WELCOME, TO THE TRAFFIC SHIPPING TOURNAMENT OF 2023!!!
Where 32 trafficblr ships will be going against each other to find out who comes out on top, so vote for your favourites!!!
The 32 ships chosen for this bracket are the current ships with most fics on 3rd Life | Last Life SMP Series fandom on ao3
All of the ships were arranged randomly for the bracket
Every round of polls will last a week
Finally and most importantly, be kind to each other. This is just a silly tournament
Tags for easy navigation:
The actual match polls -> Polls
The propaganda made by people with hopes to sway your votes! You can support your ships with your own propaganda by sending this blog an ask with the link to the propaganda post you want to be reblogged! -> Tournament Propaganda
Fun stats about the polls for those who enjoy them! -> Tournament Stats
The tournament is over and our winner is GemPearl!!!
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All videos showing people removing barnacles from sea turtles are not rescue videos, they're animal abuse- even if the video is "real".
Please report these videos as abuse and stop letting these people profit off rescue videos
There are many videos where the "rescuer" is actually the one who attached the barnacles in the first place (some you can even see the hot glue underneath as they pull off the pieces). Unless you see the animal in a rescue center with a vet tech treating it, that animal is being abused. How so?
The reason those growths are there is likely something far more dangerous that needs to be addressed. Healthy turtles do not get this level of growth on their shells. So if you see something like this, it’s a sign that this turtle is unwell and has been sick for a while. Scraping off the growths doesn’t solve the underlying issue. Also, doing so without any tools or pain medication can be extremely painful and stressful for the turtle. Often with this level of growth, barnacles will have borrowed through the turtle’s shell into live tissue. And just ripping them off like this without the expertise of a medical professional can do more harm than good. Not to mention that it is WAY stressful and not what the turtle needs most. Imagine if you had a the stomach flu or food poisoning and someone decided to “help” you by first detangling your hair, popping pimples, and exfoliating you when what you really need is fluids and someone to handle you very gently. It’s focusing on the wrong problem first and can worsen the underlying condition.
If you see an animal "rescue" video, always think- how did they find this animal? (Is it likely they just found an animal- or did they put an animal in danger to play hero for clout and ad profits? How did this animal get into this terrible situation in the first place? (The number of giant snakes found wrapped around a dog is pretty unbelievable- usually it's a person abusing two animals they own.) How is this person running into so many animals in dangerous situations? (Especially when you look at their other videos and they reuse the same animals to "save".) I am outside daily and I don't come across anywhere near as many animals needing help like these content farm channels.
Even when videos are real, if they are not a trained rescue worker they are often doing more harm than good! The people kidnapping tortoises and "saving" them by throwing them out into lakes and rivers might have just killed that animal. Many tortoises are land animals and aren't built for swimming like sea turtles, they can easily drown! A surprising number of people don't understand seals need to rest on shore, and end up killing babies and harassing adults by chasing them into the water. Baby seals can't swim for long distances, and chasing them into the water means their mom won't be able to find the baby after she's done hunting fish- the baby will slowly starve to death if actual rescue workers do not intervene!
Heck, some people have found perfectly healthy and happy baby seals waiting for their moms on the beach, but because the person doesn't understand that the mom isn't there 100% of the time think the baby has been abandoned; a man kidnapped a pup when the rescue wouldn't send someone out to get the animal which not only hurt that pup whom he caused to be an orphan, but now that pup is taking up resources that could have been given to babies that actually needed it. Rescues don't have infinite resources and I don't want to put to words what can happen when they reach maximum capacity. (The guy was also very lucky he didn't get bit- seal bite infections are much worse than regular bites!) So many others people mistreat because they don't know better, like the baby seal that had people dumping water and ice on it like it was Free Willy. Or trying to feed them sandwiches. Both of these actions make life worse for the animal.
That video of a dog as a service animal rehabilitating a baby seal? That was made by a couple idiots who likely scared the mother off and caused the baby to starve to death just so they could make their intentionally misinformative video knowing full well they were lieing! Dogs should be leashed and kept far away from any seal as they are a reason many seals are horrifically mauled to death each year! Videos like this are absolutely vile as they misinform the public who own dogs and may see a seal on the beach and think, "Oh! My dog is a good boy and can go play with the water puppy! They enjoy that!" Please do not do this! Seals shouldn't be encouraged to associate with or like dogs, that puts puts in danger not only of cross contamination with things that can make them very sick, but you don't know the temperament of any and every dog that seal will see in its lifetime. All it takes is one- and there are plenty of dogs who act fine around human children and vicious around a random seal they find. The babies don't even have a chance against a full grown dog! Their ONLY chance is that situation never happens; keep your dog leashed, because it will see that seal and shoot off before you can stop it. As well behaved as your dog is on the best day, it has free will and at the end of the day is a dog and will be an animal.
Let's face it, most of us don't know the proper care of any and every wild animal we could run into and can only guess when faced with a genuinely unexpected situation. Any legitimate rescue video should start with the person contacting the local rescue to ask the experienced and knowledgeable staff what should be done if they themselves are not a trained rescuer. Often times the animal is perfectly fine, humans just see something they don't expect and misread what's going on causing a situation that didn't previously exist. Other times if there is an issue, the rescue will instruct the person what to do- which may be to keep an eye on the animal until trained rescuers can arrive. And lastly, please be aware of fake animal rescue channels and report any videos you see and inform others about this so these channels stop being praised and profiting from animal abuse.
