#Scaling Issues

[fairydriver]

if you post an image in discord itll round the corners, but once you hit a certain smallness it rounds into a circle. so basically if you make an image that is 32x32 and you post it in discord itll go from this

to this.

so you basically can just draw a little face in mspaint or something and paste it into discord and itll look like a little emoji. you can potentially mess around with this a lot, its proportional to your image going smaller and it doesnt have to be a square either.

[solardrake]

Delivering mail to the furthest corners of the server ✉✈

[scikeyuri]

poor boys gonna be passed around the tulpar like a blunt lmao

[bonefall]

[ID: Ask from @storiesandsquirrels, transcribed in alt text]

also: link to Cow Lore

There's one major misconception here I've gotta correct before answering earnestly; Holsteins do need Super Duper Food. This is one of their major problems as a breed, you need to give them high quality feed for high quantity, low quality milk.

But! That said! These are valid questions that deserve real responses. In spite of the quick correction, I actually want to answer them as you phrased them because I think it would be more illuminating. I'm going to try and summarize them as I go along;

Question 1: "Why wouldn't we want to use The Most Efficient Cow?"

The simplest answer is disease. My ""prediction"" came true, and bird flu has mutated to spread extremely easily through the infected udders of Holsteins. No one has died of bovine-contracted HPAI yet, but with Brainworm Bobby and his love of raw milk in charge of the CDC...

well. my last prediction was prophetic. let's hope this one's not.

Minmaxing a breed for one specific purpose always means intensive inbreeding. Like I mentioned, 9 million Holsteins are genetically equivalent to 60 individuals. A more genetically diverse population is one that will be better at preventing disease outbreaks, and reducing their severity when they do.

And what even is the Most Efficient Milk Cow? If you're only selecting for pure milk production to drive down its cost, you get a breed of cattle that lacks every other important trait that would make it good livestock;

They get sick more often, due to inbreeding depression and lack of physical fitness, requiring more antibiotics and veterinary care.

They are bad parents who will need more human intervention to birth and raise calves

They won't be good grazers, meaning they need a specific food grown for them, increasing how much "functional" land is actually dedicated to cattle husbandry.

Their carcass won't yield as much meat, so more cattle have to be raised and slaughtered to meet demand.

Their bodies will burn out much quicker than a healthier animal, meaning you need to replace your livestock more often.

When it comes to living beings, "efficiency" is "fragility." It's not a stable system to begin with.

Even with the pure logic aside, just, step back here and look at the situation with a heart. We'd be making unhealthy, short-lived animals lacking critical instincts to lead good social lives. AND we probably haven't even fixed the "less land" problem, just shifted the land off-site.

For what? For more milk? We have SO MUCH milk we don't even know what to do with it!

Question 2: "Isn't an overabundance of cheap milk a good thing?"

no.

Under the infinite genius of Capitalism, thousands of gallons of milk just gets poured into the sewer daily because there's too much of it. Transporting it to a processor would cost more than it's worth, sometimes the processors turn milk away because they don't want to overproduce products, and even the US government can't subsidize every last drop; it still has 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in various caves and warehouses across the country.

The price of milk cannot get any lower because it's already being sold below the cost it takes to produce it, and yet, we're still here literally pouring it down the drain.

[photo from bill ulrich who photographed a farmer dumping milk back during the pandemic. this isn't even a recent photo. this happens every time there's a milk surplus. im using this photo because i like the farmer's cunty little pose. look at him. "just ain't right"core.]

And milk being dumped into the sewer is more than just wasteful. It's a biohazard.

Milk doesn't stop rotting when it's dumped. If you live downstream of a milkhouse, improper milk disposal reeks.

It's full of nutrients, too, which causes diatoms, cyanobacteria, and other types of algae to go into overdrive-- causing a Harmful Algal Bloom event in the water, or HAB.

HABs are horrific. There's HUNDREDS of different types. They can suck up oxygen and create "dead zones" which kills all aquatic life, they can poison the water supply for an entire town, and some can even cause toxic fumes that make it hard to breathe on land.

Now, listen, I don't want to scare you into never dumping out rotten milk or anything! It's that on an industrial scale, it's REALLY REALLY bad if a farm overproduces milk-- especially crummy milk that can't be made into decent cheese or other dairy products.

