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PSA: BAD LITTERBOX

i don't usually make posts like this, but this is a truly upsetting topic to me as a lifelong cat owner, so i feel i have a duty to share my knowledge with others.

there is a type of automatic litterbox for cats being sold that is EXTREMELY dangerous and has killed numerous cats through blunt force trauma, suffocation, etc. this litterbox is being sold under different brand names and logos, so i will include the picture of the model and two links to informational videos with more evidence and eloquence than i am able to provide.

please consider not having this type of litterbox in your home for your furry friends. me and my 16 year old tortie, puddy, want the best for all your kitty friends

image of litterbox below:

here are my two video links that provide proof and testimonials of this harmful product:

This Scam is Killing Cats by penguinz0

The DEADLY self-cleaning litter boxes that have flooded the market by One Man Five Cats

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realised. dean is the perfect viewer avatar for a horror show. he gets to be both the action hero and the quippy, self-aware wiseguy who knows he's in a horror show. he provides a safe point; a comfortable power fantasy for you to experience a story through. he's ash in the evil dead. he's a gunslinging tough guy, and you get to see those moments where heroism sits on his shoulders like an ill-fitting leather jacket. and even when he gets his turn at being captured and victimised by the narrative, it's filtered through this mythic lens first. he's the tormented hero; tortured by villains, tortured by the constraints of his role. yeah he gets bruised, beaten bloody to a pulp, torn to shreds and killed, but his perception of reality never gets thrown into serious doubt (unless it's played out as a gag). the narrative valorises his sense of right and wrong, because that's what heroic stories do. their heroes provide moral center, regardless of how we might judge them. the lines dividing hero, anti-hero, and villian are paper thin, and dean isn't truly ever allowed to be ambiguous. and the hero always wins in the end, even when he dies.

meanwhile sam is the abject object of the horror show, a character who gets trussed up, chased, tied up, ripped apart, cut into, possessed, exploited, manipulated and psychologically hounded. he's carrie covered in pig's blood. he's the marginal person people are cheering on either to die - or to live past it all. he gets his turn at playing both movie monster and victim, always occupying the liminal space between both. abject horror lives within him. he's violated with demon blood, he consumes demon blood. he hates halloween because he vomited his guts up in front of a room of normal children. he will never get to be normal, he's designated the freak on multiple levels, but most significantly, by the way his narrative frames him. he's living inside a world that is at its core, fundamentally frightening and horrifying - full control over himself and his surroundings is always slipping away, just beyond his reach. his grip on reality and the world around him gets thrown into question by the story consistently. what's right? what's wrong? what's real? what isnt? the narrative punishes him - because that's what happens to you when you're living in a horror. he can never run away from his nightmare reality, it catches up to him like a curse nipping at his heels. the only way out for him is through the punishing fire. in order to survive, he's required to be pushed to the absolute brink of instability; emotionally, physically and mentally. he emerges out the other end, barely holding it together but somehow alive - like the bloody final girl, changed irrevocably by what she's experienced.

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vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

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Wow! Neil Gaiman answered my question! O_O I'll mark this day in my calendar! I need to do some deep dive into Google and find more info, I guess)))

Good day, Mr. Gaiman,

I see that most of the questions right now are about The Good Omens (rightfully so, the show is incredible), but I'm doing my recurrent reread of American God, and I have a question. I reread it every 3-5 years and already gave myself several answers, but I would LOVE to know yours. Was it important in terms of meaning that Laura was the one who used a spear in the finale? Or was it just more convenient plotwise? I'm quite hesitant about her place in this story still, honestly. If you already talked more about her somewhere, can you point me in the direction, maybe?

And a huge Hi from Kyiv, Ukraine! Your worlds help)

Laura's really important to the story and her actions at the end are vital to how it all comes out. I've probably been interviewed about it somewhere, but I do not know where.

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thinking about how dean’s character gets simplified in fandom, or more specifically, the very black and white lens that gets applied to him. because integral to dean, from my point of view, is that he is both a victim of abuse and a perpetrator of it. that these two things do not cancel each other out or outweigh each other to the point that only one matters. he’s both, you cannot separate him from the fact that he’s both.

but very often, people do. dean is either a victim. or he’s an abuser. it’s like it’s hard for people to hold both those facts in their heads at once. dean went through incredible amount of trauma as a child and an adult, is routinely faced with violence, has resorted to alcohol abuse to cope with it. he’s also a violent person, someone who retreats into tactics of emotional abuse and control when he feels threatened, who hurts the people around him constantly and the people who are closest to him (ie Sam, Cas, later Jack) get the brunt of that abuse. these are just facts. they’re things that happened on the screen and cannot be denied.

and it’s. idk it’s weird to me (not unexpected, because he’s hardly the only character to ever get this treatment) that dean of all people is the one portrayed in such an either/or way when one of the defining moments of the show for him is that during his stint in Hell, he was tortured and then became a torturer to escape that, to feel like he had some control again, and he relished in it. it’s baked into who he is.

