This is my journey if anyone’s interested (its kinda long to read): For me, it’s a mix of multiple factors. I’ve always acted kinda different from my schoolmates (random noises, unconsciously doing animalistic things) so I thought I was just a weirdo, and that was fine. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I heard about therians for the first time at school. People where less then friendly when they where talking about them though (and they didn’t seem to actually know what a therian was, they just assumed it was a furry(not that furries are bad!)) Anyways, I went home and did a lot of research, and some of the things I read just started to click! I also watched Therian Territory videos and that helped too. I started a journal because I knew I might just be getting exited over nothing, I still wasn’t sure if I was a therian or not. After about another year, the whole idea had kinda faded into the background, but I still questioned every once and a while. But after I kept having shifts and noticing them, I re-started my journal and eventually came to the conclusion that I was a therian. That was pretty much my awakening; it felt great! I did more research to see if I had a specific theriotype/s and knew by instinct that I was a dessert animal (though I’ve always loved forests, but oh well) I did lots of searching and learned about lots of animals. I thought maybe at first I was a rodent, and stuck with that for a while. but a few months later I had a dream shift of snuggling up with foxes. I immediately started doing research again and confirmed after another month of questioning that I was a Corsac Fox. It felt so much more natural then when I thought I was a gerbil, and ever sense it’s been easier to connect with my theriotype (I’m still questioning if I might be a rondent though because something made me believe before) Fox shifts are fun! And my mom has been supportive of me ever sense I told her even though she doesn’t understand. I go outside regularly to try to connect with my theriotype and hope that one day I’ll meet other therians!

I hope you’re journeys where just as good, and that you found acceptance. I hope you’re happy being yourself. Comment your Alterhuman journey if you’re comfortable, I’d love to hear about it! And remember; everyone has different experiences and journeys, awakening could take years or days, but all Alterhumans and therians are beautiful!!!

Also pls reblog so we can get as meany answers as possible, thanx!

- Autumn

rewatching disco and i forgot he’s kind of a bad bitch we should talk about him more

On the one hand, I agree with #556. But also, it's comforting to see a queer couple who is just... normal. Like they're two married people living their lives together. They probably had all of the wild passion years ago and are settled now. It's aspirational to me in a way. I can some day have a partner who has been here so long they're part of my existence. To me, it's showing that it's possible to grow older with a partner. To get to a point where you've grown together and feel safe and content enough to be able to go do your own thing knowing that they'll be there when you get back. They don't have to go out of their way to display how much they want you so loudly everyone sees it. Because you know them so well that all they need is a little glance across the room for you to know that love.

Yes, there are really great things about passionate queer love. But I am so here for comfortable, settled queer love.

ngl this made me tear up Posting this as a response to a previos confession.

In 1987, an enormous complex of unplundered Moche culture tombs was unearthed at the Huaca Rajada archaeological site, near Sipán on the North coast of Peru.

Idk if it’s just the Monday morning sleep deprivation talking, but Fred’s jacket is giving me Data-as-Sherlock-Holmes vibes

Like what is going on with those flaps at the shoulders!!!

Fred is so clearly influenced by Data and I think it’s beautiful 🥲

update  lost 20$ billion

update David Zaslav ..fool no one,big moron never  we never seen

Mythbusters is great because Adam Savage will be like “Could Sir Arthur have built a surface to air missile with Middle Ages technology? Probably not. Anyway here’s how to make a bomb.” And Jamie will be like “If all goes well this will not blow up instantly and kill us.” And the three other guys are trying to see if you could kill a person by throwing an egg really fast.

Inside the Space Shuttle Discovery, 1998.

It's so sad that HBO, I mean, Warner Bros Discovery doesn't give a single fuck about any of it's creators

reasons why it's very frustrating to be someone who wants to work in a creative industry right now:

warner brothers/hbo/discovery decided to scrap the batgirl movie in post-production before anyone outside of its test audiences could actually see the film

the same company also decided to remove 36 titles from its streaming platform hbo max, several of which were hbo max originals and can no longer be viewed outside of pirating sites, which means the creators will no longer be able to get paid for their work

simon & schuster and penguin random house are in the process of merging. if the DOJ trial doesn't stop the merger, we're going down from having a big five to a big four in the publisher world, with the two of the biggest publishing houses merging.

Barnes & Noble recently decided to stop stocking new middle school books unless they know they're going to be major bestsellers, which multiple new authors didn't find out until weeks before their debuts. B&N accounts for a large chunk of publishing sales for said authors, and limiting what books are available there means debuting authors are mostly screwed unless they put together a massive marketing campaign on their own.

Link

#557

"I kinda wonder if Discovery season 4 leaned really into the hard sci-fi to make up for season 3 having the Burn which notoriously made no sense"

There are many reported human skeletal finds which are in discordance with current evolutionary beliefs dating back to anomalously ancient geological periods in the distant past, way before it is accepted that human beings ever existed.

An Epic antitrust loss for Google

A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html

The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.

This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.

What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators

This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.

This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.

The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers

Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Although lactation is a mammalian trait, in recent years several animals have been found to produce milk for their young.

Siphonops annulatus it is amazing to find it has a vent for producing a rich fatty milk with which it feeds its wormlets several times a day.