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Oh hi everyone!! My name's Kal and I've been a dogblr lurker for years and years but I'm finally transitioning this blog to be part of the community now that I've adopted my own puppy - meet Oliver, or Ollie for short.

Ollie is a four-month-old Australian Cattle Dog mix (not sure with what) that I adopted from a local rescue in June. I don't know a lot about his backstory, just that he came from a litter of 8 in Iowa that the owners couldn't care for.

He's very much puppy-brained and stubborn as all hell, but we're working on a lot of simple things to make things easier on us both.

I'll be using this blog to chronicle his growth and my thoughts along the way. I'm hoping to introduce him to agility and dock diving when he's ready. I'm so excited to go on this journey with him and share it with you all.

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What kills me about the ace thing is that we used to be really good at that specific thing back in the day, at least. Like, I explicitly learned that labels are for describing you, not the other way around, on AVEN back in the day. I was reading the Venus of Willendork, who was on all the asexuality blog rolls in the late oughts, talking about exactly that journey between an asexual identity and trauma in my early twenties. That theme was a huge part of the asexual community that I grew up with.

I blame the asexuality discourse, frankly, for breaking up the cohesion of asexuality community here and elsewhere—by traumatizing and driving enough people elsewhere that people leave and you don't get long term community members modeling and reinforcing norms any more. Not that all those norms were positive, or that AVEN hadn't calcified badly when I left in 2010 over the poor treatment of its large and vocal nonbinary subcommunity. This stuff is always going to be a matter of discouraging reflexive orthopraxy about category boundaries and helping people express and let go of the toxic shit they've internalized about sex. (The more pressure the person has felt to engage in sex they don't want, the more things tend to fester...) But there used to be more clearly delineated community models for catching that sort of thing and keeping it from hurting other people, I think. The fragmentation of the community in the past decade absolutely can't have helped.

I think asexuality and lesbianism share a lot of intracommunity problems—like the tendency for people with repressed sexual shame to cling to sexual identities that they feel are less “dirty” and then get neurotic about upholding the Party Line when they notice feelings and desires that don’t match the term they use for themself.

Like on one hand I understand why the asexual community has so vociferously rejected the idea that asexuality is the result of trauma—they don’t want to be medicalized and delegitimatized. But. On the other hand. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is and it’s not obvious and it may take many years for the person to really understand their own internalized shame or cultural traumas or repressions or dysmorphias. I think it would generally be a lot better if the asexual community more broadly embraced this with compassion and acceptance instead of as an existential threat.

Similarly, I think the lesbian community needs to get less uptight about the division between lesbians and bisexuals. I don’t even mean in a “bi lesbian” way so much as frustration with the way lesbians will immediately blame other women for men behaving badly. A lesbian expresses any bisexual behavior at all and other lesbians are quick to rip into her for Giving Us A Bad Name and Making Men Think They Are Sexually Entitled To Lesbians.

Like…. it’s normal and value neutral to be wrong about yourself, or to change. Everyone does in some fashion.

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I'm having fun combining patterns again. Four motifs are repeated vertically and four horizontally, so that they form sixteen different squares. Blackwork embroidery on black 14-count Aida.

Pattern here (my site) or here (Etsy).

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I feel like soooo many online platforms give terrible advice about getting a puppy as an employed adult, and it got SO MUCH worse since Covid. Feels like 90% of the advice I see is along the lines of “make sure to take 3 weeks off when you get puppy! Work from home for the first 8 months! Leave them alone NO MORE than 1hr at a time! Don’t crate train until 4 months!” and it’s like. man. I’m not saying you should get a giant guardian breed puppy while working 3 jobs and in med school, but also… at some point, it’s a dog. people have been working full-time and raising happy puppies for decades. it’s fine.