In fact, if we did produce milk on a smaller scale, it would be better for everyone! Unless you're a Milk Guzzling Fiend like I am, you probably wouldn't need to buy a whole gallon at a time. In countries like Italy, it's sold fresh and in smaller containers, and you're just expected to pick it up as you need it.

This is why milkmen used to exist, and still do in places that are cool; they'd deliver your supply fresh from the creamery. Less waste, less stress! The "subscription model" is actually sooooooooooo much better for milk production, since it helps to stagger out those "surges and drops" of demand that leads to milk dumps.

Question 3: "If the cow eats less, doesn't that mean less land for pasture, which is a good thing?"

There's a lot to unpack within this sentiment. It's actually based on a couple of common assumptions on a few levels, which are incorrect in fascinating ways. Challenging this means opening up your worldview on how complex keeping livestock actually is!

I'll start with the simpler part;

You could cut fresh pasture out of the equation entirely and shove a cow into a concrete pen with a food box-- but are you counting the land growing the fodder?

When you grow corn the way that we do on industrial farms in the US, it's unbelievably destructive. Unending oceans of monoculture. Fogged with pesticide, pumped full of fertilizer which causes HABs like dumped milk does, sprayed with thousands of gallons of wasted water.

When you look at this image, I need you to understand you are looking at a dead zone. Like a suburban lawn, just because it's green doesn't mean it's good. Nothing grows here but corn and pests of corn, which gets poisoned and dies without returning any of that energy to the ecosystem.

This is usually what is being given to "grain-fed cattle," either when they're sent to a feedlot to hit their slaughter weight, or when they're lactating so they need the extra nutrition. It's also so nasty it's inedible to human beings.

Now, a lot of cattle farmers will just supplement their cow's diet, doing a mix of pasture feeding (much cheaper) and grain feeding (quicker gains). But the facts on this are clear; pasture-kept cattle result in LESS emissions and need LESS total space than cows in confinement.

In fact, there were a LOT of benefits!

Overall gas emissions from the cows dropped by 8%

Ammonia pollution was down by 30%

Not needing to run farm equipment for fodder planting and harvest reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 10%

Rotated crop fields didn't sequester carbon; but the newly converted perennial grasslands store as much as 3,400 pounds per acre.

The outside cows did produce less milk volume, but the milk they did produce was higher quality. So, looking at all the benefits here, it's clear that pasture is actually something that should be embraced for ecological reasons, not rejected.

In FACT, it should be EMPHASIZED. Because, this is the mind-blowing part,

Pasture can ALSO be an ecosystem.

In fact, I'm a Warrior Cats guy who once did a deep dive on moorlands just so I could write WindClan better. There are entire biomes that only exist because of grazing, and British lowland heath is one of them!

Keeping cattle in a sustainable, ecologically sound way is going to look different depending on where in the world you're doing it. So many earnest, good-willed people have bought into the lie that humans are a problem, and that everything "associated" with us becomes a barren wasteland as if we are tainted. YOU are not the problem! The problem is, and always has been, exploitation. Unsustainable relationships with the land we're part of.

Indigenous people in Europe, Asia, and Africa have been keeping cattle for thousands of years. In North America, cattle can be used to maintain ecosystems that have been badly affected by the colonial eradication of the American Bison. In South America, Brazil specifically has been making incredible advances with highly efficient integrated crop-livestock-forestry farming.

Generally, pastures here in the US are not as intensely managed as an equivalent crop field. Some people fertilize them, or water them mid-summer, but absolutely not to the same extent as industrial corn farms. Cattle are typically rotated between pastures, allowing each to re-grow before they come back to graze again.

Obviously, yes, overgrazing can be an issue. Not every open space should be converted into a pasture, and the destruction of other environments to turn into cow land is a problem. But that is an issue of bad land stewardship, not the mere practice of keeping livestock.

Bottom line, though? Cattle who can graze and survive outside are better for the environment than cattle that can't.

...but hey, you know what Holsteins happen to be really bad at?

EVERYTHING. GRAZING.

They are notoriously terrible grazers. They can't do megan THEEEEE thing that cows are known for. Fragile frames, a lack of fat to keep them warm outside, increased demand for food, distaste for any rough forage, horrible mothering instincts, the list goes on. Holsteins are a NIGHTMARE to try and keep outside all year round compared to other breeds.

(especially heritage breeds, like the Milking Devon, Florida Cracker, or Texas Longhorn. Between these three, you'd be totally covered in 80% of American climates.)

