#how to start a facebook group

[quasi-normalcy]

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[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

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[radicallicious]

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[evilrry]

can i just say i Did have a full jonas brothers breakdown last night bc i realized how special it is and how lucky i am to be able to travel and see them in other cities with friends STILL like obv i’m doing this for current me but 12,13,14 year old me wouldn’t in a million years believe that what i’m doing now is possible and it’s just so insane to me

[bloomingonionbitch]

update: brought Grover, Sprocket, and my neighbor Isaac with me in the back seats of my Fit.

met inside Albertson's and the dude was like, "Oh! Were you hiding from me???"

BRO JESUS CHRIST THIS IS NOT HOW WE TALK TO OTHER PEOPLE

after the transaction, i contemplated the ripeness of cantaloupes until he left.

[claratyler]

hi i have a question about your degree. i have a mandatory music technology course and it involves math and physics. nothing too difficult but still kind of stressful when combined with my regular course load. did you ever have to take a class like this and if so did you end up liking it

a few months ago i dabbled in processing, which is actual coding, in a "Music and Math" class where we saw Actual Math (statistical models and the like) and i really enjoyed it, but this was by no means an obligatory course, i actually signed up for this outside of my uni. I promise you won't see anything like this in most mandatory modules

i did take a mandatory music production class which i was pretty bad at and i hated it but basic audio editing skills like fixing the eq or things like that are, and i cannot stress this enough, essential

i also took another mandatory-for-composers electronic music class which was more of a musique concrete approach. we also tried to digitally simulate real-instrument timbres. I was TERRIBLE at this btw. but as with the music production class, there really wasnt much direct math or physics involved. I dont think you should worry about that too much, in music courses, teacher's aren't likely to assume that we have any physics or math skills! just dont be afraid to ask any question you have, i promise you other students will be silently thankful someone was brave enough to ask :)

[slow-burn-sally]

Someone in an autism facebook group I'm in just asked "How am I supposed to earn enough to make a living without burning out?"

Someone replied: "You're not. Even neurotypicals can't right now in the system designed for them. We're the canaries in the coalmine. When we start failing, they know something is wrong."

[hellyeahsickaf]

I found an extremely dope disability survival guide for those who are homebound, bedbound, in need of disability accommodations, or would otherwise like resources for how to manage your life as a disabled person. (Link is safe)

It has some great articles and resources and while written by people with ME/CFS, it keeps all disabilities in mind. A lot of it is specific to the USA but even if you're from somewhere else, there are many guides that can still help you. Some really good ones are:

How to live a great disabled life- A guide full of resources to make your life easier and probably the best place to start (including links to some of the below resources). Everything from applying for good quality affordable housing to getting free transportation, affordable medication, how to get enough food stamps, how to get a free phone that doesn't suck, how to find housemates and caregivers, how to be homebound, support groups and Facebook pages (including for specific illnesses), how to help with social change from home, and so many more.

Turning a "no" into a "yes"- A guide on what to say when denied for disability aid/accommodations of many types, particularly over the phone. "Never take no for an answer over the phone. If you have not been turned down in writing, you have not been turned down. Period."

How to be poor in America- A very expansive and helpful guide including things from a directory to find your nearest food bank to resources for getting free home modifications, how to get cheap or free eye and dental care, extremely cheap internet, and financial assistance with vet bills

How to be homebound- This is pretty helpful even if you're not homebound. It includes guides on how to save spoons, getting free and low cost transportation, disability resources in your area, home meals, how to have fun/keep busy while in bed, and a severe bedbound activity master list which includes a link to an audio version of the list on Soundcloud

Master List of Disability Accommodation Letters For Housing- Guides on how to request accommodations and housing as well as your rights, laws, and prewritten sample letters to help you get whatever you need. Includes information on how to request additional bedrooms, stop evictions, request meetings via phone, mail, and email if you can't in person, what you can do if a request is denied, and many other helpful guides

Special Laws to Help Domestic Violence Survivors (Vouchers & Low Income Housing)- Protections, laws, and housing rights for survivors of DV (any gender), and how to get support and protection under the VAWA laws to help you and/or loved ones receive housing and assistance

Dealing With Debt & Disability- Information to assist with debt including student loans, medical debt, how to deal with debt collectors as well as an article with a step by step guide that helped the author cut her overwhelming medical bills by 80%!

There are so many more articles, guides, and tools here that have helped a lot of people. And there are a lot of rights, resources, and protections that people don't know they have and guides that can help you manage your life as a disabled person regardless of income, energy levels, and other factors.

Please boost!

