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I love attributing "cooking time" to my thoughts actually. Got a vague concept for a story but no idea how to get there? Thoughts about gender? Philosophical conundrum? Into the mental rice cooker it goes. I'll check back on it in three months and I know it'll be just right.

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"It's so fucked up women have to do sex work to survive" so trueee it's so fucked up we live in a capitalist society where you need to do work you don't want to do just to be alive. I'm so glad we're talking about ALL the jobs that are forced onto people, especially women, that are full of harassment. Thank God we're not just focusing on jobs that are already heavily stigmatized and shaming women for doing what's necessary to survive, even though every single person has to do that but for some reason it's immoral when it's a stripper instead of a fast food employee

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Billions must resign

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the dracula

he left the boat

yes

YES

the dracula is out

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this just in: hyper independent control freak gets off on the idea of being completely helpless and at someone's mercy

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big fan of this cat ✓ that shows up when you search "gatito." it sure is

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visiting big fancy pet store. has a little corner with collars with a “try it on!!!!!” sign. which i understand is for when you bring your dog in and have it try the collars. however,

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half paying attention and the 7-11 cashier was pronouncing 12 dollars as "two elf dollars" and I kept saying "what?"

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"There are more than 20 million fewer children in child labor today than in 2020...

This reduction is especially welcome news given that so many development trends, including child labor, stalled or reversed during the pandemic. Experts weren’t sure if or how quickly the world would get back on track.

Here is the even better news: since 2000, there are 108 million fewer children in child labor, even as more and more children were born during that same time period. 

To be clear, the child labor I am talking about isn’t your teenager pulling some shifts at the local ice cream shop. These are kids as young as five in poor countries who are out breaking rocks or working the fields when they should be in school.

Per a joint report by UNICEF and the International Labour Organization, since 2020, progress has occurred across all global regions and also included a substantial dip in hazardous work, defined as work that is likely to compromise a child’s health, safety, or morals.

The global goal was to end child labor by this year. With 138 million children still engaged in it worldwide, we are clearly far from success. But, the report says, “most regions could see the near or total elimination of child labor in the coming decades,” with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, where birth rates remain high, conflict rife, and economic growth slow...

If the current pace of progress continues, child labor in Asia and the Pacific will be eliminated by 2060 and near zero in Latin America and the Caribbean...

What is behind the downturn in child labor? One big factor is that old, familiar song of economic growth—parents who aren’t cash strapped don’t need an extra pair of hands. A second is better access to schooling, and a third, social protections for children like healthcare and cash transfers."

-via The Progress Network, July 3, 2025

--

Note: Something that article, which is pretty short, doesn't get into is that progress WILL increase and speed up significantly in sub-Saharan Africa. A number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa are undergoing huge revolutions in access to basic needs, economic development, and quality of life. Child labor rates in sub-Saharan Africa are NOT going to continue declining at the current rate, they are going to increasingly decline at a FASTER rate as access to clean water, plumbing, electricity, and sanitation will all drastically change the labor landscape of Africa and reduce child labor. These trends are already happening in a number of countries, as they have in the other regions of the world.

Every single one of the factors in the reduction in child poverty listed in the final paragraph of the article is improving already in a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, albeit in fits and starts, with uneven progress that will almost certainly even out further as African nations and activists and governments etc. all learn from each other and are able to offer pockets to stability to move forward. (x, x, x, x, x, x)

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Secret Panel HERE 🐸 tapas.io/episode/3499315

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Can I just say something honestly and very seriously to all you writers?

With the Internet going down the "nothing adult, no death, no nothing. Make it kid friendly" route,

Please don't ever stop making art or writing wips that are gruesome, horror, other things like that. Don't let the Internet sanitize how you wanna tell a story. Channel your rage into your art and keep going and don't give up

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Luna Lux

It is not widely known that Intelligence's werebeast programme has its roots in a project initially overseen by the Ministry of War, and for good reason. Though the combination of genetic and alchemical manipulation did result in the creation of creatures remarkably adept at tracking and dispatching Jedi, their inability to distinguish Jedi from Sith (or any Force Sensitive from another for that matter) led to the subjects ultimately being deemed too unpredictable and uncontrollable to be maintained.

The project was terminated, and almost all record of its existence scrubbed from the archives lest the technology be discovered and utilised against the Empire by our enemies. Only one of the original creatures remains unaccounted for; Subject Wesk, fenwolf phenotype, stolen from our Corellian facility by an alleged ex-Intelligence Agent. They must not be permitted to remain at large.

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This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

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Wow. Okay so... Friesian horses nearly went extinct in the 1910s and 1960s, which means they've been through not one, but two severe bottlenecks. All friesians are extremely inbred.

According to one study of Dutch friesians, the mean inbreeding coefficient was 0.126 in 2010, with the highest inbreeding coefficient being 0.38. If you mated a sire or dam with its own foal (and they started out with an inbreeding coefficient of 0.00, which is what everyone should ideally have) their offspring would have an inbreeding coefficient of 0.25. The average friesian horse is about as inbred as an uncle-niece mating and an alarming number of them are more inbred than a father-daughter mating.

This leads to a ton of severe health problems. For starters, the average lifespan of a healthy large breed, like an ottb or quarter horse, is about 25. Meanwhile, a study of 200 friesians (admittedly a small sample size), compared with 4000 horses of other breeds found this result:

This friesian study is based on individual owner report, so it may include more backyard-bred friesians than registered friesians - but most of the friesians you're gonna meet are backyard-bred, so the numbers are probably not too far off.

It's commonly said that the average lifespan of a friesian horse is around 16 years, though I haven't found a source for this claim. It's hard to get real statistics on friesians because of how indiscriminately backyard breeders keep producing more of them without registering them with a friesian studbook.

Friesians are simultaneously the pugs, the poodles, and the french bulldogs of the horse world. They're inbred and full of health problems, people keep crossing them with every other breed imaginable, and for some unfathomable reason everyone thinks they're the cutest prettiest bestest thing in the world and they just have to own one, even if they can only ride it for a year or two before it keels over from colic or aortic rupture or choking on its megaesophagus.

I also don't think a horse shaped like a club-footed pigeon-breasted giraffe, whose every movement looks painful and strained, is beautiful, no matter how long and wavy its hair is. But that's just my personal opinion. If this is the kind of animal you advertise for stud, I do not wanna see your culls.

But yeah, google their health issues, then google friesian partbreds and see how many horses now have those health issues because the owners just had to know what a friesian/shetland cross would look like.

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imagining your otp doing the forehead touch is literally the most important thing in the whole world. everybody take a second and stop scrolling and imagine your otp doing the forehead touch. okay. you can move on now.