Just a bit of a scream into the ether: please vaccinate your pets. Please.
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cwicseolfor
@cwicseolfor@zeroes.ca
mastodon 4.7.3+glitch+0s#nobots
Too rarely, I make stuff.
If I follow you, I probably think you post neat stuff. For people more used to other socials' social etiquette where growing follower count is important, I don't expect a follow back - I'm trying to rebalance my feed a bit away from doom, but I live in Nurn, so there is rather a lot of doom to be had hereabouts.
Finally joined Mastodon December '22 and had to molt one instance since. Formerly of @urbanists.social.
If I boosted something without alt text I’ve probably added it in a comment under the alt4you hashtag (or am in the process of doing so) - if it doesn’t come up shortly let me know!
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50 Posts
Joined August 22, 2025
Dilettante polyglot.:
native english, un peu français, 點點中文, litt norsk, un poco de español
Profile photo -:
Six-petaled white flowering crow's poison in the slant-light of sunset on dark grass
Header -:
Moss growing up between the flagstones in the Forbidden City, Beijing
Replying to
@BrianJopek@mastodon.world #alt4you Representative Justin Pearson, a Black man with a neat mustache and goatee in black glasses and a black suit stares down an older, close-cropped white man in a gray suit with badge, who has interposed himself against a door as a barrier to entry.
It would not be a stretch to describe Representative Pearson's stance as thoughtful, with his right hand to his chin, or the unnamed Sergeant at Arms as glaring back with a tight mouth.
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@alienghic@timeloop.cafe @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @benroyce@mastodon.social Both to avoid empathetic folks of privilege seeing how bigotry unfolds, and to avoid humanizing the targets of bigotry to people being groomed toward said bigotry.
Compare how terrified people are told to be of letting their children share a class with a trans kid, or thirty years ago with a gay kid. There's an ongoing project to insulate "the innocent" (property: women and children) from evidence lest they begin to question the decisions made by "the worldly."
Replying to
@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @clew@ecoevo.social The faces of (drinking) friends would be my go-to, ha. And cooking. But if you’ve never had honey vinegar, that might be worth considering sometime. Good wine vinegar is such a joy. That brings it to mind to be tempted to pickle some fruit, peaches maybe, or pears.
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@kimlockhartga@beige.party @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io YEAHHHH, I cracked up into neither quite laughing nor crying seeing the top post because it’s the complete, unmitigated, ad-absurdum proof that no matter the circumstances, a woman’s account of her own experiences MUST be assumed to be inaccurate.
Lost nearly the whole weekend to migraine but managed to throw a huge saag aloo together and it was ridiculously delicious, with a week of leftovers even after we each had a couple huge servings (I barely ate for three days, he covered all my chores, so we were both starving.) I’d been craving something restaurant-worthy and this was definitely mongrel bastardized improv saag, rather than anything traditional, but it used a ton of what I had most of on its last legs, with wonderful textural and flavor variety for a humongous quantity of very cheap awesome meals, so a total win.
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@ai6yr @rombat By far the weirdest part of this to me is the idea of game wardens on a power trip. I know it's probably not the same everywhere but they're the only law enforcement I've ever had solely positive helpful interactions with, like they got into it for something other than manufacture of a criminal class. I wonder if they have too many fish-poachers there, or very very few, or some kind of ultra-rare species?
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@timixretroplays It’s kind of culturally revealing how surprised I was at the request in this post, but this is exactly what we should be doing - redistributing surplus goods to the people most eager to have them. Far better to land things in the hands of collectors than landfill. I hope you can adopt many turtles out of nonuse.
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@MLE_online To me the missing link between these ideas is “if I’m doing what I reasonably can* to conserve, I get even more fired up to compel these [redacted] corporations by regulation, law, and aggressive enforcements and penalties to do it too.” It’s not only not either-or, they amplify each other.
- (Probably well more than what most people would consider reasonable, but when you have circumstantial privilege to not need more, why wouldn’t you leverage it? So I do.)
Replying to
@AutisticInnovator @rspfau If you have a food bank nearby, or a friend who can get to one for you, you are who they're meant to serve and most don't ask questions. Nobody should go hungry, full stop, if you can get anything from them to offset your food budget and spare some cash for something else you'd rather have and can eat, that's the idea. I wish I'd realized it for the months I was too hungry to get a regular period.
