#required income

[carlyraejepsans]

you want to play ghost trick. you want to play ghost trick so bad ooooo (ghost noise) hold my hand. let's get you a ds emulator baby

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

If you don’t mind sharing, since you don’t work for a zoo what is your job situation like? Making a living while working at a definitely zoo seems tricky. Is your main income zoology/animal related or is that more of a side thing?

Sincerely,

- a curious zoology student

I have a (mostly) unrelated jobjob - I’ve never actually been affiliated with a single facility, unless you count college internships before I started this blog. I freelance, working as a science media fact-checker and taking paid research contracts occasionally. I do work on a lot of animal / biology related fact-check content, but it’s not my entire scope of work. I also have the privilege of having family assistance, as I have chronic health issues that interfere with the normative 9-5 grind.

Everything I do in terms of blog writing/research, zoo industry research and publication, and photography is unpaid and pretty much a hobby at this point.

Prior to the pandemic I was trying to find funding for the intra-industry research and public-facing outreach I was doing, but there was never any money for it. (The industry is very used to expecting labor from young women for free. There was and is a lot of interest in the work I do, but the number of people/orgs that have ever provided compensation or financial support is in the single digits). The pandemic actually gave me the chance to pivot to focusing on professional fact-checking.

The only funding I get for any of this work is through a somewhat defunct Patreon I set up years ago when I was trying to make this blog / scicomm a full time gig. I’m terrible at updating it, and I’m conflicted enough about that to have been considering deleting it entirely. (For those of you who have stuck it out despite the radio silence, you’re incredible. You’ve facilitated the donation of my time to write a really cool paper with a zoo disaster response org, which will hopefully get through peer review soon).

To make something like this blog and everything else I do in the field actually financially sustainable, I’d need to fundraise and market more. The thing about a fact-checking career, though, is that it’s reinforced the need to make sure everything I write/say publicly is completely and 100% correct - because that level of rigor is what supports my professional reputation! Which means I’m slow to produce research and reticent to talk about it before it’s finished. My work comes out all the better for it, but it doesn’t fit into a content model that produces revenue.

So yeah, all of this is a side thing that I fit in around my paid work and my health. Because sometimes I just need to go see a tiger and smell an elephant, y’know?

[pandorem]

Me every time I check out the dead boy detectives tag: *rolls up sleeves* welp. Looks like it’s time for another Crystal Palace defence post

[hunter-burton]

Here’s Ship Art I did

I am A gabv1al fan I can deny it no longer

AND DAMNIT I REACHED 30 TAGS.

[cedarspiced]

reading the new lease form and rent has gone up to $1800 and that's not including any utilities at all

[nostalgia-tblr]

who can solve my plot/character problem in the sylki con artists au so that i can continue writing it

[bitchesgetriches]

Read more: When It Comes to Salary Negotiations, Are You Asking for Enough? 

And hey... did we just help you out? Tip us!

[somecunttookmyurl]

all the while society conflates "being an adult" with "having a proper job" and "having money to make arbitrary Adult Purchases" disabled people who can't work - or can only work part time or can only do entry level baby jobs - will never be 'allowed' to be adults

you can say "being an adult is looking after yourself you don't have to have a job!!!" all you want but most people who say that will still assume anybody who doesn't either can't or won't 'look after themselves' actually. and every 'marker' of 'adulthood' that's observable and thus actually counts or whatever loops back around to... having a job and 'contributing' something

[dumbbullet]

The Big Scary has improved drastically which means it's time for What The Fuck Are You Doing With Your Life to resume

[meangan-thee-lesbian]

I just had to share this email I got so all y'all can appreciate the absolute state of welfare services in Australia with me:

The NILs Loan Scheme is a government funded, no interest loan scheme for people on low incomes, but this leaves me wondering exactly who tf can qualify for their loans. Because it seems like if you have any symptoms of poverty it's a no.

I applied because I need the clutch replaced in my van, which I live in. It's lucky that I actually CAN afford the cost myself (due to living in a van & not participating in Australia's increasingly ridiculous housing market). I thankfully can afford such an expense these days & was just looking for a responsible financial buffer, just in case. But if this had happened to me a few years ago when I first became homeless and was far less financially stable, then my next living situation wouldn't be "affordable housing" it would be a fucking tent.

Anyway, the backwards ass state of a GOVERNMENT FUNDED welfare scheme refusing to assist those who need welfare the most because they don't want to encourage homelessness or whatever the dumb fuck? Just really rustled my jimmies tbh. Just screams "yet another govt welfare scheme that's actually just about handing out money to fake charities & not helping the poor". Good Shephard just got on the "do not donate to these grifters" list along with the Salvos😒

[yesloulou]

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[neurodivergent-loverboy]

I do appreciate the sentiment of "the time will pass anyway", I really do. However I've now dropped out of college three times and am still, at minimum, several years of schooling away from a degree, and the problem with "the time will pass anyway" in this scenario is that it's an incomplete response that assumes the problem is a lot simpler than it really is. "The time will pass anyway, and your family will be suffering through poverty until you can get a job again, and you'll be building up even more lifelong debt the entire time, and after all that you still might not finish school." Try that one on for size.

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

out of all the things I COULD be hoping to see during GW2's black friday sales, what I most want is for them to put all the mount select licenses on sale so I can FINALLY finish collecting Ruju's creatures--

[mylittleredgirl]

i reALLY need microsoft teams to quiet down because i'm so frickin excited about the preview of my smut4smut gift in my inbox like IT IS NO LONGER POWERPOINT O'CLOCK. everyone on this thread go to bed except me because i have Something To Read

[1794]

in an ideal world I'd have way more opportunities in my daily life to use the phrase "unlimited genocide"