#how to track bugs... website bug tracking

[nottslove]

ON CAMERA

Pairing: hacker!theo x spy!reader 1.1k words Summary: theo nott, professional, wanted hacker, has been keeping a close eye on you, the spy hired to track him down. little do you know, the more you search, the harder the search grows— mainly because theo knows you're looking for him. after following a lead blindly, you somehow land in danger and theo, who has been watching you, calls the cops to pull you out of your risky situation. as a thank you, he expects a little show...

Warnings: 18+, smut under the cut, voyeurism, somewhat stalking, exploitation, semi-public, dirty talk, cursing, not for minors.

WATCHING you had become an obsession. That was almost all he did, day and night.

Every room, every corner of your house was monitored. At first, he tried to convince himself he was doing it because it was his job. But when he began to skip sleeping to watch you sleep, he realized it ran much deeper than just that.

You, of course, were clueless about the whole ordeal. You performed your routine as you normally did, without ever suspecting that you were being hacked, watched.

You woke up early, trained in your private training room, practiced firing shots, worked out in your personal indoor gym, went for a swim, then ate and used your computer to follow up on your latest mission.

You were supposed to find one of the most wanted hackers in the country, whose identity was a complete secret, and you were positive you had a name, and perhaps a location.

Theo was watching, a smirk plastered across his lips as you searched for him. But he was too good.

His identity had remained a secret for a long time, and would continue to remain so until he decided otherwise.

"Oh, pretty girl, you'll never find me," he crooned, a soft chuckle spilling past his lips as every link you clicked took you to a dead end.

Frustrated beyond measure, you finally decided to search a dating website for something, anything.

And then, you found someone whose profile matched the one you were looking for.

"Bingo—" you whispered victoriously, staring at the profile of a young man in his early twenties.

"Hate to break it to you, Princess, but that's not me," Theo murmured to himself, lighting a cigarette as he watched you through one of the little screens around him, zooming in on your low-cut top. "Cute top though... Nice rack you got over there..."

Your laptop screen was duplicated across his as you created your own profile for an online dating site, after you came across your suspect on the website.

He was there, reading all those messages you sent, all the flirting between you and your suspect, his blood boiling with every picture you kept attaching to keep this man interested.

And then, you agreed to meet this suspect of yours. You hadn't bothered with a wire, you were confident you could handle him on your own— with two knives strapped to one thigh and a gun strapped to the other underneath your satin minidress.

Little did you know, Theo had already bugged your phone, already gotten your every movement displayed all over his screen.

He tracked you entering the restaurant, he tracked you waiting there for hours... then, he noticed you taking the shortcut back home, walking through the park... but when he noticed you moving towards an abandoned alley on the map across his display, he instantly called the cops and gave them your exact location.

Turns out, you were wrong. Your suspect was just another suspect, and the real guy you were hunting was still out there.

This guy just turned out to be some nasty creep who faked his profile to prey on young women.

You didn't know how the cops knew your exact location, or how they found out, but whatever it was, you were grateful because the cops had arrived before the creep could hurt a single hair on your head.

And when you reached home, you entered the shower first thing, trying to relax a little, before you fell asleep, unaware that Theo had zoomed into your bedroom, so that it now covered his entire screen.

"I deserve a thank you for that, don't I, pretty?" he remarked, even though he was well aware you couldn't hear him at all, zooming in on your figure, who had just come out of the shower and was now wrapped in a tiny towel that barely covered you. "After all, I did save that pretty little ass of yours back there... Gonna give me a little show?"

As if you had heard his words, you picked out a pair of satin shorts and a matching camisole, placing it on the bed as you pranced around your room in your tiny towel.

You were unaware of his watchful gaze, observing you, unaware he was so fucking hard underneath his joggers, his ringed fingers resting on his waistband as he watched you with bated breath, his eyes dark, jealous of every tiny, water droplet that clung to your sacred skin.

After you dried your hair, you took off your towel and let it slide to the floor while you got changed.

Unfortunately for Theo, your back was towards the camera. A groan slipped past his lips when he realized he wouldn't be able to see those pretty tits of yours.

Fortunately for him, he would have a nice picture of your ass.

And when he zoomed in to your plump rear, he nearly came in his pants.

He could feel his precum stain his new boxers, a loud groan leaving his lips as he slid his joggers down, taking out his cock and fisting it, spreading the precum down the length.

He gives it a few pumps, just imagining what it would be like to bend you over the bed and fuck you from behind, pull your hair back into a ponytail and manhandle you the way he wants, because he knows you can take it.

He closes his eyes, groans spilling past his lips as he begins jerking his cock in his hand, his eyes opening when he hears a small grunt of frustration from his screen— your pajama top fell when you were about to put it on.

As you bend over, you give Theo the most beautiful view of your ass, his eyes glued to the screen as he jerks off.

"Fuck—" he hisses, pumping his hand up and down his shaft, quickening his pace as he approaches his climax. "Such a cute fuckin' ass..."

Right before you slide your shorts on, he takes a screenshot, then closes his eyes, grunts of pleasure leaving him.

His cock throbs and pulses in his hand, his rings adding a delicious friction as he slides his hand faster, not even bothering to conceal his moans.

He gasps your name as he finally climaxes, his eyes rolling to the back of his head, his lower abs clenching with the surge of pleasure that flooded through him, the thick, sticky liquid now sliding down his screen, across the screenshot of your pretty, little ass.

Not even bothering to clean his mess up, his eyes flicker over to his other screen, where you're scrolling through your phone, tucked under the sheets of your bed, completely oblivious to it all.

His head slams against his table.

"Fuck— I'm screwed..."

not proofread, wrote this in such a hurry. lmk if i missed anything.

tags: @the-sylver-dragon, @clairesblouse

profile; nav;

©nottslove 2025. do not copy, steal or claim any works/graphics as your own.

[greenplumbboblover]

[Download] Lyralei's Pose Addon (Early Release)

It's finally here! 🎉 An successor to Virtual Artisan’s incredible Pose Addon!

VA’s Pose Addon has always been an essential part of my game, but it’s no secret that it had a few quirks and issues. While fixing those, I couldn��t resist adding some exciting new features to take it to the next level!

DOWNLOAD:

Simblr.CC

Requirements:

Cmomoney's Pose Box

Why Not Use Virtual Artisan's Pose Box with this mod?

This mod is an update to their original mod! Since it’s no longer available on their website, I decided to fully integrate it into this mod.

What does that mean?

This mod includes VA’s Pose Addon, so you don’t need to download it separately. Just make sure to delete the old version to avoid any glitches or conflicts! 😊

⭐ New Features:

Most things that are mine can be found under "Photo Shooting" > "Lyralei's Pose Addon".

👀Better Look at

Ever posed a sim to look at something next to them, but they do this weird "eye roll-y" and "nudging slightly to the left" type of look at?

Or maybe you simply wanted to make the eyes look somewhere and not the head?

Let's check it out:

Here we have Morgana, looking normally...

Left = Va's Pose addon - Right = Lyralei's Pose Addon.

To get started, first pose your Sim as usual! Once they’re in position, simply click "Look At..." to make it work.

Massive thanks to @thesweetsimmer111 for helping me on this!

Look at with just the eyes:

As mentioned, you can also just move certain parts of the body! In this case, the eyes!

(Left: No Look At, Middle = Looking left, Right = Looking up)

This is done with something called a "Track Mask". When selected, the only parts of the sim will move that fit the chosen trackmask.

For example: Track Mask "EyesOnly" will ONLY animate the eyes!

Blending Poses

Can't find a pose online that fits your needs, but you do have 2 poses that would totally fix that?

Not a problem anymore! With "Pose Blending" you can use a pose "base" and then overlay another pose to create your own dynamic poses!

Here are some examples!

On both cases, we have the "base" pose on the left. Then I have chosen to blend it with the pose in the middle, to get this as an end result! :)

How to:

First, pose your sim as you normally would

Go to "Photo shooting..." > "Lyralei's Pose Addon..." > "Utils..." > "Blend" > Choose whichever option you'd like to use! :)

Pick the Track Mask you'd like to apply. If you only want the upperbody to be affected, click that option.

Click/type in the pose you want to blend it with....

And tada!

Sitting/Laying poses:

Even that's possible! :) Keep in mind, though: The base pose HAS to sit/lay/etc. Otherwise, your sim will elevate!

Categorised Pose List

Frustrated because every time you want to grab a pose from your list, it takes 3455325352 years for the list to load? Well, wait no more!

Completely customizable through XML, you can now sort poses in their own respective categories!

Need a sitting pose? no problem! Just go to Lyralei's Pose Addon > Take pose From... > Common List > Sitting, and there you have all your sitting poses! :)

Can I customise this list myself?

Of course! I wrote a How-To here: Click me!

🕰️ Show History

The Add-on remembers your pose history!

Whether you’re a dedicated “Pose by Name” user or prefer the simplicity of “Show by List”, both options now display your pose history for quick reference.

Note: Each Sim has their own individual history list. This means you’ll only see the pose history for Sim X when clicking on them, and not for Sim Y.

What did I fix for Virtual Artisan's Pose Addon?

I've made sure to keep everything as it used to (and if I made a replacement for it, it's now labeled with "[LEGACY]" at the beginning of the interaction).

But, of course there were some bugs that came with it.

Changelist:

There is now an interaction that uses both look at & reaction simultaneously. (In case you don't want to use my look at interaction).

Fixed an issue where reactions would sometimes or never show on the sim.

Fixed an issue where sims didn't always want to look at the item.

Fixed an issue where certain poses get called twice, making it harder to keep reactions or even look at history data.

Optimised the code here and there.

