I Used The Poll Options To Narrow Down Choices For The Ball/toy Pit Poll

Do Bug Zappers Work? Yeah—About As Well As Any Other Indiscriminate Wildlife Slaughter.

Bug zappers kill bugs by the thousands. But there’s a problem: They kill the wrong bugs. They are ineffective against mosquitoes and other biting flies, and their otherwise indiscriminate killing can disrupt pollination and generally throw the environment out of balance. Plus, the force of their electrocution can spew a mist of disease-ridden bug parts out into the air. All of the mosquito experts we spoke with and every relevant university extension office we could find unanimously condemned bug zappers. To keep an area free of bugs or to prevent yourself from getting bitten, there are much better alternatives.

Read more:

Wirecutter: Reviews for the Real World

Do Bug Zappers Work? Yeah—About As Well As Any Other Indiscriminate Wildlife Slaughter.

Bug zappers kill the wrong bugs—to control bugs without a spray repellent, use a spatial repellent or a fan instead.

Thank you @lane-thepencilthing for voting for Oakie in the SUNY Mascot Madness tournament (link). So maybe I could’ve posted these separately but this screwball nonsense all kinda goes together. This is a silly Hollow Knight modern/gijinka AU in which the characters are trying and failing to be normal people in the normal town of Hallownest. Chaotic ideas under the cut- it’s mostly just silly.

Hollie is a Gifted Kid who just wants to be “good” and ends up being the one who mostly takes care of their little siblings because their parents are absolutely slacking off on that. They’re very tall and stand out in a crowd, but they’re shy and quiet and don’t want to stand out and are always hunched over. Also, everyone in the Pale family is autistic. When I tried to make these characters act normal they all gave off extremely neurodivergent energy XD

Hornet is a tween who is Not Like Other Girls and likes spiders and will probably bite. Herrah is basically a Crazy Cat Lady, except she has a bunch of pet spiders. This combined with the fact that she’s crazy strong and kinda intimidating anyway means most people avoid her. If you say anything bad about her mom, Hornet will come after you. Ghost, predictably, is a little chaos child. They lose speech/can’t always speak and have both autism and ADHD. Grimm is kinda frenemies with PK, but Ghost and Grimm Jr. are the best of friends. They get into trouble together often. Grimm will often just drop his child off at PK’s house unexpectedly, and Ghost will get all excited about the surprise sleepover, and PK will be like “Grimm you can’t just do this” and Grimm will be like “Watch me.” The one good parent in this is the crazy woman whose house is full of spiders.

Please do not kill bugs for the crime of being small.

@ephemeral-system

I present a doodle

Thank you for supporting Oakie!

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A blog for obsessing over autistic special interests

Oakie dokie (lol), the poll closes at 4pm today! Please vote for this acorn, I am unreasonably invested. I will post a piece of my art for e

@its-or thank you for supporting Oakie! Here’s a pencil sketch of a squirrel and an acorn (not Oakie lol)

(If you see this post and want us to post more art, vote for Oakie here and reply, message us, or like the post linked here to let us know!)

please reblog so everyone can get a treat :))

GET POUNCED ON!!!

These cool characters by @cozylittleartblog caught my eye lol. Check them out if you want :)

val is kind of a freak

“what’s your five year plan” bro i wake up every day confused by the fact that i’m even alive

asking sincerely. do you see a romance between jayce and viktor? do you think they ended up being something romantic at the end?

With apologies I am going to only half talk about the thing you are asking me, since I have something else on my mind and you happened to hit the button that makes me vomit it into words.

Coming at this from an aromantic perspective, I obviously don't experience the state of absurd obsessive delusion that you bizarre romantic freaks fetishize so feverishly*, but I am often annoyed by the idea that friendship and romance are either opposites or mutually exclusive. From my perspective, the boundary between the two is at best thin, and more realistically not actually a boundary at all except by cultural construction.

