#it's a vent !! it's a long vent

[leafyeyes417]

Delivery

Danny really didn’t like the bowing and formality of being the Ghost King. Yes he had a lot of power but as long as you were decent he didn’t feel the need to exercise it. So Danny decided to disguise himself. His choice, a messenger.

He used to have only two forms, his human side and ghost side. Now he has four. A Royal form and his messenger form. His normal ghost form could now could be considered his comfy form, which he uses when he’s just hanging as friends.

Anyway what started the whole messenger thing was when he found out there was an entire room full of paperwork just relating to one guy. Like good for him in his Soul Evasion but not for the poor Ghost King. So he decided to return to sender.

Once in disguise (Thank you minor shapeshifting), he used a portal to get to the guys vicinity. Which happened to be in the middle of a Justice League meeting. Great. Okay Danny you got the bored look down, just do your supposed job.

“I’m looking for a…” he checks a clipboard he pulled out of nowhere. “John Constantine.”

He hears a curse to his left and glances over. Yep that’s the guy. Someone asks, “Why are you looking for him?”

Danny smiles blandly. “I need to deliver a package. It is quite large though so I will need a…” He glances at the clipboard again. “12 by 24 by 30 foot room to place it in.”

Constantine blinks confused. “But I didn’t order anything? Especially not from one of your kind.”

Danny nodded. “Yes this is a late return order I’m afraid. We finally got through some of the back log.”

Perturbed Constantine agreed and Danny was led to a place in the Watchtower after getting a signature for confirmation of delivery. Checking that the measurements were correct, Danny opened the portal and with a whomp the piles of paperwork landed in the room. Impressively none of the towers of paper toppled over, only swaying a little.

The heroes that had followed out of curiosity gaped. Constantine sputtered out a, “What the ‘ell is all this?!”

Danny gave a toothy smile. “This? This is all paperwork tied to you. The Ghost King decided that if you wanted to create so much paperwork then you can be the one to fill it out.” Ripping open another portal Danny waved and said his goodbyes. “Well my job is done. Bye!”

Once back in his keep he couldn’t keep himself from breaking out into laughter. It was so worth it to play messenger boy for that.

Later (not really a connected scene but had to share):

Danny floated into one of the Demon Princes receiving rooms. Constantine had gone through some of the paperwork and he needed to deliver the finished copies. Turns out being a messenger gave him a lot of wiggle room in going to new locations.

As Ghost King he would need to ask permission, get a bunch of gifts, etc etc. Messengers just needed a ‘hey I’m neutral and temporarily entering your territory’ and as long as Danny stayed out of restricted areas he had basically free rein.

Upon getting the sigil of confirmation from the Demon Prince he handed him the papers. The Demon frowned as he started reading and then snarled. “What is this?! That human’s soul was mine so why do I suddenly not have full claim?”

Danny shrugged. “I’m just the messenger but at a guess, the guy took advantage of the fact the bureaucracy was back logged and got some more deals. Heard the Ghost King is having him work through his own paperwork as punishment for making so much.”

Snarling and grumbling, the Demon shooed him away. He smirked. It was fun to see everyone react upon receiving bad news.

[honeypleasejustkillme]

i thought i was at my lowest but holy shit it gets lower

[molabuddy]

a little personal response / tribute to "here's the life i've always longed for" by Anna Haifisch. the original means so much to me, and even though it's hard, I feel like every day i'm making more steps toward finally being on the other side of that fence <:)

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[corvid-canidae-art]

Vent comic abt being autistic and a therian

[tacc0yak1]

vanrouge family you’ll forever be dear to me 💔

idea that has been sitting in my drafts ever since i read that chapter wherein Silver mentions Lilia would take pictures of them together over the years and that got my heart like AUEUEUEUE THAT’S SO CUTE 😭 ( me likes to think mama zigvolt introduced it to them and ever since, lilia got that tradition ‘til he ran out of polaroid film lmao

-

here’s a vers. without mama bekky

[meltinii]

girl get upp

[disformer]

ITS BEEN SO LONG!!! Posting what I’ve finished from the Texaid comic I’d been chipping away at in my free time :,)

Atm i’m not sure if id be comfortable finishing this or posting the unfinished pages, and i’ll go into why a bit more under the cut, but for everyone who waited… thank you, you are so patient like the cobra 🥺🫶

Texaid is so beloved and important to me, and i don’t think that’s news to anyone who’s followed me for any length of time. I always come back to them, and even leaving a project like this on hiatus for so long I still felt pretty comfortable leaving this on the burner bc I knew I’d be back.