Most interactions will now continue on posing your sim if you exited out of the interaction, rather than resetting it. (this counts for "Change Expression" and "Look At").

DOWNLOAD:

Simblr.CC

[hms-no-fun]

you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?

cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.

first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.

cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.

but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!

the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.

i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.

all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!

what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!

like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.

uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao

[ryanyflags]

A List of Gender Terms !

So I disappeared for 2 months, but I finally completed this project! :D (Though I've been making some random posts talking about it, so it's not like I was really gone, or what I was working on wasn't obvious.)

It started off as me having trouble keeping track of a couple gender terms (and also not knowing they existed before, since I've never really seen people talk about them), then I thought I should make a list, and if I was going to do that I might as well post it to help other people too. Which I started out trying to make that list on Tumblr, but I found it too limiting so I moved to google docs, which I also found too limiting (I just couldn't achieve my vision, if you will), and now I know html and css.

As usual, I kinda overdid it, but I think I should be a little proud of myself. I had 0 knowledge of html and css, and 2 months later I've made my own website. (I could have made it much quicker, but I often had to take breaks, a bit overwhelmed by all that new stuff.)

Anyways, it has a ton of terms on there.

I have sections for nonbinary, abinary, midbinary, atrinary, midtrinary, androgyne, agender, neutrois, maverique, ilyagender, aporagender, outherine, kenochoric, and xenogender.

For 7 categories (sex terms, adult, general term, child, gender quality, gender-quality-in-nature genders, and spectrum / -iagender spectrum).

And they all have sources on both Archive Today, Wayback Machine, and if still existing, the original post too. (At least to the best of my abilities, and there are a couple of exceptions that I couldn't figure out.)

I did put effort into this, but it's possible I missed something. So if I made a mistake anywhere, or if anyone has any extra information to add on, or if you just have some comments, you can tell me. My ask box is open, but comments on this post would probably be fine too.

Also, I checked on a couple of different browsers, mobile too, and read up on web accessibility and checked and all that (I tried using a screen reader, I'm not a pro at it though, so it's possible I may have missed something obvious), so I hope the website itself is useable. But if there's any bugs there, just tell me (it'll be appreciated).

I'm also thinking of making another compilation, but for flags (for all of the terms listed here), and maybe orientations too, but maybe later haha

I also don't know how to write a image id for the top picture, if anyone wants to write to one I'll add it.

-

Below the cut is a short little video scrolling through the site.

[mariacallous]

Within just the last week or so, Elon Musk’s DOGE hit team of mostly young, almost exclusively male engineers and executives have done the following:

Pushed a website live to track “savings” that showed no savings for several days, and made it trivially easy for random people on the internet to make changes to it.

Published classified information on that same website.

Got called out for accidentally inflating that savings amount by $7,992,000,000, and doubled down on their inaccuracy before they fixed it.

Fired hundreds of people who work on nuclear security, then scrambled to rehire them, except they had nuked all the work email addresses and personnel files so they didn’t know how to get in touch.

Basically the same deal, except with the US Department of Agriculture employees working to protect the country from a looming bird flu crisis.

Rehired a 25-year-old engineer with a stack of racist tweets to his name.

Spouted a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories about who’s getting Social Security benefits. (Okay, that was all Musk.)

That’s just a sampling. It doesn’t include the damage born of purging thousands of workers across multiple government agencies, the consequences of which will reverberate in both obvious and unexpected ways for a generation—not to mention the near-term impact that arbitrarily spiking the unemployment rate will have on the US economy. It doesn’t include the opportunity cost of tossing hundreds of government contracts and programs into a bonfire.

This is just the truly dumb stuff, the peek behind the veil of DOGE, the confirmation that all of this destruction is, in fact, as specious and arbitrary as it seems. When in doubt, tear it all down, see what breaks, assume you can repair it—maybe with AI? It’s the federal government; how hard can it be?

This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things.

It doesn’t work like that. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time; when he turned to baseball in 1994, Jordan hit .202 in 127 games for the AA Birmingham Barons. (For anyone unfamiliar with baseball stats, this is very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.) Elon Musk is the undisputed champion of making money for Elon Musk. As effectively the CEO of the United States of America? Very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.

Just look at all of those firings. DOGE has targeted so-called probationary employees first, often without regard for their skill or necessity of their roles. Do you know what a probationary employee is? It’s people who have been in their position for less than a year, or in some cases less than two years. That means new hires, sure, but also experienced workers who recently transferred departments or got promoted.

Not only does DOGE not seem to understand this, it has given no indication that it wants to understand. These are the easiest employees to fire, legally speaking, so they’re gone. It even changed the length of the probationary period—from one year of service to two—in order to super-size its purge of the National Science Foundation.

It takes a certain swashbuckling arrogance to propel a startup to glory. But as we’ve repeatedly said, the United States is not a startup. The federal government exists to do all of the things that are definitionally not profitable, that serve the public good rather than protect investor profits. (The vast majority of startups also fail, something the United States cannot afford to do.)

And if you don’t believe in the public good? You sprint through the ruination. You metastasize from agency to agency, leveling the maximum allowable destruction under the law. DOGE’s costly, embarrassing mistakes are a byproduct of reckless nihilism; if artificial intelligence can sell you a pizza, of course it can future-proof the General Services Administration.

Worse still, none of this will actually help DOGE make a dent in its purported mission. What’s efficient about firing people you have to scramble to hire back? What are the cost savings of a few thousand federal employees compared to the F-35 program? What are we even doing here, actually?

There are two possible explanations for this mess. One is that Musk and DOGE have no interest in the government, or efficiency, but do care deeply about the data they can reap from various agencies and revel in privatization for its own sake. The other is that a bunch of purportedly talented coders have indeed responded to a higher civic calling, but are out here batting .202.

Musk did have a rare moment of self-awareness late last week, during an Oval Office appearance with his four-year-old son and President Donald Trump. “We will make mistakes,” he said. “but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

So far he’s half right.

[velvetwyrme]

hi its bugwars i give my official endorsement for the rpf [robot person fanfiction] fic idea. if you write it i will work very hard pressing buttons and keys in order to send it to everybody. and ill hoot and holler and cheer also and clap but you cant hear that. and maybe steal like 10 bucks to throw at you.

this is not a bribe, legally, but also if you wish to discuss or talk about the concept any further that would be awesome because it sounds really cool.

YOURS TRULY,

A MILLION BUG WARS EVERY DAY

HIII BUGWARS ANON!

i will absolutely take the chance to chatter abt this fic because it's PLAGUING me again. who knows if/when ill write it but i like thinking abt it and the potential dynamics of it.

thank u for ur interest and endorsement (and theoretical 10 stolen dollars HFJFHD) i got distracted reading >300k words of jazzwave fic in 2 days and also getting way too invested in this potential plot dont mind me.

anyway i didn't actually have any plans for this but then i started typing and then i KEPT having ideas so. im throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks

endgame jazzwave/reader because i like polys <3

the MC is a fanfiction writer who focuses on writing about the big robots that are not-so-secretly hanging about on Earth. originally i thought that the MC would write Jazzwave but... I think it's far far funnier if what they actually write is xReader fic. (Maybe also other ship stuff, but primarily reader inserts)

Jazz keeps tabs on human forums talking about Cybertronians, both for personal interest (culture is fascinating!!) but also to keep track of what public opinion is about both factions.

Eventually he stumbles across some people talking about another ✨Secret✨ forum/website... the discussion is quickly shut down (suspicious in itself!) but Jazz still figures it out and accesses it, only to realise...

It's fanfiction. It's a forum dedicated to RPF about Cybertronians. Strange, but not entirely unexpected. He's honestly surprised he HASN'T seen any up until now.

He begins reading (for cultural understanding, of course. He needs to know what humans think of them :])

... and eventually stumbles across a really really good fic, with just one caveat.

It's a Soundwave/Reader.

It's a little weird, reading a romantic fic about Soundwave in particular, especially one where the reader is supposed to imagine a romance with him... but it's relatively popular and well, he's curious.

(Jazz gets really invested.)

The fic details a softer side to Soundwave and the thing is... Jazz has seen that side of him. Soundwave cares deeply for his cassettes and he is fully aware just how far Soundwave will go to protect them and... this fic opens his mind up to the possibility of someone else also having that same protection and care shown towards them. and if that makes him feel some sorta way, nobody has to know

At some point while reading, Jazz realises that the descriptions of some of the Decepticon and Autobot plans/tactics are suspiciously accurate.

Like as in "these descriptions of battles and tactics are surprisingly detailed" almost to the point of "goddamn it War Thunder not again" type of accurate.

So he begins to wonder... who's the one writing this and why do they know so much? Are they a spy? Are they getting insider information? Is Soundwave behind this?

Elsewhere, Soundwave has also taken note of the fanfics cropping up. He's largely paid it no mind, what humans create is of no concern... until now.

He reads the fic, and is taken aback by how genuine and SOFT they portray him. It's... rather endearing really.

I also think it would be. really funny if Jazz is sent to question/interrogate you, and appears in his holoform, intending to keep it casual, but you recognize him immediately because. why wouldn't you.

(section from my scratch doc, lightly implied suggestive themes)

Things happen (presumably. Decepticons.) and the interrogation is interrupted and Jazz must flee w/ you :]

Soundwave watches from the sidelines, having found that the reader's writing resonated with him in an unexpected way, and he is intrigued at the way you seem to look at the world and view him in turn

things happen! you and Jazz get to know each other better, having taken you to a safe house since he can't just take you to the Autobot base

Cue conversations and bonding :D!!Eventually Jazz does come to the conclusion that you aren't involved with Soundwave, which is... of course when he decides to show up.