[thehmn]

Does it seem weird that people treat cats like they’re wild animals to anyone else? And by that I don’t mean people expect cats to survive on their own in the wild. I mean people act like pet cats who have owners are wild animals that the owners aren’t responsible for. And I’m not talking about cat owners specifically. A lot of people who doesn’t have any pets at all act like cats are wild animals (which might be why so many people treat them like wild animals that can be hurt with no consequences)

I never thought about that until a few years ago when someone in the town Facebook group asked who owned a cat that kept jumping in through his windows. It was summer so he couldn’t keep his windows closed (we don’t use air conditioning in this country) and he had a terrible allergy to cats so it was legit dangerous for him to have a cat running around his house.

People started offering solutions like “buy this spray that deters cats” and “you can buy this rolling thing for the top of your fence” but his response was “Okay but why am I expected to spend all this money to keep someone’s pet out? Who owns this cat!?” When he didn’t get an answer he eventually got a friend to pick the cat up when it was in his house and he drove it to a shelter, and informed the Facebook group which shelter. Suddenly the owner responded, angry that he’d do such a thing! Getting the cat back would cost money! But the guy was like where the fuck were you when I asked who the cat belonged to!? I was trying to avoid this!

I was honestly surprised by how many people were on the side of the cat’s owner. Another cat owner on our street isn’t responsible enough to keep her cat indoors but responsible enough to at least buy stuff for other people if her cats bother them. She practically have a small stach of cat deterrent spray she hands out to the neighbors who doesn’t want cats in their garden.

The whole thing really made me realize how strange it is that cats are the only pets where we expect other people to spend their money on building fences to keep them out instead of the owners trying to keep them in, as if they were wild animals with no owner to look after them.

[dmmwrites]

Ya still gotta write it.

Click to visit.http://www.facebook.com/groups/letswritealready Do you feel this way?Wouldn’t it be great if you could just snap your fingers and BAM, your book is done?Well, with Let’s Write Already, you will totally do just that! I’m totally kidding! You still have to write the book. BUT, if you’d like to be in a group of like-minded people who dream of being writers and who actively encourage…

[smellslikebot]

how to keep following people when a major social platform implodes

(...and you don't want to join 20 new websites)

First, get an RSS reader*-- here are some free options:

Desktop: Feedbro (browser extension), Fraidycat** (browser extension/web), Thunderbird, Dreamwidth (web)

Android: Feeder

iOS/Mac: NetNewsWire

You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.

Some feed URLs for social media/other sites:

Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)

Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public

Mastodon: Use instance.url/@­username.rss

Deviantart: Info here

Spacehey: Info here

Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="

Reddit: Info here

Lemmy: At the top of a community's main page, there's a small RSS link next to where you sort posts/comments.

Some additions thanks to @innumerablewounds:

Dreamwidth: https://username.dreamwidth.org/rss (users can opt out of this).

Ao3: Tags have an "RSS Feed" button.

Bluesky: Add /rss to the end of a URL.

Neocities: https://neocities.org/site/username.rss

Sites that won't work all that great:

Twitter: Feedbro and Fraidycat** may be able to use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) Public Nitter instances are dead/dying, and Twitter is now very hostile to pretty much anything that makes it easy to generate an RSS feed. For popular accounts, try this workaround using Google News...?

Instagram: Feedbro may be able to use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Check Feedbro's "scan interval" setting-- you could be rate limited or temporarily IP banned from Instagram if it makes requests too often!

Facebook: Feedbro may be able to use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs, but see the warnings for Instagram.

Threads: Come on.

Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).

*You can set up your subscriptions in one reader and import them into another by exporting an OPML file. **Fraidycat's intended use is following a lot of people across different sites, so it's well-suited for this post and I'd recommend keeping an eye on it-- but I didn't recommend it initially because I had some issues with it, and it hasn't been updated in a while. The last time I used it, it didn't have a setting to change how often it makes requests to websites, causing me to get IP banned from Twitter and Instagram...

[kedreeva]

Okay so, I don't think I've spoken of the saga here yet but! Gather round. I shall tell you a long story about the bird I just acquired and why she is VERY IMPORTANT.

At the beginning of last fall, I started looking into quail genetics a little more, because I got tired of not being able to sex my Celadon quail by their feathers. Originally I thought I could kill 2 birds (ok maybe more) with 1 stone and order nice jumbo wild type (which MANY places advertised as wild type jumbo) hatching eggs, and this would help me put some size on the Celadons (jumbo) while also making them feather sexable (wild type). Perfect!

But then I come to find out that pretty much all jumbo lines are jumbo BROWNS, as in they all have the sex linked brown (SLB) gene. So, I was a little confused and a LOT annoyed because I wanted to work specifically with the wild type color/pattern. No mutations just straight, plain wild type.