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like it is, on that subject. and can I say this without invoking a 'who's a worse person' debate because I don't care and obviously none of this is an ideal way to handle domestic squabbles. but it is, on that subject, remarkable to me how frequently dean hits sam or points a gun at him purely out of anger. whereas when sam hits dean it tends to be in order to accomplish something very immediate like 'stop dean from killing him' or 'stop dean from killing jack' or 'make dean permit him to leave the room.' like sam said in s2 go ahead take another swing if it'll make you feel better and dean just lived there for a decade. almost as if dean's moods as head of household carry as much weight as sam's desire to idk not die. like I think the distinction is less a moral issue and more telling of the family dynamics.

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al’Lan Mandragoran has ultimate "I support my woman's rights and her wrongs" energy.

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Absolutely agree! Side eye to TVD and Lorenzo "Enzo" St. John.

But even this trope can be executed in a talented and full of meaning way. For example Quentin Coldwater story in The Magicians.

Jeff Davis is #1 on my shitlist

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Sam has abandonment issues just as bad or worse than Dean's and they have a massive impact on how he behaves at various points. There's a period of the Winchester's childhoods we learn about in 7.03 and 11.08, where Sam was old enough for John to feel okay about leaving him alone by himself for days, and Dean was old enough that John wanted him hunting with him sometimes. In the same way that Dean's parentification leads to a warped, negative self-image leading into his adulthood, Sam's experience with silence does the same. Sam remembers two figures walking out of the motel room door and leaving him behind. Sam remembers silence for days stuck in a room in the aftermath, waiting for the phone to ring. Sam can't help but feel punished by the silence. If he was good enough, they would have brought him along. He wouldn't be alone.

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i think a reason why people find sam boring is because he’s not written with a lot of traits that make him seem more ‘quirky’ or personable, unlike dean. for example, dean likes cowboys and westerns, he’s into outdated pop culture, dean likes to play dress up, dean loves scooby-doo, dean likes to cook, deans really protective of his car, dean likes wearing women’s underwear. dean is given a lot more personal details and information that doesn’t contribute to the show or narrative, where as sam’s unrelated traits are reading, exercising, decently healthy, and researching.

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Audrey R., who’s running for the OTW board, is apparently also currently running for office. As a Republican

so uhhhhhh keep that in mind when you’re voting

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Emptying my brain...

Recently, there was quite a kerfuffle in the SPN fandom, over the realization that several self-proclaimed “BNFs” had been Mean Girling fellow fans into hating on certain other fans and certain other members of the cast of SPN. Thoughts have been percolating around in my head about this for a bit. Here goes... There has already been some discussions of warning about how cult-like these tactics seem: the initial lovebombing, indoctrination, evolving into intimidation and threats if people don't fall in line. The hunger to belong and smug feeling of group-think is a helluva drug. The fear of losing favor and being ousted from the silo is also a helluva withdrawal. I wonder if there's a reason all these manipulative personalities, every one of them, have been from the Destiel quarter of the SPN family. Is it sheer numbers? Or does it begin with the selling of the ship as this monumental slow-burn greatest love story ever told (even though the show's actual canon does very little to support this fable)? The relationship between Dean and Cas has been romanticized to a legendary degree, and the fanon has become the preferred telling of the tale, replete with lengthy subtextual navel-gazing over lamps and fictional beer brands and artfully staged gif sets on tumblr. Every whiff of the show has been recontextualized to point to Destiel. A stroll through any given list of Destiel All-Time Fave Fics is chock full of AUs and characters that feel more like Any Two White Guys than the actual characters from SPN.

Maybe this primes D/C shippers to be more susceptible to grift, to believe anyone with charisma and confidence and leadership aspirations, who promises the fruition of some manner of Destiel endgame. Which, okay. I totally get how deeply we often feel about our fandoms and the dynamics, how we project onto the characters and idealize the ships as more than the show intended.