No idea how things would go down past this but im thinking of the Yearnign they all experience. Soundwave growing protective over the reader and quietly getting to know them as Jazz flirts more unabashedly with both of them as he slowly comes to realise oh no he actually does like both of them

i also think it'd be fun to have a subplot surrounding the reader's mysterious beta reader/friend who provides insights and suggestions for their fics, particularly to do with military strategy as well as acting as a sounding board for relationship dynamics. the reader has never met them and doesn't know anything more than a screen name. and the mystery deepens when jazz ot soundwave is unable to track down this elusive figure, who is a veritable ghost on the internet :]

other things that may or may not fit, but i think are funny to think about:

slowly figuring out/revealing which other autobots/decepticons frequent the fanfic forums (obvious ones being thundercracker and first aid, but there are so many other good options.)

megatron and optimus reading fics about each other and yearning in the background (inverse of what happens in a lot of MegOp fics where Jazzwave is happening in the bg)

jazz somehow ends up in a conversation with soundwave in which jazz asks if soundwave knows abt the reader's fanfic- isn't it detrimental to his cool and mysterious demeanor? and soundwave is just like "... why were you reading soundwave/reader fics?"

anyway im abt to pass out while typing this so im just posting this now, if theres more i forgot ill add it tmr morning or whenever

[gabbrofan27]

I have GOT to post something outer wilds related, you like ONE drawing of Noelle DeltaRune (first name last name) and your feed is full of deltarune. This is NOT a deltarune blog tumblr you mistaken wench website

anyways, chert with a kangaroo tail bouncing instead of walking, no I need serious post. At time of hatchling launch day, say hatchling is 19-20 when launching, feldspar has been gone seven years. I don’t know how to begin to approach coming up with the reasons they were able to survive for seven years. maybr…

gossan always feared feldspar getting into a crash they couldn’t be rescued from easily, or them getting lost to the void of space with no fuel and no means to track them. so they probably packed a years worth of rations into the ship, fighting with slate the entire time about “carrying capacity” and “worrying too much.”

feldspar is stupid, but they aren’t dumb. They took one look at gossan’s written manual on rationing the rations, saw them say it could only last a year, and took that as a challenge. They needed some heavy initial intake for immediate healing after the crash, so they were able to make it last between 1.5-2 yrs. They got, veery sickly and malnourished, but it worked for a time

we dont see it in game, but if the travelers have all of the means to set up a semi permanent camp, why wouldn’t they also take seeds for trees that can bear fruit? Feldspar got them to grow after some time, and helped after the rations ran out. There wasn’t much nutrition in the soil of the anglerfish skeleton (related: tree fic named Tree Life), so they didn’t last much too long, but probably got them out to year 3-3.5

the water collectors (moisture farm? vapor condenser? Idk a good name but you get the idea) we’re actually very, very effective inside the node. Turns out, having grown from an ice planet, there is a looooot of moisture and water floating in dark bramble. One can tide them over for 2 years, and they have 3

after the fruits are gone and dead, all the soil used up, they probably had to get adventurous again, seemingly out of food at the moment. They have tanks full of jetpack fuel, and all the time in the world, so they go hunting for anglerfish. Of course, they only spear the mini ones, not a chance of anything more grown than a baby, and collect the eggs if they’re feeling reckless enough (and they are bc they’re feldspar). they have plenty of fuel by year 4.5-5, but a near fatal encounter with the anglerfish knocked them down a few pegs, alongside breaking their… speargun, I guess? No, it’s just a piece of pipe sharpened on the anglerfish skeleton with a rope attached to it, and maybe a fishing rod to actually hook the anglers

year 5 is year of the egg and year 6 is year of the bug. they had collected several hundred eggs and prevented them from hatching (shake it fast and hard for a bit), and they stay useable for a long while. Or at least, if they muscle through the myriad of symptoms that eating early eggs gives them, they’re useable for a while. But they run out, and so? Bugs. Yeap, they gotta eat bugs! Nothing much to it to be honest. Maybe they’ve been intermittently eating bugs in place of other items throughout their stay at Dark Bramble Express & Suites, so they don’t immediately use up all of their bugs, but like, bugs throughout get them going to the end of year 6

at year 7, they are running out of bugs. to avoid getting into the more uhh, sourcing of food “from the self” gory aspect of extreme survivalism (although in another post, that is exactly what happens here instead of bugs), I’ll say they’ve been on a grueling regiment of bug and jellyfish rations by the time the hatchling finds them. just in time!

if gossan knew that feldspar kept that drawing they made on the rations manual, gossan’s little scribble of the five founders together, kept it on their body at all times to always remind them of home, I think they would be put at ease just a little bit more, even if felds were to never get back home.

[bengiyo]

BL 2023 Review

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to write about BL for this year. I was originally going to do a The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly framework for it, but that feels meaner than I actually am about it. Instead, I think I’ll just write out some sections and unpack some things I felt along the way.

I Watched Too Much Again

Last year I engaged with about 92 productions around the world. This year it was 99 (I tracked stuff I completed here). Sure I dropped 18 of them this year, but goddamn. The problem with watching as much as I did this year is that I worked full time this year and also maintained a separate hobby. I also continued my twice-weekly watch sessions with my friend Emily, so there are an additional 100-ish watch sessions in here of rewatching, plus a few other rewatches (Theory of Love and My Ride most notably).

One of my struggles at this point is I’m far too familiar with the genre, and find myself feeling impatient and irritable with shows that aren’t to my taste the way I used to. Throughout the late summer and fall I found myself increasingly grumpier about the genre, and it didn’t get better until I had a holiday and basically slept a day to get some energy back. I also found myself growing apart from fans I’ve known and followed a long time. It’s been a difficult year for me as a long-time fan because my tastes, habits, and friendships in the genre have changed even if the amount I watch hasn’t really.

I Wrote a Lot This Year

I recently converted my watch tag away from my gaming internet persona to just my shortname, so all near-1000 of my Stray Thoughts posts can be found under #ben watches now. I’ve also been going back and adding #ben writes to some of the standalone pieces that I really liked. In reviewing them, the pieces I’m happiest about are my ode to Framboise from Kabe Koji Nekoyashiki-kun Desires to Be Recognized, my post begging everyone to watch La Pluie, my post about what it means to actually like queer men, my SBS ep 10 post that ended up being wrong, my post about the Lavender Scare and Be My Favorite, my Tokyo in April is… post about the breaking of the BL line,

However, the two posts I am most proud of is my half-joking response about why I think tagging each other back and forth across Tumblr in our writing is so important. and The Knowing: Being Queer in BL because I had so much great conversations with folks as a result of both of these posts.

Looking back at my own blog, this is probably the most active I’ve been in my entire time on this website, so thank you to everyone who interacted with me this year, because it really is people talking to me that gets me most inspired to write things down. Big shout out to @lurkingshan who will bug me repeatedly until I blog something that I said in passing.

We Started a Podcast!

After hanging out with @shortpplfedup since Bad Buddy, she got inspired and really wanted to bring something different to the BL podcasting sphere. I had time, and liked talking with her enough, so we started @the-conversation-pod. Now we’re a full year into it and planning out future stuff. It’s been so much fun being able to get things off my soul and break poor NiNi in our recording sessions.

From this year, I think my favorite episodes we did were The Moonlight Chicken Episode, the Eighth Sense episode, the ITSAY Anniversary Episodes,  The Wedding Plan episode, , and The Holiday Clip Show. Huge shout out to @ginnymoonbeam for anchoring the transcription process, and @lurkingshan for editing.

The VIIB Awards will begin airing soontm so look forward to that.

Favorite New Term: Business Gay Performance

Let’s be clear, Bump Up Business is not good. It is an obvious BL cash grab from OnlyOneOf that seeks to comment on the fake nature of BL while doing everything it can to trick the audience into believing that the BL pair is real.

Before we got deeper into this year, I was a big fan of a certain pairing, and then their fans took it too far and it affected the way I engaged with their performances and their work. I like that we have a new term for “fanservice” that communicates that you understand that this is for work. (thanks to NiNi for this comparison) I can look at the latest behind the scenes video from Last Twilight and say that I think Sea really understands the work they’re doing, and he and Jimmy have a very relaxed and mature version of BGP without feeling like I’m feeding into shipping.

Do I think they’re dating? No. Do I like the way they fake it? Absolutely!

I can look at one of @respectthepetty posts about Yin and War having personalized, color-coded mics, and we can talk about the next level BGP between the two and both communicate that we know that this is a performance.

It actually makes the extra PR work fun for me again, because now I can just shout “BGP! BGP! BGP!” and it not feel like I’m giving myself brainrot.

Thai BL Needs to Finish Stronger Next Year

Let’s get into some of the show stuff. This year was defined for me by Thai BL starting strong with good premises and then squandering them by not focusing on the details that mattered or leaning into baseless melodrama. Time for some reads. Some of these shows were generally good, but they failed at these things:

609 Bedtime Story: The world building crumpled in the back half and both endings are flat.

A Boss and a Babe: Cher is a pro gamer who worked for a gaming company and there was no plot point about this at all, or collaboration between the two groups.

Bake Me Please: Why was a show about cake so lacking in flavor?

Be Mine SuperStar: You had a real opportunity to explore a fan and idol romance and had Punn show so little growth. I hope the footage of First’s range is helpful now that Ja is out of BL.

Be My Favorite: You redid that whole amusement park date and muddled so much of what the hell happened on that day.

Between Us: You had years to make this interesting. Why are there five pairs and why is the end of this a JC Penny catalog photoshoot?

Dangerous Romance: What the fuck happened to the Sailom we had in episode 1 and 2 before that gun incident?