And EVERYWHERE I looked - major production hatcheries, private breeders through websites, Facebook groups, local swaps, craigslist, e v e r y w h e r e -

People ONLY had SLB.

This spring I came across a video showing about the differences between SLB and wild type and I figured if the person who made it can tell, maybe she will have some. So I looked her up (not in a stalker way, her farm name was stamped on the video and took me to the website), and what luck! She was in Michigan! Upper Michigan, so still a hike, but not California, y'know?

So I shot her an email and explained that I was looking for WT and that her site said she bred them and that people could do local pickup. She responded yeah she's totally got a bunch! And I said great, I'm also in Michigan, albeit far away, but I don't mind driving 7+ hours each way, because I really need actual, trusted WT for sure birds for my celadon project, can I come pick them up?

Cue the most frankly bizarre email chain in my short life. As soon as I mentioned that I was going to drive, or perhaps that I had a genetics plan in place, she got super sketchy and started saying how she hadn't really paid as close attention to SLB vs. WT, that it mattered less than she thought it would when she started, that I shouldn't focus on that either, and also that "fawn celadon is practically unheard of" in the hobby and "you should focus on a clean Tibetan because it's hard to find without roux in it) implying that I should concentrate on those things instead. And concluded by telling me if I really want WT, to contact this other person (why happens to be someone I can't stand). It all sounded VERY much like she didn't have wild type males, after all, and had thought I didn't know the difference so it wouldn't actually matter. But, it does. It actually matters a lot to me.

So I messaged back to say, well, I don't want to do any of those things, I specifically want to work with this set of genetics and you said you have them so I shouldn't have to go to anyone else??

And then she went radio silent for a week. I kind of figured I'd called a bluff, and that she was one of dozens of people I'd contacted who'd said they had WT only to find out they had SLB. I get that it's difficult to see the difference, but this particular person was the president of the American Coturnix Breeders Association or whatever (found out it's actually just a club formed by her and her friends a year ago, so not as impressive as it sounds, considering they don't actually DO anything- no putting on shows, no newsletters, no certifications, no public breeder directory, no finished SOP, nada), so I kind of expected she should know what she's talking about, if anyone does.

Eventually, after a week, she responded that she had been judging at a county fair, but she had a few heterozygous males (WT het roux, which is fine) and she could set a hatch for me for more if I wanted to come at the end of the month, but she's in WI now, not MI. I said sure, since where she was in WI was actually closer than where she'd been in the UP, and we arranged date/time.

The day of, my neighbor friend, Jude, comes with me for company/keeping me awake through the 15 hours driving round trip. It's a pleasant enough drive. We arrived at a cutesy little house on the edge of town that looks like anyone's house in a neighborhood, with a spacious lawn. The person meets us and takes me around the side of the house to a 6x6x1.5 or so chicken tractor, where she's got some male coturnix. She pulls the available males for me to look through and... fam, they ALL looked SLB, to me.

Now, she swore to me up and down that they couldn't be anything except WT het for roux, because of the way she is breeding them. But I've put these birds next to my SLB males and if I didn't have my males banded, I would not ever have told the difference between them. I still picked up 4 of them, because I will give it a go- worst case, I can produce plain Roux hens/plain Roux males for use in breeding later, best case they do actually produce WT hens and they just LOOK SLB and I have to figure out what the differences are. I don't want to leave without seeing her hens, which she has told me are all WT (which is why the males HAVE to be het for it), and she takes me back. Now the hens, the hens are easy to see the difference. White bellies first of all, but the chest feathers are also wildly different! The shafts are white, the dot around the shaft is dark, ringed in red, ringed in white. On an SLB, the shafts aren't white, it's just a black dot surrounded in a red feather, and the belly is all red/buff/cream, not white.

This is what an SLB hen looks like:

So I take a nice long look to memorize the color, and thank her for showing me and meeting, and we head back home.

I do fecals when I get home because all of the males are VERY thin, no meat on them at all, and since she said she'd been feeding Purina (garbage for fowl feeds), I figured that was why, but no- HUGE coccidia loads in all of them. So I treated them and got them on a better feed. They immediately began putting on meat, and they're find now.

The rest of this summer, I have spent going to local bird swaps and inspecting all of the quail I could find, hoping to find one (1) actual wild-type phenotype bird. Hundreds and hundreds of birds, I have pawed through them all, being super obnoxious to the owners I'm sure, holding and inspecting males. I found ONE suspected WT male (and this is a HUGE "suspected," he could very well be SLB with low red expression). I compared him when I got home and I'm doubting myself still, so I don't know if I will ever actually pair him with the SLB hens or if I'll just wait til I have a roux set.

