothes, I wield guns, I sleep on the ground and do the 18 mile hikes and whatnot—and to him this makes me functionally a guy in these scenarios, even if I don’t look like one. and it just utterly stunned me to realize that a lot of cis people, even conservative ones, understand that gender is a performance. they understand that gender is expressed by what you do and what you wear and stuff like that. and they’ll admit it to you straight to your face! they just can’t—and won’t—put it into those terms, even though they already believe it

[iamthemaestro]

all this being said I still love this friend a lot; I don't necessarily agree with him on everything but it's mostly a product of how he was raised and I think fundamentally he is a kind person who doesn't fully understand. however it does make everything extremely funny because if nothing else he loves that I'm like this and is actively determined to make me More like that. but like. in the most 18th century way possible. like he wants nothing more than for me to spontaneously start liking beer and get drunk with him. it is a goal of his to get me as obsessed with pipe tobacco as he is. he is constantly encouraging me to drop large sums of money on flintlock weapons I cannot afford. I am being platonically forcemasced by a revolutionary war era british soldier

[anonbeadraws]

today's warm up: people should put up warning signs or somethin'

[kaelio]

[some-sort-of-humanoid-lifeform]

My mother is all into homesteading and off-grid living videos right now. Every time I check up on her, this is what she wants to talk about.

It gives her a sense of peace and purpose I guess. Which is good, she’s been struggling to find that with her injuries and condition. She’s learning skills, and feeling prepared for “the worst”. Like I can’t get her to stop watching conspiracy theory bullshit on YouTube so at least this kind of content alleviates some of the anxiety the other content amplifies, because she feels like she can do something now to secure her safety later.

But to get through these conversations, I have to tell myself— hey, if natural disaster comes our way, some of this might be useful. But I know she’s not just thinking a big storm or natural disaster. She’s preparing for the collapse of society. And I don’t know how to break it to her that we wouldn’t survive that. You can make long lasting candles with crisco? Cool. Where you going to by crisco when society collapses? You’ll stock up now? Ok cool. What will you do when it runs out? Honestly, before it runs out, what will you do when people with guns come to take your various stockpiled supplies?

If we hit a point where society collapses, we’re done for. Food, medicine, etc. we can’t survive without society, without a world where people are working together trying to help each other out.

So, I’ll go through with this shit in the name of natural disaster preparedness, and because it helps her. But that’s as far as I’m willing to put energy into it. I refuse to prepare for, bet on, or hope for the collapse of society. I’d rather spend my energy trying to prevent society collapsing, what little part I can play in that. I’d rather spend my energy supporting people in my community. I’d rather work and build towards a better future, not prepare for the worst.

[prismatic-bell]

OP, if your mother is physically able to do the following, I strongly suggest it:

Get her into a fibercraft. Sewing, knit, crochet. Because here’s the thing:

At first, you can pitch it as “we’re all still gonna need clothes and these idiots with their doomsday bunkers can’t even thread a needle.” But after awhile—let this take a bit of time, not so long that she gets bored but long enough that she’s like “I’ve DONE this already”—introduce her to a slightly more advanced concept. She was practicing on circle skirts? Check out how to make darts. Crochet blankets? There are SO MANY cool stitches.

And then when the craft has a decent grip as a hobby….THEN you introduce her to a crafting social group.

One of the best ways to stop people falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole is to make sure they have active and diverse community, and being able to make tangible things has been shown to have a positive influence on mental health. If cost is a concern, I literally have spare crochet hooks I could send you to get her started and all I’d ask for them is cost of postage, which is like. Maybe three bucks. You can even find halfway decent yarn at the dollar store now. It’s not amazingly high quality, but it’s good enough for practice and learning.

[scruffydogcreative]

I cannot recommend the above enough. My dad is a prepper and was falling in with a militia. Like the white supremacy militias.

So I started casually mentioning i wanted to do Search and Rescue- knowing my father is incredibly competitive and will try and out do me.

