#or generational wealth

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

If you don’t mind sharing, since you don’t work for a zoo what is your job situation like? Making a living while working at a definitely zoo seems tricky. Is your main income zoology/animal related or is that more of a side thing?

Sincerely,

- a curious zoology student

I have a (mostly) unrelated jobjob - I’ve never actually been affiliated with a single facility, unless you count college internships before I started this blog. I freelance, working as a science media fact-checker and taking paid research contracts occasionally. I do work on a lot of animal / biology related fact-check content, but it’s not my entire scope of work. I also have the privilege of having family assistance, as I have chronic health issues that interfere with the normative 9-5 grind.

Everything I do in terms of blog writing/research, zoo industry research and publication, and photography is unpaid and pretty much a hobby at this point.

Prior to the pandemic I was trying to find funding for the intra-industry research and public-facing outreach I was doing, but there was never any money for it. (The industry is very used to expecting labor from young women for free. There was and is a lot of interest in the work I do, but the number of people/orgs that have ever provided compensation or financial support is in the single digits). The pandemic actually gave me the chance to pivot to focusing on professional fact-checking.

The only funding I get for any of this work is through a somewhat defunct Patreon I set up years ago when I was trying to make this blog / scicomm a full time gig. I’m terrible at updating it, and I’m conflicted enough about that to have been considering deleting it entirely. (For those of you who have stuck it out despite the radio silence, you’re incredible. You’ve facilitated the donation of my time to write a really cool paper with a zoo disaster response org, which will hopefully get through peer review soon).

To make something like this blog and everything else I do in the field actually financially sustainable, I’d need to fundraise and market more. The thing about a fact-checking career, though, is that it’s reinforced the need to make sure everything I write/say publicly is completely and 100% correct - because that level of rigor is what supports my professional reputation! Which means I’m slow to produce research and reticent to talk about it before it’s finished. My work comes out all the better for it, but it doesn’t fit into a content model that produces revenue.

So yeah, all of this is a side thing that I fit in around my paid work and my health. Because sometimes I just need to go see a tiger and smell an elephant, y’know?

[thoughtportal]

[generatedblacklove]

[loki-zen]

It's like nearly 10 years now I've been on this website and I still can't get over that "people in the here-and-now deserve to suffer as recompense for the actions of same-nationality elites long before they were born" is a mainstream opinion around here.

I think I can count the number of times I've seen someone other than me push back on this on the fingers of one finger

[kelocitta]

Figuring her out a lil bit

[shit-people-probably-didnt-say]

Jesper: Kinda rude that I wasnt born into a multimillionaire family

Also Jesper: *Marries into multimillionaire family* Close enough 👌🏾

[matlab-exe]

rgg studios stop being cowards and give seonhee a matching punk costume with saeko

[justablognothingweirdhere]

Random headcannon that Carter drives like a maniac and absolutely BLASTS the most inappropriate music on the face of the Earth cause rich kid, ya know?

[generatedblacklove]

Generated Black Love

[whetstonefires]

to continue my tradition of mdzs height posting, another character besides mo xuanyu who is routinely and unjustly described as tiny: Wen Qing.

according to the officially released heights, she and jin guangyao are roughly the same size. about five and a half feet tall.

which is on the small side for a man even in china, though not in medieval china, and is ofc loads smaller than the ridiculous giants making up most of the cultivator elite, but is not actually a small person.

that's statistically above average for a woman even in the modern US; in modern china it is often hard for women that height to find off-the-rack clothes. in a historical chinese setting she is mildly gargantuan. five foot six is a positively unmaidenly height.

wei wuxian (as i've previously discussed) is slightly over six feet tall at his original full growth, which is stupid tall even when you're an aristocrat who didn't starve as a child. wen qing is, in turn, too tall for wei wuxian to hook his chin over her head, even if he stands on his toes, unless she ducks.

he's got maybe more than half a head on her. she could headbutt him in the nose from a standing start, as could most adult men because he's a freak.

wen qing would walk among a group of normal-in-context women like a turkey among hens. she is not tiny.

i know cql kind of made her look that way, but in fairness their version of lan wangji is a stick of no great height also. and even on cql she's not particularly small, just exceedingly pale and slim with big eyes. i truly do not know why it's so popular to conceptualize her as teeny-tiny, except maybe for the contrast value. it's not even hornyposting.

