#happy crabitat

[screechingjellyfishnight]

@happycrabitat I just ordered $35 or so of food from you and I can’t wait to feed it to my crabs because they love your red snapper omelette meal. I’m seriously excited about it! Thank you for everything you do!

[happycrabitat]

Can we take a moment to appreciate all of Sebastian’s hard work today?😅

[kirstielol]

finished the river for my crabitat tank 🦀 i carved it out of polystyrene foam board! then covered it in silicone, put gravel in the middle part where water will be running down, and covered the rest with eco earth and moss! used gorilla glue to glue on a couple extra rocks and moss, then sealed the middle gravel part with a water based acrylic sealer!

[sweebat]

Got some moss poles printed for my girlies ❤️❤️❤️

Can’t wait to help them start climbing

[catspinach]

yayy i cleaned my crabitat really well and my crabs seem happy and curious of the new arrangement:)

[kayleerowena]

a few designs for the new batch of crabs! happy short circuits launch day, claws up!

(more info about each character concept under the cut!)

i have thoughts about these characters and the crabitat is still on 24-hour lore lockdown, so! concepts!!

grapefruit walnut (pregame ritual: blessing their weapon) is a paladin of the olde one. ey have armor made out of the olde one's carapace and a floating dagger.

malachi others (pregame ritual: shouting "gametime") is a shadow person with an ornate skull mask that floats in front of where their head would be.

iliad offshore (pregame ritual: chanting) is the spirit of a shipwreck! she's made herself an unofficial recordkeeper/storyteller of the league, especially trying to collect information on who everyone is so their story lives on if they happen to be incinerated.

cara yates (pregame ritual: awaiting orders) has something to do with the olde one, but i haven't decided exactly what yet.

amos penny (pregame ritual: hyperbolic time chamber) is a time traveler with coral growing on them. she has a mullet. i think they might be in love with iliad?

[coneygoil]

Right after New Year’s Day, our boy Tamatoa buried himself in the soil. I knew he was going to molt because he was chowing down on all the wood matter in the crabitat (he even stashed away a piece of millet in his den lol). I heard him for about 2 weeks shuffling around and then there was nothing. I figured it was taking Tamatoa a while to molt since he’s fairly big, but I started losing hope that he was still alive since it’s been so cold around here. Even with two heating pads, the tank’s temp was below 75 degrees during the night (we don’t have central heating so our house gets really cold).

A couple evenings ago, I spotted two feelers wiggling on the surface of the soil. Tamatoa was emerging!! He’s a little bigger and looks healthy, so it must have been a successful molt. I’m so happy that the molt went well. I was afraid with the low temperatures and the 3 inch substrate that it wouldn’t be good enough for a molting crab. But it was!

Here’s a picture of the newly molted Tamatoa. He’s even hairier than he was before too.

[bluntforcefem]

carcinization, babey!

so floating around blaseball spaces have been blink’s lore on how the garden has affected the flowers’ players, and recently, mads’ stuff on how the call got the firefighters, which makes it sound like they got murdered but that’s fine. and i started thinking about carcinization, because becoming a crab is about a lot of things, like gender and crabs and being a Part Of The Team and love, y’know, crab things, but it’s also about what is left in the “absence” where a [mumbles vaguely] killed god was at some point, and it’s also incredibly up to interpretation! 

anyway! crabs players.

so, a basic thing of how i view carcinization: it’s both connected to debbie and not. at some point, it was because of her, and now it’s not, but it is, kind of. it’s about baltimore and it isn’t. it’s about the crabs and it isn’t. what it is about, in no uncertain terms, is the person being carcinized! on some level you have to be willing to be carcinized for it to happen. if you walk into the baltimore crabs and you say fuck this shit i don’t want this, it’s not going to happen. there’s obviously a lot of nuance to this, but the basic foundation of it is that it is voluntary! and it’s reversible. and despite being a very, very physical thing, carcinization is about emotions.

i’m going to do players in order of who i have the most thoughts about! because some crabs are definitely definitely thought about more by others than i do, haha.