And with my work sometimes I do have to take fandom hiatus breaks! But I got a slightly confused dm from a friend at one point that said ‘hey man, did you know everyone’s crediting your designs to someone else in the fandom’ and ???? it was true!

And I know how obnoxious it is to see an artist get on their diva shit and claim design elements, but it’s important to know that, at the time, I was one of like three people posting texaid, and the other two were Japanese artists on twitter.

My redesign has my fingerprints all over it; those big circular rotaries on his shoulders? A mistake! I got my references mixed up at one point and just kept rolling with it because it was funny! His pointy teeth and nose and boots and fingers and eyebrows? I’m bad at squares! I was doing everything in my power to avoid drawing squares!

And people have asked if they can use my redesigns in their own au’s in the past, and i’ve always said no (especially in regards to texaid) and that’s because they’re personal to me. My vision of Texaid is something I projected a lot of my own personal romantic past onto, they were my first nsfw art, my first real emotional outlet after getting kicked out of home for being trans and was starving in a flop basement. Vortex’s design was cooked up out of the primordial soup of my brain at a time when I was at my most raw. Texaid doesn’t belong to me, but i redesigned them for a reason, and that was to distinguish the fact I was representing something personal.

So to come back to the fandom and see my boys and the dynamic i drew with the serial numbers filed off, with zero acknowledgement of my influence or even crediting another artist entirely… I feel really bloody hurt. Especially after watching the way this fandom viciously ran off an artist of colour for much less prolific art theft.

It kind of feels like y’all don’t care as long as you like the content. And idk if i want to keep posting in a space like that, where my niche vent art gets repackaged into something more marketable, and I go unacknowledged.

So yeah, might be the last time I post my texaid stuff publicly! If they’re that important to me and I get this upset when theyre cribbed, and if i feel like yall can’t rly be trusted, then Im just gonna keep it in dms with besties. Thanks for hearing me out xoxox

[dumplingsjinson]

List of “sweet and intimate actions which make me go feral and have me folding like a folding chair” prompts 

Character B carding their fingers through Character A’s hair and playing with the strands.

Character B peeling back the neck of Character A’s turtle neck sweater to trail gentle kisses down their neck. (This!! It is so hot, and it's everything I didn't know I needed until now, and I cannot stop thinking about it wlkfnlkwe)

Character B placing their arm around Character A’s waist while in public, resting their chin on Character A’s shoulder. “Hello,” they say in a teasing tone as Character A tries to grab ahold of their hand to keep it there but fails a few times before successfully doing so. 

Leaning against each other while in public.

Spooning and back hugs.

Character B letting Character A rest their head on their chest; lets them listen to their heart beat. 

Character B whispering sweet nothings into Character A’s ear.

Character B checking in on Character A to make sure they’re comfortable and okay with the way things are going; to make sure they’re not being too much. “You’re not,” Character A would reassure, repositioning themselves to get closer to Character B.

Just cuddles and snuggles in general.

Neck kisses.

Kisses littered all over the face. (!!! It's one thing to read about it and one thing to experience it wlejbfewljn)

Character B tucking Character A’s head under their chin while they’re cuddling.

Character B nuzzling their neck and breathing in Character A’s scent/fragrance, and commenting on how nice they smell.

Character B making sure Character A gets home safe by driving them home.

Character A telling Character B to message them when they get back home safe, and once Character B gets home, they follow through by sending a message to let Character A know they’ve gotten back home safe.

Taking naps together, from day till night, waking up every now and then to get more snuggles in. 