In that era I used to live on heavily creamed coffee through the day, a sweet potato in the microwave at lunch, and oatmeal for dinner, or vice versa, plus whatever was cheap enough on clearance here and there. I'd spend a significant chunk of my food budget to get real cream to put in my own cup for more fat in my diet (because creamers are mostly starch) and pour the crap coffee they brewed at work over it. If it's something you'd like it costs a bit less than half over again what soda does for the calories, but it doesn't give the spikes and crashes of tons of sugar so the hunger's less annoying and it'll never have a chance to go bad if it's a significant caloric source and kept at the coldest area at the back of the fridge.
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@AutisticInnovator Oh, I know, I’m from here (top level domain notwithstanding.) It’s part of my specific ire for Frito-Lay-Pepsi (and Dr. Pepper too for what they did to the workers in Dublin.)
I never would have qualified for benefits but spent a lot of the twenty-teens on an $80-100 grocery budget (while working in a grocery, ‘natch) so I pay a lot of attention to this issue. I’m overdue on a requested write-up of what I’ve been doing to stay well under $200 per adult per month but I kept kicking the can because I wanted to start incorporating the price of electricity into it - running ovens, especially in AC weather, adds a ton to the price of home cooking.
Replying to
@ShaulaEvans@zirk.us Early twenty-teens I was utterly baffled how many young end-millennials I saw taking up cigarettes, given how much we now knew; covid really set me clear on how little a nebulous future motivates ordinary people when they already question whether the present is worth enduring. I've always been a much more systematic, long-term oriented person than my peers, but I didn't see how far an outlier that made me until 2021.
Alcohol will definitely be going through some of the same fits and shocks and wavering. It's more culturally embedded (thousands of years over much of the world, vs. a few hundred for everyone but indigenous Americans) and more ubiquitous. It's also easier to find present in both low and high concentrations, and isn't always the main "draw" to what it's present in. But the conversational door is finally open on factual grounds, rather than nebulously moral or religious ones, or the second-order behavioural risks of intoxication, so that's a sea change really just beginning in my lifetime.
(More idly I also can't help but wonder if we could raise public reluctance enough to pressgang Big Booze into finding the key to cancer to avoid business model obliteration. Big Tobacco didn't really have the tech advancement to hand, so that didn't look like an escape hatch - there'll be corporate disinformation and misinformation, and lobbying, to come but the tools are, I suspect, sufficiently close and the money sufficiently plentiful to perhaps goad a few outside strategies. It'd be terribly ironic if this banshee of my family discovered a cure for its children.)
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@rspfau @AutisticInnovator People with limited appetite or access to soda cheaper than other calories. Not the “healthiest” option but it offers both caffeine and (in the case of colas) phosphoric acid, both of which are pharmaceutically useful when you can’t access other medications for the same need (caffeine helps migraines in some, pain in many, alertness and thus job tenure in most; phosphoric acid is just about the best thing for a badly queasy stomach in my experience.)
All things being equal I’d just add fat to the diet for cheap calories, but all things are rarely equal.
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@AutisticInnovator So many of these foods are aimed at kids, and parents with kids are by far most likely to be benefits recipients because of the aforementioned inhumane qualifications. Walmart of course is among the worst offenders paying its workers so little, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see prices on these items suppressed for a while at most retail grocers, because the inequality split is severe - swelling ranks of poor to a shrinking pool of wealthy - they’re going to see a demand crash that eventually starts impacting their ability to turn over before the best-by date. I wonder if they’ll start raising prices again in a month or six, though, especially if all other foods begin to rise given the fuels crisis in the works.
Hopefully demand will fall and stay down, new (but still joyful, not ascetic) food habits will prevail, and Frito-Lay, Walmart, et alia can get stuffed on their profit-seeking at the expense of the poor. Maybe this is the time for budget-focused creators with an eye to affordable pleasures to blow up (Kiki Rough is one of my favorites) and the rest of us to start swapping recipes.
