Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
This is what your dash looks like if you fall for the Tumblr April Fool’s Joke.
I know some of my followers might have vision sensitivities, and as this background is a rather bright color, I wanted to warn everyone.
If you don’t want your dash to look like this, do NOT click on the “This Is Decision 2016″ voting link. It will take you to a page where you vote for a lizard, and once you do, it changes your dash to look like the above.
If you’ve already fallen for it, there is a way to revert to the default dash. Underneath the spinning “Decision 2016″ graphic on the sidebar, there is a link to opt out.
I don’t think people realize how much of an impact this kind of support can have, I don’t think everyone knows what these little things can mean to us.
It may just be me, I don’t know. But every single time I see this on my dash or on someone’s blog or anywhere else, I kind of just breathe a sigh of relief. That’s one more person who cares. That’s one more person who doesn’t hate me.
Because it means so much, especially when all the media is spewing out is that I’m a terrible person and no one wants people like me near them. It means so much because I’m tired of people who won’t sit next to me in class, or who choose to join the longer line at the grocery store because they don’t want to be beside me and my family. It means so much when I have to lift my head any time someone says the words Islam or Muslim because I’m scared that they’ll say something that’ll hurt, when I have to pay attention to the news because who knows what so and so is saying now, who knows which of my people are being attacked now, who knows what’s going to happen to me now.
It means so much because I’ve been given the idea that the world is against me. And a huge part of it may be, but at least I’ve been reminded that some of it, just a small group of people, acknowledges that I’m a person too. That people like me are just that, people.
Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. But now you do, so thank you for believing that I’m human when so many people don’t.
While we’re on the subject of honeybees, I was recently visited by a swarm!
I came home Tuesday to find a huge cloud of bees all around a magnolia tree by the garage. In less than an hour, they coalesced into a tight ball of bees about the size of a football.
Now, I knew from a lifetime of nature documentaries that honeybees are at their most docile and least likely to sting when they’re swarming. A this time, they are stuffed silly with honey, don’t have any young to protect, and can simply fly away to avoid predators. They’re cruising around with their queen, looking for a new place to build a hive.
I wasn’t worried about them hurting anybody, but I didn’t necessarily want them to take up residence in my garage or attic. So I did what anybody would have done in this situation. I made a Facebook post about it and then googled what to do.
Fortunately, a friend of mine works at the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware, Ohio. She put me in touch with their Apiarist (beekeeper), who was simply ecstatic to hear that I had a stray swarm and that I hadn’t poisoned it (apparently, lots of people don’t know the difference between honeybees and wasps/hornets/yellowjackets/etc). We set up a time for him to come rescue the swarm, and he even called a couple of students up to share the experience. One of them had been waiting for over two years to go on a swarm rescue run.
He brought out a hive box with some already-combed frames. We cut down the twig the bees had clustered on and dropped it into the box, and they immediately began claiming it as their home. Detecting the wax comb on the frames and recognizing a good hive location, the bees started to emit a lemony “homing” pheromone, letting all of their sisters know to settle down here and start laying down wax.
We kept the hive box overnight to allow errant scouts time to return. He came back the next morning to pick up the hive and take it to a quarantine site, until he could be sure of the bees health and temperament. He even left us a little parting gift from the apiary at Stratford. Everybody kept saying what an absolute treat it was to find and save a swarm, and how rare it was to see them. Provided the hive is healthy, in a month or two, I could go up to the ecological center and visit my bees!
With 40% of honeybee colonies in the US dying in the last year, every bee that can be saved is a small victory. It was a real privilege to witness this event and have a hand in finding a good home for the swarm.
If you see some swarming honeybees in the wild, call a beekeeper! They’ll be grateful to hear from you, and you’ll be doing some good for our pollinator friends!
Yelp is crazy unethical. Even before I heard about this nonsense, I worked at a small business in San Francisco whose customer traffic was directly influenced by their cesspool of a site.
Anyway, my supervisor and I worked hard to make sure every customer was happy. And we were succeeding! We had a perfect 5 star rating on Yelp! It was amazing! Then one day we got a 1 Star Rating on our Yelp Page. Someone from Pennsylvania left a nasty review on our site. It was scathing.
Now, that’s not something that’s too far out of the realm of possibility for my job. While I sold mattresses in a brick and mortar, we also sold mattresses via Amazon and our online store and people from all over the country purchased mattresses from us. But I digress. The reason this is important is, well, where it gets dicey for Yelp. Because sure enough, Yelp sent us an email telling us that if we paid some fee they would push all the bad reviews off the site. They were extorting money out of us!
And here’s where it gets really interesting. My supervisor contacted the customer to see if there was anything we could do to make them happy with their purchase, so they can change their review. But the customer in question had literally never heard of our company and obviously never purchased anything from us.
Yelp literally committed fraud, and it was only when we threatened to sue that they took the fraudulent review off of our page.
Yelp is awful.
I worked for a solar company (smaller, not one of the big national ones) and my friend worked in marketing, so part of that was looking over the Yelp reviews and reaching out to people. Someone left this scathing one star review for us, but the person wasn’t a customer. The working theory around the office was it was a fake by a competitor or just a really confused person. But because it was bad the head-honchos got on my friend’s ass to get in touch with Yelp to get it removed or whatever. I think they ended up paying to have it moved or did some incentive with customers to get them to flood the page with 5 stars to balance it out. The way that Yelp scams is gross.
actually i can’t find the link but a bunch of social scientists were like … hmmm about this. And they created a fake frozen yogurt shop with a random address typed into google (i think it was a NJ city) and sure enough 1 star and 2 star reviews came pouring in about how their frozen yogurt was melted, or tasted bad or there were rats but the place never existed :)
MarketWatch did a study that literally 20 percent of all Yelp reviews are fake. One out of five.
We use Yelp reviews as well as Trip Advisor to help our restaurant better ourselves and there have been some questionable bad reviews claiming things that quite frankly never have existed! (That’s not to say that we don’t have our share of customers who are miserable and use the internet to share this disdain, but literally some of the things never happened). I used to use Yelp to help me gauge businesses and restaurants but Yelp has proven itself to be a source not to be trusted.
ATTENTION: if you see a post like this, IT IS A SCREAMER. DO NOT CLICK THE LINK.
The screamer includes a black and white flashy gif maximized to fit your browser and a very loud piercing screech noise. If in any way this can trigger you, please be aware and reblog to signal boost.
thankyou ohmygod a friend linked me this literally 2 minutes ago and i was about to click it and i would’ve had a seizure you saved my life ohmygod im so grateful
Just in case I have any followers with epilepsy like myself. Stay safe!
I love seeing my followers reblog this! This is fucking awful. And when we say you saved our lives? Let me explain. 2x the number of people that die from breast cancer each year die from having seizures. So yeah, it’s a fucking big deal. So thank you all so much! Everyone, please signal boost!
omg that would’ve scared tf out of me
Signal Boost for anyone who hates those damn things.
