Saturday 2/5
Also from Twitter:

Justin Beiber is not actually the antichrist. He's just another teenage pop star with formulaic hits. (Granted, I do not need to be locked in a room with his music piped in and no way to turn it off, as I'd likely emerge twitching and smiling in a very unsettling way, but it won't actually kill me to click onto a YouTube video.) (I would later hear his opinion of abortion and revise that to 'dangerously uninformed Conservative-Asshole-Christian-educated person influencing our youth' but at least he's Canadian.)

I would like to read a werewolf pastiche of Ginsburg's Howl.

Currently, mental health care in the US is not really accessible. The barriers to receiving it (especially when you've got crappy or no insurance) are things that might daunt someone in their right mind, and could and did make me just give up at the sight of it when I was deepest in the middle of depression and probably needed someone who could actually prescribe me something the most.

I wonder if there's an overlap between anti-vaccination crackpots and pro-Rapture crackpots who really want a pandemic.

Sunday 2/6
Poor LikeALiar was trying to write a werewolf book, and asked the chatfish for ideas. Chat promptly started giving her the most horrible imaginable moon-and-tooth jokes.


A linked article got me going on this, unrelated to werewolves. My opinion on vicious dogs and dangerous breeds of dogs is informed by my opinions on dog training, a study I read that involved newspaper mentions of vicious dogs (used to be that "bloodhounds" were the vicious, feared dogs, and then it meandered through some others, including German Shepherds, and now it's pit bulls), my opinion of people who do dumbass shit with dogs (provoking them on purpose is bad news bears), and the actual danger posed by the meanest, most out-of-control example of the breed.

I think that any line of dogs that have been bred to a standard that does not value the temperament of the dog has a chance of getting mean-ass or unstable dogs. A dog that's generally mean-ass, you might know where you stand. An unstable dog -- I saw video that involved a trainer nearly getting her throat ripped out by a big damn dog because the dog thought she moved wrong. I'm all for attempting to salvage dogs with poor training, etc., but I'd volunteer to drive that dog to get put down.

Poor training can do some jacked-up shit to a dog. Abuse can do some jacked-up shit to a dog.

A vicious, unstable tiny dog: there are physical limitations to the amount of damage one of them can do. The same actions in a huge dog, or a dog with more biting power, are actively life-threatening.

The sorts of people who want a mean dog as a symbol of their masculinity/a macho accessory, are the people who are likely to both pick out a breed of dog with a reputation for being mean, and to train it to be mean, possibly with bad training and possibly by abusing it. Any nastiness inherent in the breed is thus amplified by the jackass owner.

I don't support people drawing lines strictly based on breeds of dog without taking the dog's training and temperament into consideration. I'm also still not going to let my entirely hypothetical two-year-old go up and stick her hands in the mouth of your great big "totally a marshmallow" gnarly-looking dog, because I don't know how the dog is trained, I don't know its temperament, I can't predict whether my child will start gnawing on its ears if I take my eye off her for two seconds, and even a corrective nip from a great big jawsome dog has the potential to do some real damage. Similarly, not allowed to hug the adorable banty rooster who wouldn't hurt anything that wasn't a fly, not without safety goggles on account of how chickens peck anything that might be delicious, and eyes are shiny and move fast and you can't blink faster than a chicken's beak.


"Contains" is an ingredients label. Gay sex is not gluten or peanuts, and therefore shouldn't need a warning.

Crossposted. comments.