[hahahafangirl]

is sugishita a big silly stupid dumdum?

my staunch belief is that sugishita is NOT DUMB. hes pretty smart, actually. somehow i fell into the illusion of sugishita being a dumbass, which, of course he is, but, like, hes not dumb, or super naive, or an idiot (an archetypical baka) (affectionate) the way sakura is. see: sugishita not falling for suo's bullshit

extremely unimpressed

but he gloats a little too much about this... maybe hes usually pretty baka stupid but not as much as sakura.

his favorite subject is chemistry! dumdum heads like sakura or kaji either have 0 or have PE as their favorite subject. even if hes interested in it because of gardening, he knows the material.

so heres what i think: i think he gets average grade. ok grades. which is great for somebody who go to bofurin and sleep through class since the 2nd grade. in a normal high school, he would be a good ole just-below-average to average to barely-above-average student. in furin, this would probably put him at the upper quartile of his class. being quiet and socially awkward doesnt mean hes a big dumdum in everything else. hes not good at expressing himself, yes -- i think sugishita's development will likely center around him learning how to express himself and may end with him helping somebody else articulating their feelings, or (framed as unexpectedly) stepping up to a leadership role temporarily, like in a fight -- but, like, that doesnt make him dumb. a stereotypical teenage boy is bad at words but good at science, for example.

heres my headcanon/fanfique(tm): it would be so funny if sugishita is the only one to go to college after graduation. he scores perfectly average in every subject, except for chemistry, which hes solidly miles above average. not genius, not once-in-a-lifetime talent, not award-winning even, but he starts off college already knowing two years worth of a chemist education.

which confound everyone who sees his grades and read his applications. suo and kiryuu passionately discussed and strategized on how sugi can get into college, from local ones to travel-to-tokyo ones, and suo even flirted with the idea of sugi getting into utokyo (too far from home, sugi absolutely cannot be left to his own device in a metropolitan area, chance of getting in ~1%). their homeroom teacher and guidance counselor almost went bald deciding how they should write his recommendation letter (quiet but helpful? righteous anger? he-looks-scary-but-hes-a-good-kid-we-promise?). they werent even sure if he was at college-reading level going into third year (nirei helped. a lot.) at the end, they settle at the nearest college in town, which is fine and decent enough that they harbored some doubt if sugishita is going to get in. umemiya encouraged sugi to apply to several places (just in case).

to the surprise of most (but not suo, kiryuu, or umemiya), sugishita got into college. its a fine one. its close enough that he still lives at home, go to college full time, and work part-time at whatever establishment umemiya now works at (my headcanon is that he starts a farm. kiryuu uses his nepo baby money to be the primary stakeholder). sugi's grades in college is good enough that he contemplated getting a phd at some point. but then he decided, nah, and follow the agricultural science track, graduate, maybe get a masters, and work at the farm with ume-senpai. sometimes, when the local elementary school go to visit, ume pressured sugi into giving them a chemistry-focused tour.

andddd this is basically a fanfic. maybe i'll write it someday.

[cormancatacombs]

Image description:

A screenshot of a pair of tweets by Janel Comeau @ VeryBadLlama. They read,

“ ‘our great-grandmothers were so much happier staying home with no jobs’

congrats on the generational wealth, I hope your great-grandma waved at mine as she worked her full-time job at the factory

my great-great grandma did not spend the early 20th century sweating her buttons off in a British garment factory to have me sit in my air-conditioned office pining for the days of yore”

End of description.

[noe-clara69]

Jeremy Knox religiously wears khakis.

[weareravershq]

[nylaannalise]

if I was rich, I'd just study and get like 50 different degrees

[officialblackwallstreet]

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