so luis acevedo! traded to the crabs in the season 7 elections, from the garages. they’re a hologram, and they’re constantly shifting both their appearance and identity subconsciously or manually to suit them how they see fit. they have a very very very solid sense of identity despite this, and they’ve been around, you know? centuries old. so they get to baltimore and they kind of already know what they’re getting into, except they have no idea at all, really. 

and i think they see carcinization from this outsider’s perspective, like, this is something you get when you’re a part of the team, this is something you get when you’re truly from baltimore and you’re truly a Crab, and they want it! they really do. because the crabs weren’t super important to them at first but they become important, and they want that connection to what becomes their family. but they don’t get it, not from an outside source. it’s because they’re a hologram, kind of, but mostly their identity is malleable by them and not many other things, and that’s the way they’ve crafted it. 

so luis rolls up their sleeves and goes okay, bitch, guess i have to do everything myself around here! and they carcinize themself, essentially, they give themself chitin one day and blue blood the next and claws and legs and every time they want to change they do, and i don’t think they quite realize until late into the Up that this is their carcinization. that this is their connection to the team, because they made it that way. and they run into the place where all the crabs hang out like holy fucking shit is this what it was? and they’re all like yeah?? we figured you knew?? and [luis vc] i fucking did NOT. it ends happily for them, either way.

next is [squints at hand] squid galvanic and jacoby podcast! these two are extremely intertwined for me specifically in relation to their experience with carcinization, because they’re both playoff births, right? they’ve only truly existed on the immaterial plane for a couple years, maybe, squid longer. and i think while the shadows are normal now that the fk apple is up (something i will elaborate on   later), they used to be not so great. and squid and jacoby were born into the shadows and not baltimore, really, and carcinization couldn’t reach them there. and then squid’s out, and it is seeing baltimore for the first time in its life, and the crabs for the first time, too, and finn invites it to go swimming in the extremely toxic bay with her because it can! 

and it does, and it wakes up the next morning with chitin plates interlocking up its spine and patches of it along its jaw, and it maybe freaks the fuck out, a little. because nobody explained this to it, because nobody thought they had to? but once it gets explained and it knows what’s happening, squid is overjoyed. it wasn’t a part of the crabs like the rest were in Up, and now it’s a step closer to that, and it’s happy about it. plus, it makes it look really cool, and i think it likes the feeling of sort of being Distinctly Inhuman in another way than it already is.

jacoby, on the other hand, doesn’t get carcinization. like, they get it on an objective level? and i think they understand it, sort of, in the way that you can understand it when it hasn’t really happened to you yet. i think they’re too unsure for it to happen, and when they’re more confident they get some hermit crab carcinization, but it’s… very slow. one step forward two steps back. i think that being a replacement for a bad pitcher that got foreshadowed has made them a little too anxious in their abilities, and their carcinization reflects that. sometimes squid peels stray bits of chitin that tried to grow on its vampire squid half and sets them on jacoby’s head and they laugh about it, though, and it makes it easier. 

i think about tosser’s carcinization in the context of it reflecting self-confidence a lot as well. the general thing about tosser is that after the real bad reverse sweep before the first peanut fight, he lost his carcinized arm! normal arm time. he blames this on debbie, and on carcinization not seeing him as good enough anymore, but carcinization isn’t the one seeing anything, really. tosser, on some level, has taken a hard enough blow from that loss to lose the confidence and motivation that made that arm carcinize to begin with. in the Up the rest of the team helps him build his own arm, artificial, and it’s once again the self-made connection to your team. you don’t need carcinization to be a crab, it’s something you foster yourself, and tosser is an original, and he’s had that connection and only made it stronger. i think once he gets down chitin and muscle begins to interweave with the metal, a bit, but nothing nearly as much as before. he’s okay with that, really. prefers it.

tot fox is a fox. she wears that funny crab hat you know the one. she doesn’t mind carcinization, and carcinization doesn’t mind her, but they’ve never really interacted, i think. she gets some extra legs to scuttle around with after she kills the sun and she’s happy with that.