I've already explained why it's not actually very good or important that we minmax milk volume, but even if that was actually something we should value, there are so many downsides that they would absolutely not be the dominant cow breed in a truly "efficient" system.

"Less cows means less cow food and cow land" is sound logic, but Holsteins are not the right cow for that job.

Question 4: "How could this be done in a way that doesn't increase cost of living?"

I'm not sure how to answer this question, simply because I'm not Bonestar, Leader of AmericaClan. Wish I was. I would rule tyrannically.

It's worth noting that Brazil is the second largest producer of beef in the entire world, AND the number one largest exporter of it, AND only puts 30% of its land to total agricultural use. The USA dedicates over 50%. And also Brazil is net reducing its amount of agricultural land while increasing output.

It seems clear to me that the USA actually has a massive food waste and resource distribution problem, to the point where the price we pay for stuff is actually wildly disconnected from the actual value of the goods and labor.

I think the way that us Americans tend to frame our conversations on these topics as "growth" vs "cuts" instead of asking how to minimize waste by making existing systems more efficient prevents us from solving problems. We're also just... really culturally resistant to the idea of anything being more "expensive," even if it ends up costing us a lot more money in waste or mismanagement later.

Penny wise and dollar foolish ass country.

Question 5: "What can we personally do about this?"

I mean, I wasn't making a call to action in Cow Lore, I was just explaining to one of my regulars why I don't like Holsteins LMAO. Since you're asking though...

I don't think we can change the wider trend in the dairy industry without actual government intervention and regulation, though, and that's very unlikely in the current political environment. they just sent random dudes to Ausalvador-Birkenau and when the Supreme Court said "bring this specific person back" they said "nuh uh." fellas I don't think we're getting better dairy regulations in the foreseeable future.

So I think the most productive thing to do is focusing on supporting small farms and heritage breeds. Get involved in your community garden or heritage society if you have one.

Not only is that generally a very rewarding thing, but it will be helpful to you in case The Situation Gets Worse. Knowing your neighbors and having real human connection is your best defense against economic recession.

Supporting the locals is always a great thing to do, which can be as simple as going to farmer's markets. You don't need to buy fancy food every day to make an impact on your community-- it can be a treat sometimes!

You could also subscribe to the Livestock Conservancy's free newsletter, where they talk about the work they're doing and upcoming events. If you're a knitter, crocheter, or any other kind of fiber artist, you could even join in on a challenge they're running where you make items out of rare wool for prizes!

Should you end up liking the work they do, you can become a member for 4$ a month, or go to one of their educational events.

Even just talking about the problem can do a lot! Did you know the Highland Cow was actually critically endangered in the USA within the past 10 years? It was the work of the Livestock Conservancy, plus a surge in their popularity, that helped to bring their numbers up. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.

All that said, remember, you can't solve every problem. It's a big world and there's a lot of them. Being made aware of an issue doesn't mean you have to drop what you were previously doing-- just care a lot about something that you want to improve, and let that guide you.

[king-of-men]

No wait, it's not that simple! A duck has a very different Bauplan from a horse; it's not at all obvious that a horse-sized duck puts out 131.2 times the power of a regular duck even though the horse/duck power ratio is 131.2. There's such a thing as the square-cube law! A horse-sized duck would have very thin legs relative to its body - it might well collapse under its own weight. Actually, do those honeycombed bird bones, very strong for their weight but not strong in an absolute sense, even support a horse-sized creature? And there are similar objections to scaling down the horse, just more subtle. The gallop gait relies on the sheer mechanical motion of the chest helping to activate the lungs; do the fluid mechanics scale down correctly? The heart is suddenly vastly overpowered; it no longer needs to push blood down very long legs and back up again. Stroke, heart failure? Better stay tuned, because this duck-sized horse sure isn't.

In case you were wondering

[juggalogojackerbox]

Happy 15th birthday to this silly little 2000's webcomic that's been very near and dear to me over the years

[mediumgayitalian]

worst part of writing gay sex in the living room is that i gotta sit weird so no one walks behind me and reads over my shoulder

[sharksandjays]

“As of late, however, Ive felt different. My powers feel more…aggressive. My temper shorter. My purpose clouded and uncertain. Maybe I’ve been pushed to the edge by now.”