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@colinpurrington @clew The novel concern is more that eggs that land on the (e.g. dry stone or concrete) can desiccate, and then those desiccated eggs wash away in the rain, to rehydrate and hatch larvae somewhere else. Even if you dump on a perfect schedule, with flawless adherence, the eggs dumped from the bucket and dried out are still viable - though already-hatched larvae aren’t so hardy.
(Controlling for this feels a lot like trying to work around botulism spores, cells, and toxin sometimes: everybody has different survival and activity conditions.)
Replying to
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io That's terrifying. The kid's gonna need all that money for therapy.
Yours is going to be telling stories about you to their grandkids, if they decide to go that way.
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@Pepijn Successfully lifted ducks and geese (well, ducklings and goslings.) No swans or cygnets though.
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@glyph@mastodon.social @xgranade@wandering.shop Not to imply that this isn’t also legitimately happening, but I’ve noticed an uptick lately in what are pretty obviously bot swarms (lots of repeat comments, emoji-intense, etc) mobbing people “from their left” (that is, going after people who aren’t “left” enough) on algo media, with violent threats of purity policing, utterly cartoonish misandry, etc. and I’m wondering if there isn’t a spreading campaign to split a possible coalition with any fence-sitters and undecideds by poisoning the discussion with over the top anti-nuance (since that was already a conspicuous weak point.)
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@ShaulaEvans@zirk.us Given what covid has shown us, while I agree with you on the main of the thread, it's clear a lot of people *won't* accept a tradeoff of their sense of normality even when their own family has paid the price and they know it. It's not that defenders are untouched, there are far too many; it's most likely that they're either innocently, or willfully, ignorant of the correlation, the latter in denial of the reality (with a vanishingly slim few who've seen the data, thought it through, and made a decision in its despite - in which case I'm just thankful the risk is noncommunicable.)
The scientific reality really only become a matter of discussion in the time since I joined mastodon, I think. I associate the news with the PHAC, it was carefully skirted in US coverage. It really feels like a flashback to my early childhood when we were finally confronting the tobacco industry en masse.
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@passenger @inthehands I knew he was an obviously unmitigated PoS, but I had not the faintest conception he would prove so much of a dupe. I’m still reeling a little.
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@mariafarrell@mastodon.social @jaypeach53@calckeymusic.social @_elena@mastodon.social Even paid users have to tell Kagi “no ai” over and over??! That feels like it would invalidate the whole value prop to me. (Or maybe I’m flashing back to “wait, why pay for fancy channels on cable only to have to sit through commercials,” because I’m just old enough for that.)
Replying to
@augieray They are relying SO MUCH on their base upholding the American exceptionalism narrative to resist clueing in on the call coming from inside the house. It feels like a really dicey gamble at this stage in a way it never has in my life.
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@clew @colinpurrington On the upside since it would be easier to control a smaller volume of water, it encourages a smaller, lighter bucket. I have been trying to come up with a good mostly passive way of doing this between a couple vessels, because I worry both about them evolving resistance and just the dependence on outside inputs that supply chain troubles might shut down. Having some kind of filtered flow between the equivalent of hanging baskets on a sturdy substrate has occurred to me, but it needs workshopping.
Replying to
@colinpurrington @clew So I suppose the real answer is having a special dumping tray that will be covered/ won’t get rained out.
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@Kathmandu@stranger.social I set the no-AI DDG as my default browser on everything (technically still using Firefox mostly but attending manually to the about:config, but that may change.)
@mariafarrell@mastodon.social Unsure if you’re still using DDG at all but if so that may be the way to avoid seeing any AI suggestions.
@jaypeach53@calckeymusic.social @_elena@mastodon.social
Replying to
@ItsePerkele@expressional.social @mariafarrell@mastodon.social That’s great for the above-average nerdy (I don’t even qualify, but I’m right there with you) re: online time and spaces, but all you have to do is look at the state of the US (or indeed the price of RAM) to understand why evil on the internet doesn’t stay on the internet. They’re not just coming for the internet, and once they’ve immiserated or impoverished them enough, they’re going to use those normies as jackboots.
Replying to
@elebertus@eigenmagic.net @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org That’s the sort of thing I was remembering. I recall hearing several people discuss in NYC that people were offering cash, well above asking, as-is, sight-unseen, and I was wondering how many people were taking advantage of that situation to sell proverbial bridges. It seemed like an insane gamble to make, but I suppose they assumed they could fix up anything cheap relative to the cost of acquisition of the location.