Hidden Agenda: Tee, what the hell was this? Twelve weeks of this?

I Feel You Linger in the Air: You may be the most beautiful show, with some of the most impressive performances of the year, but you absolutely botched this ending. Finish the goddamn season next time.

Love in Translation: I love you, but that whole kidnapping plot was so stupid at the end.

Low Frequency: I like your OST. That's about it.

My Dear Gangster Oppa: No examination about how gaming friendships become close quickly because of the combination of anonymity and teamwork (shout out to @twig-tea for this excellent summation).

My School President: Saving your gay commentary for the final episode felt like a conservative choice. I want more from you next time.

Naughty Babe: You retconned your own characters to tell a worse story. Unforgiveable.

Never Let Me Go: You didn’t know if you wanted to be a high school BL or a mafia story. It was difficult to watch.

Only Friends: I cannot believe you did Boston like that at the end. Either give Force’s character a clear personality next time, or keep him enigmatic; half measures make him and Book look worse. Sand was absolutely embarrassing. Boeing was a waste. Ending on all of them paired like that felt so unearned.

Step By Step: You forgot to ground Jeng’s external dreams at the end, so the final two episodes are just frustrating.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. We can go into the next year now.

Korea Put in the Work This Year

I really like the efforts from the various Korean studios this year. I really hope we get a Strongberry joint next year, but I want to acknowledge that we had 18 Korean BL dramas I watched this year, and at least three of them I think are must watches: Our Dating Sim, Sing My Crush, and The Eighth Sense. Beyond that, I think Love Tractor, Unintentional Love Story, and A Breeze of Love are easy recommendations.

It’s really impressive how the complaint for me this year with Korean BL is not about them using their time poorly. It’s more about normal drama concerns, where I think characterization is a little weak, or a theme doesn’t land squarely. This rapid iteration from the Korean studios is really impressive to watch, and I’m excited to see what some of the recognized players do next year.

Taiwan and The Philippines Have Been Quiet for Me

I wasn’t really able to connect with much from the Philippines this year except for The Day I Loved You. I never wrote about The Day I Loved You, but this beautiful and heart wrenching show is one of my favorites from this year. I wasn’t too keen on the Oxin Films offerings of this year, and I’m still chasing down the ones from The IdeaFirst Company.

As for Taiwan, this new BL project from the end of the year just isn’t hitting. Kiseki: Dear to Me also ended up really hurting me with the way they used Wayne Song and Huang Chun Chih. I love that angry little man with the white hair, but I’m still salty about Wayne and the general mess of that show.

Japan was Busy This Year

I watched 16 new shows, a few older ones, and a few movies this year from Japan. We haven’t gotten this much from them ever. I continue to love the Drama Shower project from MBS, and my beloved What Did You Eat Yesterday? returned this year. We had pretty stellar outings with Our Dining Table, If It’s With You, and I Cannot Reach You.

I think a third of the Japanese BL I’ve tracked on MDL actually released this year. That’s huge.

Still, I am going to side eye Minato’s Laundromat 2. You were the show that let me down the most this entire year. More than Only Friends, more than Step By Step, and even more than Kiseki. You absolutely blew it. You were telling a great story about a man with an acute case of internalized homophobia coming out of his shell and learning to love his younger partner and you blew it for stupid amnesia nonsense. I will never forgive you for this.

Where Were All the Uncles This Year?

Really, without Jim from Moonlight Chicken, and without the men from What Did You Eat Yesterday? we had an alarming dearth of older gay characters passing on knowledge and wisdom to the youngsters this year. What the hell happened?

Rare Dynamics Won: Second Chance Romance and Friends to Lovers!

We had so much second chance romance this year. It’s really my favorite version of gay romance because gays don’t always have ideal settings when they’re young. We had Our Dating Sim, Individual Circumstances, Jun & Jun, The End of the World With You, Tokyo in April is…, Be My Favorite, Love Class Season 2, and A Breeze of Love. I am satisfied.

Friends to Lovers is actually so rare in romance and we have so many to choose from this year! The best examples are I Cannot Reach You and Sing My Crush, but we also have one of the pairs in Love Class Season 2.

Gay Thoughts

I had a couple of ongoing thoughts this year about queerness in BL.

First, I want to return to my post about Sing My Crush and La Pluie, and how I assert that Men Need to Be Angry Sometimes. More than giving men grace to be righteously angry or upset about things, along with letting them express it in ugly ways, I really want to get into how we engage with these shows. I will stop engaging with moralistic reads on characters in 2024. I will no longer engage with asks, reblogs, or meta gripping the fandom where we're judging the moral fiber of the character.

The question that really only matters for me at this point is: Is this act from the character justified from their characterization, the narrative, or genre conventions; and is it interesting? Whether or not the character is good or bad reeks of the lame arguments about good and bad representation, and I am not watching BL like I’m being graded in Sunday school.

The second thing I really want to acknowledge at the end of the year is that the gay sex is finally getting better again. I watched The Novelist this year, and we have taken so long to get back to the space that show took us on the portrayal of male-male intimacy. We are in the genre about people with dicks. It should feel like it. There should be a masculine component there that feels specific to queer intimacy.

I will acknowledge 2 Cutie 2 Pie, A Boss and a Babe, Be Mine SuperStar, Bed Friend, Candy Color Paradox, For Him, I Cannot Reach You, Kiseki: Dear to Me, La Pluie, Love Class 2, Love in Translation, Love Mate, Middleman’s Love, Naughty Babe, Only Friends, The End of the World With You, Tokyo in April is…, and Wedding Plan for your contributions.

Final Thoughts

I like how broad the genre felt this year, and I enjoyed how much speculative fiction is entering into the conversation. I don’t know how I feel about there being five vampire stories in the works next year, but overall I’m glad that we’re getting more experimental concepts. I’m burnt out on the college engineering BL, and would like to see more shows about working adults.

Despite how grumpy I was for at least three months, I think this has genuinely been one of the best years we’ve ever had in the genre. I made a lot of new friends in BL this year, and I’m excited to see what comes next. Thank you all for spending some of your time with me this year and I’ll see you in the next one.

[marveloustimestwo]

Thank you for the Yandere Hotch post!! It was better than I thought. Now I have anothr request if I may: Platonic Yandere Penelope Garcia! I fel she's be even worse than Hotchner in her overprotectiveness.

I'm happy you liked it! Thanks for sending something else in!

Warnings: Yandere themes, stalking and tracking via technology

Penelope Garcia is definitely a big worrywart when it comes to her darling, especially if you're on the younger side.

She just can't help it. Before she knows it, her mind starts to fill with paranoid thoughts and fears, and the only thing that helps is hearing your voice or seeing your face.

Penelope really doesn't mean any harm. Your safety and comfort are her first priority. She wants you to trust her, to feel safe with her. After all, you're her friend, someone she considers a sibling.

But her job tends to mess with her quite a bit. No matter how many bright things she fills her office with, she can't escape the gruesome pictures and websites she has to dig through daily.

After doing her job for so long, Penelope can't help but project her fears onto you. If you're a woman, especially if you're on the younger side, she is constantly afraid that one day you're going to be another victim, another person on that screen that she has to look at.

She may be paranoid, but she can't help it. She's not like Derek or Emily. She's not a fighter, she's not as strong as they are, and she can barely hold a gun.

So how is she supposed to protect you?

Penelope knows it's invasive and kind of illegal. If you found out she bugged your home while you weren't watching, you would lose all trust in her.

But how else is she supposed to keep you safe? She may not be able to physically protect you, but at least she can tap into your home at all times. She can make sure you're safe, wrapped up in your bed or the couch. At least she can track your location, to make sure you are where you said you are, just to be sure you weren't kidnapped.

Don't worry if that green recording light on your phone or computer lights up. It gives Penelope that extra bit of comfort to hear your voice or see your face if you aren't in the view of her cameras.

Please don't judge her for running a background check for everyone you've ever worked with or been friends with. She's not likely to let you know that she even did this, but she needs to know the people you're interacting with are clean. You shouldn't be friends with or be forced to work with someone with a criminal background.

Or, really, anything less than a perfect background. Penelope will know about the slightest dirt on someone's file and deem them unworthy of you.

If she has to make things worse for the person to get them out of your life, then so be it. She's done illegal things before, she's not afraid to do it again for your safety

On a lighter note, however, Penelope's favorite thing is tracking your wish lists. Whether it's on Etsy, Amazon, etc, she's seen it, even if it's private. It helps her get to know you as a person, and when she gets particularly sad about a case or worried about you, which is often, she'll go ahead and buy you something off the list.

She likes seeing you happy. Even if sometimes you don't know it's her that bought you the gift, seeing your face light up is all the thanks she needs.

A lot of the time, though, she loves giving you those gifts herself. Penelope will pass it off as her knowing you really, really well, or having heard you mention it once in passing. And there doesn't need to be an occasion to get you a gift, silly! If she wants to spoil you, she will!

Overall, Penelope is a very sweet yandere. She would never harm you or kidnap you, but she is very paranoid and overprotective. She will not hesitate to blackmail the people around you she dislikes. If you knew about what she does for your safety, you would no doubt feel a bit violated.

[allthingsfangirl101]

Out of The Blue – Keys

Masterlist

I walked into my apartment and kicked off my shoes. I went upstairs and changed into a pair of leggings and an oversized flannel. The second I got downstairs, I collapsed onto the couch.

Right out of MIT, I got a job as a traveling coder. I meet with business professionals and owners and help them build their websites. After the first meeting, everything I did could be done from home.

