Playtime for young kea birds! There’s a benefit to this apparently carefree behavior. It helps establish long-lasting relationships between the youngsters and even diffuses tension. David Attenborough | BBC Earth
These are local Placobdella parasitica (smooth turtle leeches) I pulled off of our permanent-rehab pond sliders. While these critters can evade detection on healthy aquatic turtles by staying under the shell and behind the legs, they’re given an advantage over turtles with deformed/injured shells and turtles with less leg functionality, (assumedly) allowing them to multiply over more surface area.
I will be taking these two (live) specimens to my bio lab on Tuesday. I removed a large cluster of juveniles that I have since humanely euthanized from a large pond slider to bring in as well. The two live specimens are mature adults and will be released after lab examination.
You’re a genie, and you were recently found by a Cyclops, of all things. His first wish was simple, “I Wish I had eyes like humans.” It’s not often you meet a Cyclops, so you decide to do him one better.
Medusa laughs, having just turned a hapless intruder into stone, exited to have another statue for her lair. She scans the room, looking for the perfect place to put it. As she turns back to it, the statue seems…. closer than it was before…..
There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding
(Less Than) 48 Hours to Deadline. Please note that there
may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.
If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the
DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed
anonymous comment.
You realize you’re dreaming, so you turn to your best friend and ask, ‘I’m dreaming, right?’ The whole scene freezes, and everyone around you stares in complete silence. Then your best friend — who’s been dead for a year — says, ‘You shouldn’t have done that. Run!’ And that’s when you wake up.
A naked eye 3D pterosaur installation at Shanghai Natural History Museum
(The guide is describing the exhibit and talking about the various “flying dinosaurs” and their appearance through history as they emerge from the fossil displays)
So by now most of you have probably heard that my account was suddenly terminated (aka banned) on Saturday afternoon. I’m back now, and since I had to do some digging into this on my own, I figured I’d make a post for others to reference.
How to tell if you’ve been wrongfully terminated
You will find yourself suddenly locked out of your account. For me, I had just made a post when I got kicked to the login screen. My password wouldn’t work, so I tried to reset it, at which point I got this screen:
Now, if Tumblr legitimately terminated your account - meaning, you broke a rule and they banned you for it - they should send you an email telling you why. So, immediately check your email. If you don’t get anything, it was probably a glitch. These happen shockingly often, so there’s a whole process to it.
How to get your account back
First, submit a support ticket. Tumblr’s support email does NOT work, you MUST go through their site. Select ‘Terminated account’. Write a POLITE message explaining the situation. Describe what you were doing when you suddenly got kicked off, and state that to the best of your knowledge, you haven’t broken any rules, or that if you did, you would be willing to delete the offending posts. Include your url and email.
Check your email. You should immediately get an automatic message saying they’re looking into the problem. If you don’t that means that Tumblr marked your email as spam (because they banned you). If you need to, resend the ticket using a different email address at the bottom. Explain that your account email doesn’t seem to be going through and that’s why you’re using a different one.
Wait. Tumblr Support’s hours of operation are 9-5 EST, Monday through Friday. If, like me, you submitted your ticket on a weekend, you may be in for a wait. If you don’t get a response within 24 hours, DO NOT SEND ANOTHER TICKET, but instead reply to the email they sent you. I’ve seen it advised that you should send another ticket only if the problem isn’t fixed within the week.
Check you url often. Tumblr will likely never respond to your email letting you know what happened or that you’ve been reinstated. Check your url every so often, and if it finally loads as your blog (instead of the ‘There’s nothing here’ screen) you are free to log back in.
And that’s it! If it was a glitch, they SHOULD reinstate your account, but you MUST submit a support ticket letting them know what’s going on.
5 YEAR OLD POST SORTA KINDA SAVES ME FROM ETERNAL CONFUSION YAAAAAHHHH
Okay, so, in the years since writing this guide, I’ve both seen some discussion as well as made my own observations that lead me to believe this is not just a glitch with Tumblr’s code.
More likely, if you’re reading this because you got termed, your blog was caught up in a bot dragnet.
Tumblr, like all social media, has bots. And Tumblr also does regular bot purges. It’s strikingly clear to me when these purges happen, because this post will gain a ton of notes in the span of a day. Occasionally, but not always, this will happen shortly after I notice an influx of bot followers.
That means that, for most people experiencing this problem, you are doing something that triggers Tumblr’s automated bot removal process. I cannot say what it is. Social media tends to keep their bot removal criteria vague, so that people scripting bots can’t evade capture.
Which sucks for the innocent human bloggers caught up in the purges, but it also means that if you can get someone to double check your blog, you should be reinstated pretty swiftly.
My blog has not been termed again, but if you check the notes of this post, you will see plenty of people who got their blog back using this process, many of them in the last few months. So these steps should still work.
When we made first contact, we unsuccessfully tried to hide our shameful past from the aliens. But when they uncovered it they were relieved, saying “Thank goodness it’s just war. We feared you were hiding a history of Xylok.”
If you haven’t heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
i’m not gonna name names but i recently started playing an online squad shooter with one of my beautiful mutuals and after TWO FULL DAYS of playing humble while clutching SITUATION after SITUATION in pvp she decides to CASUALLY let slip that she has over SEVEN HUNDRED HOURS logged in a fucking AIM TRAINER. she is clicking on the fucking worry crease on these dudes’ foreheads 100 shots out of 100 and the only person more mind-blown than them is me. i’m literally just there to provide a second target and maybe some covering fire while she just BEAMS dudes in the CORTEX i am WEAK WITH ARDOR
do you know how good you have to be at a video game to solo two dudes, say “gg” in a girl voice, and have them say back “yeah that was clean gg” DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD YOU HAVE TO SON A MAN TO HAVE HIM RESPECT YOU ON CHAT
before she told me it was just two days of me like, spotting a guy and tagging him with my first shot and she, facing the OTHER DIRECTION, whEELS around and puts EVERY SHOT DIRECTLY ON HIS SCALP like she’s giving him fucking HAIR PLUGS and me going “jesus christ that’s jason bourne”
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