Just to be clear, this story is kind of true, but has a fundamental error in it's reporting.

People did not call 911 over the night sky, they called the local observatory.

This is the original story and you can see the original quote towards the bottom.

Los Angeles is one of the cities from which it is not visible. Light pollution has erased much of the night sky for decades, said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory. In 1986, many Angelenos couldn’t see Halley’s Comet with the naked eye, Krupp said. Efforts by the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting to combat light pollution by capping the tops of street lights to deflect light down have made a difference, Krupp said. But commercial lights, including the strobing search lights used to attract attention, have worsened the situation. “A perpetual operation, night after night, causes severe problems for looking at an object in that part of the sky,” Krupp said. So foreign are the real night skies to Los Angeles that in 1994, after the Northridge earthquake jostled Angelenos awake at 4:31 a.m., the observatory received many calls asking about “the strange sky they had seen after the earthquake.” “We finally realized what we were dealing with,” Krupp said. “The quake had knocked out most of the power, and people ran outside and they saw the stars. The stars were in fact so unfamiliar; they called us wondering what happened.”

People were not panicking and seeing stars and calling 911, they were calling their local observatory to ask about the new stars they were seeing since many of them may not have seen them before.

“You have to finish the problem”

is what former president Donald Trump said when asked about Israel's current offensive in Gaza.

this is for all the so-called "leftists" who keep burying their head in the sand and claiming that they are somehow unable to vote for biden because of his policies towards israel.

this is your alternative.

are these good options? no. welcome to elections. you may choose between ceasefires and brokered deals or gaza being flattened to the ground. good luck.

Im working late ‘cause im a singer!

Collab w @uftopia !!!🔥🔥🔥💪💪💪💪💪💪 COLLAB OF THE CENTURY 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️‼️‼️

Here’s faye’s part!

Im working late ‘cause im a singer!

Collab w @uftopia !!!🔥🔥🔥💪💪💪💪💪💪 COLLAB OF THE CENTURY 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️‼️‼️

Here’s faye’s part!

to succeed in adult friendship you must remember the key tenets of child friendship:

Play Toys

Play Pretend

Snack Time

this is going to sound simplistic + i promise you it's not: stop following people whose entire schtick is being cruel or fighting with others online. even if the ppl deserve it! even if it's not a ~problematic~ cruelty! even if you agree with all of that blog's opinions!

it's one thing if someone snaps back when provoked or posts the occasional "get a load of this guy". nobody needs to play up respectability for people who haven't given them respect in return. but if someone's online identity centers around being needlessly mean for laughs + they're constantly seeking out socially acceptable, easy targets for petty cruelty, that's a red flag. there's a huge difference between not taking shit/cracking a joke + mocking others as your several-hours-a-day hobby.

especially if, when they are inevitably in the wrong + mocking someone mercilessly to their 50k followers over something petty goes south (shocking!), they become extremely defensive or block everyone or play the victim or dismiss it as "well, how was i supposed to know they were autistic? i'm autistic + i don't meow in public" or whatever.

this isn't a "well i knew all along" post bcuz nobody should be shamed for being in the dark about something like this but many of the popular bloggers who have later been exposed for serious harassment or abuse should not have shocked us. if someone's blog is 90% shit like "you should light yourself on fire because you watch x anime" or "look at this so-called lesbian bitch + her ugly fucking boyfriend at a kink convention- it's giving drowned rats", should it really shock you that they are also being cruel or abusive in less internet-acceptable ways? if they've already shown you that they get a such a thrill out of being vicious that they do it daily + are regularly rewarded with thousands of followers?

dnf's pronouns are we/our

there's also a movie called 'death bed: the bed that eats' that i personally have watched at least twice because i need to keep reminding myself about the premise, which is a bed that eats people, and it continues to succeed at eating people. it's on youtube for free iirc.

I just looked it up and yeah, that bed sure eats people. Except for one artist that it appears to have kept captured in a painting for no particular reason??? Wild shit.

Further context:

Movie is called "Night Swim" and the premise is that the pool can heal any illness, but it eats someone else for each person it heals. It was built off a short that did really well on youtube in ~2014. The original movie was based around the general fear of swimming on your own and how common drowning can be.

I think the fundamental issue with the movie is it did the thing where it had a cool premise that works for a short but that doesn't work when you explain things. Like "wouldn't it be fucked up if a pool just killed you" works for 5 minutes but it's hard to get that to work for a full feature.

That being said, I do think there is something to "pool that just keeps killing people but people keep going in it" because in a way, that is kind of our relationship to pools?? Like, in the US drowning is the leading cause of death for young children and second for like 5-13. Pools kill a decent chunk of people and that's something we've kind of accepted as a society because we just really love being in water.

Imagine for a moment that instead of accidental drownings, there was a monster that could appear in any water and just gulp up a child that ate like a certain percentage of people each year. And everyone was just like, "yeah that's the water-eater monster, if you pay attention you can usually spot it and get out in time but sometimes it just takes people. it's fine, it only takes a few people and the odds it takes you are pretty low. anyways want to go swimming this weekend?" That'd be fucked up and weird and a valid horror exploration!

