Want to help me with an assignment by talking about your pet?

Hi!! I have an assignment to make a piece of art using crowdsourcing. My idea involves collecting a lot of text about people's pets! Anything about them, what you like about them, a description of their personality or appearance, something funny they did--really anything. In the end, I want to use all the text to make something interesting (I haven't decided the specifics yet). I'll upload the finished project here when it's done! (it's due a week from now, March 12th)

How to be a part of this project:

Reply to this post or reblog and put in the tags or in the post itself anything you want about your pet. You can also send me an ask if you want, but I will not post any of these asks.

If you want to speak about a pet that has passed, please indicate somewhere in your reply that it has passed. I intend to use that information in the piece itself.

You can include a picture of your pet ONLY IF YOU WANT! Pictures aren't necessary but I might figure out a way to incorporate them.

Important:

The text you provide is not going to be credited to you/your url, everything will be anonymous.

I'll be reblogging this every now and then to help get a lot of different responses :) Sorry if you get sick of seeing this post! Also, if you don't have a pet or you don't want to talk about your pet, it would help out if you would reblog this anyway! But ofc, you don't have to.

Okay, this is super preliminary, but since we've been talking about zoo accessibility I wanted to launch a project I've been planning for a couple months.

One of the hardest things about visiting zoological facilities when disabled is the lack of knowledge ahead of time, right? Often the information on the zoo's website about accessibility doesn't contain everything folk need to know to plan a visit. I think we can probably help fix that, even if it's with just crowd-sourced knowledge!

This is a google spreadsheet for recording accessibility information for various zoos. It is super unfinished right now, FYI. That's partially because I need to fill in more of it from my own experiences, and partially because there are things I didn't note or experience - which I'd love for y'all to chime in about.

Categories for the spreadsheet so far include rentable assistance options, service dog information, accessible bathroom locations, mobility, vision, auditory and sensory issues (or accommodations), food allergy options, and general notes. I'm also including the information each zoo website provides, and guest assistance phone numbers, so all the information is in one place.

To add to this crowd-sourced zoo accessibility resource:

Send an ask to the blog, or comment on the appropriate cel on the spreadsheet (if the facility you want to comment on is already listed).

Provide the name of the zoo/aquarium/sanctuary and the approximate date you visited.

Tell me your experiences / information, and what categories they belong in.

Feel free to submit photos, if that's useful info! I'm going to see if I can find a way to host them and link in the spreadsheet.

I'll take information as it's submitted and integrate it into the sheet. If the zoo you've visited isn't on the list yet, I still want to add it! This resource is going to stay US-based, however. (I just don't have the capacity to manage an international one).

Obviously, I can't personally verify everything people submit, so this is very much a resource and not a definitive guide. Date stamps are crucial important for keeping track of what's recent and what might have been updated since someone visited.

Let's make zoo, aquarium, and sanctuary visits more accessible for everyone!

Postcard Tag 2023

2023 was a big year for Postcard Tag, the Newberry Library's project for crowdsourcing postcard transcriptions and classifications. We rebuilt the backend of the program in July to make it more efficient and added all-new cards to tag and enjoy (including the above sequence).

Before that changeover, our taggers submitted 1895 classifications. After the revamp, which also added transcription, taggers:

Classified 1798 postcards

Transcribed 2691 postcards

Finalized 1892 of those transcriptions, which are now in our digital collections.

That's 6384 submissions altogether in 2023! Whether you contributed 1, 100, or you're just learning about Postcard Tag for the first time from this post, thank you for being part of Digital Newberry and helping make our collections more searchable and accessible for future generations 💖 We have great eggspectations for you in 2024.

Visit Postcard Tag

Browse curated postcard collections at Postcard Gallery

RENT UTILITIES HELP NEEDED FOR DISABLED QUEER ACE

Hello! I'm Elle, a disabled nonbinary queer neurodivergent writer. I need help to raise $2,000 for rent and utilities for March. There's $1,960 to go, and funds are needed ASAP.

