way back in 2014, probably a few weeks or months after you posted that picture of boone with the stick on his head, i checked your blog out and so dearly enjoyed all the dogposting that i followed. i think you were the first dogblr blog i actually followed at the time, but it's been ages and my memory is bad, so i'm not fully sure. it wasn't long before then--2012 i think?--that i had gotten a new dog of my own, a border collie. iirc he and boone were just about the same age.
in 2018 i lost that blog i'd followed you with, and a lot of connections with it. i didn't return until 2021, and when i did, i didn't refollow most of the old blogs; i don't think i even really went looking for them. it took me a while to get back into the swing of using tumblr.
last september, my border collie had a sharp health decline, and i had to say goodbye. it's not the first time i've had to put a pet down, but i think it was the hardest. i'm still not over it. even just typing this now, i feel raw.
then in march or so, i made a new fandom friend who knows you, and i enthusiastically recalled following you before and how much i enjoyed it. i didn't even know about stellina, and now there's kep too! but... i also didn't know you'd lost boone. i followed because i still really enjoy your blog, and i love your collies too. and butters!!! so glad she's still here!
idk what made me look tonight... maybe because i talked about my old border collie with someone today. i went looking for the posts immediately around when you lost boone, because i guess some part of me wanted to know what happened. i spent the better part of an hour (maybe longer?) reading posts from the weeks before the decline, and then the loss, and then the deluge of old boone pictures after, and i've been crying pretty much the whole time just reading your posts and tags about him.
and this is a long and windy way to get to saying thank you. i'm glad you shared your grief, though that seems like a weird thing to say. there's something cathartic about crying over someone else's dog when you still hurt about your own, and knowing you're not alone in that kind of sorrow. boone was such a beautiful boy. i'll never forget that silly post that made me check your blog out in the first place, or the years of posts i stuck around for after. i wish i'd remembered to follow sooner, but the archive is still there, and it's so fun looking through all those old posts about him and his quirks and antics. he was amazing.
sorry for the length of this, i just... really wanted you to know that he touched yet another life, i guess. and i've been so deeply enjoying your posts about stellina and kep. i know it'll be a year soon... i hope there's some peace in how things have gone since he passed, and i hope the anniversary isn't too hard on you. thank you for sharing him with us.
i've been on tumblr for 14 years and this is, genuinely, the nicest ask i think i've ever been sent.
thank you - sincerely. there's been a lot of times over the course of this blog that i've felt like i was oversharing, or talking about pointless things only i cared about. i still so frequently start typing out a post only to stop mid-sentence and delete it because i can't help but think "no one cares about this." possibly it's why i like to talk about my pets so much - they're not me, but i'm the one who knows them best, so i get to say "hey look at this" and ramble and have people say "i'm looking" back. when boone passed, i lost that filter and i poured my grief out into this blog because it was the closest outlet i had. and to have hundreds of people not only acknowledge this but to commiserate, to reassure, to share their own stories - that helped healed me more than i can put into words. it's exactly as you said: there's a catharsis in grieving together.
i am sorry you also had to say goodbye. i wish i could say it gets easier, but i think that would be defeating the point of grief. your grief is your love and damn it if there isn't any act more loving in the world than choosing to say goodbye to an old, loyal dog. you think of how dogs were domesticated tens of thousands of years ago, of how human society and dogs have developed intertwined, of how we have records of ancient greeks and romans carving loving epitaths on their dog's graves, of how a prehistoric dog's skull was found with a bone placed in it's mouth after death, and you wonder if grieving a dog isn't one of the most consistent experiences in the whole of human history that there is.
i'm glad to know that this could bring you some comfort, in some way. it's incredibly touching to know that you kept me and boone in your thoughts for all this time. i am doing ok - i've been reflecting a lot as we approach the one-year mark. i'm not sure if i'll be able to condense those thoughts down into coherent words, but i'll do my best. i hope that my silly little pets continue to bring you some happiness, and that you've found peace with your own grief.
thank you, again - this is extremely touching and means a hell of a lot to me.
45 notes
·
View notes
Made this for the Solarpunk Aesthetic Week server in a sudden creative fever, so I guess I'll post it here too hh
A relative of mine knows someone who teaches kids, so I'm gonna suggest this as an art project for them! The idea is that students could each make/decorate their own shelf, then put them together to form a hive, which could function as mini lockers in their classrooms. Then, by the end of the school year or something, they could either take their own little shelf home (or exchange them with their peers?), or recycle them into materials for the next class! Hopefully it'll teach them about pollinators too 🐝
Idk how doable this project is really, and its scary to imagine one of my silly designs could actually become something tangible irl. But even so, I'm still excited to try 🥰 (And if anyone else attempts this too, please let me know!!!)
167 notes
·
View notes
smashes my current interest together with my old interest
(aka yet another "what Dungeon Meshi but Gamers?" AU)
Once when I was a child I had a complete crying meltdown over Creatures, because the manual insisted that the complicated AI of the Norns made them truly alive and 10-year-old me was freaked out at the idea of being solely responsible for making sure these real animals wouldn't die. The funny part was that this was the Playstation version of Creatures, which has no biochemistry and very basic AI compared to the PC/Mac games where players actually were debating whether or not it was true artificial life. A PSX manual gave me existential dread and it wasn't even telling the truth.