That soft exhalation of adoring laughter leaving Character B’s mouth after kissing Character A (this shit had me folding so fucking hard it’s not even funny. I Am Weak). 

That soft exhalation of laughter once again just because Character B is so content with having Character A in their presence, and Character A just basking in how cute that sound is and how happy it makes them. 

Character B entangling their legs with Character A’s, pressing their bodies flush against each other’s, leaving little to no space between them. (It’s almost like they can’t get enough of Character A.) 

Kissing so many times, to the point where they lose track of how many times they’ve kissed already. 

Holding hands and lacing their fingers together while they’re cuddling.

Comparing hand sizes and giggling about it together.

Character B stroking Character A’s hair while they’re asleep. (Or uh, pretends to be asleep DJSKKSKDSK but it’s so FUCKING CUTE WHEN HE DID THAT IM GONNA SCREAM, me thinking moments like these only happen in Korean dramas or some shit anfkakfksk-)

The sweet little banters in between; Character B being all cheesy and Character A playfully deflecting their comments only for Character B to playfully push back with an “Is something wrong with that?” or “But I’m not lying.”

Falling asleep in each other’s arms, both not wanting to leave the bed for the entire day and wanting to stay comfortably snuggled up against each other instead.

Character B placing their hands on Character A’s shoulders, and Character A, with a grin on their face, gently grabs Character B’s hands and wraps their arms around their neck while leaning back into them. Character B reciprocates by hugging them closer to them.

The soft noises of content Character A makes when they snuggle closer to Character B, or when they want Character B to hold them closer to them, with Character B happily obliging. 

Character B rubbing their cheek against Character A’s.

Character B trying to not wake Character A up because they look so comfortable when sleeping. (His words, not mine.) 

Soft, repeated pecks on the lips, causing Character A to laugh/smile against Character B’s lips. 

[brookshusband]

do any other Selfshippers get really anxious that they aren't making enough content but also at the same time too frightened to post because what if I post too much and annoy my mutuals or they hate the things I make?

[milkamel]

Truthless Recluse doodle + sad PV sketches (close-ups under the cut)

he's so pretty when he cries I'm sorry 💔 a beautiful angel make him suffer more please

[ch3rryfl4vored]

[lasbiarez]

Something about relationships...

[rose-chateau]

I'm white, so I have limited stock in the conversation about the ending of the lilo and stitch remake. Predominantly, the movie was imperialist propaganda supporting and normalizing indigenous children being taken from their families, young women being emotionally divorced from their families, and indigenous people moving to mainland america to pursue an idyllic future.

But the specific situation makes me feel really shitty and sorry for myself, because my mom left me in the care of someone else to go to college, and it was NOT a good decision in the long term.

My mom left my brother and I with our grandparents until we were 7 to pursue college education. She didn't want to; she did it because it was the only way to get a career to support us. And she really only did it because our grandparents bullied her into "pulling herself up by her bootstraps" instead of getting her inpatient for some stuff she was going through at the time. Without kids to worry about, she was able to graduate in a few years, and my brother and I moved in with her again... and she got so fucking sick of us that all she ever did was threaten to send us to "grandparent boarding school." She had her own life, and having 2 young kids cramped her style so much that our entire family dynamic was critically messed up. My brother and I were neglected, and our only adult figure didn't have any interest in us.

Having no kids and going to college made her worse for us. It emotionally separated us so much that after only 3 years of having us, she couldn't care less. She got remarried when I was 11. My brother and I went to stay with our grandparents "just for the summer, just so they got a really good honeymoon period." And then we never moved back in with our mom. She came to visit about as much as she did when she was in college. She whinged about how she's our Mother and she wasn't the one raising her children. But she never really made any effort to get us back.

Nani didn't get Lilo in the remake. She wasn't the sole supportive understanding force Lilo had in the original. I mean, characterization-wise, it makes total sense Nani went to college and used a portal gun just to visit Lilo instead of the other way around. Again, the imperialist propaganda cannot be understated in this movie, but on a less serious note, it also just feels like they're trying to absolve mothers who don't love their kids.

[ratsoupee]

Accepting isolation, craving belonging