Sharing or donating both help SO much.

cashapp - Ssecretladyspider

venmo - @secretladyspider

paypal - [email protected]

ko-fi — ko-fi.com/scretladyspider

Thank you for your support. ♥️

So, I have this bottle of wonderful perfume oil. I originally found it at the Faire when I was 16 and could only afford a tiny amount inside a glass vial hidden in the center of a pendant that was a pewter fairy and flowers (not pictured). I jealously hoarded that oil as my Most Special Occasions Only perfume for twenty years, until I was finally able to go back to that Faire. I didn’t expect the vendor to still be there.

THEY WERE THERE. And I had Grownup Money this time so I bought a proper vial of oil. (Pictured)

More recently, I went on a day trip down to Cape Cod that included a visit to the Sandwich Glass Museum, and I bought a tiny glass perfume bottle. (pictured)

The dilemma before me is how the HECK do I get the perfume oil from the wide mouth glass vial into the slender necked perfume vial without spilling, minimum waste, and without running afoul of the physics of fluids. Thoughts and prayers?

Hey, friends. I woke up to this distressing email from Let Them Live in my inbox and I wanted to make y'all aware. Will you take a minute to read what's going on?

Dear LTL donor family,

I’m reaching out to you with a pressing situation that requires our collective compassion and encouragement.

You are probably familiar with the heart-warming stories we've shared over the years, the countless lives we've managed to impact through our shared dedication and generosity. But today, I’m not asking for monetary support. Instead, I’m asking for something equally powerful: your prayers and words of encouragement.

Stephanie, a courageous 14-year-old girl, is pregnant and in an extraordinarily challenging situation. She has no doubts about keeping her baby. However, she is under immense pressure from her parents, who are insisting on an abortion, an act which is illegal and against her will.

Let Them Live is working with top notch attorneys and has taken all necessary steps to alert authorities.

If you could take a moment to click on the button below to read more about Stephanie's story and send your uplifting words, prayers, and encouragement, I would be so grateful.

Send a message to Stephanie

Your message to Stephanie will be a beacon of hope in this difficult time.

I’m not asking for money, just the kind of support that comes from the heart. The emotional solidarity and encouragement that our community is known for.

Let’s show Stephanie that she is not alone, that she has a community standing behind her, offering her strength and love in her challenging journey.

With gratitude,

Emily Berning

Co-Founder and President

The full story + window to leave a message for Stephanie with LTL is here:

URGENT: 14 Year Old Girl Forced By Parents to Travel Out of Texas for Illegal Abortion

Please reblog.

Hey, guys, I'm sorry to be asking for help again, but the friend I was staying with while I was apartment hunting kicked me out and I'm staying at a (cheap) hotel with my kids, and I could use some help with paying for the room while I still look for an apartment

cashapp: $darkangel0410

Please reblog, thank you ♥️♥️♥️

Hey, folks--I could use some perspectives here!

So I am starting the troubleshooting chapter in The Everyday Naturalist, where I give advice on what to do if you get stuck in the process of trying to identify a particular organism. Current topics include:

--It's not in any of my field guides/etc.!

--There are too many things it could be and I can't decide which one is the best match!

--I'm someplace I've never been before and I don't recognize anything!

--There aren't any field guides or other resources for my area!

--I think I got the wrong identification; what do I do?

--I don't feel confident enough in my identification skills!

What I'd like to know is if, in the process of trying to identify some animal, plant, mushroom, etc. you've run into any other sticking points that don't fit into the above categories. I want to make this as thorough and user-friendly a book as possible, and while the above are all issues I've personally run into over the years, I'd like to hear from other folks. In a similar vein, if there's anything you wish you'd known when you first got started with nature identification, I'd love to hear it.

Thank you :)

So I need help. Apparently I have a few days to get out? Idk they don't make this easy to understand.

I have no idea if this still means i should pay rent or just leave, but regardless I have pretty much no money. I just had to take a lot of time off to get my wisdom teeth out and then they didn't heal right.

If you can help financially my ppal and $app are both TransManDragQueen. Anything would help.

Im gonna go to work now and cut off this panic attack.

Please share this post.

I love you all. Please help.

Digital Field Guide

Spring is here!

And I can’t recommend the Seek app enough. It acts as a digital field guide with automatic identification. It is great fun and keeps tracks of your identifications in a pseudo-Pokédex style

You can also post your identifications publicly for public citizen science projects!