I grabbed my laptop off my desk and took it to the family room. I put on the TV show I was currently binge-watching and slowly started working on my newest project. I was finishing up for the night when I glanced over and saw how late it was. I was just about to close my computer when it dinged. With furrowed eyebrows, I checked my email.

Walter McKeys.

My heart flipped and then plummeted into my stomach. I haven't talked to Keys since college. We were in a lot of classes together. We constantly studied together and helped each other with our homework. I was the one who gave him the nickname "Keys". He gave me the nickname "Buggy". He used to say that I was annoyingly good at finding and getting rid of computer bugs.

Memories came flooding back as I read his email.

Hey Buggy, It's been a long time. I'm sorry for this random email, but I've been thinking a lot about you lately. That's probably weird. To be honest, I don't really know how to explain why I'm emailing you. I've never been very good with words. I'm only good with code. You know that. How many times did we have to do a presentation and all I could do was the coding part? You were always the one who did the presentation and the talking part.

Sorry. I'm email-rambling. Anyway, I've been having this issue with a code and AI. I finally made the connection and figured out the problem. I only figured it out because of you. I know that doesn't make sense, Buggy, and I'm sorry. Please watch the video attached and maybe, just maybe, it'll make more sense.

Sincerely, Your Keys

As I finished the email, my breathing was unsteady, almost coming out in short gasps. I reread it over and over again, my mind spinning with questions. I opened the attachment, but for some reason, I couldn't play it. When I finally pressed play, Keys popped up on my laptop screen. From the looks of it, he was at his office late at night.

Why would he film this at his office and send it to me despite how late it was?

That question made me finally press play. I held my breath as Keys started talking.

"Hey, Buggy," he smiled at the camera. "I know this is kinda weird, but I need to get some things off my chest. I'm not sure if you know this but for the last year, I've been working for Soonami on a game called, "Free Life". Lately, I've noticed something. . . Strange. Before I explain, I need to confess something. A while ago, I created a game with a friend of mine called, Life Itself. To be honest, Y/N, I used part of your code from our senior project."

Keys looked away from the camera and sighed. When he looked back, my chest tightened at the look on his face.

"I'm really sorry, Y/N," he whispered. "I should've. . . I changed it a little bit. Your code was focused on programming. All I did was adapt it for gaming. I'm sorry. I know I should've called and asked for your permission. I really hope that doesn't make you hate me."

He cleared his throat and took a minute to get his thoughts back on track. "Anway," he continued, "Soonami bought "Life Itself". They claimed to have shelved it, but my friend Millie found proof that they didn't. For you to understand what happened, I need to introduce you to Guy."

I smiled when his scream split and I saw the character he started talking about. "He's supposed to be an NPC, but something changed. Now, from the beginning. . . Guy's behavior is much more complex than it should be, thanks to our code."

My heart jumped when he called it "our code".

"But he's still stuck in "Free City,"" he continued. "He's still stuck in his life, this loop. And then, something changes. He comes to life. Why? And then I remembered. One of the characters from "Life Itself" was this guy that I nicknamed, "Lovelorn". And he was someone who was designed to never meet the right person. It was essentially the building blocks of the character. But he never stopped hoping that he would meet "the girl of his dreams". So I had to base this girl off of someone. . . and who better than the person that I was sitting next to every day? You."

My breathing sped up and I felt my heart jump back into my throat as he continued to explain to me what was going on.

"But then, one day, he meets Millie in "Free City", and once he sees her. . . he can never be the same. He was supposed to feel doomed, but instead, he feels alive until eventually, he is alive. Millie changed him. You wrote the code that was able to be changed by one person. One connection. You brought him to life, Y/N. You wrote the code that brought him to life. And he was alive because he met the one person he'd been waiting for his whole life. And I had to make it realistic, so. . . I based it off of. . . You. The woman of his dreams. . . she was the same as mine."

I hit the pause button, my heart beating against my chest. I ran my fingers through my hair as I tried to put my thoughts together.

"But Millie is the one who met him," I mumbled under my breath. "She's the one who brought him to life. . . I just wrote his code."

I grabbed my bag and headed to my car but stopped when I realized what time it was.

I went to bed but as soon as I got up, I found Soonami's address. I anxiously drummed my fingers on the steering wheel as I got close. I signed in at the front desk and headed up to the offices. The entire time I was in the elevator, I kept repeating what Keys said in the video.

"Hello, gorgeous," a guy smirked. "I'm Mouser. And you are?"

"Not looking for you," I said harshly. "Where's Keys?"

"Not here," he shrugged. I sighed as I ran my fingers through my hair.

"You got an address?"

* * * * *

When I pulled up to Keys' apartment complex, my nerves made me freeze. I wasn't even sure what I was going to say to him when and if he opened that door. I barely found the courage to park my car and head up to his place.

I got to his door but hesitated before knocking. I held my breath as I waited for him to answer. The longer it took him, the closer I got to turning around and running away. I was just about to when the door opened.

"Y/N," Keys stuttered.

"Hi," I said, my voice softer than I wished. "We need to talk about that video."

He sent me a small smile and nodded. I took a shaky breath when he opened the door and moved aside for me to come in. I walked in and instantly started nervously playing with my hands.

"Have a seat," he invited me.

"Nice place," I mumbled as I looked around but didn't sit down.

"Thanks," he chuckled, clearly embarrassed. He cleared his throat before attempting to break through the tension. "So, that video. . ."

"Millie brought him to life," I cut him off. "Not me."

"It was your code," he shrugged with a small look on his face.

"You said I was the woman of your dreams," I continued, "but your friend Millie is the one who brought him to life. Not me. So according to that, she should be the woman of your dreams."

"But she's not," he said, slowly taking a step closer to me. "Millie has a lot in common with you. She loves bubblegum ice cream, swingsets, and Mariah Carey. So yes, Millie is the one that Guy ran into, but it was the similarities that he fell for. In fact, if you had run into him in the game, you would have brought him to life."

"Keys, this is. . . I don't understand. . . I just. . ."

I cut myself off when he leaned in, his face inches from mine. "I know I was rambling," he whispered, "but there is one important part in what I said."

"What are you talking about?"

"I've had a lot of time to think about this," he continued. "You're the woman of my dreams, Buggy."

Before I could say anything, Keys leaned in and gently pressed his lips to mine. My mind was swimming as I slowly kissed him back. He broke the kiss with a small smile on his face. We looked into each other's eyes as we struggled to catch our breaths.

"I know this was completely random," he whispered with his forehead pressed to mine, "but I couldn't stop thinking about you, Buggy. Every day I fixed the coding issues with Free Life, I thought about you. I haven't stopped thinking about you since the night we graduated from MIT."

"That video. . ." I whispered but didn't continue.

"Was my cowardly way of admitting my feelings for you," he said with a small chuckle as he leaned back. I held my breath as he reached forward and gently grabbed my hands, slightly pulling me closer.

"Say it," I said under my breath.

"Say what?" He asked, slightly tilting his head.

"Confess to me what you confessed in the video."

Keys smiled as he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me closer to him.

"You are the woman of my dreams," he whispered. "I created the character Lovelorn and kinda based him off of me. I designed him to never meet the right person because I was worried I never would. As I was creating him and "the girl of his dreams", I started basing her off the first girl that came to my mind. You. I thought about what I felt as we sat next to each other and worked on our senior projects. I thought about how I felt when you helped me with my code. I thought about how badly I wanted to be more than just coding partners. You, my dear Buggy, are the woman of my dreams."

I grabbed his face and pressed my lips to his. I felt him smile as he tightened his arms around my waist and kissed me back. We let out matching laughs as we fell back onto his couch. He hovered over me, looking deeply into my eyes.

"I've missed you, Buggy."

"I've missed you too, Keys."

[goron-king-darunia]

Eggtober 3rd, 2024

"Anxieties and Anger" Fried Egg in Monochrome

(Krita, soft chalk default brush, 10 colors/values of red, 20 minutes.)

Inspired by life kicking my ass recently. A bunch of things didn't go right this year, I got sick for the first time in years, and I've just generally been dealing with being unwell, anxious, busy, and all around not managing well. I'm trying to take better care of my health, but it's difficult to make time and track down help because the earlier part of the year was all insurance nonsense, and now it's trying to pin down doctors that take my insurance. My dentist did make an appointment decision for me, which was actually helpful since I kept putting it off due to other stressors. But I haven't been in for a physical lately and I'm having emergent symptoms along with stuff I've been putting off getting looked at or considered. I am wondering if I should start treating my ADHD again, among many other things.

It's just hard to cope with the realities of adult life sometimes, especially with ADHD, and it's frustrating having to manage so much. Life stops for no-one, and certainly there are people dealing with more than me, some even better than I am dealing with my own problems, but it makes it no less frustrating. I wish it was easier to just ask all my dumb anxious questions and not get billed for things that aren't treatable problems. I don't know how true it will be with my new doctor, but with my old doctor, you could get billed extra for bringing up new things that the appointment was not about which is wild to me. What do you mean it basically has to be a different appointment for all 15 new things I'm worried about even if they're probably nothing?!

It doesn't help much that medicine really is such a new and wiggly field of science. It doesn't feel like it is, because we have so many sophisticated medicines and machines for caring for so many things now. But it wouldn't take doctors decades of study to be good doctors if just anyone could tell the difference between "that perfectly normal mole and a really sneaky melanoma" or "that symptom could just be stress-induced and will go away if you calm down" versus "you are actively dying of a disease that's incurable because you waited 1 day too long" or "you literally have a known vitamin deficiency and this symptom will improve with supplements" versus "this symptom is actually new and while it can happen because of your vitamin deficiency, you're actually having a more serious problem."