Alt under cut

[mewhenthhe]

“oh yeah i can fly….. and explode things…. move shit with my mind…and i physically cant drown or freeze or burn if i lock in enough… but…. like…. i dont have a mind reader ability that i can only use in a stupid government job so my life is useless sad face :(“

^life of a talentless or something

[bonebabbles]

RiverClan Refugees

Gorseclaw and Lizardtail want to join ThunderClan because they watched Harelight, their only other family, get publicly executed in front of them

They are trying their hardest to be useful and polite while being refugees in ThunderClan, and get mistreated for the effort-- having their food preferences mocked, getting told they're taking up space, hearing a steady stream of slurs, etc

After one more mass shaming session where Squirrelstar asserts they won't be accepting new cats, Sunbeam and Fernstripe join in on condescending them, and we get this;

"It would have felt bad turning them away, but if they chose to go home (AFTER BEING BULLIED FOR SEVERAL CHAPTERS) then there was no need to feel guilty"

This does not come across as these two earnestly missing home and choosing to go back; it comes across like they're accepting the fact that they are unwanted and getting out of dodge before it gets worse.

Honestly, I'm at the point where I can't call this a lack of self awareness. The difference between ThunderClan's treatment of Gorse and Lizard vs RiverClan's treatment of Wasp is obvious to me. The narrative is straightforwardly pro-xenophobic as long as it isn't overtly violent.

Social bigotry is fine. Good, even, to separate the "desirable" immigrants from the "undesirable" ones. What defines those categories? A good one will assimilate fully and leave their culture behind; a bad one only wants safety and a better life for their family.

Terrifying, imo, considering how the irl overton window has shifted on migration at the time of writing this in 2025. Does the spectre of the times loom over these words as I speak them? I hope not.

[szilverer]

y'know... for a setting that places so much importance in Language and does so many ice cool things playing with it (Correspondence/Discordance, Parabola & Irem, etc) i think there's a bit of a missed opportunity when it comes to the terms and words people use in their day to day life... like for example:

do you think radical revolutionaries would avoid words like "enlightening" in their vocabulary and flip them for LON-appropriate counterparts to signal their beliefs?

like substituting the word "light" with "blight". lol

similarly, pet names relating to light like "sunshine" kinda have a whole extra flavour tied to them, leaning into nostalgia, melancholy and/or danger depending on the people using it. irony, even

"honey" as a pet name also has extra connotations now and might actually bother some people instead due to the association with the drug...

do you think SMEN, taboo as it is, and seeking being a recognizable phenomenon even to the common londoner, would spawn swear words and insults? (imagine the weight of telling someone to Go Seek or Fall Down a Well)

the word "well" itself. well as an adverb, interjection, adjective. just. think about it. think about what it represents. idk something is happening to this word for sure

[essektheylyss]

I do find the uptick in folks who got upset that some of us felt like there wasn't enough follow-through on narrative consequences suddenly turning around wanting the Hells to be hunted by Vasselheim very funny, because I'm just like... so what I'm hearing is that you want your faves to be on the run from religious leaders because the choices they made had such massive ramifications and so aggressively spurned that religion it demanded exile if not outright execution, because it makes for a more interesting story with more interesting characters.

I understand the canary in the role mine now: you're jealous of me. You want what the Essek stans have.

[borkthemork]

I think the thing about Kirigiri that fucks me up in an immense way is how much of her memory has been erased in retrospect, and how extensive the memory erasure was. Out of any of the DR1 cast, Kirigiri's whole sense of self was suppressed and erased. Everyone else had retained their childhoods and the moment they walked into the school, but she basically came to the school with no recollection of her past training under her grandfather, her childhood, her parents, who she was as an Ultimate, and why she was there.

When Junko removed her memory, she removed any notion of her being a detective and her relations to Jin Kirigiri off the map, and a great deal of her life was connected to her detective work in the Kirigiri family line.

We know that her grandfather had trained her from a young age to be the best in her field, and that means so much of her tween life was put into detective work. In the Kirigiri novels, she's said to have been registered into the Detective Library at AGE 13. Even before then, even when she didn't remember the existence of her father much until she's confronted with his identity in the novels, her childhood memories probably still had remnants of his presence in there that needed to be wiped.

Now, with that in mind, a great deal of her background is gone. I wouldn't be surprised that being so integrated into detective work has caused so much of her memory to leave her disoriented on how she even found herself in an abandoned school to begin with. However, there are some areas that seem to be intact when she's given a moment to process them or when acted upon subconsciously.