Anyway, kid!Marcille would also have a meltdown over the Creatures series, especially if she had the computer games and got to see how vastly different some breeds' lifespans are. Like in C2 where you have Norns that live for around 5 hours and Norns that live for 10, both of which are vastly more than Ettins who don't even live for 1.5 hours (and usually less due to radiation or starvation).
Lucky for her, having the computer version means she could download modified genomes made by other players that make creatures live longer or even outright remove certain death triggers. However I think she'd have more fun learning to read and edit the genomes herself, to get a better understanding of how the game works and how to change it to suit her own tastes. And because she could pretend she's one of the mysterious ancient Shee who created the Norns, Grendels, and Ettins and then vanished, leaving behind relics of their old society.
(Speaking of Grendels, she would unfortunately dislike them because they're the Designated Evil Species and she'd hate how they harass and attack her Norns. I think she'd also pity them though, because they get sick a lot and have short lifespans. Likely she'd just end up downloading/creating a genome without the aggression towards Norns. Ettins she'd like except for in C3 when they dismantle her meticulously-placed gadget setups, so she might mod out their hoarding compulsions too. Both of them would of course also live for however long her Norns would live.)
Also. While standard creatures' lifespans are counted in hours, if you modify the half-lives in the genome editor you can increase it to centuries. Or even just over a millennium if you set the half-lives to their max length (assuming you also leave the old age death trigger at its vanilla value).
and I like to think that elven Creatures players would pass around copies of what they consider a template genome that's appropriate to their own lifespans. Something that would make their creatures live for weeks or months of continuous play. I also like to think the Creatures DS Warp is still active in this AU because of the hilarious frustration when these long-lived Norns travel to worlds run by short-lived players whose Norns have vanilla lifespans, and vice versa.
(Most of the time in Creatures, offspring of parents with different lifespans will just have one or the other, but there's a chance the genes cross over right in the middle of the various age triggers and cause unstable aging rates. Like a Norn that goes through the childhood stages in hours but then has a very extended adulthood. Or a days-long childhood followed by suddenly dropping dead of old age once the vanilla adulthood genes kick in. Or, if the child has one parent's half-life decay rate and the other parent's age triggers, all sorts of odd things could happen. I once had hybrid Norns who lived for 20 hours and would die of organ failure before reaching the old age threshold!)
(Now that I think of it, Marcille would absolutely hate fast-agers. The first time she watches a creature hatch, turn old, and die in just one brief minute of life, she would be sobbing for days. One of the first things she'd learn to mod out would be mutations that cause the Ageing/Life chemical to decrease unusually fast.)
On a lighter note, while I don't know what her favorite designs would be I think she'd love choosing cute breeds to use in her world. Once she figured out how to give her creatures the comfortable life she wants them to have I can see her redirecting all her gene-editing efforts into changing color expressions. She might even learn to sprite or model her own custom designs.
7 notes
·
View notes
There’s a post going around recently about how the whump community tags for disabled characters and I…have to disagree with its main point.
Simply tagging a post with ‘disabled whumpee’ does not give me enough information to know if a fic will be validating or triggering for me. I need more specific tags to filter out my squicks and triggers, and to identify posts of interest. Specific tags are the keystone of a community that specifically talks about potentially triggering or upsetting content.
For example, I like reading stories with characters that use prostheses and mobility aids. I find these stories relatable and validating as someone with both! But should those posts simply be tagged ‘disabled whumpee’ because it might conflict with the other users of the mobility aids and prostheses tags? I can only find out the nature of the whumpee’s disability by reading, and a negative outcome can at best turn out to be a waste of time or at worst deeply upsetting.
Cancer is a difficult topic for me given my past and current experiences with it. I have the cancer tag and a dozen variants of it blocked. Of course, people on tumblr with cancer or talking about their experiences with it use that tag to talk about it. If someone is writing about a character who has or had cancer, but only tags for ‘disabled whumpee’ I won’t know that I’m getting into a story that will cause me great distress.
I’m disabled. I have severe nerve damage, limited mobility, chronic pain, a plethora of other medical bullshit, and my condition is progressive. Whump is part of how I’ve been learning to deal with and process my struggles, and part of that involves writing and reading about disability in whump.
Do I just block all ‘disabled whumpee’ content and never know if I’m clicking on a story I’ll find relatable and validating or if I’m clicking on a story that will upset me so badly I won’t use tumblr for a few days? No - I block specific tags and specific blogs as necessary. The idea that we should stop using specific tags, when writing about a specific condition or disease, to put everything under one vague blanket is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
I understand the frustration of seeing posts you don’t want to see in a specific tag (the number of x reader headcanon blogs for fandoms I’ve never heard of that I’ve had to block when trying to browse is ridiculous). But at the end of the day if those posts are tagged appropriately (ie. not crosstagged spam in violation of the TOS) you just do what you always do for something you don’t want to see on this site: blacklist, block, and move on.
15 notes
·
View notes