From early this morning. I had to go to bed before it finished uploading.
The extended family all together! Plus some divebombing Endler Boys acting like nuts, as usual.
The new fry are still bleached out some after the move a couple of hours earlier. But, they seem to be settling in well, and are already not acting particularly shy of the bigger fish.
Sometimes they will dart away from the Old Lady, who still looks like a whale compared to even the younger adults. And no wonder…
Also visible here: some better shots of the three larger surprise babies I have seen so far, who survived in the main tank.
The two smaller babies actually seem to be around the same age as the ones just added from the nursery tank. I’m guessing they’ve had good luck finding a steady supply of food in there, and maybe the new batch will grow more quickly too now that there’s more room and better foraging for them. They haven’t exactly been starving in the nursery, but they still haven’t put on nearly as much growth over the same time.
Bucephalandra Cobalt Blue – gorgeous irridescence! Need more Buces in my life.
Where have you found this one before? Online? I haven’t found a Chicago shop that sells Buces
Online! I ordered my Buces from hanaquatics.com (and I’m going to get more I’m hooked)
Oh sweet, thanks!
I have a mighty need
So did I… But they’re mighty expensive.
I still haven’t found a buce below $10 a small plant (2-4 leaves) though its way down from the 30-40 most were even two years ago. But still the nice ones are prrriiiccceeeyy D:
One day when I’m rich. I cannot live my entire life without these. But, one day.
I’m going to get one. Or more. SOON. I’m gonna do it.
I just read an interesting story about the way Trump likes to golf. At first, I thought it was an inconsequential puff piece, but it turned out quite revealing. Trump loves golf. He plays it constantly. Even when he probably shouldn’t. Many of his golf buddies have been interviewed about his skills on the course and they all had basically the same thing to say.
He cheats.
Not a little bit.
He cheats A LOT.
It starts with the initial drive. He will often take several mulligans until scoring his first stroke. Meaning he keeps hitting the ball until he is satisfied with where it lands. However, if he does hit it into the woods, the ball will somehow magically appear back on the fairway by the time he reaches it. Due to his caddie rooting around in the tall grass and tossing the ball back to civilization.
Then Trump gets into his cart and since the rules don’t apply to him, he drives it straight onto the carefully manicured green. No one is supposed to drive on this delicate grass. There is video of Trump doing this. And he drives with gusto too. I was surprised he didn’t do a few donuts.
And to finish the hole off, Trump never actually takes his final putt. He calls this a “gimmie.” If the ball is close to the hole, that’s good enough for him. I guess he just assumes he would have hit the ball in.
Some of the people who have golfed with Trump say he often brags about winning championships and setting course records. After seeing him play, all of these people say that is most likely bullshit.
Pretty much everything about Trump’s golfing experience is a lie. Not only that, he doesn’t even try to be sneaky about it. He cheats in plain sight for everyone to see. It’s like a card hustler pointing to the cards hidden in his sleeves before a hand. I’m not even sure why he plays. I mean, technically he doesn’t really play. He just goes through the motions to make it seem like he is playing. The whole point of sport is to challenge yourself. That’s what makes it fun. I don’t understand what Trump gets out of the experience.
I remember back when the original Doom came out for the PC. I loved that game and played it nonstop for weeks. One day I found cheat codes on the internet and at first it was very exciting. I had unlimited ammo and turned on God Mode. Nothing could touch me. Initially, it was kind of awesome. I was plowing through demons like they were paper people. I was getting to levels I couldn’t reach before. But that excitement quickly faded as I played. I discovered that I was getting very, very bored. Overcoming the odds, fear of dying, progressing through the game using my skills, reflexes, and wits… that’s what made the game fun. These cheat codes had turned this once exciting game into a total yawnfest. After years and years of playing in God Mode, how is Trump not totally bored with golf?
I guess this article struck a chord with me because it showed that Trump doesn’t even take the things he claims to love seriously. Even in a game where the outcome means basically nothing, he cannot stand to do poorly. He must lie to himself and others while playing. Nothing is more important than maintaining his ego. It seems like there is nothing too small that he will not lie about. There is nothing so inconsequential that he will not try to cheat. In every aspect of his life, that’s who he is. A liar and a cheater. Nothing is sacred.
And it just makes me think, if he is willing to lie about pointless golf outings… if he is willing to perform these lies blatantly in front of others with absolutely no shame… what items of actual importance is he willing to lie and cheat about?
I don’t think I have ever witnessed anyone as hollow, needy, and pathetic as Trump. Someone so empty of anything save a clawing, desperate need not merely for validation, but veneration… and even the thinnest, most ethereal kind will do.
See, Trump isn’t using golf as a game. He’s using it as a system to test participants in his circle.
First up, he’s brazen. So brazen, people call their own world view into doubt before being willing to accept how brazen, blatant and obvious the cheating was, to the point, some will refuse to process that it happened.
This is the first buy in for the con. He can test if you’re willing to exert consequences for his actions, or willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If you were to inform Trump that you’ll not be having this bullshit from an biped Cheezles packet, you’ll find yourself in a circumstance of either being escorted from the scene, or having those people who have bought into the previous bullshit make an excuse for the Orange-a-Tan.
Alternatively, he may offer you some deal or reward, to buy into the bullshit, or threaten you to comply.
That’s phase 2.
Once you’ve drunk the Tang, being waterboarded by the Kool-Aid or pocketed the benefit,, you’re going to have to either live with consistency to avoid cognitive dissonance, or you have to face being complicit when you try to break rank.