dreamy and nagomi are both very carcinized, i think. nagomi found strength in the ever-changing nature of it and everything about it, in contrast to the heavy stasis of lady friday, and dreamy’s an original crab! however, i think while nagomi’s carcinization has remained just as heavy and strong as ever, dreamy’s faded and molted off over siesta. not for lack of wanting, but because with the sudden absence of the crabs, it sort of weakened her connection to it, and then over the decade it just sort of retreated back into itself? and she misses it, of course, but she learns how to live without it. and then the crabs come down, and i’m always thinking about sim’s minific where the carcinization comes back all at once. dreamy knows before anyone that the crabs are back because the chitin lining her jaw is back in full force and she can feel it, intrinsically, like something coming home to her. moco is less carcinized to begin with, but i think their armor grows chitin plate to replace rusted and missing pieces.

i’m sleepy now, and i don’t have particularly strong articulated thoughts on the rest of the crabs’/former crabs’ carcinization, so you should come to the crabitat at tillmansucks.com and ask about them! because i do love them very dearly. (pedro davids my beloved)

thank you for reading! love a crab

[leonstamatis]

fr the commentary can you talk about the scorekeeper? like the whole concept but also if u want one scene the one where she meets alston

oh the scorekeeper my beloved. okay. so the thing you need to know is that where that whole fic came from is one thought i had while on a walk in the morning. and that thought was “i bet dividing up runs is like slicing an onion.”

jaz had pointed out a glitch in a game where an unrun was counted when it should not have been. and i started thinking about how human that mistake is? if you’re the person behind the scenes, maybe you mix up the tally or put the wrong item in the wrong box. we’ve all done it.

and then i got fixated on runs and unruns as physical objects, and how they play off each other, and like. runs being these nice delicate things, and unruns being just. abhorrent. because not only are they unfamiliar but no one wants them. I’m not a crabs fan but I’m in a server full of them, so I saw the frustration every time alston hit a home run and it was an unrun! i got frustrated myself sometimes, particularly with the grand slam. so i mapped those feelings out onto someone, and that someone is the scorekeeper.

i was originally going to have the scorekeeper and alston become friends over time? i had this idea in my head of what the dynamic should be and how they could learn to tolerate each other. but then I looked at the wiki and it turned out i wasn’t thinking about alston cerveza, i’d had him confused with jesús koch. so. i scrapped all of that and just let the scorekeeper be mad! she has a right to tell him off for making her life harder!

the scorekeeper as a whole is probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever come up with, genuinely. but she came well after the initial ideas for the fic. first was the runs and the unruns, and then came alston, and then she walked in and i wrote the entire thing in one afternoon. and now she’s in the crabitat with candy and a stolen sweatshirt and people keep stealing all her runs. but she’s happy.

[haunthouse]

21 with loser & dreamy (not as a ship)

things you said when we were on top of the world / writing prompts.

takes place right after s6 d110!

Oliver Mueller hits a ground out to Kennedy Loser, and the Crabs win their first championship.

They don’t wait for the clawmentator to announce game over — everyone’s rushing together, running full-speed at where Kennedy stands in the infield; those who have lungs are screaming as loud as they can, their excitement drowning out even the droning feedback that echoes through the Crabitat. 

Dreamy walks a little slower. Takes it in. The crowds are cheering. The Garages make their own huddle on the other side of the field, a sadder affair. Dreamy hit a single in the second inning, and Parra brought it home, and she knows she isn’t anything spectacular when it comes to blaseball skills — she will never make it onto the idol board, never be on any leaderboards at all, and perhaps that’s a safer place to be — but she looks inside herself and finds that it feels good, knowing that she helped this happen. She was a part of this, their victory.

It doesn’t feel all the way real. Maybe it’s the sound, overwhelming at best, static mixing with screams, overlapping shouts of “Crabs good!” coming from everywhere at once. Dreamlike in its incomprehensibility. Sutton Dreamy was here in season one, standing in the same hollowed-out-shell of a stadium, spinning in the same slow circles in the middle of the field in a vain attempt to see the entire crowd at once, in panorama — and in season one, the crowds had been scarce, and the Crabs had been as far away from a championship as a team could be.

