Bring Back The Guillotine

[samarajethwa]

[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

[thissweetenamor]

[ryan-sometimes]

Working an office job will truly make you have the wildest enemies, bc why is my nemesis rn a woman I’ve never met and who exclusively haunts me by sending diabolical emails, and also a specific guy who left my company before I even worked here and made the system so fuckass that it ruined procedures for like a year

[ryan-sometimes]

Yesterday my nemesis (woman I’ve never met and whose face I’ve never seen) sent my office an email so rude, basically saying we had fucked up every project she ever ordered from us, one of the worst emails I’ve ever read in my life.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

It was the most satisfying workday I’ve had since I got hired.

[winnie-wine]

[whirligig-girl]

I had noticed these strange little occurrences all my life. A bird would fly past my window and it'd sorta look like it was half there, half not. I'd glance up at a clock and for a moment, the second hand would be in two places at once. Never really thought much about it. I thought it was just normal. Someone told me once about the clock hand illusion where you flick your eyes and it looks like time stops for a half second or so, I figured it was something weird like that.

But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.

And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.

It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."

And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.

That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.

I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.

One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.

I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.

It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.

Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.

I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)

She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.

I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.

In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.

I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.

It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.

It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.

When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.

But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.

Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.

I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.

But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.

I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.

My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.

I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.

After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?

And I was just like :| yep.

Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!

And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.

The kinda scary thing is, every once in a while I'll see some of those artifacts that I used to see, like, little tiny desynchs within each timeline. I only recently got used to being in two timelines at the same time, I don't think I can handle being in three or four. My brain's already better at handling the desynch, like, one time I managed to move my finger in two directions at once all in the pizza timeline. But I'm really scared of the desynch multiplying over time. Maybe it's inevitable, but my main strategy is just to not flip any coins for the rest of my life.

[gingerswagfreckles]

Buzz Aldrin punching a moon landing denier in the face at the age of 72. Lol.

[gingerswagfreckles]

This video has been almost completely scrubbed off the internet because the loser who got decked keeps suing everyone. Luckily for you guys EYE have a copy of the video! :)

In honor of the Artemis 2 launch!!! Suck it crazies in the chat yelling about how NASA is using AI!!!

[weaselle]

"you're a coward and a liar" it wasn't that long ago a man could be shot or stabbed with a sword for saying that to another man and nobody would think the man defending his honor had done anything wrong.

Also, Mr. Aldrin had an active military career before his astronaut days and i'd say he hasn't forgotten how to throw a damn good punch -- just look at his wide stance

10/10 well-deserved punch

additional info

at the time, Aldrin was 72 years old, 6 foot 2 inches, and 250 pounds. Sibel (the man he punched) was 37 years old

Sibel has made multiple "documentaries" about the moon landing being fake and has repeatedly harassed the astronauts involved, in this instance getting Aldrin to agree to the above meeting by pretending to be doing an interview on space for a Japanese children's television show

Buzz Aldrin's step-daughter was present, and in addition to being poked repeatedly and aggressively with a bible (Sibrel wanted him to swear on a bible that he went to the moon) Aldrin felt the man following them into the hotel refusing to leave them alone might pose a threat to her

charges against Aldrin were either dropped or never filed, based on Aldrin's lack of a prior criminal record, witness accounts of Sibrel's having drawn Aldrin to the hotel under false pretenses, Sibrel's aggressiveness before the punch, and Sibrel having declined to seek medical attention and sustaining no obvious injury visible to witnesses during the incident

[acepalindrome]

The move away from physical media is so infuriating. We should have unquestionable ownership of the things we purchase that aren’t dependent on the whims of the company years after we bought the thing, but also! I love having nice pretty editions of things! Movies, books, video games, music, I love having a lovely special edition of my very favorites to display on my shelf! And now every company that makes every kind of media wants us to pay to basically rent things that they can take away at the moment’s notice with no recourse for the people who got screwed over. Fuck off!!!!!

[mooned-knights]

is anyone else annoyed that "ai" encompasses both chatgpt and tools we train to do repetitive tedious work for us. and by the ripple effect of articles like "scientists develop ai to detect cancer early" that make people argue for the merit of chatgpt or become anti-medicine. and by the general state of the world and society

[nihilisticlinguistics]

adulthood notes:

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

The Cool Binder Rule: by wearing clothes and accessories that are to your taste instead of trying to blend in, people will be more likely to compliment you and show interest in you as a person.

[teaboot]

We don't NEED AI art. We NEED to have a full apartment complex full of 1960's-1980's sci-fi & fantasy cover artists on permanent retainer

It just doesn't get any better than this

[megamindsupremacy]

Beautiful dash pull

[talisidekick]

A while back my pharmacist saw my deadname on my profile and accidentially called it out, he corrected and deleted my deadname from the system so only my preferred name shows up now. There was a crowd of people behind me, so as he hands over the pills he apologized, in equal tone and volume as when he called my deadname and lied saying it's been a long day and he didn't mean to call out -his own- name. I quietly told him it was fine and he didn't need to do that for my sake.

