The Roost

🌱 plant mom, nerd, tired 🌱 🩵pan/demi, old enough to remember that the internet is not the place to give identifying details 🩷

[crowboy-bebop]

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

source: hellgate osprey cam

[curlicuecal]

[ozarkthedog]

A very important snippet from Shawn Hatosy's Variety Interview about The Pitt

Part of the reason he didn’t see the interview was because he’s taken a step away from social media — something that felt necessary this season as some of the commentary became too intense. “I’ve had to kind of step back. Because sometimes it goes into these weird places where if fans disagree about a character, they start to turn on each other. That is not what this is supposed to be,” he says. “All through my career, I’ve had a pretty good relationship with social media, but now, seeing how all this is unfolding, I’m kind of reevaluating what that looks like.”

So-called "fans" need to read this over and over until it's burned into the backs of their eyelids, and then fucking reevaluate themselves.

[finco99]

Aaaand this is your friendly reminder that it's perfectly okay to disengage from media that isn't working for you. Criticism is a completely valid response to art. It always has been, and it always will be. What I struggle with, though, is how comfortable some people have become using the internet as an excuse to abandon basic social etiquette.

There's a reason online discourse and offline discourse often feel so different. And I think a lot of people blur that distinction in ways that end up excusing some genuinely awful behavior.

The people you're talking to online are still people.

They have their own experiences, perspectives, biases, and histories that shape how they engage with art—just like you do. You absolutely can engage in challenging conversations. In fact, I think it's often healthy to do so. But conversations are a two-way street. That's the one thing people seem to forget when they decide to jump into discourse.

If you're entering a conversation expecting others to listen to your perspective, engage with your points, and take your thoughts seriously, then you also have to extend that same courtesy to the person you're talking to. Otherwise, what's the point? And if that kind of engagement isn't something you're interested in, that's okay too.

Block. Mute. Disengage. Move on.

Curate your online experience however you need to. There are plenty of ways to have constructive conversations about media. Plenty of ways to discuss what isn't working for you, where you think something falls short, or why you disagree with a particular interpretation. But those conversations stop being productive the moment they become needlessly hostile. And fandom spaces thrive on discussion. They thrive on people bringing different perspectives to the table, because fandom has never been one thing.

It's the person who watches something after work and wanting to spend a little more time in that world. It's the person who wants to spend hours dissecting a character's motivations. It's the person who loves a story enough to criticize it because they want more from it. It's the person who's simply here to have a silly goofy time with something they happened to enjoy. All of those people belong here. That's THE entire point.

Fandom is a table with enough room for all kinds of engagement.

So if encountering a different opinion immediately makes you want to become cruel, hostile, or vicious, maybe that's a sign to step away from the conversation for a bit.

Log off. Take a walk. Do literally anything else.

And if nothing else, learn a little internet etiquette before deciding to take your frustration out on strangers. Because disagreement isn't the problem.

Treating people poorly because they disagree with you is.

[lestatfag]

STAY SAFE!! [ID: the Gilbert Baker pride flag with the words “Happy pride to all those who are unable to celebrate openly and safely. You are loved and seen!” in all-caps black text over it. /end ID]

[insertusernameici]

[unicornempire]

I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.

[theheroheart]

#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)

[jack-the-bear]

Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.

[lets-go-steal-an-ot3]

This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.

[gay-jesus-probably]

Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.

Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.

[mikkeneko]

A charity where you can do this, right here.

Be Parker! Be somebody else’s Leverage!

[melyzard]

Reblogging for the website.

[nianeyna]

yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. They’re completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. I’m a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt they’ve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if you’re doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. that’s a pretty good deal, I think.

[bethanyactually]

RIP Medical Debt is now called Undue Medical Debt!

Undue Medical Debt Homepage

Undue Medical Debt makes it easy for donors to make an impactful difference in the lives of those struggling with medical debt.