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@elebertus@eigenmagic.net @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org It might derive from having lived through recent times when bidding wars were so fierce people would buy sight-unseen, which may still be ongoing in some parts of the country. At minimum the cost in effort is nil, so they’re happy to be shady about it.
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@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Really elevating those slugs (and coincidentally mice.)
I have no idea why and cannot justify this with anything but the impression I always got about slugs (as detritivores) was they were after the “rotting grain/ fermenting plant tissue” olfactory suggestion rather than the ethanol or sugar thereby promised to us mammals, so the low quality beer tradition wasn’t merely judgement on what a gastropod deserves, but I look forward to future experiments yielding greater success for you. I wonder if burying a bottle such that only the narrow mouth were above the soil would prevent interlopers? Bit hard to clean out, though.
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@lockelyfox This update was unreasonably cheering, as not-even-a-Trekkie. Enjoy your restored ritual vessel!
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@AutisticInnovator @rspfau Definitely worth looking into. They want to help, sometimes they also have pet food, depending. For your table, if you get to choose, especially if you can get things that supplement rice or oats if you can digest those, which are about $0.60-80 dry per 1700 calorie pound if you can save for the 5lb bag, beans, oil, veg. (Technically cats can also eat either grain in a bad pinch but obviously not for long.) I hear a lot of places more reactive to "picky" people will respond a lot better to the idea of "trading" things you can't eat for what you can.
Cheapest I find for wet cat food is usually Blue Buffalo in the 5oz cans or Tiny Tiger (Chewy's brand), both about $0.27/oz, but that's easier to access lump-sum wise if you either can split with friends or save up, especially if you can do it when there's going to be one of those "spend $100, get a $30 gift card" deals. But sometimes wet kibble is acceptable as a wet food substitute, I do that with mine intermittently.
Replying to
@log I kinda prefer a robust transportation nexus vs. the private pickup option for a lot of reasons of corporate accountability, taxation liabilities, etc. but this would be a really useful model to jumpstart the rest of that.
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@jimfrost Do their heads always go brown earlier than the rest of their bodies? It would make sense, if so, as their heads are the part of them they’re most likely to position on patches of exposed grasses during this phase of the melt.
(I’m in the temperate to subtropical latitudes so no animals here have different winter pigmentation, if anything at all they just get fluffier.)
Replying to
@beadsland A friend once was playing a 2010s-era Final Fantasy game and I’m usually rubbed markedly the wrong way by that art style, but I found it more attractive than usual, more compelling. Worth noting we were both artists and fans of figure drawing.
After several minutes of staring I figured out the TV was actually slightly horizontally compressing the output, intended for TV dimensions, on a slightly wider screen than standard to fill the screen. It didn’t make them look altogether human in proportion, but a lot less weird.
I think you’re onto something significant.
Replying to
@murodegrizeco@toad.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org The American collective imagination tends to be limited to its quarter-millennium scale when cities can last many centuries, but even within thirty years I can see a return of streetcars, the conversion of parking lots to usable space, even greenspaces, the retrofit of bike and pedestrian paths on former streets; we could accomplish so much with just a little investment and commitment. Add some public charging from solar or wind on the taller buildings and people who need (electric) motors can access them with no import of fossil fuels.
I grew up somewhere fitting that description, but for some years even the Republican mayor was a cyclist and that created some significant, if discontinuous, arteries for pedestrian and human-powered traffic.
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@colinpurrington @clew OOOH, I was thinking of manually operating them but if it had more containers you really could automate a lot of it. Also useful as a thermal battery at scale and you might be able to combine that further with hydroponics or aquaponics. Bookmarking. I’m not as good at implementing plans as I used to be but if I get either good plans or a prototype …
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@colinpurrington @clew I've been using planters big enough for me to sit in, trapped with dunks and a chunk of wood for anything falling in to climb out on (and apparently per one of your upthread posts, giving it that special soaked wood funk.) But it'd be nice to find some way to spoof that bigger container according to whatever sense they're using to detect depth so I could gravity-feed it between tanks and filter the eggs for dehydration, to be brushed off and killed with crushing or heat (not hard here with a simple black box.)