His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.

Bro literally deadnamed me once, and has committed to flat out stealing my deadname. It's his now. Legally. Officially. I over heard his co-workers call him by the name.

[bluerose5]

Thank you, Black people in fandom spaces. Thank you, Black creators and Black lurkers. Thank you Black artists, Black writers. Thank you, Black bloggers, Black influencers. Shoutout to those Black characters, both canon and original. Thank you, Black people, both queer and cishet.

Your perspectives matter. Your representation matters. You are not bothersome for demanding equal treatment in fandom. It is not your responsibility to make fandom more welcoming and inclusive to you. It is not your sole responsibility to create all of the Black-centered content. You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.

Black people in fandom, you are wanted. You are needed. You are loved and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

And since they don't get told it near enough, thank you, Black women especially!!!

[murfpersonalblog]

You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.

[ijustwannafallunderyrsawteeth]

so gross and insidious how the conversation around glp1s co-opts the language of body positivity

using a glp-1 for weight loss is not 'loving yourself'. that's literally marketing and it obviously worked.

unfortunately, these are drugs used experimentally at several times the dose they were created to be used at to increase the side effect of weight loss. it is unknown what effects using these drugs at these doses over long periods of time will do to you. it is honestly wildly irresponsible that it is prescribed in this way and people are assuming it's gonna be safe for you. using a glp-1 is assumed to be the healthy thing to do, so 'loving yourself'. but it's not and these drugs absolutely have significant known risks in addition to potentially long term so far unforeseeable risks.

if you feel you love yourself more on a glp-1, it is likely because we treat fat people like shit and thin people better. the only acceptable fat person is the one that is trying their best not to be fat, so maybe the people around you are treating you better. but it's not the medication. it's attempting to alleviate fatphobia.

[filmnoirsbian]

This week:

A 19 year old passenger with her baby, who only spoke spanish, missed her connecting flight due to weather and would have been stuck sleeping in the airport but my co flight attendant (who spoke spanish) booked her commuter hotel for her and gave her a free room for the night

Another passenger missed her connecting flight home but since she lived just under an hour from me I gave her a ride from dc to virginia beach

My pilot was contacted by the wife of a pilot he'd flown with (who later killed himself) because she'd found a photo of their crew at dinner, so now he takes group photos of every crew he hangs out with, just in case

Another passenger missed her connecting flight and was crying because her mom was in hospice so 2 other passengers who did not know her offered to rent a car and carpool down to jacksonville together

An actor who I will not name but who I'm a huge fan of was in line at the airport pizza place in front of me and my co flight attendant (also a fan) and we were trying so hard to be cool about it and he could tell and he paid for our food because "You all take such good care of us in the air, we should take care of you on the ground."

The van driver for our new orleans overnight heard me say I was vegetarian but wished I could try authentic gumbo and called his friend who is a chef and then drove us to the restaurant where I was given a creole style vegetarian gumbo he'd improvised

After a terrible night which saw me and my co flight attendant trying for 4 hours to get hotel rooms from our airline, the night clerk at a hotel finally took over the phone call and reprimanded them on our behalf, dictating the exact paperwork she needed sent over and then expedited the process so she could give us rooms

[vultania]

When I was little I showed a flight attendant a picture of a ladybug life cycle I drew myself, and he sat down in the empty seat on the other side of the aisle and drew a flipping plane and holy cow that was the first experience I had of someone drawing and drawing amazingly well. I wonder how he's doing...

I still have the drawings! And the notebook!

The notebook in question:

The terribly childish drawings in question:

LOOK AT THIS

I DIDN'T EVEN REALISE HE'D WRITTEN MY NAME

Flipping heck 🤣🤣🤣

Oh yeah, this was a Virgin Australia domestic Brisbane to Sydney flight which I'd done with my family multiple times at this point.

Btw I was 8.

Gerome Gardiner, I have cherished this drawing all throughout my childhood, and if you ever see this, thank you for taking the time on a pretty empty flight to draw me something with such beauty that I have carried it throughout my life.

But I feel I should apologise because I have not kept up my drawing skills and neither have I had much time or energy to do so 😅

I paint pictures with words now ✒️📖💻

One day I'll show you one of my stories! 😁

[thecactifindahome]

He's still out there drawing planes.

[therealraewest]

[tryan-a-bex]

Updated link

[malwareproductions]

hey. you have to love your trans brothers of color okay. and your trans sisters of color. and your nonbinary siblings of color. you have to okay. its simply non-optional

[ramshacklefey]

Recently managed to activate the most amazing infodump trap card.

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

Secondly, Sister Lucy always said when she died she wanted to come back as one of Phyllis's dogs because "mom treated the dogs better than us."