The quotes from this Washington Post article are funny, sure, but here’s a longer quote about some of the theories behind this phenomenon:
“A seal’s preferred prey — usually fish, octopuses and, of course, eels — like to hide within coral reefs to avoid being eaten, and since the marine mammals don’t have hands, they have to hunt with their faces.
“They like to stick their faces into the coral reef holes, and they’ll spit water out of their mouths to flush things out. And they’ll do all sorts of tricks, but they are shoving their faces into holes,” Littnan said.
Perhaps, he said, a cornered eel decided that the only way to escape or defend itself was to swim up its attacker’s nostril, and young seals who are “not very adept at getting their food yet” were forced to learn a tough lesson.
But Littnan said that theory doesn’t make much sense.
“They’re really quite long eels, and their diameter is probably close to what it would be for a nasal passage,” he said.
He added that a monk seal’s nostrils, which reflexively close when they are diving for food, are very muscular and it would be difficult for any animal to push through.
“I struggle to think of an eel really wanting to force its way into a nose,” he said.
The other way eels might be ending up in nostrils is through throwing up. Similar to how people sometimes end up accidentally spewing food or beverages from their noses, that could also happen to seals, who often regurgitate their meals.
Still, Littnan said it doesn’t seem possible that a “long, fat eel” would end up going through a seal’s nose rather than out of its mouth. The “most plausible” theory, he said, is that monk seal teenagers aren’t all that different from their human counterparts. Monk seals “seem naturally attracted to getting into troublesome situations,” Littnan said.”
So while it’s possible that this is some sort of ridiculous teenage seal behavior, please also remember that there might be alternate explanations and that at this point, they’re all based on conjecture.
Also, it’s criminal that OP didn’t screenshot the last line of the article.
“If monk seals could understand humans, Littnan said he has a message for them: ‘I would gently plead for them to stop.’“
It’s my opinion that like if a white supremacist/Nazi is going to be reformed. They need to do so willingly. The only times I’ve heard of successful rehabilitation of fascists is when they made the conscious decision to no longer be one anymore and seek atonement. People who try to like hug and change fascists that don’t want to change are fucking morons
Correct. I was crypto-facist for a few years, and the people trying to hug me didnt change me because at that point I wouldnt have listened. It was only when I started to see the movement for what it was that I was finally able to listen.
I’m not derailing your addition but I’m horrified you’re only 18. When did you become a fasc?
Yeah trust me it *is* horrifying. I’m ashamed of who I was and I think my only atonement is to talk about how damn easy it is to become one when you’re young.
This is gonna be a long post.
For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.
I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said “logic” or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.
Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as “too tolerant” towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.
The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when you’re young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted “too white”, following my mother’s German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted “too brown” I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my “Indian” customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.
So I’m not saying this is all youtube’s fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.
Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If I’m remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie – Philip Defranco – Chris Ray Gun (sp?) – Thunderfoot – Sargon – etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.
Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.
I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for “Sanity Sunday”, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.
I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my “correct” heritage.
From here I delved into “race realism”, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.
To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, “we wuz kangs”, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: “See, we aren’t misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.” But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I will never pretend I didn’t.
But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didn’t fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need a white ethnostate.
I don’t want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.
From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, I’m healing.
I think that’s everything. I probably got some times and dates wrong because I’ve been trying to move on from it. But if you need more info or anything like that, please let me know.
long story short bethesda accidentally doxxed people who complained
in case you missed it, the chain of events is roughly as follows:
1. fallout 76 launches. it is entirely online. there are a lot of bugs. a whole lot of bugs. people report countless bugs, many of which are game-breaking. bethesda’s communication leaves a lot to be desired. fallout 76 officially has a no refund policy, but due to the large number of people requesting refunds, many refunds are issued.
throughout the following events, they are largely vague in regards to patches, support, outreach, and the fallout community is split between defending or criticizing their actions.