Of course I'm one of those idiots that goes to Dr. Google for things and then freaks myself out over nothing. But the fact remains that I don't make time to see my doctor enough. And I should. So I will try to do that moving forward.

Whatever happens, I'm doing my best to make time to enjoy Eggtober. It's one of the few things I do for fun as a little "just because" and it's helping me take my mind off things for a bit.

Hoping to see my new PCP soon and start handling my body and health, and with luck, other things will improve bit by bit. There are other things that can't be solved that easily, but without a healthy body, I'm never gonna tackle everything life has decided to throw at me. Wish me luck!

Tagging @quezify as customary, and also because apparently Tumblr is having a bug where art won't show up in the tags without a transparent bar of pixels in it because Tumblr is a functional website...

[snoozykazoo]

happy springtime allergies! 🌸

The flowers at this time of year are so lovely! sniff sniff sniff… They’re pretty enough that I’m THIS close to forgetting the pollen up my nose. So it goes. Regardless of springtime allergies or not, it’s Snoozy Devpost time!

If this is your first time seeing us, hey! We’re Snoozy Kazoo, a game dev studio of six guys who make dumb, silly, and fun games. We made the Turnip Boy games, and we’re currently in the midst of working on our latest game, Hobnobbers!

This month, we're getting into our task management workflow to help all you fellow indie devs out there!

What's Snoozy been up to?

Ah…! We’re so, so close to being able to announce something really exciting…! But you have to forgive me. I can’t say anything yet. Keep your eyes peeled — there’s going to be a LOT of exciting Snoozy News™️ come May. Even if I can’t say the big deets yet, I can at least drop this link right overrr here for you merch heads out there…

Cool Makeship Link 👀

Buuuut since we can’t talk about our projects, let’s talk about the next best thing: Project Management! This past month, Snoozy switched from our old task-tracking system to a new system called Codecks. Imagine if you could track your project progress with a deck-building roguelike, and that’s what Codecks is! It’s a nifty little tool specifically made for Indie Game Developers, which we just happen to be.

And to clear the air: no, we are not sponsored in any way by Codecks. Though if Codecks is reading this — we’d totally love to be!

We wanted to share how this system has been working for us, so any aspiring indie devs out there can see if this system is appealing to them and potentially benefit from it!

How it works

What’s made Codecks click for us is how it blends structure with playfulness. It doesn’t just let you organize your work — it encourages you to think about it in terms of clear progress paths, visual layouts, and deck-building metaphors.

We kept falling off of our past task systems because jugging a game’s worth of art, code, design, writing, marketing, and bug-fixing while ALSO needing to come up with constantly updating organization methods is. Hard. Codecks simplifies that process!

Codecks organizes itself into Cards, Decks, and Projects. Cards are tasks (like “Animate a Hob’s death!”), Decks are chunks (animating a Hob would go in our ‘Art’ Deck, but you could split it up further into a ‘3D Animation’ deck while also having a ‘3D Modeling’ Deck), and Projects are, well, projects! (‘Hobnobbers’ is, well, our project!)

What we like

Myyy personal favorite bit of Codecks is how it handles Conversations. Conversations can be had on any card, which makes it really easy to find discussions and notes on particular topics. In the past, we’ve used Discord to talk about ideas, critiques, and problems as they’ve come up. When notes are discussed quickly, they don’t necessarily quality for opening up the whole task itself, which has made remembering clarifications like “Wait, what resolution did this sprite need to be, again?” as simple as pulling up its relevant card.

Other people on the team love the ‘Required Effort’ settings, which allow you to set an amount of effort for each card and then see how much total effort a single person has. Basically, all of us adore the fact that you can use Markdown (which I, Yukon, am currently converting this post into for the Snoozy website haha). There are just a ton of little quality of life features that really feel like this tool was made by indie devs, for indie devs, and it’s really smooth to use!

But I’m just a little guy. Just a Small Man. With Few Dollars?

Codecks is free for up to 5 users on a team! If you’re a solo developer working on a project in your spare time, it’s probably more than suitable for you.

Aaaand that was our non-sponsored shilling of this tool we really like! There’s only so much we can say without going too into the weeds of it, but we hope that giving you a peep into our processes helped you out!

Team Corner!

It’s back a second time! Almost like it’s always going to be here!

This week we’ve got… badadadum, Jake! Our musician and developer!

What are you most excited for in Hobnobbers?

I’m most excited for the physics. Some of my favorite games have really robust physics simulations like Gang Beasts, Motor Town, and BeamNG.drive. I love sandbox games that have fun and unexpected environments to explore in a tactile way.

What’s something you’ve worked on in Hobnobbers recently that you’ve found particularly frustrating?

Audio Volumes and spatialization. In a 3D game, each space needs to sound different, and sometimes dialing that in just right can be a pain. Large open rooms and tiny little tunnels sound different in real life, and they will do the same in Hobnobbers, after lots of tweaking and iteration. Coming from 2D development, this literally opens up a whole new dimension of sound design.

What kinds of feelings do you hope for the Hobnobbers’ music to bring about?

I really want to mix dreamlike folktale and plastic consumerism. I am super inspired by I spy books, grimms fairytales, folk/americana music, and toy instruments for the Hobnobbers musical palette, and the music comes very naturally when the inspirations are so vivid. A lot of Hobnobbers is about simulating something tactile and physical in a digital space, and I hope to channel that into the music.

Yay! Thank you for your time!

Andddd we’re all wrapped up!

As a reminder, feel free to send in questions for us to answer right here on our Tumblr, or join our Discord and ask questions in the “ask-the-devs-❓” channel!

Keep your eyes peeled for this upcoming month in particular — we’ve got a lot of cool announcements coming up!

As per Devposts, see you next month!!

[copperbadge]

Hello, hello, could you please say more about how you use Microsoft OneNote in your professional life? I need all the help I can get to stay organized & on top of things, so I would love to know.

Sure! I use it less than previous because there's less randomized stuff I need to do now, so I don't need such robust management, but I can talk about how my use began/evolved. I started using OneNote because it was less finicky than Word but still had an autosave function and basic formatting, so it was useful for initial drafts of documents, taking notes on meetings, and keeping track of information I needed at my fingertips frequently.

OneNote's largest "unit" is the Notebook. You can have multiple Notebooks but I've never bothered; still I can see how if your screen was public a lot, you'd want to put some things in a separate Notebook. The Notebook then breaks down into Sections which look like tabs, which I would assign to broad things like "Meeting Notes", "Assignments", "Templates", "Personal" and "Excel Hacks". Sections break down further into "Pages"; each page is a document stuck into place, which you can title so that you can have a list of "pages" on the sidebar and find the one you want easily. Text in Pages can be formatted to some degree, and if you copypaste from websites, it'll tag on the URL of the site you pasted from, although you can also turn that off if you want. You can drag and drop Pages from one Section to another pretty easily.

So, for example, I'd have a "Meeting Notes" Section, and when I clicked the tab for that section I'd have a list of Pages, each of which was notes from a meeting I'd attended. Every time I went into a meeting I just made a new page, gave it a meeting title and date, and took notes on the meeting into the page window. The "Meeting Notes" Section thus became a fully searchable record of meetings I'd attended and what was said. When meeting notes were no longer relevant I'd drag them to an archival Section to retire in peace.

Here's an example of my Excel section:

You can see "My Notebook" up in the left top corner, my current Sections as tabs at the top, and the pages list on the left (I think more modern OneNote skins put the pages on the right, I moved mine back). Each line on the left is a separate "page" that tells me how to do something in Excel, something I need to do a lot but can't commit to memory (or couldn't but now have, it's a trifle out of date). So we're in My Notebook, section Excel, page Formatting Stripes, and on the right you can see how to format an Excel sheet so that it has alternating colored rows (there are other ways to do this but this way the stripes always stay alternating no matter what moves where). In theory I could dump all this stuff into one Page and call it "Excel" and put it somewhere else, but I liked having an easily-visible list so I don't have to scroll a single document to find what I want.

There aren't nearly as many tab/sections as there used to be; "Assignments" covers "all work that is not excel formulas" and includes stuff like instructions for how to pull a query in our database, a list of what everyone does at our company, a yearly guide to our events program, a few other things. I don't have a "Personal" section any more but I do have 2-3 pages in the Assignments section that are personal notes.

There's no inbuilt tagging function but because the entire notebook is searchable, if you're really into tagging you can simply add keywords to the top or bottom of a page.

I have OneNote pinned to my taskbar in Windows, and it's basically always open but it autosaves, so adding stuff is super simple; if I find a bug in our database or a quirk I want to remember I just click over to OneNote and add it to the database file, or similar.

I don't use it on my phone or tablet, because if I'm at work I have access to my laptop generally, but OneNote does sync across devices as long as you're logged in, so if you have OneNote and a Microsoft login you should be able to access it in multiple places.

[sophieinwonderland]

Hey so I checked through some of the sources you’ve sent and… none of them are real…

Like I tried back searching the people behind them and, my best guess is that they’re either pseudonyms, ghost writers, or just made up.

I want sources to show others that my system and tulpas are real but every source you cite is just… fake.

Alright everyone!

Today, I would like to educate you on how to recognize a bad faith troll.

Trolls are notoriously lazy. They have no interest in actually putting any effort into the discussion. If they can put you on the defense and get you to spend more effort in debunking them than they put in to the discussion in the first place, then they consider that a victory.

So class, how can we recognize that this anon is a troll?

I think the key tell is a lack of specificity.

They claim to have looked at my sources but don't name any of them. Why not?

If there was specificity then I could find additional information but the comment is kept intentionally vague.