Regardless, it's been a dry season for getting what I want. It's been a dry YEAR. Yesterday was another swap and more hundreds of quail and me pawing through all of them.

Until.

My eyes landed upon.... her.

If you've only lived in an area that has american crows and not ravens, you find yourself wondering if crows are ravens. You see a big crow and you think wow! maybe that is a raven! It could be a crow, but it's seems bigger so maybe it's a raven. But, if you take a trip to a place with ravens, and you see one for the first time, you realize that there is no question, when you see a raven. When you see a raven in person, there's no question and not only is there no question, you wonder how you could ever have thought a crow was a raven. It's laughable, while looking at the raven.

That's how finding this bird felt. I'd been picking up every SLB hen and going maybe this is actually WT? It could be SLB but maybe it's WT? But the second I laid eyes on her in the middle of a pack of SLB with some mixed colors, I knew I was looking at WT hen, and I can't imagine how I ever thought maybe an SLB hen was WT.

Here's a better photo of her chest and belly (she's beat UP from her previous home, the back of her head and most of her rump are plucked clean from males). You can see the white shafts and the white belly.

And some other pics of her, showing the grey-brown on her side and back- VERY different than the SLB hens

I can't express how stoked I am about this bird. This is the first time after a LOT of effort and time, that I have felt confident I am holding the bird I want.

She's also the indicator that I have a LOT of work ahead of me.

My end goal is to have birds that look like her, weigh 12-14oz, and lay large, blue eggs. I have birds that lay large, blue eggs, I have birds that weigh 12-14oz live weigh, and now I have at least 1 bird that looks like her, which means I can make more that look like her. The first step is cleaning the color mutations out of the celadon line without losing the celadon eggs. This is going to be a bit of a nightmare, BUT, I have a friend helping me out with getting a few celadons that are either WT or SLB (I'm guessing SLB all things considered) to start the work with. I will work over the winter to get a few more actual WT birds here, and to start crossing out the celadons with the SLB jumbos to clean out the other feather color mutations. Once I'm down to just SLB and celadon for mutations, I can clean the SLB out with the WT and roux lines.

This project will likely take me a good 2 years, maybe 3, to complete and then test breed to ensure I haven't lost the celadon gene and I don't have any hidden recessives lingering about. But just having the fucking materials to do it all on hand now is a huge step forward from where I was when I decided to start the project.

[reasonsforhope]

"Irish conservationists report that the magnificent osprey has successfully bred in the wilds of the Emerald Isle for the first time in almost 250 years.

Worldwide, ospreys are doing great—listed as “Least Concern” by the IUCN who add they are increasing in population. However their massive brown and white wings have been absent from Irish skies for two centuries after being hunted to extinction.

The last recorded osprey to nest in Ireland was found in 1779, writes the Ireland-based conservation group Golden Eagle Trust on Facebook.

Visiting ospreys sometimes stop on the island to rest, but almost since the signing of the US Declaration of Independence, no pair has ever deemed it a safe environment to raise young.

A nesting pair (ospreys mate for life) was discovered by experienced birdwatcher Giles Knight, the Environmental Farming Scheme Advisor with Ulster Wildlife, a conservation non-profit.

“Along with my son Eoin, I have watched the adults return to the same site since 2021, so you can imagine my excitement the moment that I saw three chicks and two adults this year,” said Knight in a statement. “It was a rub-your-eyes, once-in-a-lifetime moment; an absolute highlight of my 30-year wildlife career—like finding long-lost treasure.”

“With at least two of the chicks fledging this season, this is a huge conservation success story and indicates a healthy wetland ecosystem with plenty of suitable habitat and fish to bring this apex predator back to our skies and plunging into the Fermanagh Lakelands. Truly the return of a living countryside!” ...

The old Gaelic name for osprey was “Iascaire Coirneach”, meaning “Tonsured Fisherman”, possibly related to how its black eye band and white crown give it the appearance of the semi-bald tonsure typical of medieval Christian monks, the Golden Eagle Trust wrote on Facebook in a celebratory post.

“Now these birds are back in Ireland and breeding successfully, it is critical that they are left in peace so their numbers can continue to grow by returning year on year to breed,” Knight added in the statement. “We believe and hope that this could be the start of a raptor dynasty.”"

-via Good News Network, August 27, 2023

[hellenhighwater]

Do you just do a ton of, like, scouring buy/sell groups, online marketplaces (ebay? craigslist? FB marketplace?), and online or in-person antique shops?