What is Postcard Tag?

The Newberry Library's Postcard Tag asks the public to help make collections of early 20th century postcards more searchable and accessible for everyone. You can either classify the printed information on the postcard or transcribe handwritten messages from the original senders. Hosted on the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse, every postcard is random, so you never know what you're going to get next.

We built Postcard Tag to be a fun and easy way for anyone to contribute to scholarship, build better accessibility, and learn more about these (absurd, strange, wonderful) postcards. The Newberry holds one of the largest postcard collections in the world, over 50000 of which are freely available online--with your help they can one day all be fully searchable for future generations!

Explore Postcard Tag

Explore all of our digital postcard collections

please don’t scroll; I really need your help to reach my gofundme goal of $3500 and not become homeless.

Im Elle, a queer, ace, disabled person with ADHD, depression, and two cats. In November, I lost my job without warning. I have no savings as the job already had me living to the last dollar of every paycheck. I was denied unemployment and food stamps. I cannot work away from home, a physical job, or something with strict hours due to some yet-to-be-diagnosed illness.

this is my story — what’s going on & how I got here. (Smaller text used because it’s a lot of information/a long post.)

In early 2018, I was doing regular walk/runs. In 2019, I stopped being able to run, so I went on walks. Running took hours, then days, to recover from. My body couldn’t produce energy to do it consistently, so, walks. In 2020, I kept going on walks and tried to do aerobics. I was not able to keep doing aerobics. My body took hours upon hours to recover, where before it hadn’t, I was alone for almost all of 2020, and never developed COVID symptoms; it was what happened with running all over again. In 2021, it started to take more time to recover from walks. Then I started to need to take a nap immediately after I clocked out from work— and it was a work from home job. In 2022, I began to go from my sitting desk job straight to my bed most days, laying down exhausted right after work, even sleeping through lunch to get some rest.

On New Year's Eve 2023, I spent 30 minutes cleaning, including vacuuming my living room. I had to rest the rest of the day.

In the last five years, I've gone from running to being exhausted for hours by taking my garbage to the curb.

Imagine you were someone who enjoyed recreational exercise. Now imagine doing 1/100th of that and feeling sick for days. Thats me.

There are other symptoms also. More vulnerability to infection and more trouble fighting infection. Shooting, sharp muscle pains in large muscles such as the thigh or forearm, like a pinched nerve, that come and go at random. Pulse rate that skyrockets upon standing, to go back to normal soon after. Stomach inflammation. Inflammation without major swelling. Headaches. Complete inability to tolerate heat, leading to excruciating migraines that only go away with things like cold showers, electrolytes, and hours of rest in the dark with ice. Muscles that literally don't feel like they're getting oxygen. Random rashes. Face flushing. Being much more easily out of breath, yawning over and over, like I can't get air correctly. Weight gain, no matter what I eat or don't eat.

And just being so, so tired.

In summer of 2018, something… stopped working in my body. I felt sick all the time. I had a low, unexplainable fever nearly every day. Shooting nerve pain would wake me up at night. The doctor said I had a cold. But months went by and I didn’t get better. When my blood work and thyroid hormone level was normal, I was referred to a rheumatologist.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia after he made me wait 45 minutes, came in and asked “are you tired?", poked me hard, said I was tender, and left without running tests. This sort of “uhm the standard blood work came back normal, have you tried exercising more? I know you’re here because your body can’t recover from it but have you tried more of that? Also going to sleep at night?” has been the response over and over and over for five years. It got to the point where I even started to wonder if I was somehow making it up. I see a psych nurse. She thinks there's more than just depression, ADHD, and other things - though we both agree that managing those is vital too. She used to be a cardiologist, so this is reassuring. But when I have tried to see other doctors, it goes differently. Most of the time they see I have ADHD, a long history of depression, and hypermobile joints, and say that explains everything. I can't count how many times I've been told "well, you have depression” when the labs, if they even agreed to run them, came back normal. My standard blood work sometimes comes back with anemia, but I take an iron supplement. No improvement had come of it. I’ve had my thyroid hormone levels tested over and over, but never the antibodies. No imaging or referrals have happened, outside of one to a second rheumatologist. He ran no tests either; he just saw my joints are hypermobile and I was “sure taking a lot of mental health medications” (two at the time), and… that was that.

