still here

Kaley / she/her

[thecollectibles]

Amelie - Background paintings by Boskoop

[awakefor48hours]

Every once in a while, I wish the friendship meter from the Sims was real so that way when people tell me "I used Chat-GPT" they can visually see just how much respect I just lost for them in that moment.

[berkelbites]

One time an acquaintance told me she entered Snape's star chart into chatgpt and I could physically feel that meter dropping three separate times over the course of her sentence

[sceptixfakemon]

i really genuinely wish I could hit chatgpt with my bare fists and hear its pityful electronic voice fade into glitched robotic gibberish and choking beeps as I hit it before I smash it for good and it shuts the fuck up forever

[sceptixfakemon]

no no it's fine

[sceptixfakemon]

why are so many people wondering if I'm horny for chatgpt. it's like the most unfuckable robot ever created heeell NO

[sceptixfakemon]

dragging you out of the tags like it's the last thing I'll ever do on this site

[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

[mutant-distraction]

Massive Birds Nests on telephone poles in the Kalahari Desert South Africa, a native bird called the sociable weaver bird constructs massive nests that from a distance, look like a giant haystack that's fallen into a tree. These nests are the largest built by any bird and are large enough to house over a hundred pairs of birds. Some sociable weaver nests have remained occupied for several generations spanning over 100 years.

[bonesbeetle]

everyone come live in the bird apartment megacomplex with me

[beemovieerotica]

[teaboot]

Im a guy am i allowed to support free the nipple. I mean obviously yes, im aware that its beyond sexist that they cant but i also just like tits. I think woman should be allowed to be shirtless wherever a man is but at the same time do i just think that because im straight?

Hey man I think you can do both. Like I appreciate man tits and those are legal p much everywhere, but if I was ogling people or touching folks without permission or clutching my pearls whenever I saw a nip it'd be a different story

It's not so much "do I think boobs are hot and do I enjoy seeing them" so much as it is "do I think it's reasonable that what I personally find hot shouldn't get to dictate how others dress"

All u really got to be careful of is how u support- cause yeah,it may come off as skeevy if u get too excited about it.

But the drum we're beating here isn't "STOP EXPERIENCING FEELINGS", it's "YOUR FEELINGS AREN'T MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY BODY" and "THE HUMAN BODY IS NOT IN ITSELF OBSCENE" and "WOMEN'S BODIES BY THEMSELVES ARE NOT PORNOGRAPHIC"

And for the love of GOD don't get me started on letting people breastfeed their kids

[teaboot]

Also llike. As a baby-steps thought excersise, consider this:

Picture the LEAST attractive person with breasts you personally can imagine. If your knee-jerk reflex is, "I no longer support that person's right to be topless", that's a Gratification motive paired with a Disgust motive.

The key is to move AWAY from Self-Gratification and Disgust and TOWARDS "Equality".

Self-gratification is something we encourage in our view of women so strongly that it almost becomes invisible- to the point of detriment to BOTH sides, which is what bedrock stone-bottom Feminism exists to address.

Your grandmother should be just as commonplace being topless at the pool as your grandpa. Your sister should be able to take her shirt off when it's scorching out and still be as safe and blasé as your brother. Seeing a mom whip out a tit on the bus to feed her baby should be as commonplace as a milk bottle.

The foundational idea is, "the primary purpose of a woman's body is for women to live, not for others to pick apart for approval".

I want to live in a world where a young woman can go out and get groceries or walk to a friend's house or go swimming without being interrupted every five minutes by the stranger living in her skull demanding that she appear beautiful at every possibly moment

[setulose]

I think I might be about to send a deranged email

[setulose]

Couldn't find an email address so it was instead a deranged form submission

[setulose]

HUGE NEWS

[det395]

[staticbluue]

“People should pass a test before being allowed to have kids.” “Isn’t it scary how white people have this inborn capacity for evil?” “I’ll never pass because males and females have different skull shapes.” “Autistic people have a stronger sense of justice than anyone else.” “I don’t want AMABs in my space because they’re dangerous.” “You shouldn’t have access to hormones if you dress like THAT.” “Anyone who does something that awful isn’t human.” “Some people really shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

This is eugenics. This is phrenology. THIS IS NAZI SHIT, YOU ARE A LEFTIST BUYING INTO NAZI SHIT. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO NAZI SHIT.