I'm in the process of buying a house and know I have, like, no furnishings for when/if I manage to pull that off. I really love the idea of reusing older furniture (both for sustainability reasons and because anything "new" in my budget would be, like, prefab stuff that's usually more on the minimalism-side aesthetic-wise), but outside of what's listed above, I'm not even sure to how to start! (Also totally fine if you prefer to keep how you find stuff secret, thanks for reading either way. :) )

Yeah it's like 90% just Facebook marketplace. I have luck at thrift stores for decor items but not furniture, and antique stores are mostly not in the budget. Just start trawling Facebook!

And let people know that you're moving and are looking for furniture. They might not have your style, but if it's free it'll give you something to use while you look for the right thing.

Edit: it's also worth investing in moving gear. Ratchet straps, work gloves, furniture sliders, dollies, scooters, moving blankets, a shoulder dolly, etc. If you're disassembling furniture, always bring a zip lock bag to put screws and stuff in so you don't lose them.

Oh yard sales! Also good. They just don't happen in the winter where I am.

[stuhde]

i had shared what is happening in sudan on a long facebook post last night, but it virtually received almost little to no engagement or shares from the nearly 600 “friends” i have on the site.

this morning, my great-aunt was shot by the soldiers fighting for power, and God forbid, i lose more of my family members before eid this friday.

please read below to understand what is happening and how you can help my country. i hope the tumblr community can show more kindness than the lack of support and advocacy i’ve seen elsewhere.

يا رب اجعل هذا البلد آمناً 🇸🇩

the lack of awareness and advocacy from the African, Arab, and Muslim diaspora and the human rights community has been painful.

while Western media has done little to no coverage of the ongoing conflict in the capital city of my motherland, Sudan, it appears that the rest of the world also partakes in normalizing crimes and violence against SWANA people.

violence and war hurting the SWANA region are NOT ordinary occurrences — no one, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, religion, and gender, should experience the unprecedented amount of violence that harms my two living grandmothers, aunts and uncles, and baby cousins who live in Khartoum.

your decision to ignore reading or educating and discussing with others about what is likely to be a civil war is complicity in viewing SWANA people as individuals who regularly experience conflict and are undeserving of help.

the silence is damaging, and it is up to us as privileged members of the diaspora (or individuals living in the Western world committed to human rights) to support the people of my country and their dream for a stable, democratically elected government.

what is happening in Sudan is a fight that started on April 15 between two competing forces for power — the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — neither groups are representative of the needs of our people. The Sudan Army is loyal to the dictator, Omar Al-Bashir, and the RSF is responsible for the genocide in Darfur.

with both power struggles backed by different Arab and Gulf nations, the two parties have been fighting for power for the last few years. While they worked together to try and end the people’s revolution, they lost. however, they are now in a constant power play of who will get to rule the nation.

this all means that war is NOT a reflection of my country — violence does not represent the SWANA people. Sudan is a nation of beautiful culture, strong women, intellectual and influential Islamic scholars, poets, and youth at the front lines of the revolution. we are a people committed to a region of peace for ourselves and the rest of the Ummah.

my family and the rest of Sudan’s innocent civilians are at the most risk, with many currently without drinking water, food to eat, electricity, and complete blockage to any mosques during the final nights of Ramadan, our holiest month of the year.

i ask that you please keep Sudan and our people in your prayers — donate to the Sudan Red Crescent or a mutual aid GoFund Me, email your representatives if you live in a country that can put pressure on either competing force of power, discuss this with your family and friends, and please do not forget to think about SWANA people — our brothers and sisters in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and many others need our love and support.

الردة_مستحيلة ✊🏾

#KeepEyesOnSudan

[lizardsfromspace]

The speed with which the anti-Haitian hoaxes took off is just unbelievable. It started with one Facebook post *a couple weeks ago*, and in a matter of days it made its way onto the Presidential debate stage, and then into bomb threats that closed schools in Springfield for multiple days

No better sign of how omnipresent it's become than this

From the way it's phrased, you'd think someone died. But no, this is a minor accident with little damage to either car & where no one involved was hurt, which the story tacks on at the end. This is the kind of story that would, normally, be about 5 seconds on the local news: "In other news, a motorist making an illegal turn hit a car carrying two people downtown today. Thankfully, no one was hurt" - if it made the news at all! But bc of a racist campaign of harassment, now minor car accidents that occurred nearly 600 miles away from the publication's office are a national concern. An illegal u-turn can be a national story if the right targeted minority group does it. This obsessive documentation of every crime, no matter how minor or overtly false, done by minorities is not so much giving Der Stürmer as it is literally just the same thing Der Stürmer did