It'd be fine... if fans then didn't feel the need to evangelize for the ship and punish those who got in the way. Some groups have been actively attacking the cast and parts of our fandom for years, as well as making actual bank off it all. Under the guise of inclusion and camaraderie, they dangle paying admission into their sacred inner circles like worms on hooks. They took, and are continuing to take, money to offer glimpses behind the doors of their Patreons or special levels of their Discords, where those lucky customers would theoretically be honored with friendship (parasocial, much?), and gifted with the potential of supposed insider info, and/or proximity to the cast and crew at conventions. In return, that same congregation would be used as a tool to attack and discredit the parts of the SPN milieu that the grand poobahs dislike. They would be asked to buy their merch, to keep their secrets, to send hate mail to each other in order to place the blame on “the other side”, try to get competing fans (or even TV shows) canceled, carry the torches of hate, and the list goes on. I don't know where this is going exactly, but there's a difference between bickering over which ship has the best blorbos or whose fave is the most girlboss, and actively trying to generate a lemming-like mass of obedience, enough to impact the IRL health and well-being of other people. Fandom can rally to accomplish such good feats (and lord knows the companies and studios that own our favorite franchises have figured this out), but every coin has two sides. Just, be aware of which one you're on, I guess.

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Just sos you knows, AO3 is down under a DDOS attack right now. They’ve been coming back in little blips and then disappearing again. It’s been several hours. (For reference, it’s currently 3 p.m. eastern, July 10, 2023.)

https://twitter.com/AO3_Status/status/1678468065070030856

The culprit (as with a few other DDOS attacks recently) is Anonymous Sudan, a group that is likely Russian, not Sudanese. The ‘reason’ they gave–that AO3 is “full of disgusting smuts and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW things,” is thin and probably not completely legit, though still legitimately concerning.

The AS claim: https://twitter.com/FalconFeedsio/status/1678397195039526912

Reporting on AS: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-28/anonymous-sudan-does-group-behind-microsoft-cyberattack-have-ties-to-russia (you can use archive.ph to get this one, 12ft doesn’t seem to work)

As noted here, https://twitter.com/honeyskeleton/status/1678449598703050769:

DDOS protection is expensive especially for a high traffic site like ao3. And it’s uniquely vulnerable as an independent site without ads or other corporate support. SPECIFICALLY targeted bc of its queer works and yet ppl will still complain every time they ask for donations lmao 

So, again, when AO3 comes back online, please don’t go hard with refreshing all your tabs. Please do remember to download fics you love early and often as  you continue in your whole ~reading journey~. And please do support AO3 through a dono or becoming a donating member, if it is possible for you to do so.

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To add to my last post:

I’ve seen a lot of people, some on tumblr but mostly on TikTok, saying we need to limit what’s on AO3 and other fanfiction websites. Now most of these people are new to fandom space or just don’t know how the AO3 tagging system works. But understand with fanfiction it is all or nothing. If we start restricting things, everything can be restricted. This includes the entire sites we read fanfiction on. And with the way queer people are being treated in the states right now, it is very likely if actual restrictions started queer people would be the next group on the docket.

You are responsible for your internet and social media experience. If you don’t like something exclude it in the search. Block creators. Block tags. BLOCK EVERYTHING! Tumblr and AO3 both allow you to so do it! I got things I don’t wanna see blocked! I have creators I don’t agree with or don’t like blocked! And remember, a head canon, is the canon in YOUR head. You can’t enforce your own opinions on media onto other people.

Stop trying to enforce your morality, your headcanons, and your ideal media experience onto everyone else.

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there was a post on my dash a few days ago about an interview with jensen about the prequel. he talks about casting, and about how the actor they hired for john had both sam (1) and dean (1) in him, and the actress they hired for mary had dean (2) energy (that none of the other actresses were serving, apparently). and the post rightfully pointed out that dean himself is there (3). so three deans to one sam, they noticed.

(edit: here is the link for anyone interested)

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and looking at the reviews about how bland the pilot is, i can’t help but think that’s part of why? 

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Today is my birthday. And today is my first day as a refugee. I never thought something like that could happen in my life. I suited the whole life of three adults and 14 animals in one small car and drove for 5 days to get my family to safety. My library, all my photos, the spoon that my grand grandfather got me, and all my other personal treasures are left home. My hometown is under aviation attack every single night. I still have warning app, that tells people when to get to bomb shelters. And notification cames and cames and cames. All I can do is to pray that my home will stay safe and people I love will survive. Someone will die, I just selfishly hope it will not be someone I know. I cried for the first time in 4 years the day I left home. Since then I cry every day, when I read news (I read them all the time), when I catch myself thinking that I need to take or do something I don't have in my life anymore, or when I ask my friends if they and their family are alive and safe. I don't tell you this to get pity, I had the possibility to go to the safe place, I have my family, I'm fine. I want to give you a glimpse of how your life can look, if Russian aggression would not be stopped now. You think you are safe, that it could never touch your country, your city, your life. That's what I thought, that's what millions of refugees thought. No one is safe. If Ukraine would not be able to stop the Russian army, it will be the next victim and next one and next one. My army and my people are fighting. But we need help. Anyone can give financial support, spread real news about what's going on and ask your government to be active and CLOSE THE SKY OVER UKRAINE! That's the only way to give us a chance to survive and save others from the day that I had today.