Many of the sources I cite are easy to find. The World Health Organization's ICD-11, for instance, has its own website. Transgender Mental Health by Eric Yarbrough can be found on the American Psychiatric Association website to confirm that it is a real book. Although, the contents of that book takes a bit more effort to find.

Michael Lifshitz and Samuel Veissière who have been involved in many of the tulpa studies have profiles on the McGill University website since they are both professors there. Tanya Luhrmann has a profile on the Stanford University website as a Stanford professor.

Those three are pretty much the Holy Trinity of tulpa research.

All of these authors are really, really easy to look up.

Now, to be fair, I do have a few studies listed that are not from doctors. These studies might be more difficult to verify. Which is why I don't cite them as often, and if you were looking at my studies and research page, the more trustworthy studies are going to be the first ones listed in each category.

Unless you are skipping over the first studies and choosing which ones to read with a pendulum, it seems really unlikely you would be reading the studies that aren't by doctors first.

And circling back to the beginning, even if these were the studies that you read first, why not call out the specific studies that you think are fake? You claim to have researched them, so who was it that you researched? What were the studies? How many did you look at? And what post of mine did you find them on?

Details like this would make it easy to address any issues. But making it difficult to address is a feature of this type of post, not a bug. The vagueness is by design.

The other tell is how the ask is worded in a way to elicit an emotional reaction.

"Every source you cite is fake" isn't how someone would phrase it if they were legitimately a tulpa system looking for information.

If you couldn't find information about a certain author, it would make more sense to just ask about them. See if there was something that you overlooked or didn't appear on your Google searches.

There's also a strange jump from the beginning of the post where they say "I looked at some of your sources," to the end where it becomes "every source you cite is fake."

It doesn't really track logically. Again, if this was legitimately someone looking for more information, if they only checked some of the sources and concluded that those weren't trustworthy, why not ask for better sources instead of just accusing every source of being fake?

[gardening-guy]

garden update || 10/25/24 🌿🏡🥰🌱

see that very nice-looking raised bed on the bottom right? THAT'S NEWWWW!!! i just set these two new raised beds up yesterday with a dear friend who's been staying the night over the past few days!! yippee!! 🎉 i've been showing this friend of mine how to garden and letting them learn in my backyard. we've only done flowering plants so far as well as planting dill & cilantro seeds -- so yesterday, i decided it was time to learn about crops!

we sowed seeds for walking egyptian onions, broccoli de cicco, dill, and cilantro; but i plan on also teaching them how to transplant so we'll also transplant in more kale, cabbage, and hopefully chinese pink celery! this'll be a very full & very productive raised bed, i hope!

i also have a few pictures of the progress in the greenhouse box!

the seedlings are all steadily coming along! i do need to sow a LOT more chinese pink celery seeds, so i'll do that once i finally get another bag of soil (i already need 2 more for potting houseplant props, 4 more for my last raised garden bed, and probably 2 more for future seedlings -- augh my budget is so fucked).

currently in the greenhouse box, i have 8 chinese pink celery, 15 cilantro, 3 copenhagen market cabbage, 3 blue-curled scotch kale, and 3 dill. (holy shit so much cilantro, they're going to be gifts for friends!!) i plan on transplanting the kale, cabbage, & pink celery all into the raised beds, i'm just waiting for them to grow up a bit more unfortunately.

i also have photos of some of the flowering plants in the raised beds from today! i use an app on my phone called planta to keep track of all my plants, and once a month, i like to upload photos & notes as a monthly plant progress report. it does get pretty daunting, seeing allllll the tasks that i have to do daily in the app, but i slowly make my way through it! i'm one of those people who just really likes recording & organizing stuff, especially hobbies like reading, gardening, writing, working out, et cetera. i've got apps/websites for most of them!

the butterfly milkweed, bee balm, and coneflowers are steadily going dormant for the cold seasons -- i really really hope they survive and thrive in the spring!!! i'm proud to say i've been a lot better about remembering to prune my chrysanthemums and they definitely look a lot happier (especially compared to last fall's mums)! that coleus is inevitably going to die off, i've accepted it since they're not really meant for outdoors especially in the ground. my lithodora is looking alright (hopefully will bloom again in the spring), my gerbera daisies are looking gorgeous, and the petunias are doing alright (yet are looking a bit... scattered, i suppose).

that's mostly it now for this garden update! i will say my zinnias are still going mighty strong, and i've been seeing soooo many bugs & critters in my tiny lil city suburb garden, and that makes me happy! the stray cats are mostly comfortable with me, the birds love their bird feeders, the squirrels keep taking shits in my raised beds (as well as this one stray cat i call cinnabun), and there's a regular praying mantis in my garden that i am lowkey terrified of (she's just so fucking huge i think she's cool and i respect her but damn she watches me steadily and it's freaky)!

i am potentially going to try to make an arch trellis in the garden with these camping tent poles that i want to repurpose, so maybe that'll be my next big thing? or i do still want to do another greenhouse box once my budget is not as tight (although that's looking like not anytime soon unfortunately) -- we'll see in the future!!

thank you for sticking around this long, and i hope everyone has a wonderful day + weekend!!! :)

[morbidsmenagerie]

Scientific Literacy and Stray Cat Policies

Or how to read scientific papers and interrogate claims for accuracy.

I said in my previous post I eventually wanted to write something about how to read scientific papers and how to be aware of the ways a lot of credible sites summarize papers in a way that is misleading or inaccurate. Well since the topic came up yesterday now I've finally motivated myself to make this post so this is it. Although this is a bug blog, I will be focusing on specific claims made about cats because the way that scientific papers are used to affect policy is more direct and focusing on cats makes this topic more approachable and widely relatable.

I will be formatting this through the lens of finding a claim made on a site that has a citation, and how to read the original paper and compare it to the claim that the site is making. This I think is most applicable in everyday life. I'm also not a researcher or in academia, but I want to present this information as how to read a paper as a layman on a topic you don't have experience in. Hopefully by the end of this you'll have a greater sensitivity to statements made by secondary or tertiary articles, and you'll be more inclined to investigate information to it's source.

The other reason why I'm focusing this post on cats is because I ended up taking a deep dive into the policies we have about cats and how those policies are scientifically backed. We found a cat we had reason to believe was a lost pet a few months back, and we took him to a shelter so they could hold him while the owner was tracked down. During this, we were told the shelter doesn't take healthy cats, and that the policy was to put any cat you find back where you find it and "keep an eye on it", and the shelter would only take it if it was actively sick, injured, or starving.

This policy was based on guidance from the National Animal Care and Control Association.

We'll get to this is a second. Another shelter nearby that we tried had a similar policy, and their website included this graphic to explain that "When a cat is found outside, healthy and free from immediate danger, it is far more likely to return to its owner on its own."

This graphic has a source here, and we can see that it's one of the same sources used in the NACA findings.

The NACA findings consist of these main points:

Impoundment of healthy adult cats reduces the likelihood of reuniting families with pets

Impoundment of healthy adult cats may disproportionately impact under-served and marginalized communities

Impoundment has the potential to increase cat populations and impact

Impoundment fails to resolve the inciting factors for nuisance situations

Impoundment of healthy free roaming cats reduces capacity to respond to critical community needs

From the site, we have these references listed:

I'm going to focus on the first two points for space. The first two points seem to be the bulk of the argument for releasing found pets back outside and TNR is a whole other thing I don't really want to get into currently. Let's look at the first two references, which are describing lost pet cats and their owner's search and return methods.

This is the first reference, "Search and Identification Methods that Owners use to find a lost cat".

Scientific papers typically start with an abstract. The abstract is not the only thing you should read when looking at a scientific paper. The abstract is a summary that I like to think of more of a keyword organizer, it will briefly describe what the paper is about, what the author did, and what the author thinks the results of the experiment show. This paper shows the parts of the abstract very well, because instead of just a paragraph to sum up the whole thing it's broken down into sections.

So we can see the purpose of this study was to look into how owners were looking for their lost cats, and what aids in cats being found. The study was conducted through a telephone survey, and the results show a breakdown of recovery methods that led to a cat being found. One of the things that immediately sticks out to me in this section is the first line that states "73 of the 138 (53%) cats were recovered". So right away we can see that the NACA site that claims that "In fact, the most successful reunification method for cats is the cat returning home on its own." is a misleading statement, while the majority of cats that were found returned home on their own, most of the lost cats were never found at all. Saying 66% of the cats that were found came home on their own is ignoring the fact that it's 66% of the total number of found cats, but only 34% of the total number of lost cats. Another thing that sticks out to me is the statement that "Only 26 of the 138 (19%) cats had some type of identification at the time they were lost." and that "Owners allowed 82 (59%) cats to spend at least some time outdoors". So the survey was done on a group of cats where a bit more than half were allowed to roam outside and a vast majority had no identification on them. Immediately I would assume that has an effect on how they were recovered, stray cats and indoor/outdoor cats are pretty common and people don't tend to immediately assume a cat they found outside is lost. And without an identification tag, anyone who did find the cat would not be able to return it to it's owner. The conclusions the author draws is also not that shelters should deny the intake of stray cats, but that we should "educate owners about the importance of identification and the need to keep cats indoors".

Let's look at the rest of the article though.

The next section is the Materials and Methods section. Depending on the paper you don't always need to read this, it will describe how the author collected the data, usually includes some information about the statistical relevance, or describe how the experiment was performed. Sometimes this section can highlight implicit biases in the way the data was collected, for example in this paper it states that "The study population consisted of a cohort of cats that had been identified as missing by their owners through placement of an advertisement in the lost-and-found portion of the classified section in the Dayton Daily News or through contact with 1 of the county’s 3 animal agencies". So they only surveyed people that posted a lost cat ad in the paper or directly contacted the shelter about their lost cat. This would exclude anyone that looked for their cat or put up lost cat posters but didn't happen to contact the shelter or run an ad, and the people who didn't look for their cat at all but just assumed the cat ran away. Biases like this are important to be aware of when interpreting the results of a paper, even if they don't have an apparent effect on the results.