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trump admin is encouraging federal workers to proselytize their religion in the workplace.

we need him more than ever before

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since police k9s came up yesterday they've been on my mind a bit and it is extremely transparent how the very same people who get hysterical about pit bulls think attack dogs used by the police are heckin good boys

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Matilda is an SDIT and gets what I would call an out size level of stimulation, fwiw; Benton is a pet. I work in a computational neuroscience lab.

On an average work day, I get up around 7 to 730am and feed the animals (cats eat upstairs, dogs downstairs). Dogs might get meals in a puzzle toy or in a bowl depending on my level of cope. I do morning chores and pack up to leave. Matilda somewhere in here alerts to med time, which she views with ironclad seriousness. We may or may not play ten minutes of fetch and then I'm either settling into work from home or heading to work from campus. Benton is generally seeking cuddles from anyone he can through this point, once all food is eaten.

If I'm on campus, Matilda walks about a mile from my car to my office with me in heel position. Then she is expected to nap quietly in my office for most of the day, barring anything she needs to alert to. Matilda is not allowed on the same floor as the mice, so if I have meetings she is usually napping in my office couch by herself.

Benton spends his day napping. He might go out and putter around in the yard looking for mice in our neighbor's yard. After work, Matilda usually gets 2-3 sessions of fetch lasting from ten minutes to two hours, depending on how much I feel like being outside. She is expected to deal if the weather makes these fetch sessions impossible. I've been trying to work in more small training sessions throughout the evenings lately, so she might get that.

On a normal week, we might travel to a Sniffspot to give the dogs some time in a new area. We might not, too. Sometimes dogs get left alone for up to 8h and are expected to cope. It's worth noting that I believe dogs should be sleeping about 16h per day and that I want them to be able to self regulate shit the remaining 8, which means that I rest my dogs more than Matilda in particulatar would really like me to do. On the other hand, Matilda at her preferred level of exercise is exhausted and not capable of focusing on much for long, so I don't really feel bad about that policy.

I have a question for all of dogblr.

What does an average week, day by day, look like for you and your dogs?

I feel like the internet is really scewing what daily life looks like for most people and I really would love to know what it actually looks like.

I never feel like I'm doing enough.

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“You don’t know whether people relate to the breakfast program, because you’ve never fed anybody. You don’t know anything about the free health clinic because you never asked anybody. You don’t know anything about the good that a gun does you, because you never tried one. And we say that if you was born and if you said you didn’t like pears and you never tasted pears, you’d have to be a liar. You don’t know whether you like pears, but you can’t claim that you don’t like pears. The only way that anybody can tell you the taste of a pear is if he himself has tasted it. That’s the only way. That’s the objective reality. That’s what the Black Panther Party deals with. We’re not metaphysicians, we’re not idealists, we’re dialectical materialists. And we deal with what reality is, whether we like it or not.”

— Fred Hampton speaking about how you must practice your theory, or else it’s irrelevant, 1969.

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I will never be over how incredibly racist breed bans are. The language used, the way they are enforced and policed, the class divide on who can own these dogs and who can't....the history behind it all of it boils down to racism and very specifically anti black racism. They don't work because they aren't meant to stop pit bull attacks, they're a form of racism. In some ways one of the most insidious ways racism shows itself in laws, this kind of association game that drags something as common and innocent as a dog into structural racism, all in the name of safety (for who? who does and doesn't get to own a dog? what makes a dog truly a "dangerous breed"? what markers are we deciding that with? these are important questions to ask!)

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Have you seen nilered's video about making coffee from scratch?

It's euhhh..... interesting....

Oh god what did he do now kfjdslkjf

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looking for opinions both from americans and non-americans: what would you consider to be the big 4 american cities in terms of like, vibes-based cultural impact?

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The City of Atlanta Georgia has decided to demolish the research and conservation center of the Amphibian Foundation. This organization works tirelessly to conserve the Frogs, Toads, Salamanders, Newts, and other amphibians in the United States. In addition, they provide key education for herpetologists on the care, conservation, and preservation of reptiles and amphibians.

This emergency need is compounded by the government mass firing of conservation officials and the pulling of funds from many of the country's conservation organizations.

