#meta nonsnakery

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Hi friends!  I have let the queue run rather ridiculously out, and there isn’t really a good reason for it.  Both Jormie and Morty are still doing well, and I will set up some posts to start running a couple-ish times a week again... erm... sometime soon.  I hope.  Thank you for your patience!

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Hey everyone! Just a reminder that if you follow or reblog from me, and a peek at your blog turns up a li'l whiff of transmisogyny, then I'm gonna block ya. I just don't feel as though that sort of people belong in the My Cute Snaky Boys Fan Club community. You're comfortable with excluding people yourselves, so I'm sure you understand!

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Before December 17, I went through all the posts on this Tumblr, found two flagged as potentially adult, and successfully had them both reviewed and released from Tumblr jail.

Today approximately twenty posts are newly hidden as adult, and there is no longer a red review link/bar, either in the app or via web.

I have at least a coupla hundred live human followers at this point. Perhaps someone can tell me how I may free my boys?

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Today's scheduled snake post showed someone's arms *all the way past the elbows*, and is therefore far too saucy for Tumblr apparently. And the Appeal button isn't working. What a hilarious April Fool on me, I guess. Please stay tuned.

[Edit: okay, it actually did appeal one of the times it claimed to be unable to appeal.  Whatever.  Here have a video of my little boy!]

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Hello! Sorry for radio silence. I am again preoccupied with things not related at all to snakes, but rest assured, the scaly boys are fine. (Jormie somehow got a couple of small scrapes on the bottom of his jaw, but we are monitoring and will take him to the snediatrician if it doesn't heal up! He loves to use his head as a shovel, so these things are bound to happen.)

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I... did not mean to post two Mortimers at once. You're welcome, I guess?

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Okay, so my mom promised that I can get a ball python once we move into our house in January, I'm 13 now. I know snakes, especially BPs can live a heck of a long time. College will be an issue. Im hoping that I would be able to teach my grandmother, dad, and sister to take care of him. But knowing me I won't be able to sleep without him. Do you happen to know any colleges that either allow reptiles or let freshman live off campus in the USA that does an engineering major? Or links?? Thanks!

Hello!  It took me eight days to get to this and I apologize for that.  At least you get an answer that is long enough that perhaps I was literally typing on it for eight straight days nonstop?  Ha ha, just kidding, I type fast.  This took me only 94 straight hours of typing tops.

I am… going to be the annoying, boring adult here, and basically caution you against, like, almost everything in your entire ask.  On two fronts: the “get a snake now” thing, and the “pick a college for snake” thing.

The now thing: if you don’t already have a family member On Board With Snakes, then I would recommend against getting one any time soon.  I am doing the math in my head here, and I recognize that the idea of waiting until college, or maybe even after college, equates to “please wait another approximately 50-75% of the entire time that you have existed on this earth so far, and THEN you can realize your dream, maybe”.  But…

Like you said, beeps can live a long time.  Theoretical Noodle would almost certainly still be alive and still a young thing when it’s time for you to go to college.  And if you knew already that someone else would be cool with caring for him or her – warming up and feeding the dead r.odents, cleaning up the poops, cleaning out the occasional massive spatter of fluids that used to be inside of the dead r.odents – well, if they were already lined up, you’d be bringing your new pet into a situation that you can assume to be stable.  Even if you had to leave them home when you went to college, you could be confident that they were getting the care they deserved.

But it sounds like nobody else is completely on board yet, and that would mean that the situation isn’t stable.  You’d be bringing a tiny innocent creature into a situation where you can’t be sure that they would get that proper care longer than about five years.  And maybe you can convince someone, but maybe you can’t. Or someone else does agree to take over, but they don’t have the passion and the love for that animal, and that would almost certainly lead to a lower standard of care.  

It doesn’t have to be something big and obvious like “I got tired of it so I dumped it off at the animal shelter”, or even like “whoops I left the cage open and the snake got out, oh well not a big deal right?” (that one, I saw that someone had run into not long ago while they were away for a month or so).  It could just be that the person who takes over is not really feeling it, and so snakey never gets fed quite as often as they would like.  Or their tank never gets cleaned quite as often as maybe you’d clean it.  Or maybe the water dish goes empty a while before somebody notices, repeatedly.  