[ellaandtheocean]

Humpback whales breaching: gorgeous, majestic, graceful, embodies all the strength and beauty of the ocean

Minke whales breaching: I will launch myself out of this ocean like a f***ing surface-to-air missile to seek and destroy my enemies

[gallusrostromegalus]

I remember an interview with a guy that did the camera work for nature documentaries and he said that baleen whales like these guys were the scariest things to shoot because “They’re the size of a train, they can suddenly appear out of nowhere in dark or murky water and they don’t make a goddamn sound. I was absolutely sure that one of them was going to hit me and well, ‘that’s all folks!’. Gave me a lot of perspective on how I handle myself when filming smaller animals now.”

[a-book-of-creatures]

Fin whales breaching: sea serpent

[fleshdyke]

levitating minke whale

[plaguedocboi]

Sperm whale breaching: wjaht the fuck

[necronatron]

I have a feeling I have already shared this, but please, take the contribution of the northern right whale dolphin.

The humble eyebrow

[youngerfrankenstein]

To put it very bluntly.

You will always make a better impact helping people who need it than trying to hurt people you think deserve it.

[spidersdaily]

[sergal]

everyone shut da fuck up this is the only thing that matters

[sergal]

Oh My God Damn

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[da-janela-lateral]

Outdoor cat owners have no concept of basic ecology and it shows. "You're saying my kitty is EVIL for following its instincts???????" obviously not, you idiot, its an animal. I don't blame it because it is designed to hunt and doesn't understand human morality. The cat's human owner, though, should stop pretending that millions of people letting their pets hunt native species for fun WON'T make their ecossystem collapse. If you stop hearing birdsong in your neighborhood its your fault 👍.

[da-janela-lateral]

Also cats are domestic animals????? Its your pet. Its your responsability to take care of it and it certainly doesn't look like you are doing this if your pet spends 90% of the day on the streets. Outside cats are in great risk for being ran over, stolen, beaten, poisoned, mauled or eaten by wild animals. A mildly bored cat is way better than a dead one and besides? Just offer your pet enrichment. You don't need to risk its life to keep it happy. You can even let it outside with supervision!! Look how many options we have. Insisting the only way to keep your cat happy is allowing it to wreck the environment and possibly die is not only fucking irresponsible, but also lazy and shows that you don't really care for the wildlife around you.

[miss-m-winks]

I live in a neighborhood with so many outdoor cats. They will fight in our front yard at night. They will sneak onto our back porch. We have a dog who hates cats. He has actively chased them from our yard, and if a time ever came when he happened to catch up to one, it would be a bloodbath.

Our neighborhood is near a field that happens to be home to at least one coyote. I have seen that coyote wander down the road and people have even spotted it in fenced backyards before. I'm sure one reason it dares to wander into backyards is because it knows there are cats wandering freely around here.

The red tailed hawks in the area may not be large enough to carry off most full grown cats, but that doesn't mean they won't try.

Raccoons aren't exactly nice to cats either.

And i can easily point out several houses, including my own, with flowering plants out front that could absolutely make a cat sick or worse. Lilies, for example.

Even before tackling the problems of cars, malicious people, poison from pest control, or the ecological damage cats themselves cause, just the fact that other people will decorate their own yards with plants that can poison a cat should be enough of a reason to keep them inside!

Hell, just the fact that you don't know what they're doing or when they'll be back should discourage you from letting a cat wander outdoors! Anything could happen out there! You don't know what they're eating, you don't know what injuries they might get, what diseases they could come home with, or anything. That's scary! Just keep them inside!

[leupagus]

It's really fucked up when you treat characters like people and people like characters.

[leupagus]

No seriously it's REALLY fucked up when you treat characters as if they were real live people while you treat people like they're just characters.

[leupagus]

I'm gonna go ahead and repeat: it is super, duper, extra scooper fucked up when you treat a character as if it were a living person while treating other human beings who are interacting with you like they are merely characters who can be written out of your personal story if you just find a remark mean enough.

[leupagus]

You. You get it.

ETA wait why does this have 18k notes

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[jag-ger-dig-min-morgon]

Buff shirtless peepaw be upon ye ❤️❤️❤️

[normal-with-adhd-is-a-joke]

Filming people without their consent is a massive issue of not only privacy but ableism that's been going on for many years.