2. people begin to realize that the $200 collector’s edition, which promised a canvas bag, came with a low-quality nylon bag. bethesda claims it was too expensive to make the canvas bags and that they cannot possibly honor their $200 bundle, despite promotional material listing the canvas bag as part of the bundle up until release and until shortly after.
3. bethesda offers 500 in-game atoms (game currency) to individuals who purchased the collector’s edition. to receive the atoms, players must submit a support ticket with personal information, images, and proof of purchase. it is worth noting that these 500 atoms are worth approximately $5 USD, and cannot even purchase an in-game canvas bag.
4. after significant backlash, bethesda begins producing the promised canvas bags. to get the bag, people have until january 31st to submit a support ticket proving they purchased the collector’s edition. again, this requires submitting a ticket with ample personal information.
5. at some point, everyone’s support tickets became viewable to people who submit their own support tickets. meaning, the full names, usernames, addresses, phone numbers, emails, proof of purchases, and partial credit card details of everyone who submit a support ticket for any bethesda product were viewable. it also allowed anyone to open or close anyone else’s support tickets. bethesda effectively doxxed the most hardcore of their fanbase – the ones who spent the most money and were most likely long time fans. the long time fans who may have been inclined to defend bethesda up until this point. following this leak, a huge chunk of even the most hardcore fans have stopped defending bethesda.
the status of the leaked data is currently unknown. it is also unknown how long the leaked information was visible. several people took screenshots, meaning that it was possible for all of the leaked personal information to have been collected, scraped, or otherwise saved with nefarious intent.
summarized by a screencap from the linked article:
This blue dinosaur from Yo-kai Watch 3 is called Clodzilla in the west:
“A massively strong dinosaur Yo-kai that is also ridiculously clumsy. The number of buildings he destroyed while trying to protect the city from bad guys is uncountable. A royal pain to have to deal with.”
As it turns out, transphobic messaging like this — which links access to public bathrooms and locker rooms to the threat posed by sexual offenders — was “concocted,” according to a Massachusetts-based “pro-family activism” organization Mass Resistance. Its president, Brian Camenker, is believed to be the author of the group’s November 9th “Election Analysis” post, in which the organization (which is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) admitted its scary campaign to repeal a statewide Massachusetts nondiscrimination law was a lie.
“Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions. It worked in Houston a few years ago,” reads the post.
There’s something missing from this post that I feel is very important to know: this is the group who put anti-discrimination legislation protecting transgender residents in Massachusetts up for a ballot question during the midterms. If the ballot question had resulted in repealing the ALREADY ESTABLISHED LAW, it would have sent a threatening legal precedent, not just in Massachusetts, but in the US. I need to stress this, because a lot of people weighing in on the Yes on Three campaign seemed to think that this was not a matter of already established law.
Trans rights were already made law in Massachusetts, and Mass Resistance and Keep MA Safe created a petition to put the law back on the ballot for voters to decide. Fortunately, a majority of voters defended transgender rights, but I must draw attention to the massive effort created by Freedom Massachusetts, the coalition which went out on the streets, asking people to vote yes on three. Due to the confusing way in which the ballot question was worded, we very well could have seen a different, more dire result, instead of the current outcome. This result did not occur in a vacuum. It was the result of people standing up to defend trans rights against those who are willing to draw upon scare tactics which they know to be false. This scare tactic is why trans rights were on the ballot. Don’t dismiss this as a small or insignificant detail. As a transgender resident of Massachusetts, life could have changed utterly here.
As it turns out, transphobic messaging like this — which links access to public bathrooms and locker rooms to the threat posed by sexual offenders — was “concocted,” according to a Massachusetts-based “pro-family activism” organization Mass Resistance. Its president, Brian Camenker, is believed to be the author of the group’s November 9th “Election Analysis” post, in which the organization (which is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) admitted its scary campaign to repeal a statewide Massachusetts nondiscrimination law was a lie.
“Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions. It worked in Houston a few years ago,” reads the post.
Monsters and Stuff 