Then we come to the Results section, which essentially gives the data as it was collected with no interpretations or conclusions applied. This section has a bit more about the specifics of the methods used, how long it took cats to be recovered, and whether or not having an identification tag made a statistic difference.

Last is the Discussion section, which is where the author interprets the results and draws a conclusion based on that. This is an important section to read because it usually gives some insight into what the authors think the data means. Obviously even researchers aren't infallible, but the authors have a lot more context and knowledge on the subject the paper is about and this can be helpful if you're reading a paper on a topic you're unfamiliar with. In this instance there isn't a lot of technical knowledge that's needed to understand the paper which is part of the reason why I chose to write about cat shelter policies.

In the discussion section, the author writes "These results may, in part, be due to the fact that no animal control laws related to cats existed at the county level in Ohio at the time of the study and that no identification was required for cats. There is tremendous debate as to whether cat licensing or mandatory identification is effective in reducing the cat overpopulation problem and whether owners of cats would comply with such laws." It is important to note that the paper still noted that there was only a small difference in returning cats with identification and that even in states where identification and microchipping is mandatory, although the return rates from the shelter for cats in states that require identification was higher than in Ohio where it's not required, the number was still much lower than it is for dogs. The author also notes that people generally take longer to contact their animal shelters about lost cats, and there was no mandatory holding period for stray cats at the time of the study but most agencies held stray cats for 3 days, which might have caused some of the lost cats to be euthanized before the owner contacted the shelter. Ultimately the author concludes that "we believe the present study illustrates the importance of educating owners about providing identification for their cats. We also believe the present study points to the need to continue to encourage owners to keep their cats indoors....Veterinarians can play a key role in educating owners on the health and safety reasons for keeping cats indoors and the importance of identification. Given that 56 of the 138 (41%) cats in the present study reportedly were not allowed outdoors, it is important to educate owners of indoor-only cats on the importance of identification and the potential risk that these cats will escape and become lost." The author does not seem to be concluding that because most of the cats that were found returned on their own, it is therefore better to leave stray cats outside. Instead the conclusion seems to be that people should be better about having identification tags on their cats, that they should contact the shelter early when they suspect their cat is lost and be proactive about following up with their shelter, and that cats should be kept indoors.

Let's look at the second study, the "Frequency of Lost Dogs and Cats in the United States and the Methods Used to Locate Them". One of the authors in this paper is the same author from the previous paper, Linda Lord. This doesn't necessarily mean anything but it's important to keep in mind if a website is citing multiple articles but the articles all come from the same author or data. I've even seen a website cite multiple sources, but when looking at these sources, all the sources were based on the same paper, which is also important to consider. If for example a website cites another website that talks about a paper and cites the paper itself as a different source, then it looks like there are two different sources for the information when really there's just one.

This paper's abstract is a lot more concise, with regards to cats it says "75% (95% CI: 64–85%) of cats were recovered...For cats, returning on their own was most common...Cats were less likely than dogs to have any type of identification. Knowledge of the successful methods of finding dogs and cats can provide invaluable help for owners of lost pets. Since 25% of lost cats were not found, other methods of reuniting cats and their owners are needed. Collars and ID tags or humane trapping could be valuable approaches." Right away we notice that the recovery percentage of cats is a lot higher than in the previous study, but that 25% is still a large percentage of cats that were never recovered. This is particularly interesting because this is the paper that the shelter cited on their website as the source for the information on their graphic about cat recovery, but again we can see the exclusion of the number of cats that weren't found is misleading.

From the Methods section, we can also see that the respondents to the survey in this paper were randomly called, and that they were asked about pets that had become lost within the last 5 years. This removes the bias of the previous paper of selecting only for people that used a local ad or went to the shelter to search for a lost pet.

The results are presented here largely as just the raw data in an Excel sheet, so I'm going to skip over to the Discussion section. In the discussion section, they say that "The definition of lost pets used in this study deliberately was designed to be broad so that owners of pets would include any time they were concerned about the absence of the pet from the home". The authors recognize that this could cause a discrepancy where there was no set time frame for how long a pet was lost for before the owner considered them lost, and they realized that people would respond to the survey under circumstances where other people might not consider the pet lost, and that allowing the pet to roam or be indoor-outdoor would change when or if the owner considered the pet lost.

The author also notes that "We did find that lost neutered pets, lost pets belonging to respondents with more education, and lost cats belonging to respondents with higher income were more likely to be reunited with their owners. This could be due to different behaviors of neutered pets or to different behaviors by owners of neutered pets. Since households with higher owner education and income levels were more likely to have neutered pets, these results could be due to some complex inter-relationships, which we were not able to study further due to our limited samples size. This does suggest future avenues for investigation evaluating other pet-keeping and health variables and their associations with human lifestyle and demographic variables." This paragraph appears to be the source of the claim from the NACA that sheltering healthy cats disproportionately affects marginalized communities. The statement the NACA makes about "Only ~40 % of people in the lowest income bracket (<$30,000 annual income) that lost cats were reunited with them, compared to > $90% reunited for those making $50,000 or more per year" seems to be based on this paper, but the actual data to back this up is presented as such:

So for people making less than 30k$ per year, 8 of the cats were found vs the 11 who weren't found, which does make about 40% found. The 90% seems to be based on adding up all the found vs unfound cats for people in the above 50k$ range, so 25 total found cats vs 1 cat that was not found. This makes 96%, which is >90% but I guess it's a bit too high of a percentage to seem accurate. It's also possible they added in the Don't Know category, I'm not sure exactly what they looked at to get the 90% number. The point is that the statement about taking cats into shelters affecting marginalized communities is a statement based on a total of 50 cats (excluding the 30-49k bracket) which the authors of the paper say is not enough data to make a definitive statement about.

The NACA website also points to the low usage of shelters through a program designed to reach low income communities, and the authors of the paper state that "Since the majority of cat owners that lose and do not recover their cat did not search at the animal shelter, there is likely an opportunity to increase messaging regarding this option as a search method for cat owners...These results may suggest that a proportion of “stray” pets in shelters are actually lost as opposed to abandoned by their owners. Lost pets in shelters may not be reunited with their owners if the owners do not know that there is a shelter that might have their pets." It seems that low usage of shelters and the extended time cat owners take to reach out to their local shelters does contribute to the low number of cats that are recovered from shelters, but to say that because of this cats shouldn't be kept at a shelter at all seems to be backwards. More education about shelter services and encouraging pet owners to utilize their shelter more and reach out earlier when their pet is lost would likely improve pet recovery from shelters. If shelters made it a policy to not hold pet cats then obviously people would not reach out to shelters to recover a cat since it is likely that the cat in question would not be at the shelter.

The author concludes "Animal shelter staff and veterinarians can provide a valuable service by making available information on how owners of lost pets can best find their pets. They could also help owners find their pets by instituting matching of reported lost pet records with reported found pet records. Veterinarians might offer microchip and identification tag clinics for community pet owners and be sure their own clientele’s pets have microchips, collars and personalized identification. Veterinary clinics and animal shelters could have a list of resources and options for advertising for lost pets; some local papers will publish a lost pet ad free and many shelters have lost and found sections. Local veterinary associations could support advertisements for lost pets...Since 25% of lost cats were not found, other methods of reuniting cats and their owners are needed. It is possible that collars and ID tags or humane trapping could be valuable and more work is needed to determine this. Veterinarians and animal welfare professional can play a key role in helping pet owners if their dogs or cats become lost by guiding owners to use active methods to find lost pets, particularly within the owners’ neighborhoods." Again, we see a distinct lack of suggestion that the conclusion of the paper is since most cats that are found returned home on their own, the best policy for shelters to have is to not accept any stray cats. The suggestion from the author is about further education on the importance of identification, guiding pet owners to more effective methods of searching for their pets, and maintaining lost and found pet records.

Both of these articles are presumably used to support the claim from the NACA site that states "Lost cats are 10-50 times more likely to be reunited with their owners if they stay in the neighborhood of origin than through an animal shelter. In fact, the most successful reunification method for cats is the cat returning home on its own". Based on reading through these two articles, they seem to be combining first article which states that 48 (66%) of the cats came home on their own vs the 5 (7%) which were found at the shelter and the second article which says 32 (59%) of the cats came home on their own vs the 1 (2%) cat that was found at the shelter. Again we can see that this claim is misleading based on the data it's sourced from, the sample size is very small and there were other factors stated in both cases that contribute to the low use of animal shelters in returning cats.

Based on these two articles, the NACA has concluded that shelters should not take in healthy stray cats. This includes cats that have evidence of being owned and lost, or evidence of being abandoned and adoptable. The cat we found had a microchip, but the phone number listed on the microchip was disconnected and the address listed had been recently moved into and the current tenant was receiving old mail from the owner listed on the microchip. Because of this, we had solid reason to believe this was a pet cat that had been lost or abandoned, and yet still the shelter was using a misleading policy written on the basis of obfuscating the actual suggestions the author made in the article it cites.

By finding the original source of these claims, and reading what the source article says, how the data was collected for the source article, and how the author of the source article interpreted this data, we can improve the way we engage with claims and facts presented on various websites and media outlets. This is going to be a two part series (at least) with the second part discussing claims on outdoor cat health, but I hope this was enough to encourage you to read the scientific articles that are at the source of a lot of policy decision and public perceptions.

Part 2