[konoko]

[pinnipetal]

It deeply saddens me that "pdf file" has become slang for pedo. Don't you dare disrespect my wife the beautiful portable document format ever again

[dualcasterjay]

and to the children in the notes saying we need this fucking baby talk to get around censorship online; there's been no credible evidence that any site other that YouTube (which will only demonetize your video, ftr) will actually censor or hide content that include words like rape, pedophile, gun, terrorist, etc. etc. and even if we take as a given they were (which, again, they are not), do not fucking comply in advance, you absolute fucking coward. and ESPECIALLY do not comply by altering your real life fucking vocabulary. don't let the technocrats dictate what words you say holy fucking shit dude!!!!!!!!!!!!

[juneberryjammin]

Additional reminder that this kind of self censorship makes it harder for people to block content they do not want to see.

[catasters]

[monchursouls]

Smacka smacka smacka

[greatmountainfloofsquatch]

Enrichment!

[anodymalion]

Also while it’s on my mind, I wanted to write down stuff from a really interesting panel I went to at the con, run by a guy who does anime market research and marketing strategy, about the data behind anime viewership and revenue. I think it’s especially interesting coming on the heels of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards and the discussions I've seen around it (mostly around not being happy with the winners).

I wasn’t taking notes during it, but this is what I remember to the best of my ability; apologies if there are any inaccuracies:

At this point there is more money coming into animanga from overseas markets than from domestic (i.e., Japanese) markets. Companies are aware that for something to get really financially successful, it has to appeal to international audiences.

And most of that overseas money comes from subscriptions to streaming services. Merch / purchase of physical copies / etc make up only a small % of revenue.

Shonen and isekai outperform everything else to a huge extent. So there continue to be lots of these produced.

About half of all recent/current anime views are going to just a few (like, a single digit # of) series. I believe it was: Solo Leveling, Sakamoto Days, Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, MHA, and (I think) JJK. Also Solo Leveling by itself gets far more than any other series.

Quote: "Statistically, if your favorite anime from the last year wasn’t one of these, then no one watched your favorite anime"

Note that these are all shonen (except technically Solo Leveling since the original material is manhwa, not manga, but close enough)

Don’t be surprised that these are the series winning awards, even if you don’t think they hold a candle to [insert your favorite anime here] — there’s just so many more people watching these that it’s virtually impossible for any other series to win.

The only series in the recent top 20 that wasn’t shonen demographic or isekai genre was Apothecary Diaries.

Quote: "Thank god for Apothecary Diaries." lol

Crunchyroll has by far the biggest market share of overseas anime viewership, followed by Netflix to a lesser extent. No other providers come close.

The perception among production companies is that Netflix is where people are getting converted from non-anime viewers into anime viewers, and CR is where established anime viewers go.

Average anime watch time among anime viewers on Netflix is 1.5 hours per month, whereas on CR it’s 1.5 hours per day (?!)

Discovery on Netflix is heavily determined by what the Netflix promotes / actively surfaces to users, and that tends to skew towards particular series — likely reinforces that views are going to already-popular series and that new anime viewers are getting funnelled into certain genres.

Netflix doesn't license all that much anime compared to what they could be licensing, so that further skews things. Also, even if a series is licensed to Netflix, if the Netflix algorithm doesn't actively push it to users, no one on Netflix will watch it.

Rating sites such as MyAnimeList tend to be skewed towards a particular type of fan that is not representative of the actual market, and these ratings are meaningless when it comes to actual success metrics. IIRC he said only a few% of very frequent anime watchers actually rate/review things.

He phrased it as "rating things on MAL is not normal behavior" which made me lol

Anime adapted from light novels tends to perform the best compared to anime adapted from other sources (manga, webcomic, games) and original anime. Adaptations from manga is #2; everything else is wayy behind.