And now — an eighty-win season. Unprecedented, the news kept saying; every time she walked past a radio, a Blest Buy with their television displays on, a newspaper stand, it seemed to be commenting on the Crabs’ unprecedented wins. A twenty-one win streak. Never before seen in blaseball. She isn’t the best player by far, but she was part of that.

“Dreamy!” 

She blinks herself out of her thoughts — how long has she been standing in the middle of the field, just looking at everything? Long enough for some of the crowd to have filtered out of the door, taking their celebration into the streets around the harbor. Loser is doing that weird half-jog towards her. She goes to smile and finds that she is already smiling; brings her hand up in a wave.

“You alright out here?” There’s that undercurrent of concern in his voice that seems to always be there — team captain, defined by taking everyone else’s problems onto his own shoulders. It’s endearing, even if Dreamy is hesitant to share any of her issues with the team. The thought, at least, is nice.

“I’m fine,” she says. Truth. “Just — I don’t know. Taking it all in.” She laughs, high-pitched.

“It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?” Kennedy laughs, too; he bumps his shoulder into hers softly, and she takes the invitation, leans against his side.

That’s an understatement, she thinks. “Is this real?” she asks, suddenly. It could be a joke, or an idle hyperbole of a question, but Kennedy knows it’s a question with weight, under its lighthearted facade. Sometimes she has to check. Just in case. Reality in blaseball is a fickle thing, and Dreamy is very, very good at questioning anything she can’t confirm with her own eyes, and anything she can, and anything in between.

Kennedy takes a step back. He has to look up to look her in the eyes, but he does, and she resists the instinct to look away; settles for looking at his forehead instead. “All real, Dreamy.” He’s grinning. The weight he gives the words can’t hide the current of sheer joy under them. “The Baltimore Crabs are the season six champions.”

“We really did it,” she says. It could be a question. It isn’t.

The deafening noise of the stadium seems to fall into the background, if only for long enough for Kennedy to say, “Yeah, Dreamy, we did.” And then the noise returns — she laughs, wraps her arms around him, and suddenly the whole team’s there, embracing and falling over each other and filled with the kind of pure happiness that simply doesn’t exist in most of blaseball, not unless you make an active choice to ignore everything going on around you — but it’s here, and it’s warm, and it feels amazing.

And for a moment, the Crabs are at the top of the world, and Dreamy is right there with them.

[screechingjellyfishnight]

I felt like I was going to have a spiral but then I looked at the isopods in my crabitat and thought “if they can thrive and be happy with bad things happening around them, so can I”.

I was told to off myself and smoked some weed about it. Then I let myself enjoy some nice music and watched my isopods and crabs scuttle around together in the tank. Good days, my friends, good days. Sometimes when people say hateful things they need love said back to them. That’s all there really is to live for in this life. Love and kindness make the world go around in a positive way. Let’s keep our words positive and our minds clear, if not for others than for ourselves.

[happycrabitat]

Caught a really sweet moment

[kirstielol]

The crabitat paludarium is pretty much finished! I still need to order more plants, all I had on hand was some lemon button fern and random moss. I'm going to order some more plants soon, aquatic and terrestrial, including a lady of the night orchid (brassavola nodosa) that I plan on mounting to the cork bark in the background. Should be so beautiful when it blooms 🥰

Also I did not buy enough distilled water so the water level is much lower than it should be! Going to pick up more in the next day or two.

I'm pretty happy with the set up, except the colour of the sand is bugging me a bit. Bf says I'm being nitpicky and it looks fine, but idk.. I'm not 100% happy with the sand colour in contrast to the gravel and everything else. Kinda wish I went for a golden colour sand... I might end up replacing it.

[fbwzoo]

CrabCon Day 1 was amazing!!! There were so many great talks and I already learned so much!! I’m so happy that I’ll be able to go back and watch the videos repeatedly over the next year, because there’s just so much information in them. So much to think about, so much to discuss. 