I had given up on actually even getting help until my SIL recommended a doctor she knew. For the first time in five years, when the standard blood work and TSH tests were normal, she told me we would keep looking. I actually cried with relief at that. It’s amazing to be believed after all this time.

Because of …. All of this, I'm trying to figure out how to either work for myself or find a work from home job that has flexible hours I can choose. I literally wouldn't be able to work a retail gig where I have to stand for eight hours, or even a 9-5 where I have to be there for those exact hours, because my body cannot do that right now. I want to get better but it's a long way off. First I need to know what's even wrong. I'm praying for a diagnosis soon. And treatment. At the least, management.

I have heard of EDS and I have been evaluated. I apparently don’t meet enough criteria, hence the diagnosis of JHS instead. It’s in the same family. I have also heard of POTS. I am pursuing testing. Same with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MCAS, fibromyalgia… yeah. The thing is nothing outside of the standard blood count and thyroid hormone level test, no other lab tests have been done. There are so many things this could be that have never been checked. Lyme disease, for example, is extremely common where I live (it’s actually just extremely common worldwide) and matches much of my experience, but 1) in the USA the initial Lyme test relies on a strain of bacteria cultured in the 80s 2) there are over 100 strains of Lyme disease in the USA 3) in spite of decades of research there are doctors who don’t believe chronic Lyme exists 4) no doctor has ever checked and I only recently learned anything about it so I never asked. But… there are a lot of things to check that I’ve never had checked is my point. Fingers crossed someone can help me get there.

I do not have a partner who can try to support me through this, and my family already supports me however they can. My severance (which was low as I found out I was being paid much less than the rest of the team later) paid only my January rent.

Since my ability to work is severely limited right now, and I've been denied unemployment and food stamps, and I would need a diagnosis and to be awarded disability benefits in court (which can take YEARS that I don’t have), I have nothing in savings because of years of underpaying jobs the cost of living and being disabled and going through prior periods of unemployment due to this and other factors, I am left in a tough spot without help. Without this help, this gofundme... I have nothing.

So... here I am. A queer nonbinary disabled neurodivergent writer, trying my best, living with some undiagnosed illness that's severely impacted my ability to function, who got fired without real reasons (in America they can just do that to you without even telling you why), asking for your help to pay my February rent and January bills so I don’t repeat the trauma of being homeless. Or for you to reblog this.

Thank you for reading all of this.

It’s been on my chest for a long time. Even if it wasn’t for the gofundme, it feels good to talk about and be honest about my health. It reminds me you’re not supposed to feel like this all the time when I tell other people and they tell me I should get help and deserve answers. It’s reassuring to see competent doctors who finally believe me. I hope we figure it out.

no donation is too small— they add up. If just 100 people gave $35, the goal would be met. Sharing is also giving— it means someone who can help is more likely to see it.

You can also help via my venmo — secretladyspider

CashApp — secretladyspider

or find PayPal in my tip jar in my linktree

Goal is $3500 or over. Funds needed ASAP. If it goes over, that’ll help with February.

Thank you for anything and everything.

going through a bit of an emergency with our newly rescued cat, zinnie. she’s having issues with her teeth and we’ve managed to pay for her x-rays and whatnot with the help of the rescue we adopted her from but she needs professional work ((cleaning and a few extractions)) done as soon as possible!

readings are on sale on my etsy!! and i’m rehoming a bunch of decks on m3rcari as well,, if you’re interested in anything and want to avoid fees just shoot me a message on here :)

((sorry for the cross tagging))

Just a curiosity about the type of materials folks prefer for designs. Like if I were to put a star shape on material (garments or accessories), what is your preferred form.

HI ALL! Please reblog and help me out!!

I am an artist too, primarily ceramics/sculpture (pics of my work below) and I want to do Astarion “fan art” but a little different. i want it to scream “ASTARION” even though his face/body won’t be part of the sculpture.

I’m working on ideas for a themed piece for him and struggling with what elements to include. Help me decide!

Please comment if you have other element ideas and/or suggestions and/or think multiple options are better!