I’m just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they’d finished their collection of games for it back in April.
Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they’ve got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is… considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they’ve only gotten manuals for three games. So if you’ve got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual’s still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!
Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm’s Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.
My morning took an unexpected turn when I passed a woman coralling this mama mallard and her ducklings along the main downtown street. They had just been fished out of a sewer drain and needed to be brought back to the river a couple blocks away. I took up the task and herded the family until we were just across the street from a river, when all but 1 of the ducklings fell into yet another sewer drain.
After 45 minutes of sitting by the drain and keeping the mother and one duckling out of trouble above ground (with the help of a couple passersby), the fire department was able to fish the babes out and escort them safely back to the river.
What stands out most, however, was that after the fact I had my own field of expertise mansplained to me. The lead fireman chastised me for handling the one above ground duckling, saying “that could kill it or cause it to imprint on humans”. Respectfully, sir, I am a semester away from my bachelor’s in Biology, with plans to pursue a graduate program for ornithology. I have studied and worked with birds all my life. The ducklings had already imprinted with the mother and the whole “touching baby birds makes the mother abandon them” thing is a myth. I agree that wildlife should not be handled willy-nilly, but the mother kept leading the babe into traffic and close to the grate, so I made a calculated decision for the sake of safety.
Anyway, they are all safe and back in the river now. I just felt so taken aback from the fireman’s condescension. Respect and help wildlife however you can🦆
Y’all, I’m over here DYING cuz Google suggested me this article about the crisis of backyard chicken keepers– which is that they love having chickens so much that they keep getting more, and then don’t know what to do with all the eggs.
Which I can see how this would be a problem, but it’s just so funny to me because they had interviewed this one guy who started off with 3 chickens, and then kept adding more and more, and eventually started donating the eggs to a local food bank, and at the end of the year when they wrote him a tax receipt, he discovered he’d donated over 400 dozen eggs.
Seriously, it was a whole article talking very seriously about how people are so into chickens that they just keep collecting them like pokemon and then have to “scramble” (their words not mine) to get rid of the eggs, because they weren’t even thinking of egg production, they just loved having chickens.
And while I may be over here laughing a bit too hard, honestly? Big Mood.
ALT
