You’re an ancient Greek man coming home from 4 months of war to find your wife 3 months pregnant. Now you’ve embarked on a solemn quest: to punch Zeus in the face.
Soon after you begin your quest, you encounter another man in a similar situation. You decide to join forces, as two mortal men stand a better chance at punching Zeus than one.
Two villages over, you encounter a woman who had relations with Zeus and was left with a highly aggressive half-boar half-man offspring. She too feels your anger and offers to join your quest.
By the time you reach Mount Olympus, you’ve amassed a large and formidable army of cuckolded/ravished mortals, demigods with daddy issues, mythical creatures with scores to settle, and a seamstress who you’re pretty sure is Hera in disguise.
Just for funsies, let’s price out the best stuff available for, say, an adult male Boa constrictor imperator (it’s actually a bit more than I expected!):
Cage: Animal Plastics T20, $440 base, but we’re adding a basking shelf ($40) and a stand ($50, & $17 to ship): $547.
Lighting: Optional, but I would install LED strip lights - Ikea has the perfect set for around $20, and a light timer will set you back $10.
So we’re at $811.98 for really high end stuff. But this is for a large snake; notice how the price soars when you have to house large animals? The cage alone for my indigo was $650.
If we’re housing a ball python instead (or a dwarf male BCI)…
Cage: Animal Plastics T8, $150 base, $185 for hinged doors (my preference), basking shelf ($30), stand ($35, & $8 to ship): $223 - 258.
Heating: Reptile Basics Radiant Heat Panel, 80 watt (40 watt is their recommendation for a 4′ enclosure, but most folks have low ambients, so we’ll stick with 80 watt): $89.99.
So for $113.33, you can make a fully functional, safe enclosure for a ball python that will greatly increase your husbandry success and your snake’s quality of life.
And what do people go out and buy instead? Hundreds of dollars of aquarium which needs to be modded heavily to be appropriate. Heat lamps that suck out the humidity and are risky fire hazards. No thermostat. No lighting (aside from the heat lamp). And then they refuse to change anything because - hey - sunk cost fallacy!
Do your homework. Buy the right thing. It saves you money and possibly an animal’s life.
Things I like: those pieces of fanart that depict pokemon trainers as sinister, all-powerful individuals by utilizing hard shadows and surrounding them with very strong, intimidating pokemon
THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT
Illustrated by: Kōhei Horikoshi, known for being the writer and illustrator for Boku no Hero Academia.
Basic rundown on what’s going on with YouTube atm from what I understand:
YouTube changed the algorithm for the site’s coding, resulting in big-time YouTubers like H3H3, PewDiePie, and even @therealjacksepticeye losing hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of subscribes at an alarming rate. Basically what they’re doing is dropping subscribers from these popular channels if you haven’t watched their videos on a daily basis and if their daily videos aren’t getting X amount of views.
However, as H3H3 pointed out, there are YouTube channels that are benefiting from this. And those are the channels that are putting money directly into YouTube’s pocket. These videos are showing up in the trending tag despite not even hitting 50,000 views, because they’re ‘Trending.’ What’s really going on is just they’re stuffing money into YouTube’s pockets, and YouTube’s current response when asked about this is literally
‘lol idk fam ;)’
So YouTube is shafting YouTubers and don’t have any answers for it, meanwhile channels that are run by big time corporations or big recording studios/teams are able to literally buy their way to the front page of YouTube and gain a lot of hits. It’s back to the early 00s again, with click-bait taking over YouTube instead of original content. So original content creators are getting the shit end of the stick shoved directly up their asshole.
What the fuck
Whatever branch of Google runs Youtube knows they hold a monopoly on easily accessible video sharing with a large audience so they just endlessly abuse it’s community.
Some advice for everyone that is currently generating income from YouTube: get out now. Try to find an alternate source for posting your videos that can net you that income. And try to do it soon, while you still can reach your audience to let them know about the change.
The problem is, YouTube has not been profitable for Google. In fact, despite the huge viewership numbers, Google has only ever been able to break even on it. The YouTube CEO has to explain this to thee Google board of directors who in turn have to explain that to their shareholders (particularly the big, institutional investors), who are not happy about it, especially becauese they’ve essentially had a monopoly that they can’t capitalize on.
The result? Google will keep fucking with the model to try to squeeze more revenue out of YouTube. And one of the big problems is that the current YouTube megastars attract too young of an audience. So, it’s not surprising that they’re taking potshots at the YouTube stars while feigning ignorance so they can promote channels that might be able to attract broader demographics.
I think that YouTube is going to crash in the next few years, and the only people currently relying on YouTube videos for income who will survive it will be those who jump ship for alternate platforms.
Gryffindors: Want to prove that they CAN become great
Slytherins: Want to prove that they ARE great
Ravenclaws: Want to prove SOMETHING
Hufflepuffs: Want to prove that they can eat fifteen slices of bread in five minutes
