Soooo, i got a pet leech.

His (their? Its?) Name is Larry. I got him from a swamp in Tacoma.

He seems like a *Placobdella* leech, usually feeding on snails and frogs. But i got him to feed on me.

Here he is all stretched out, lounging.

The thing is, there are so few resources about how to care for leeches, especially of this variety. Does anyone know? Any fellow leech lovers on tumblr have any idea about what they need to be happy?

Literally just water! They don't care much for a filter, though I use a sponge filter (an attachment for an air bubbler) to keep their water cleaner. Otherwise leeches can be raised just fine in a large jar. They like rough stones to hide under and help shed their skin, so I use lightweight lava rocks. They can also climb, but they like a lot of air flow, so instead of a lid most people put pantyhose over the top of a leech's jar, with a rubber band to hold it on a little tighter too :)

People aren’t gonna like hearing this but the practice of boycotting internet spaces genuinely only makes them worse, and then everything wrong with them spills out into the rest of our culture anyway. The people who avoid reddit or twitter or facebook or anything because of their toxicity probably outnumber the toxic users a hundred to one. If even just my own tumblr follower count went over to 4chan to post exclusively positive and nice things it would easily bury all the notorious bullshit. If you can find a use for a free public website, just use it. No amount of user boycott will actually hurt any of them so people may as well exploit their utility for better purposes while they exist, rather than constantly shrinking and hiding from the trolls and creeps. It’s your house too.

#douchebags come into other people’s spaces to troll anyway#why don’t more people want to be anti-trolls and do the opposite?

The answer is: because it’s not my job to make the internet better

You are right that if an environment is toxic I won’t make it better by boycotting it. But. If an environment is toxic, why should I want to be in it at all?

I’m here for me, not for you. I don’t owe anyone a duty of anti-trolling.

You are less likely to change a sick system than to be changed by it

You are less likely

to change a sick system than

to be changed by it

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Ah swell. Now thanks to haiku bot people think this is a brand new post and that it's about Elon's twitter when I made this before he even bought it.

It was literally only about how I've personally watched places get worse because people feel pressured to abandon them even if they still enjoy some aspects or benefits of them. It's literally right there in the post: "if you find a use for a website just use it."

It's not a suggestion that you should feel obligated to make someplace better but was a direct response to people being shamed for remaining on these websites, as if using them for an information source or art platform is a personal endorsement of bad people who also use them.

It also has nothing at all to do with how sites are run by their owners and the situation with twitter X is therefore completely irrelevant to the topic.

Fuck yeah lampreys

Another lamprey

That's the unique pouched lamprey of New Zealand! The only species like it! We actually don't know for certain what the pouch is used for, which develops only on males, but has been hypothesized to store rocks he uses to build a nest. Most lamprey die after mating but these live another hundred days and coil around their eggs until the end :)

I found some pouched lamprey larvae when a local river was drying up. I saved as many as I could and released them back when the water returned a few weeks later, but preserved a couple that didn't make the heat wave.

Most lamprey (including pouched) are Anadromous. Their larvae (called ammocoete) are eyeless, toothless filter feeders during their freshwater life stage. They live in slow moving streams and silty bends in rivers for up to four years before beginning migration out to sea, during which they metamorphose into more adult-looking macrophthalmia. Which develop eyes, teeth and shimmery blue & silver skin.

image: ammocoete & macrophthalmia | © Shelley McMurtrie / EOS Ecology

I actually knew about a certain plastic skeleton creature as far back as July, but was waiting all month to gush about as my "end of August" Halloween post.

It is NOT this magnificent skeletal moth, which I discovered only Mid-August, but that's here too. If you haven't already guessed what it is, go ahead and follow the link to find out what could POSSIBLY ever be even better than a bone moth!

SPOILER:

Next day reblog! I have a lot of new followers again so this is one of my things I do! I review creatures that only exist as Halloween decor!

2023: missives from desktop tumblr suggest that per the latest update my mutuals are being hunted by some kind of grotesque clown. staff assure us this is driven by user feedback.

the person who tagged this #unreality is about to have the worst but unfortunately funniest day of their life

tumblr trying to be like tiktok then trying to be like twitter then giving us the 3rd unreality inducing immersive ad, its staff members being condescending to the userbase, the marketing team trying to parasocialize their way into your pockets, youtube trying to do away with adblockers after upping the percentage of ads by 40% and making it so even if your video is demonetized watchers will still get them, youtube removing the dislike button then making it so you don't get a home feed if you have watch history turned off, google being able to remove your synched bookmarks if they don't comply with their policy, if i listed every way in which twitter has gotten worse in the last year this post will be as long as a novel, ai generated articles and images everywhere, google searches sucking ass in general, reddit charging for its api, KOSA being introduced into the US senate, tiktok in general, every social media under the fucking sun introducing log in walls, being unable to browse most sites on mobile from the sheer amount of popups taking over your screen WAUUUGH social media being products and thus requiring infinite growth and thus trying to introduce newer and newer shit that alienates its dedicated userbase. saturated sludge era of the internet

I actually knew about a certain plastic skeleton creature as far back as July, but was waiting all month to gush about as my "end of August" Halloween post.

It is NOT this magnificent skeletal moth, which I discovered only Mid-August, but that's here too. If you haven't already guessed what it is, go ahead and follow the link to find out what could POSSIBLY ever be even better than a bone moth!

SPOILER:

I scribbled this in half a minute when I woke up so the dream I had wouldn’t fade completely away. I’m glad it worked.

In the dream there was a CG theatrical film about a kingdom of snake people. These three character designs were fresh in my memory for only a few moments. The skinny one was rainbow colored and had a voice like Mark Hamill’s Joker.

The snake people were simultaneously film characters and the real, actual creators of their own film, and they were angry that it was panned so hard by critics.

They had brought one critic to this vast arena and he was trying to explain to them why humans didn’t go for such an intensely violent children’s film.

The rainbow snakeman flailed around a bit shouting “WE DON’T CAAAARE” and the horned snake guy roared how it’s “THE WAY WE DO THINGS” or something.

The critic then complained, specifically, about how the movie had just one too many scenes in which the snake people call for a “trial by blood.”

That’s where the dream ended but I think we know what the snake people called for next.

I just ran across this post from 8 years ago and the dream had completely vanished from my memory, but reading it again I can now remember exactly what it really looked and felt like to dream it.

Nearly all types of conservatives and also democrats assume you love and support democrats and especially biden if you're left leaning or vote for them, so let's test it.

The final few answers in this might seem redundant, but they're measuring the *emotional severity* of the opinion.

Okay to be honest I'm shocked the bottom 3 or 4 aren't 90% of the votes, I thought we were all in the "every politician belongs in jail" camp and in fact that was the point I expected to prove with this. Maybe people aren't aware of Biden approving so many oil pipelines or being so pro-cop? His administration has made some positive changes in spite of him, not really because of him. Trump is catastrophically more harmful to more people in every possible way but this was about your personal moral view of these guys as humans, ie Republicans tend to "support" their presidential choice on an actual ideological and ethical level as a "leader" they worship and glorify, so they ASSUME that's what you also do, that we actually adore Biden as some kind of hero just because we voted for him, when it's more like we basically chose being stabbed in the gut over being nuked. We're still being stabbed in the gut and allowed to hate it. It's important to remember that the actual poll question assumes you still prefer a biden presidency over a trump one; you're still saying he's the better choice even if you vote that they're both morally monsters.