Humans usually don’t do as good a job at something they aren’t passionate about, and that is NOT me saying your family members are bad people, just that they’re human.  It’s a lot easier to dance the r.odent corpse around for a half-hour straight, singing a little song in a squeaky voice in case that makes the meal more appealing, if you don’t absolutely love that noodly little buttface to death.  Then when you give up and have to throw the r.odent out, which means taking it to the outside trash can in the dark because you don’t want it rotting in your kitchen trash can all night, the love makes it just a little more tolerable.

And then, at last, the pick a college thing: I don’t have any info on what might be a good college to look at based on the criteria you mentioned (I am old and my only children are the scaly types, so it’s totally out of my wheelhouse these days).  But you’re going to be spending 4+ years of your life and however many thousands of dollars (assuming no fancy full-ride scholarships) on a degree!  

“Should” is a strong word, I don’t want to “should” you here, but picking your college based on something like (has good program for major I want + I can afford it without working eight jobs + I like the school/campus culture itself in general + they actually let me in which is not 100% in my control unless I have straight As and enough extracurriculars to form an entire other human out of) will probably result in a successful academic career.  If “will allow me to have a snake” gets thrown into the mix, that could make the choice a whole lot more limited.

Maybe it turns out that Basically Perfect For Your Academic Wants University will also let you take your pet with you, but what if it doesn’t?  Will you settle?  Will you go to Kind Of Crappy And Also A Dump Polytech because it allows reptiles?

It’s 100% your choice, and I, a random person on the Internet, cannot (and should not, this is strong enough for a should) tell you how to prioritize your future.  But you asked, so you get my recommendation!  Waiting is super hard, and I already finished my waiting so it’s easy for me to just go “bluh bluh just wait a thousand years and then all snakes will come to you”.  But that’s still what I got.

Thank you for asking!  I hope you do not regret it too much now that your eyes have presumably fallen out of your head from Too Many Words.

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Gosh, I haven't posted in forever. Who's ready for some snake photos? Maybe some posts about my new Animal Plastics enclosure once they send me a top that isn't damaged so I can finish assembling the thing?

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Whoops, I haven't posted in *how* long now?

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I thought sure I had a third ask or comment-on-a-post that came in recently that was written in a way that it could use an answer (as opposed to something kind/supportive which doesn’t really NEED to be answered).  However, I can’t find it.  If you wanted something from me and I haven’t responded, please ask me again!

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A non-snake update from my human place of work! The massive project which I have been architect/technical expert on for over a year now is, maybe, finally, if nothing explodes at the last minute, going live tonight. This means I may be able to get back to regularly taking and posting photos soon!

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It has been almost three weeks since I posted!  I’m sorry, everyone here continues to be well but my work continues to be busy and looks likely to continue that way until the first week of December if I’m lucky.  I have a bunch of photos going back several months which need to be edited and turned into posts, but for now I’ll just pull something out of the ol’ drafts backlog.

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Work has been ridiculous lately and I have not had the energy to edit up some recent photos for posting!  I will try to get to it soon.  Meanwhile, Jormie and Morty are doing well and wish for you all to have a lovely day.

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Friendly reminder that I am generally happy to answer questions and things, but if I can tell from either your blog description or your recent posts that you deserve to lose your very favorite pair of socks, then you really shouldn’t expect me to be willing to engage with you.

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Hey by the way I wrote up some Ask guidelines!  They mostly boil down to “I’m not a vet, please be patient, don’t be a jerk”.  There are a couple of anon asks about tanks and bedding still waiting on me and I will answer them soon I promise.

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moshpitiful replied to your post “Okay, so my mom promised that I can get a ball python once we move...”

I've wanted a snake since I was also around 13, I didn't get one until after I moved out of my parents and convinced my fiance that noodles aren't scary (like 2 weeks ago!!). And for bringing it to college if you get one, my knowledge on the matter is that reptiles don't really count as a pet, usually they're only strict about cats/dogs/rabbits, things that make noise and are destructive. My apartment doesn't allow "pets" but my bird, gecko, and snake are all fine lmao.

Good addition!  In non-college apartments, at least, pet rules vary a lot; I’ve lived one place which was no dogs or cats but anything “in a tank, such as fish” was fine (we used that loophole to keep gerbils), but then my last apartment was “cat-friendly” but explicitly black-letter prohibited snakes.

I’m honestly not sure that with campus housing they bother publicizing that info, because they probably don’t consider it important enough, so it could just be real hard to track down whether Really Amazing A&M allows student pets.  But that’s only a guess!  I am 37 and childfree and have not exactly done any research on colleges any time recently.