Yo, this might be a joke but speaking to you as a social worker who has worked in housing and homelessness services and food banks?
ALWAYS CHOOSE YOUR RENT.
Food pantries are a punch in the nuts to your pride but they require WAY less hoops to jump through to get than the financial side of housing assistance. Also, there is often going to be MORE RESOURCES AVAILABLE for you when it comes to food assistance of MULTIPLE TYPES (food stamps/ebt, places that double said EBT, food pantries, places that just give away free food like soup kitchens, places that give away their leftovers from the day before etc) rather than housing assistance which are neither numerous nor are people likely to apply for.
I personally have used food pantries. I may have to use them again. They are there to help you for that reason, okay? Please fucking choose to pay your rent until we can abolish landlords and live on mutual aid.
Stay housed. Do you hear me, if this choice happens, seek mutual aid or charity for food and STAY HOUSED. Statistically, it is better to take the hit to your pride, go ask for food assistance, and sleep in your bed and eat that food in your home because coming back from losing said home is going to be so much harder that recovering from food insecurity is.
ITS FUCKED UP THAT WE HAVE TO CHOOSE BUT PLEASE TRUST ME ON THIS ONE OK? JUST TRUST ME.
Type the link into your browser for more information!! Help us counter the harmful and abusive wild capture of hermit crabs - they deserve to be valued more than they are now.
I was under the impression it was near impossible to captive breed these guys? 0:
Yes, it’s extremely difficult to successfully raise the babies! We’re actually starting to see a lot more breeding behavior in many people’s tanks at this point, which is extremely encouraging from a care standpoint. There’s not a whole lot that can be done to encourage the process though, other than having good care, male and female crabs of a medium-ish size or larger, and see if they do anything. Then you have to hope the female correctly spawns the eggs in the salt water pool for them to hatch - it’s not uncommon for the eggs to get eaten, dropped on the sand, or spawned into the freshwater pool, where they immediately die.
The really hard part is if they do breed, and spawn the eggs correctly… then you have to have the right set up (kreisel, or multiple glass jars), keep the water clean with multiple changes daily, feed them, have another set up for the megalopa to transition to needing shells, the right shells…..
It’s definitely a ton of work, time, and money, and a huge labor of love. That’s a big part of the reason for the cost of the captive bred babies ($50 each, required to adopt at least a pair).
But Mary has been successful in large numbers - I think something like 400+ the first year, 700+ last year? I think I saw a mention that she has at least 500 for adoption still. The money goes back into the breeding program, where she’s focusing on exotic species now, and hoping for others to work on continuing breeding purple pinchers. But she only has so much room to work with, and the babies have to be adopted for breeding to continue.
Currently she’s focusing efforts on adopting directly to homes - we don’t want the babies to go to pet stores to be sold with less care towards who takes them home and whether they’re prepared for them or not. That makes things more difficult, but hopefully we can slowly make the shift.
actually, hey, here’s some more stuff on a similar topic:
cyclonus and tailgate have a dichotomy that a lot of the fandom seems to really miss out on because a lot of the fandom makes snap-judgements about their personalities based on their appearances and some (some) of their in-comic dialogue
tailgate is. spiteful. tailgate holds grudges. tailgate lies to make people like him. tailgate 1) tries to attack megatron the moment he thinks he’s pulled something and 2) is ready to ABSOLUTELY THROW DOWN with people who’ve upset him the moment he has the power to. tailgate can be naive but that’s his lack of experience more than anything else.
cyclonus, meanwhile, is what i can really only describe as “an emotionally constipated absolute sap”. you have to remember that his reasoning for not telling tailgate he loved him was not really anything overly broody (i mean part of it was “he deserves better than me” but i wouldn’t call that brooding), it was “these things should be felt, not said”. he sings to comfort himself – and when tailgate needs comfort, his first instinct is to sing for him and teach him songs. he says things like “hope is a lie” but holds on to hope with all of his spark; cyclonus is a romantic, he just doesn’t wanna admit that he is. all in all, cyclonus is a very forgiving character, too. he does not hold grudges unless it’s a matter of honor.
so all this really boils down to is
tailgate can be soft but he is not the soft one in their relationship
I was gonna do a little comic about Cousin and Shep trynta figure out affection for the first time and I only ever sketched it out. Idk if I’ll ever get back to it, but here are 3 panels I really liked from it. The two of them exploring each others’ faces.