If you can help please donate here:

Key points from the Amphibian Foundation.

Our building will be demolished in 2026, and we need to identify a new location (or locations) for 7 labs and over 1,000 animals, many of which are endangered and part of critical conservation programs.

We've identified a new location for most of AF, but not our research and conservation programs. We have an amazing lead, but it's not confirmed yet.

Our first fundraising project is the AF Emergency Fund as the minimum cost estimates to move this many labs and animals safely is $50,000. (It costs about 50 USD per animal to move them)

If you can't donate.. please share... here.. and everywhere else.

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The other reason I'm generally annoyed with the "Abolish X" crowd who actually DO mean "abolish X" and not a watered-down version is that ime they very rarely have fully thought out the implications of what they're demanding and then get angry when other people ask about it.

"Family abolition means completely removing legal ties for family units and allowing all children the choice of where they live" okay. So if I see a three-year-old throwing a fit because she doesn't want to leave the park, and I go over and tell her if she comes home with me she can stay as long as she likes and then we'll get McDonald's on the way home, that three-year-old should have the ability to make that decision? The parent or guardian has no legal recourse to stop me from taking her? Cause if the answer's no, that's not abolition, that's reform baby!

"I'm done talking about what we'll do with rapists and murderers after we abolish prisons, it's all anybody ever wants to talk about!" Well yeah man! 98% of people just interpreted your words as "we're going to let murderers roam around killing people at will"! You need to explain very clearly what plans you have that will stop them that aren't incarceration or you're not going to make any headway! And if your answer involves any form of "well of course SOME people can't be allowed total freedom" - that's not abolition, that's reform baby!

I'm not even gonna touch the number of people who think we should abolish the police and replace them with what are essentially roaming squads of vigilantes dispensing "community justice", whatever the fuck that means.

Like these aren't "gotcha" questions, they're legitimate problems you're going to have to contend with. And if you wave away all these questions with "you're just making up ridiculous scenarios" and "we'll think of something to fix that once we destroy the current system", then yeah actually, I DO think you care more about sounding radical than about making any kind of change.

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She is technically trained to pick up a small braided paracord tab on my pill box because I do not want her opening the containers, so she seems to have decided that any smallish softish object will do for now. Some of her recent incorrect picks over the past month as we work on the skill:

my wallet

my keys

clean puppy pad

many small hanks of paracord

a beaded earring in progress

the martingale I'm braiding for her in progress

socks

That's okay, it's a work in progress. We're shaping the thing she's looking for, and I am not a full time dog trainer, so it's going to take a little longer than it would if I wasn't also doing my very different regular job.

I do admit, having my wallet thrown at me is pretty funny though.

I have been tired and run-down and not posting as much, so have a nonexhaustive list of small things Matilda has done recently of which I am extremely proud:

able to lie quietly in vet waiting room and ignore a small poodle sitting about ten feet away who desperately wanted to say hello and whined softly about it the whole time, with bonus extra interested sniffing at the air where he'd been (exciting because Matilda's dog reactivity seems to be largely fear-based, and showing any interest socially in another dog is a big positive change)

now spontaneously alerts to hitches in breathing that indicate that grounding is warranted

has not turned a hair at having to walk through major construction every time we go to work all summer, even giant backhoe destroying street six feet away from us

spontaneously alerts to meds at correct times only when my phone was left in the car or ran out of juice

has learned to ask politely to go outside rather than barking at full volume; this morning, spontaneously woke me up with gentle whoofs

working on "find my pills" task is ongoing, but the enthusiasm with which she hurls them at me is well worth the small snags when she decides she would like to throw other things at me instead

I'm very proud of her ridiculousness, even if I've been pretty banged up in the last six months.

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YEP

Y'all.

Y'all.

What the fuck.

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He what now.

Y'all.

Y'all.

What the fuck.

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I let myself rest and now I'm daydreaming about academia and academic research and writing again