Today’s talks were about putting live plants in the crabitat, substrate, advanced lighting options, foraging, dehydrating food, DIY environmental control systems, rehabbing sick/injured hermit crabs, and hermit crab reproduction. Like, that’s such a great range of topics!!! Even the “simplest” things that I’ve already known about since I started with crabs, like substrate & food dehydrating, I learned new things from the talks. 

And so many of them gave me ideas for my future “dream” crabitat, for when we move into our forever house. And this is something like 10 years off, so I have so much time to learn more, for the community to learn more, and to keep upgrading my tank plans!! This thing is gonna end up very ridiculous, lol.

And then there were discussion panels/sessions, which were on the future of the hermit crab industry & shaking up the wild-caught trade, selling hermit crab supplies & food, and advocating for hermit crabs sold on boardwalks. I got to participate on the first panel & we had a really interesting discussion. It’s overwhelming figuring out how best to go about pushing the transition from wild-caught crabs to captive-bred, but a lot of good points were brought up. A lot of this will be time & seeing how the captive-bred efforts go. We’re going to need more successful breeders besides just Mary in order to make this push. I hope to be able to contribute to this, but we’ll see!

And I was pleased to attend the session on selling, as well, as I’m hoping to possibly open a shop in the next couple years, after I get more hermit crab plants put into our yard. I have big plans!!

Can’t WAIT for the next two days! Even more fun stuff coming! And my enrichment talk is tomorrow, I’m both anxious & excited!

[robinmarie12]

Happy Wednesday! This morning when I went to greet my animals because I try to do this on a morning basis I found one of my crabs shells upside down. I was a little worried and so I carefully picked her up (her name is Star) and looked inside her shell. I didn’t see anything. My brain is thinking: okay don’t freak out put her in the makeshift swimming pool and she will climb out. She didn’t climb out... I checked all the shells in the aquarium and she wasn’t in them. So now I might have a naked hermit crab running around my crabitat.

I worked out today with Just Dance 2018 online. Then I used this new shampoo I got to try out that is a bar of soap. It is called “Spring and Vine Oatmeal Gentle 2 in 1 shampoo bar”.

Today was the first day I tried it and I have to say I really enjoyed using it. I felt like it cleaned my hair (although I hadn’t washed my hair in like four days) But some shampoos I feel like can leave like a residue in your hair and I am not all sure all the shampoo is out. They also have other scents as well that are supposed to do things with your hair.

I was looking through some posts from people who are off on weird sleep cycles and it go me thinking that I have really been on top of going to bed at a somewhat normal time except for the few weird late nights and then I wake up on my own around the same time every morning. I want to make sure I keep this so that whenever Quarantine is over that I don’t have such a hard time transitioning back. But I didn’t take a nap today for like three hours and I haven’t done that is a while.

I made myself a grilled cheese and I always eat my grilled cheeses with applesauce. I have done this since I was a little kid. Then tonight we had breakfast for dinner. When I went to the store the other day, I got some different meats and then split them into different freezer bags so that we could just pull them out when we decide what we were going to make. I do a lot of the cooking and since it has been relatively nice here (a little on the chilly side) I have really been into grilling lately. I need to teach my husband how to grill because it finds it difficult. Since we have a deck, it i quite simple and the electric grill meaning we don’t have to buy propane.

I have seen all notes that people have been leaving about my guinea pigs and I am sure they adore the attention they get. I was cuddling with Lily yesterday on the couch because her sister Yoshi won’t do it. Lily will usually tell me when she is ready to go back because she needs to use the bathroom or she is just done with being held.

I have been thinking about getting my betta fish another snail friend as her last friend died. She doesn’t mind them being in her tank. I tried giving her ghost shrimp and she thought they were a nice snack that I had gotten for her.

[a-concert-just-for-me]

Fingers crossed so that I can convince my mom to let me get a bigger tank for my crabs while it's on sale this weekend lol