Solo Leveling seems like quite an outlier in this regard since anime adaptations from webcomics tend to be among the least popular

The single feature most correlated with success of an isekai was whether the main female character has big breasts and that’s not a joke.

Quote: "If the main female character has big breasts your anime will likely overperform, and if the main female character is a monster girl your anime will likely underperform. Because things aren’t fair."

At one point he was like yes I really do have to go into serious business meetings and present this anime breast data to client companies.

There’s a perception among audiences that pirating animanga that isn’t legally available in your country will prove there’s a demand for it, and lead to it getting licensed in your country, but this isn’t true. Pirating stats don’t actually have much effect on whether stuff gets licensed — because there’s no reliable conversion from people who pirate -> people who will pay to view legally.

Studios get booked for projects 3-4 years out, so stuff for 2029-2030 is getting booked now. There are a lot of reboots/sequels/franchises/reusing-IPs type projects getting booked, just like what western media studios have been doing, because (as with western media) companies want the reliability of IP that is known to be successful rather than the risk of something new.

He concluded that the quality of storytelling in animanga is completely unrelated to whether it is popular, and that, at the current time, the popularity of a series essentially just comes down to 1. is it a shonen, 2. sheer luck. rip

[lightweightkate]

I’ve been cackling about this for like five minutes now

[uncharacter-istically]

[Video caption:

O-okay, let’s get into this, shall we?

*grumbling* Would you rather work for Lex Luthor or the Joker- *shouting* Lex Luthor, by like, a fucking mile!

Yes, yes, working for Lex Luthor is basically like being an Amazon employee that makes weapons of mass destruction, which is bad. Lex is like Donald Trump mixed with Mark Zuckerberg mixed with Jeffrey fucking Bezos, it’s not a great mix. He does not treat his henchmen well. Their lives still suck, and they are probably monitored on how long they take piss breaks for.

But let’s analyze what working for Lex Luthor is like versus the fucking Joker. With Lex you probably get a dental plan, a health plan, a paycheck, and the guy that you’re fighting really cares about human life. Superman will hit you just long enough to knock you out, so you’re not a treat, so he can stop the problem.

If you work for the Joker, your payment is you’re not fucking dead. You say one wrong thing? Bang. You don’t laugh at his jokes? Bang! You do laugh at his jokes? Bang! You think Joker gives a fuck about a henchman?

Who’s Lex Luthor’s right-hand-man? It’s a woman, you sexist, her name is Mercy, she’s awesome. Who’s Joker’s right-hand-man? Bob? Nah, he’s dead. Harley? Tried to kill her multiple times. Slappy? Who the fuck is Slappy?

The best case scenario of working for the Joker is that you fight the fucking Batman! And that presents its own fucking list of problems. If you stop Superman as a Lex Luthor henchman, Lex’ll be pissed, but he’ll be at least happy that Superman was caught. If you stop Batman as a Joker henchman, you better have a fucking coffin picked out yesterday.

This isn’t a fun hypothetical question, this is a screening technique that the doctors at Arkham use to determine your mental health! There is a right and a wrong answer to this question, and the correct one is Lex fucking Luthor. Thank you for coming to my fucking Ted Talk, have a nice day.

End caption.]

[loveitorreblogit]

Bitch neither I work for Wayne Industries, they got better offers than work these clowns:

[gandalfsbignaturals]

batmans secret special attack is offering all of his enemys henchmen a living wage and guaranteed healthcare

[yffresbeard]

i think it is important to recognize the ways in which your favorite thing sucks. i think it keeps u normal

[rabbithaver]

prev im so sorry to put you on blast like this but please know this had me in hysterics

[athenagray]

“So... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:

It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.

You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.

Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.

Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%

During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.

When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.

You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.

You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.

If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.

Please feel free to share this.

And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.

And no, ivermectin will not help this at all.”

[ravioliraz]

Well, OP was very much correct!

[hunter-rodrigez]

So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

[these-violet-delights-fic]

People love simple, extremely practical things. I hope you win!