When you talk to her in her FTEs, there are portions of her memories remaining — like the idea she went abroad, that her father existed, that perhaps one of her guardians was part of some secretive or governmental position — but even information like her once attending an all-girls school and being with her grandfather doesn't come up.

In addition, she isn't sure if she ever went abroad, or had a father, etcetera, since all of this information is in question marks.

The most heartbreaking part of this is that she doesn't even know who her mom is or if she even had a mom, and in the game, it is revealed that she died when Kirigiri was very young.

Another thing is that her subconscious actions and thoughts affects the way she talks about specific events and scenarios. Such as how she is calm in her deduction process, knows a variety of crime methods, can do thorough autopsies, and potentially has read detective fiction judging from when she asked Naegi about Ellery Queen.

For the more intense examples on this, we can look towards her family and loved ones, and how her subconscious behaves towards them. We know about her strong reactions to the mention of the Headmaster, but there's another one that might've flew under the radar for some.

After Sayaka leaves the Rec Room and you're given an opportunity to interact with the others after they watched their videos, this is Kirigiri's reaction.

In UDG, we find that her captive loved one is her grandfather, and if we follow the idea that every person was sent a video of their loved ones before they disappear from the screen, then Kirigiri — without any supposed knowledge of her grandfather — reacted viscerally to the sight of him when he appeared.

Regardless if her grandfather was intended to be the captive or if it was written post-DR1, her having this pained response is already similar to how she reacted to the mention of her dad even without knowledge of him, and sends warning bells that something is deeply deeply missing.

In the final FTE with her, we also get a glimpse of her getting strong feelings towards her hands' burn scars. We don't know how much Kirigiri has learned at that point relating to those specific parts of her memories, but if we go by the idea that she doesn't — since Samidare's death is closely linked in detective work — I would imagine her garnering a lot of subconscious thoughts and feelings of loss.

She doesn't know what they are. All she knows is this strong sense of mourning and pain while analyzing her hands, and that's terrifying.

Imagine how weird it is to be a stranger of your own mind and body. Your past is a swirl of feelings and hunches and headaches. You are able to hone in on the skills of detective work on instinct, that you can handle dead bodies calmly even when you're anxious on the inside, but you got no clue why, how, and when this occurred. Specific things are triggering memories, pained emotions, and your body harbors scars that you have no clue where they came from.

If Naegi and the others were able to recall why they came to this school in the first place (due to their talents or being picked by lottery), how much does Kirigiri even remember when she fainted? Did she only remember glimpses of her going to a school and then fainting? Did she think she fainted even farther back in her recollection of the timeline? How much did she know was solid memory, and what wasn't?

In addition, if Naegi harbors a strong sense of disconnect towards the interview tapes, and how his past self accepted staying in Hope's Peak out of defeat compared to who he is during post-amnesia, then that also means Kirigiri has to collect her memories as if she was witnessing another version of herself too.

She'd been ripped of every part of her identity while having to pick up the pieces of a past life that isn't hers anymore, and she's afraid of what she has lost.

And that makes the question she asks to Monokuma after Trial 3 very chilling.

[plantanarchy]

as much as i dislike horticulture's reliance on peat in soil mixes, there's yet to be a good alternative for large-scale growing and uhhhh there are no peat bogs in the US. the entirety of our potting soil supply comes from canada. so canadian tariffs are going to cause some big issues for the industry.

[otrtbs]

okay hi! hello everyone! yikes!

art heist, baby and tender curiosities, baby! have been taken down very briefly but please do not fret! i have every intention of uploading them again very soon. i have been dealing with people selling copies of art heist, baby! recently despite me asking 385845 times for people not to and despite me no longer allowing people to bind my fics. so i took the two works that people were selling down while i issued some cease and desist letters and made some more copyright infringement claims. but they'll be back up shortly as soon as all of this is resolved. it's nothing to stress over friends! <3

i will ask that you refrain from sharing the pdfs and things around unless you know and trust that the people you're giving the pdfs to won't open an etsy shop and start selling them for profit. at least till this is resolved. thanks!

[harrypotterfuryroad]

just weird how there’s such a big overlap between people who became professional antisemitism noticers when hogwarts legacy came out and people who got duped into supporting hamas