*i am taking an excessively hostile, crass tone for my own amusement i do not mean this seriously please be normal at me, weird allo freaks

I won't get into my full feelings about the end of Arcane, but it seems perfectly plain to me that the script, the imagery and the animation presents Jayce and Viktor as two halves of a whole, not opposing forces but alike to yin and yang: opposites which each contain the other. And at the climax of the show, the greatest peril to life and peace in the narrative is resolved by these two men literally joining their bodies and souls together, and going into eternity holding one another for comfort and strength. They are quite literally soulmates, quite literally the most important people in one another's lives.

I don't think that that kind of intimate emotional connection between men must necessarily be either romantic or sexual - I am aromantic, and plenty of ace people exist, and there is nothing in our natures excluding us from intense connections of love with other people of any gender.

I also think it is willfully ignorant (and genuinely homophobic) to act as though these deep connections are mutually exclusive with sex and romance. As though if Viktor and Jayce fucked nasty and made out sloppy style, suddenly their intimacy is less pure or valid, or tainted somehow.

"If these two men who are emotionally close to one another also fuck or get romantically involved, then friendship is dead, murdered on the floor by a dick-shaped knife; vile sexuality corrupts and debases the true, pure and virtuous love of ✨friendship✨" <- This shit is homophobic at a baseline, queerphobic in general, and frankly as an aromantic man I find it pretty fucking insulting as well.

What, are my friendships with other men just inherently more pure and divine, more meaningful and true than a gay man's can ever be, because I will never suffer the vile temptation of adding romance to my affection? Is that how I should think of myself? And is an aroace man more pure than me still, the only source of TRUE male friendship that a man can ever experience, free from the pustulant corruption of sexuality and romantic desire?

You get this pathetic defensiveness (especially from men, but other genders aren't immune) wherein sex and sexuality and romance between men is perceived as a threat to men's right and ability to experience deep connection to each other. But the emotional castration of men comes not from people imagining sex and romance as a component of our relationships - it comes from people who insist that our emotional lives must be ruled by strict binaries. Sex and romance, OR ELSE friendship. Deep romantic connection OR ELSE deep platonic connection. Pick one and do not dare to imagine both, nor act as though the boundary between them is something that we built by cultural fiat, and which can be dismantled just the same.

And yes, yes, yes, I know there are cultural forces literally illuminati-style conspiring to systemically erase the entire existence of explicitly romantic, sexual male love from media, and I know that homophobic puritanism is on the rise and there are material concerns and a real necessity for explicit representation in fiction, yes I know. Everything is more complicated than a tumblr post can cover, I am not trying to Solve Rainbow Capitalism™ over here, I am trying to express frustration as an aromantic man that this stupid fucking binary keeps getting culturally reinforced by both my enemies and my well-meaning allies, when I think the binary is what's fucking killing us in the first place.

So anyway. My position is that Viktor and Jayce can be entirely aromantic no-homo friends, and they can fuck nasty in the throes of mutual need and obsession, and I refuse to entertain the idea that there is an irresolvable contradiction between those things. Each of those can contain the other, or become the other given time and circumstance.

What the imagery, storytelling and script of Arcane makes clear is that Viktor and Jayce love each other more than life itself. To say that that love must be shoved into the box of either "platonic" or "romantic" is to miss out on almost everything that is beautiful about love. It can be both and neither! It can be a secret third, ninth or fifteenth thing that they haven't invented a tag for on Ao3 yet.

They are giving each other whatever the spiritual mind-ghost equivalent of sloppy backshots are on the ethereal plain forever, they are the most romantic lovers in the cosmos, and they are also the most chaste and platonic life-partner friends you have ever seen, effortlessly intimate and unashamedly tender. They are men who love one another, in every way that love matters.

You can pick whichever interpretation brings you joy, and resonates with what your heart needs, the text of the show is eminently and explicity open to it, and anyone who says otherwise either failed to pay attention, or refused to pay attention on purpose.