And then we get to round 3 – Trump has consistently worked to create circumstances where there is no consequence for his actions that cannot be mitigated by lies, fraud, or other means. He’s not playing a round of golf, he’s working out and training his primary core system – brazen bullshit buy-in, and every one of his recurring golfing buddies are recurring enablers of this bullshit because they value what they think they can gain over forcing consequences, even tiny little consequences like golf scores. So when they let Trump slide that little thing, and then another little thing, he’s setting them into the patterns needed to accept bigger and bigger things until they’re either full invested in backing their man, or they’re in so deep, they’ll have to face themselves if they try to back out.
Which is why he does what he does – the benefits to Trump outweigh any consequences, because very few people have ever made the man experience a negative repercussion for his actions. It’s economic rationalism cost-benefit calculation take to a moral free logical conclusion – does this benefit me? Yes, then do it.
One of the most powerful moments I experienced as an ancient history student was when I was teaching cuneiform to visitors at a fair. A father and his two little children came up to the table where I was working. I recognised them from an interfaith ceremony I’d attended several months before: the father had said a prayer for his homeland, Syria, and for his hometown, Aleppo.
All three of them were soft-spoken, kind and curious. I taught the little girl how to press wedges into the clay, and I taught the little boy that his name meant “sun” and that there was an ancient Mesopotamian God with the same name. I told them they were about the same age as scribes were when they started their training. As they worked, their father said to them gently: “See, this is how your ancestors used to write.”
And I thought of how the Ancient City of Aleppo is almost entirely destroyed now, and how the Citadel was shelled and used as a military base, and how Palmyran temples were blown up and such a wealth of culture and history has been lost forever. And there I was with these children, two small pieces of the future of a broken country, and I was teaching them cuneiform. They were smiling and chatting to each other about Mesopotamia and “can you imagine, our great-great-great-grandparents used to write like this four thousand years ago!” For them and their father, it was more than a fun weekend activity. It was a way of connecting, despite everything and thousands of kilometres away from home, with their own history.
This moment showed me, in a concrete way, why ancient studies matter. They may not seem important now, not to many people at least. But history represents so much of our cultural identity: it teaches us where we come from, explains who we are, and guides us as we go forward. Lose it, and we lose a part of ourselves. As historians, our role is to preserve this knowledge as best we can and pass it on to future generations who will need it. I helped pass it on to two little Syrian children that day. They learnt that their country isn’t just blood and bombs, it’s also scribes and powerful kings and Sun-Gods and stories about immortality and tablets that make your hands sticky. And that matters.
Small tip to help some of your blind friends: do not put 10,000 emojis in the middle of a text or a post if you continue to put text after the emojis because I will tell you that I will Straight give up if I have to listen to “face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy,” 23 times just to hear the rest of your text or post.
Oh my god, that’s what screen readers say when they read out emojis?? I didn’t realize.. I will change how I write my posts now… My bad…
This is good to know. Pretend there are twenty three light bulb emojis indicating sudden understanding following this text.
So the clap hands emoji post would be extra annoying since you can’t just speed read it, damn!
YES. That is one of my least favorite emojis because it’s LONG. It also says skin tone on some, and while that’s AWESOME, if you put 30 prayer hands, I have to hear “hands clasped in celebration with medium dark skin tone” 30 times in full. And even if I use a braille display, it still writes it out in full because there’s no real way to represent them any other way yet, so until someone invents a Braille display with like 10 lines that isn’t astronomically expensive, there’s no easy way to skip over them.
Now, at least with some screen readers, punctuation is a little different and if there are multiple of the same thing it’ll say like “17 exclamation points” instead of saying them all individually, and I wish that update would be made to screen readers to speak emojis in multiples that way… That would be a good solution.
Is it okay to use emojis sparingly? I don’t ever use a million like that, the most I’d put in a row is probably two different emojis, lol. But I do feel the need to use either emojis or ASCII faces in order to get emotion across in my writing. Which is better for you, a traditional ASCII face like 🙂 or a newfangled emoji like ☺️? Can your screen reader “translate” things like 🙂 into “smiling face” or do you just hear “colon dash right parentheses”?
Oh yeah, of course! If you only use one or two in a row that’s totally fine! Don’t feel like you have to just stop using them. They are fun and lots of people like them.
As for emoji versus traditional typed out faces, it doesn’t really matter. It can’t translate most of those faces except for a general smiley face, but I know what the symbols put together mean, though this may be difficult for somebody who is not very well versed in print reading. Most blind kids get taught to recognize both though.
There’s so much good info on this post! I didn’t know any of this. Thanks for making it!!
But how do screen readers translate GIFS? Does the OP know that the above post is a gif of a shooting star with the words “the more you know” riding it?
Nope. All I know is that that is an image. Screen readers cannot interpret with the pixels on an image mean. The only reason it can tell me an emoji is because the developers of those emojis programmed them in some way that included alt text, though I cannot tell you how because I am not a programmer or a coder.
Thankfully, somebody noticed the irony in that addition and reblogged it with a description.
the reason that emojis have text associated with them is because emojis were designed not to act as pictures but as a language keyboard and since every one is a pictograph there needs to be a closely associated definition.
that’s also why apple, samsung, or any other company can’t copyright “face with tears of joy” just the art that their operating systems use to express thos pictographs. The art of a set of emojis used by a phone company is essentially a font used for a language.
#NowYouKnow
Also, y’all, in iOS 11, I think somebody somehow saw our nice little thread here and fucking fixed the problem of many emojis because I can remember three (3) distinct times in the past few days that I have come across something like “5 face with tears of joy” and at first been like “what the fuck?? What did that say?“ and then used the rotor to navigate by individual word and character to realize what it was and I was like “OMG!!! My desires have been realized!”
So like I think someone at Apple saw this and answered our prayers guys
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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