Replying to
@potterybyosa The alt-text is for sure there, it was just invisible. I can't use the Mastodon app between missing features, glitches, and just turning my battery into a portable heater, so my data is all browser-based. ALSO glad you asked, especially since I'd absolutely go on alt-texting other people's already-described videos in blithe enthusiasm absent that intel, ha! Thanks both for that and the lovely multilayered art (pottery, gardening, cinematography), it's always a joy to see your name pop up in my feed.
Replying to
@potterybyosa #alt4you A wonderfully round vessel with a widely flared neck and exquisite raked patterns of diamonds receives a gentle rain, set vividly apart in exterior shades of terra cotta to ivory and its glazed celadon mouth to a background of vivid green foliage including what appears to be a small banana plant or relative.
Replying to
@frigginglorious@freeradical.zone @rooster@beige.party It is, as they say, a spectrum. Sometimes the label’s all that’s wrong (or as in your example, the product catalog; I identify as cisgruntled, because I am definitely female, but a lot of the meaning of “woman” is nails-on-chalkboard incorrect for me.)
Sometimes there’s a parts or fuel swap necessary, sometimes a totally custom build is the right choice for the user. The main consensus is there’s no call for excessive deference to a manufacturer with such a high error rate, but thankfully the secondary market seems to be catching up.
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@potterybyosa It’s such a gorgeous moment that people who can hear but not see the video (or maybe neither) might as well enjoy the doomscrolling interruption too! Really lovely staging & garden here.
I never had "Bergman filtered through clown and drag" on my bingo card for synthesis on this topic, but here we are. I don't think even a couple of years ago I'd have appreciated the visual language choices here as fully as now. Considering posting to Mastodon leaves me wondering if we'll get to the point of doing full written breakdowns of visual work like this for wider accessibility at some point, and the kind of artistic movement that translation effort would create, too.
Meanwhile the wordplay is great and I've had it stuck in my head for weeks, so there's plenty for everyone as might appreciate it.
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@stephanie@ottawa.place @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io If you aren’t, they insist you “look too healthy” to be sick or injured. There’s no winning condition if they first diagnose you with female, just one angle comes with moralizing false concern and the other with patronizing “praise.”
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@hi_cial@donphan.social @KatCopseyGreens@mastodon.social Ditto this, I didn’t see it on the office’s website!
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@Thad@brontosin.space Headline concision. They ought to update theirs. @gbargoud@masto.nyc @CStamp@mastodon.social @realtegan@wandering.shop @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
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@hwll I've been stricken by how many people I would have expected to be attentive to it just don't bother. People for whom it wasn't a challenge, financially or transport wise, with animals who have never been vaccinated (ever-vaccinated is still a leg up on never; protocols are different if they've ever in their lives been vaccinated for rabies, for instance.) Awful, awful shit ensued.
Of course there are people for whom it's difficult to access physically or afford, too. I appreciate the efforts of our local low-cost clinics to keep it within reach for folks so much.
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@log The one thing to solve from then would be access to transport for people who have to depart during the day (as children typically have transport-enabled guardians to call on when they're sick.) I wouldn't really want to leave that up to the chancey quality of *current* local rideshare/ taxi services, though in such a future hopefully those would also be better.
Replying to
@potterybyosa Oh, no, I can’t! I’m on Mastodon, apparently v4.5.7+glitch+0s - though clicking through to your server’s original page on mastodon.social doesn’t show me either, which may indicate some issue with the browser. Normally it will show me a small black badge in the (typically bottom right) corner reading ALT if alt text is available on stills, gifs, or video, and I can’t summon it by pressing and holding either, so that is *definitely* odd, maybe to do with the new iOS update? Looks like neither Safari nor Firefox on current iOS is displaying it. It IS available, but not “announced” with a badge on desktop, having just run to check, so presumably anyone using a screen reader or who cannot load the image is covered, sorry about the redundancy - I added the hashtag because I could not NOT boost it but I perceived it as illegible to some of my followers (apparently based on bad data, I’ll be poking around that.)
(Nice to know it in fact a banana, I almost asked first as I’ve never seen one still in the ground - looks like sweet potato too?)