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Guys I don't normally talk about this on this blog, so I'm only going to say it once, and im going to say it as calmly as I can:
Stop with the pro-Trump - sorry, "anti-Biden" propaganda.
Stop spinning this as a choice between good domestic policy and bad foreign policy vs. bad domestic policy and good foreign policy - there is no universe in which Donald "Muslim ban" "build the wall" "turn Gaza into a parking lot" "has streets named after him in Israel" Trump is an improvement on our foreign policy, no matter how much it may FEEL like we can't get any worse and no matter how aggressively some people try to spin his end-of-term (i.e., EARLY COVID ERA) detainment numbers as "proof" otherwise.
Letting him win the presidency does NOT imply to the Democratic party that Americans want better foreign policy, either - they look at what the majority of voters say as evidence of what the people want. This is why they're so damned wishy-washy - because leftists keep trying, and trying, and trying the inaction strategy...so they go for the actual voters. They go further right - because that's where the people they see as "motivated enough to care" are. Abstaining doesn't send the message "I hate both of these options" - it just says "I don't care." It says "do whatever you want to me or anyone else, it's no skin off my nose." It says "those protestors? They're a tiny loud minority. Most Americans want more war, not less."
You cannot boycott a government the same way you can boycott a business - they're getting your tax money anyway.
You cannot change the world by sitting on your hands and doing nothing. Anyone with power who tries to tell you that inaction will get you what you want is someone who is trying to silence you.
If voting were useless, if voting made no difference, if the right weren't utterly terrified of losing power, then we wouldn't have gerrymandering, voter suppression, disenfranchisement of prisoners, disenfranchisement of anyone with a felony record, voter roll purges, we wouldn't have had to fight to secure voting rights for women and POC, the list goes on. The worst people in the world really, really want you NOT to vote. I am begging people to be more aware that just because someone knows how to speak your language to spin your silence as action does NOT mean they have the best interests of you or ANYONE else at heart.
And there is so fucking much more at stake than this one issue and "imperialists' comfort". Half the horrible shit that has happened domestically in the past four years has been because Trump stacked the Supreme Court - the overturning of Roe v. Wade? Remember that? We're likely to have more vacancies in the next 4 years. If he gets more appointments, we could be fucked for DECADES.
"But what about the rest of the world?"
Look. If I can't convince you that Trump's foreign policy would be worse (even though it is), let's consider climate change. Let's consider environmental laws. You know who the first people fucked over by climate change are, no matter who it is that's fucking around? People in Africa and South America, mostly. Do you want to enable the dismantling of the EPA? Or are you willing to admit that someone whose first act upon being sworn in was to rejoin the Paris Agreement is a lesser evil in that regard, even if his foreign policy re: international weapons sales is maybe 5% less dogshit at best?
If I can't convince you that the lives of disabled and queer people in America are worth the same as anyone else's - not more, not less, but THE SAME - then can I at least convince you that not turning Brazil and Congo into 45°C uninhabitable wastelands, or at least buying some time against that ticking clock, is a worthwhile endeavor?
I know some of you think that there's a chance that if we let Trump win, it will galvanize people to fight back harder. We tried that in 2016-2020. People died. Laws against protests tightened up worse than they EVER have under Biden - I was getting emergency alerts about curfews on a daily basis, because of crackdowns against the BLM protests. The actions being taken against the antiwar protestors now are despicable, yes - but they are nowhere near the same level of intensity. Accelerationism is tricky like that though - it FEELS like you're getting more done when the pushback is harder, doesn't it? - but all it does in the end is kill more people and set precedents to set us even further back.
Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act. Martial law. Do you really think that we can take on the most expensive military in the world, domestically, and win?
Do you really think that there is ANY amount of "motive" that will be enough to see us WIN a sweeping Hunger Games-style, burn it all down and rebuild from zero, "revolution" - i.e., a civil war against the US military - at all, let alone in time to save a SINGLE person in Gaza, or anywhere else for that matter? Let alone in the 5-7 months it will take to elect and inaugurate a president? The system will go on, with or without us.
At the end of the day, this is a trolley problem. People are going to die, and it sucks, but there is no third option - BUT, if you pull the lever, the casualties will be fewer. The question is not of which option results in fewer deaths, it's not of which of those lives is "more important", it's not of whether or not the numbers are ACTUALLY somehow secretly equal - it is only of whether or not you can pull the lever, or at least admit to yourself that you can't bring yourself to do it instead of trying to invent a reason the higher death toll is an objectively better outcome, actually.
Please. Think calmly for a minute about what the alternative is. Remember everything Trump has very clearly said about Arabs, remember the streets named after him in Israel, before just assuming that at least he can't be any worse, let alone that he's going to somehow be good on foreign policy and spare at least one non-American for every American he kills. Think about EVERYTHING that's at stake instead of flying into a blind rage about how that evil traitorous Joe Biden wrote "gullible" on the ceiling, because when you mistake sitting on your hands for a political statement just because the plea to do so was wrapped in emotionally charged leftist lingo, you are playing PERFECTLY into fascists' hands.
Please.
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