It started out with filming more visibly disabled people, like high support needs autistic people having meltdowns in public and (especially fat) disabled people literally just using mobility aids, but once that was deemed less acceptable it moved to other things. Filming people acting "weird" in public. Eating weird foods. Falling asleep in weird places. Wearing weird things. Stimming. You get the idea. It's no longer safe to be visibly weird in public and that's an issue for a lot of disabled people. I recently had to lay down on the floor of a department store because I had an ME crash while out shopping. Not only did I have to worry about the normal things like people coming up to ask me if I'm ok, I also had to worry about some video of me at my lowest point, when I'm suffering immensely, being shared around as "haha look at this weird bitch on the floor". It's upsetting. It's scary.

And then there's fakeclaiming. A fun trend where people will film us in public to "prove" there's some kind of huge epidemic of people faking disability. Spoiler alert: there is not. Most of the time the people they film are real disabled people who don't fit into the expected mold for disability, usually service dog teams or people who use mobility aids who don't "look sick". And you would think this trend would be some kind of abled nonsense, but it's not. It's often other disabled people doing the fakeclaiming. Yes, there are some times when it's obvious a service dog isn't trained properly, but other than that, it's damn near impossible to tell if someone is faking a disability, and you're much more likely to target a disabled person than a faker. I'd love to say this trend was new, but it's been going on since the days of "the people of walmart" where many of the people posted were fat mobility aid users, always with the assumption that they used it because they were too fat or lazy to move on their own. In fact, the image of a fat person in a mobility cart has become almost synonymous with "lazy". It's one of the things that drove me to get my own expensive power wheelchair, to avoid the judgmental stares in the grocery store when I was just trying to exist, to avoid the fear of public shame. Even now when I stand up from my chair to walk to the bathroom stall or reach something on a high shelf, I watch the corners of my vision for that telltale phone in the air. I feel like I'm never safe from the judgemental eye of the internet, even when I'm logged off, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels that way.

Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, these places are all great for disabled people, especially those of us without access to the outside world. But it's also become a source of great anxiety for anyone who's uncontrollably "weird", mostly disabled people. Leave us alone, I'm begging you, we just want to go to the fucking grocery store in peace and safety.

Tl;dr

Stop filming people for "acting weird" or "faking a disability" in public. It's ableist, it's invasive, it's creepy, and it's humiliating. People don't exist in public for your amusement and especially not disabled people. You don't know who is disabled and who isn't no matter how many disabled people you've known or how sure you are that the person is faking.

[thehouseoflore]

None of that was necessary Higgs. Like at all.

[willgrahamscock]

how are you gonna be 31 and posting fandom content bro leave it to the teenagers

People 10 and 20 years older than me are writing your favorite fanfics, and drawing your favorite characters. You'd have no fandom without the people you think are 'too old' to have hobbies.

[emachinescat]

This mentality is so insanely frustrating. Why do teenagers think that people have to give up their hobbies, give up fun, when they reach a certain age? Like??

When I was a teenager writing fic, I remember finding out that one of my favorite authors was in her 50s and that just was SUCH a revelation for me!! What do you mean, 50 year olds can write fanfic?!? Does that mean I can write fics when I'm her age?? That's AWESOME! I seriously looked up to her so much. And now I'm 35 with a husband and kid, and I'm still writing fanfic and posting fandom content - and I have no plans of stopping!

If you try to drive 30+ people out of fandom, you're going to lose the backbone of said fandom!

[evilwriter37]

The ageism in fandom is fucking insane. It’s strange that people seem to have the idea that fandom was created by and for teenagers… It was not. It was created by adults. How would we have ao3 if only teenagers were in fandom?

I don’t want to sound like I am hating on younger people in fandom, but god, y’all need to stop it with the ageism. You don’t have to give up what you love once you’re an adult. Honestly, the belief that you have to is pretty bad. It sounds like it would make people afraid of aging. Granted, modern society is so very afraid of aging.

Don’t give up what you love just because you’re an adult. You don’t have to. And don’t try to force others to do it either.

[shiverandqueeef]

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)

[archaeo-geek]

And this flow chart needs another sub-level because I, as a Canadian scientist (archaeologist) use metric length measurements for work, but as a historic building researcher I use imperial length measurements for recording old houses.