I feel like other could apply to incredibly complicated situations like mine where one of my brothers is actually my moms cousin and thsts generally its whole mess, but i could also see it applying to “i was the youngest growing up but my parents just had an oops baby”

Yeah, other makes sense as category, also for like, situations where a sibling died, sometimes before you ever met them or really knew them. Like, outside of adoption you have cases where someone might tech be a younger sibling but never have met or been raised with their older sibling. Sibships are complicated and have all sorts of stuff going on so "other" makes sense as a category.

like. i understand why some people say that op added the adopted sibling option to the poll because it might seem like a different dynamic, but apart from the fact that you’d still be younger/older/whatever, it also leads to the question why didn’t they put something like step or half siblings as well?? if you think adoption affects the sibling ecosystem, then that would, too

Yeah, it was just weird to single adopted kids out particularly when like, it's so easy for there to be overlap? Someone can be adopted and also be the youngest or oldest or only child. So it makes it weird for them to answer that poll? Idk I was trying to figure out what I was missing or if it was just me that thought it was weird.

As someone with 2 adopted siblings that were adopted at an older age—weird age dynamics do happen! I was the youngest of 5 before the adoption, and when we adopted my two sisters, I was 10 and the younger one of them was about a month and a half younger than me. Due to a couple other factors there was this odd dynamic where I was still very much a Youngest Sibling in every way but the most literal, and she didn’t feel like a younger sister *or* an older sister to me, just a sister. So I still tell people I’m the youngest even though I’m 6 out of 7–I’ve never had a “little sibling” the way most people with a younger sibling have.

All of that being said, I have no idea why “adopted” was its own category on that poll. Adoption *can* make the age dynamics “weird” among siblings, but it’s going to be extremely varied depending on the actual situation and also it’s not just going to be the one that was actually adopted that’s experiencing that.

Oh for sure, weird age dynamics can happen, my family actually has a little bit of that too with my younger brothers, but my point was more to the second thing, that I didn't understand it being it's own category and entirely separate. Adopted dynamics can impact age relationships, but they don't always, and having it as a weird outgroup when there's also an Other catagory is just somewhat odd? That's what I was commenting on.

Fun irl fact about me actually, I got a little sister because my father made the mistake of making a bet with me when I was like 5.

For context, I was a total hellion and the absolute worst at 5, and also I was obsessed with getting a little sister since I didn't like being the only girl in the family outside mom. Since we'd already adopted my younger brothers, I knew for a goddamn fact there were free children out there, and I was insistent that my parents go get one of those free children and bring them back for me.

My father, thinking himself very clever, decided to shut me up by making a bet with me. He told me if I could behave myself for 6 whole months, I could get a little sister. This bet was made on the premise that again, I was a hellion, and 5 year olds are not known for their long attention spans or ability to behave for 6 months straight.

However, he underestimated my sheer powers of spite even at such a young age, and as a result I was a goddamn angel for those next 6 months. My parents had been considering adopting again anyways and had a case that came up that they were well suited for, and after a lot of paperwork, I got my little sister that I wanted so badly. Absolutely no regrets, 100% worth having to behave for 6 months.

I think the reason "adopted sibling" is its own answer on the poll is in case you had a complicated relationship in regards to age ie you were an only child but then your parents adopted someone else, or vice versa being the adopted one; there's also a stereotype (unsure if it's a reality) wherein adopted kids with siblings are less favored than the birth children, so maybe op wanted to be kind and include those experiences in the poll? /theory

I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but like, I'm not really sure why it'd be different to get an adopted kid vs a sibling via birth? Like you start out an only child until your parents acquire more children somehow unless you're a twin. My younger siblings were acquired at younger ages with variance between them (little brother were babins, little sister was a few years old), but all of them still impacted my life and the process of getting them and adjusting to being an older sibling similarly to how getting a younger sibling through birth would've.

Also from both my personal experience and the research I've seen, adopted children tend to be equally favored to biological children. Depending on the sort of adoption and the reason for it, it can actually go the opposite way too where adopted siblings from traumatic situations can require significantly more attention and leave biological children (generally older) feeling less favored. I do remember seeing this stereotype in movies though (alongside lying to children about being adopted), and being constantly pissed off about it.

While again, situations vary, and biological children can also feel neglected/displaced by biological siblings, with adopted children there's generally more of a sense of a collaborative effort? Like, I played a role in all of my younger siblings adoptions, despite being younger, and was incredibly excited for them. It's not universal for sure, but at least according to one study I found it's ~45% of adoptive siblings being involved in the adoption process, vs 10% being totally uninvolved.

Also also, "fun" fact, myths about adopted children being unwanted or adoption being bad for children/biological parents being preferable was explicitly cited by courts as part of denying queer people marriage rights. Good read on some of the data for this from the mid 2000s is here.

I think they're trying to account for all the different dynamics people have and might be considering those who were adopted at a point where they could remember it which might be different from someone you grew up with since you or they were born(?)

I suppose but like, I feel like that'd better fit under other since it doesn't fit most cases of adoption? It also isn't really exclusive to adoption? Like, people get more siblings as they grow up, generally younger siblings, which is how you end up the oldest/youngest.

Idk, I just don't really get that being separate from the age dynamics? It's just weird to me.

The weirdest small thing right now is I follow an even number of people that really don't like talyor swift and people who really like her, meanwhile I am wildly indifferent to most of her stuff, so every like 4 posts right now I run into either people who hate the new songs or people talking about how much they love them, often one after another, and I'm just sorta casually nodding along and absorbing none of it.

whenever i'm trying to talk myself out of buying something i don't need i always hear my old russian professor's voice echoing in my head: "WHAT??? WILL YOU DIE THE RICHEST MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD?" and then i make an unwise financial decision