babycharmander

[babycharmander]

no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder

[babycharmander]

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[babycharmander]

New none pizza left beef just dropped

[babycharmander]

🍏

[babycharmander]

my art album based on tetris attack!

[babycharmander]

i made a tiny clay pyro ^_^

[babycharmander]

if you make an OC that you are genuinely insane over, like you are obsessed with this freak and can't stop thinking about them, then it will rub off on other people. the virus spreads

[babycharmander]

FURRY SHOES!?!? (artist moxuan zhang)

If you were a furry which of thies shoes would you wear?

[babycharmander]

I noticed that their dynamics were so similar… what if they swapped for a bit

As a treat (For Swansea and Daisuke) and a punishment (For Stan and Soos, but also me, because that shit hurted)

Also, bonus doodle under the cut but be wary of Mouthwashing Spoilers!

[babycharmander]

What is with the recent trend of CG animals in movies being stripped of all expression and body language, even expressions and body language that are NATURAL for animals to have.

Like is this higher ups going “uhhhmmmmm why is that cat so expressive???? this isn’t a CARTOON. animals don’t have EMOTIONS.”

Or what??? What is this?

[babycharmander]

finally how to train your dragon can shed its childish character design and lighting and evolve to instead have the bold and engaging art direction of a car insurance ad

[babycharmander]

I reblogged a comic the other day about a doctor watching House, MD and diagnosing toxoplasmosis, tagging it with "you're more likely to get toxoplasmosis from a salad than a cat". There's a story behind that.

I used to work in the kennel at a vet clinic. One day one of the vet techs came into the kennel in a tearing hurry, handed me two cat carriers, and said, "Find a cage for these two. Don't know how long, but you can put them together." And then she left.

This was not how that was supposed to happen. I had no cage cards--no names, no feeding instructions, no health information--they weren't on the schedule, and techs didn't usually intake boarders. Medical cases had a separate kennel, so a tech shouldn't be bringing me an animal in during office visit hours. But I had a cage in the cat room, so I tucked them in--two adult females, very friendly, apparently healthy.

Half an hour later the tech came back--with cage cards--and said, "It's okay, they're staying overnight and going home tomorrow." She slumped against the kennel wall and told the cats' story.

They had been brought to the clinic to be euthanized, to die.

These healthy, friendly, beloved cats had been brought in to be killed, because a woman's doctor, her obstetrician, had told her that they had killed her unborn baby. He told her if she ever wanted a child she had to get rid of the cats. He told her they should be euthanized before they killed any other woman's unborn child.

He said, with no evidence, that they had toxoplasmosis. He said that toxoplasmosis caused her miscarriage.

The woman was distraught. She had just lost her baby, she was dealing with the hormonal changes of the pregnancy loss, and now she had to euthanize her beloved cats. Fortunately no vet I've ever worked for will euthanize healthy animals brought in by a sobbing client without asking why!

The vet spent almost an hour talking to the woman, educating her on toxoplasmosis, telling her all the reasons her doctor was wrong.

Not all cats have toxoplasmosis, and even when they do they only shed the oocytes in their feces--they're only infectious--for the first few weeks. Most cats are infected as kittens and are no longer infectious as adults. According to Wikipedia, "Numerous studies have shown living in a household with a cat is not a significant risk factor for T. gondii infection,[61][63][64] though living with several kittens has some significance.[65]"

Most people get toxoplasmosis from raw vegetables, especially salad greens that grow close to the soil and are hard to clean. Raw or rare meat, raw seafood, and unpasteurized milk are also a risk.

Toxoplasmosis can be a soil-borne disease from feces in the soil. Gardening is a greater risk than cat cohabitation.

Toxoplasmosis infection is dangerous to the fetus in pregnancy, yes, causing birth defects and miscarriages. But only the first time the person is infected. If this this woman had lost her first pregnancy to toxoplasmosis--and the vet said it really didn't fit the symptoms--she would be at low risk in a subsequent pregnancy.

So basically the vet told the woman that 1) her miscarriage probably wasn't toxoplasmosis, 2) even if it was, she probably didn't get it from her cats, 3) even if her cats had given her toxoplasmosis, they weren't infectious anymore.

The woman kept her cats and got a new obstetrician.

Human doctors get a few lectures on zoonotic diseases--diseases transmitted from animals to humans or vice versa. Veterinarians get semesters. If a doctor ever tells you your animals have given you a disease, get a second opinion from your vet!

[babycharmander]

A meeting of dragons.

[babycharmander]

A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

[babycharmander]

The "ace discourse" never actually died. People just got more subtle about it.

Instead they just hope people ignore the pages and pages of aphobic posts from a few years ago on their blog and give people a shifty non-answer when asked about their current opinions.

Or they just make a lot of jokes that happen to be at the expense of aspecs and get dodgy when people ask them about their actual opinions on aspecs.

Or they're like, "I don't hate asexuals or aromantics!! I have a lot of aroace friends who of course never try to butt into LGBT affairs, or try to score oppression points by making stuff up! They're great allies!"

Or they say, "Of course I think asexuals and aromantics are queer!! But those sex- and/or romance-repulsed ones are sooooo annoying."

But we can always see it. We can tell you don't really support us, no matter how funny or fake you try to be about it.

[babycharmander]

I’m a big fan of people finding a spiritual or religious practice that works for them but if you’re required to pay money to a particular person or buy a certain thing regularly from a certain place I don’t think that’s a spiritual practice. You may have been scammed.

[babycharmander]

stan & shifty