I was all "but we can't rely on the government to find people!"

Now he has been on 6 different tours in the US. He is a field commander and the most successful in state history.

He independently made a partnership with a Black and Missing coalition and partners with them on searches for Black Ohio and.

He called me the other day so proud he has " a Trans and a nonbinary whatever that is" on his search team. So is he perfect? No. But now he isn't toting a gun around and threatening people.

He's getting better. Sure he built a secret bunker in the basement. But he's recovered multiple bodies and reunited people with loved ones.

Sure we still can't have a conversation without him divulging into some bigoted speak here and there.

But he's been lead in recovering teens trafficked from our state and successfully recovered them in Georgia in 10 hours.

Sure he isn't perfect. But he didn't fall completely and maybe he will become even better on his own.

The secret is: is they aren't going to become themselves again but you can help them not crumble completely. You can still have your parent even if they are a bit.. ahhhh.... hurtful. But they aren't hurting anyone and that's the important part.

[kyraneko]

We are what we become. So help people become in a good direction.

[shallow-between-stars]

Part of the reason people (particularly white people) of a certain age fall down the doomsday preparation hole into conspiracy theorist is

there is very little community for non-churchgoing white folks.

There is such a push in white culture to get your kids out the door and settled in their own home after you've raised them nearly exclusively alone for 20 years. Your work friends are your work friends. You retire and they don't see you anymore.

You don't go to church? All of the church groups don't see you.

Because the prevalent culture among white people is go it alone. If you're lucky and not divorced, you get your partner, but usually the go it alone is so pervasive that even working as a team with one other person is usually too hard, not to mention the stress of only having one person and how you have no place to vent about that person when needed (and everyone sometimes needs to vent about their loved ones no matter how good the relationship.)

So you get to this place where your culture has led you and you have grown-up kids, no spouse, no friends, and a whole lot of undefinable resentment about your life that you're not supposed to feel.

And this person on youtube comes along and says "Fuck them all, society will collapse any day now."

And you nod along in agreement.

But if you have a hobby, and start making friends from that hobby?

Suddenly that support system vents all of those icky building resentments and you can depend on people and make friends and have relationships and the world doesn't feel so bad.

Honestly, white culture takes a pack animal and puts it in a cage alone and then wonders why so many white people are miserable, racist pricks.

[gothiccharmschool]

I highly recommend amateur radio as another community-building hobby. My Dad has been involved in it for decades, and he’s told me about the various right wing prepper types who join the chats and slowly become better people.

[rmhashauthor]

I've just joind a writer's group in my city. It is REALLY helping with my stress and anxiety and that's saying something because I am NOT a social person unless Pisces is in Gatorade or some shit and this one specific blade of grass is EXACTLY 47.2mm long on a Tuesday when the day of the month is a prime number. But being surrounded by a bunch of other writers talking about how my current WIP made them all VERY excited for chapter 2 is making me feel things. GOOD things like anticipation instead of dread and maybe even something kind of like hope? We're talking about doing a "smut night" where everyone brings a short smutty story to read out loud while we all drink.

They said Chapter 1 is "amazingly well written" and "I get vibes of Star Wars, The Fifth Element and Star Trek:DS9 and I'm REALLY into it" and "This made me anxious in a good way!" Got some good notes so I will work on that tomorrow, but when everyone starts talking at once you KNOW you're on to something. It's like entering a cake baking contest and catching a judge on a hot mic saying "This is one of the best damn cakes I've ever had, the other entries don't even come close" and having ALL of the other judges nod in agreement and fight over the remaining pieces.

Why didn't I do this sooner?! Ah, right, because I'm awkward as hell and it's not a Monday and this one very specific turtle in Tanzania is sitting on a rock aimed precisely 13.11° southwest and Jupiter is in my Moon House under Saggitarius contrapost to Mars.

Find a group, it really helps!!