sparkylurkdragon

[sparkylurkdragon]

I'm just saying, if there's a curse that runs along your family line and you don't tell your kids about it, how the hell are they supposed to go on a quest to stop it?

#healthcare

[sparkylurkdragon]

Yangtze spirits

#thank you tagg #baiji #dragons #and friends #this one is very powerful and gives me emotions #cetaceans

[sparkylurkdragon]

Power

#metroid #samus

[sparkylurkdragon]

"All autistics have low empathy" - This statement is wrong.

"Autistics having low empathy is a MYTH, we actually have HIGH empathy!" - This statement is ALSO wrong.

Autistics can have low empathy, they can have high empathy, they can have learned empathy. The myth would be that all autistics only experience one end of the empathy spectrum.

In spreading around misinformation that autistics actually have high empathy, you are disregarding the autistics who do have low empathy. And vice versa.

#autism #thanks #ableism

[sparkylurkdragon]

from john ciardi’s translation of “the inferno” by dante alighieri

#language #writing #localisaton

[sparkylurkdragon]

The littlest things we know to be small = debut literary fiction

The dark wife: thriller, adapted into a Hulu original

The mailman’s niece = historical fiction

The mailman of Warsaw = also historical fiction but about war

The gate of wind = fantasy

The gate of wind and bones = young adult fantasy

A gathering of pelicans = mystery, part of a long running series that takes up a whole shelf at the library

The Group Project Partner Gambit = romance with a cartoon cover

Wendy Jenkins is Scared of Commitment = romance with a cartoon cover of gay people

#I read a lot of natural history books so I am HOWLING WITH LAUGHTER at twigged #reading #oh dear

[sparkylurkdragon]

NEW ALIEN

I call them Ocira. They're a sort of combination of seals and octopus. They're eusocial and very kind

That wrinkly thing on their chest are their gills, which they can use to express certain emotions.

Their "teeth" are truly spines that can be raised to eat meat, or flattened to chomp plants.

To communicate, they do a sort of drumming and pinching of their swim bladders for different tones and squeaks.

They live on an ocean planet, in shallow, warm waters around reefs.

I might draw them more and tell more about them 😸

#aliens #evospec

[sparkylurkdragon]

I present u with…Leopard Gecko Hydra: THE MOST FEROCIOUS(ly cute) variant  🦎✨

#dragons #hydra dragons #yes good

[sparkylurkdragon]

Drawing Venusaur with every Pokemon pt. Wailord

#pokemon #venusaur #wailord #so cute it hurts

[sparkylurkdragon]

#oh dear #furries #rat anthos #anthros

[sparkylurkdragon]

I would be the worst spy of all time because on one hand I overshare like hell, but on the other hand I also have THE shittiest memory so it’s really a lose/lose scenario for everyone involved.

#oh dear #torture cw #whump #comedy and horror are lovers

[sparkylurkdragon]

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

#ao3 #fandom

[sparkylurkdragon]

What I have gleaned from Cattle Plague: A History so far:

Wars and conquests sure are good at spreading diseases!

Rinderpest proooobably originated somewhere in Asia.

It is legitimately hard to tell where rinderpest struck in antiquity because it and anthrax (and to a lesser extent foot-and-mouth disease)* got lumped together a lot. Generally speaking if a lot of humans and/or horses also died at the same time it was probably anthrax,** but then again that could also have been starving people eating rotten rinderpest-killed cattle, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ * There's a particular account where the chronicler is like 'if the cow gets sick and it spreads to its foot it'll probably be fine, but otherwise it will probably die' - FMD is incredibly contagious but generally causes low mortality in adult animals, while rinderpest was close to 100% lethal in some populations. ** Rinderpest, in natural settings, seemed to pretty well exclusively affect even-toed ungulates, in particular cattle and buffalo, though it could also infect goats, sheep, pigs, deer, and so on. Horses are odd-toed ungulates and so weren't susceptible in a natural setting, as far as I can tell. (In the lab the virus was cultured in rabbits and chickens in order to create early vaccines.)

#long posts #rinderpest #sparky reads #animal death cw #human death cw #cattle plague a history #veterinary medicine #viruses #infectious diseases #original posts

[sparkylurkdragon]

#music #fire #hELL YEAH!!! #dragonkin #carol of the bells

[sparkylurkdragon]

What I have gleaned from Cattle Plague: A History so far:

Wars and conquests sure are good at spreading diseases!

Rinderpest proooobably originated somewhere in Asia.

It is legitimately hard to tell where rinderpest struck in antiquity because it and anthrax (and to a lesser extent foot-and-mouth disease)* got lumped together a lot. Generally speaking if a lot of humans and/or horses also died at the same time it was probably anthrax,** but then again that could also have been starving people eating rotten rinderpest-killed cattle, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ * There's a particular account where the chronicler is like 'if the cow gets sick and it spreads to its foot it'll probably be fine, but otherwise it will probably die' - FMD is incredibly contagious but generally causes low mortality in adult animals, while rinderpest was close to 100% lethal in some populations. ** Rinderpest, in natural settings, seemed to pretty well exclusively affect even-toed ungulates, in particular cattle and buffalo, though it could also infect goats, sheep, pigs, deer, and so on. Horses are odd-toed ungulates and so weren't susceptible in a natural setting, as far as I can tell. (In the lab the virus was cultured in rabbits and chickens in order to create early vaccines.)

#amazing!!! #original posts #rinderpest #infectious diseases #sparky reads #cattle plague a history #animal death cw #human death cw #veterinary medicine #viruses #long posts

[sparkylurkdragon]

two of them

#sonic the hedgehog #shadow the hedgehog #sonic

[sparkylurkdragon]

Rivals

#sonic the hedgehog #sonic #shadow the hedgehog