iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 04/04/2026

I've been looking at all the earth photos from the Artemis II mission and feeling a kind of peaceful, melancholy reassurance from the perspective they elicit. The hot lump is welcome, too, and so is knowing other people feel the same way seeing them. May it rescue us like Apollo 7 did in 1968.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 04/02/2026

I don't know why the preview image is broken, sorry.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 04/02/2026

www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vi... In an interview on The Curiosity Desk today, Dr. Federico Rossano was asked by Herwick whether he faced any pushback for the research. He answered yes. He was warned by colleagues not to pursue this work if he ever wanted tenureship. Premier is tonight at 9pm.

pbs.org

Can Dogs Talk?

Do speech buttons really allow dogs to talk to us? Scientists investigate.

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Peter Singer @petersinger.info · 08/01/2026

AI is biased against animals, and it could have a huge impact on the wellbeing of all animals. Nautilus has just published an article about this that I wrote with Tse Yip Fai, who first made me aware of the problem. nautil.us/ais-innate-b...

nautil.us

AI’s Innate Bias Against Animals

AI’s Innate Bias Against Animals: Chatbots and robots are a setback to animal welfare—but have the potential to be a step forward.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 25/12/2025

Christmas cookieeeees

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Dr. Alexandra Zidenberg @alexandrazidenberg.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

🎉 Thrilled to announce our new paper in the Journal of Sex Research! "Exploring Sexual Attraction to Animals: A Qualitative Analysis of Zoophile Experiences" One of the largest qualitative studies on this topic, with 960 participants sharing their experiences. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A screenshot of the title and abstract of the article (accessible by screen reader by clicking the link)

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herder1013 @herder1013.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

“You notice an ant struggling in a puddle of water. Their legs thrash as they fight to stay afloat. You could walk past, or you could take a moment to tip a leaf into the puddle, giving them a chance to climb out. Should you take a moment out of your day to help one out?” aeon.co/essays/an-an...

aeon.co

An ant is drowning: here’s how to decide if you should save it | Aeon Essays

Should we simply assume that all animals can feel pain and are of moral concern? Or is that taking things too far?

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 25/10/2025

Complaining and documenting and analyzing the (dozens) of zoo sticker designs will elicit a blank stare from me while I sip my earl grey. There's no code to crack. You have not discovered anything we did not intend to show the world. What you see is all there is. And they are for us, not you. 🦄

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 19/10/2025

There's a lot to be proud of here. We're much more than just talking heads!

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herder1013 @herder1013.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Trans rights are not the rights of a minority. They are everyone’s rights to autonomy, to self-determination of our health and identities. Attacks on trans rights are not attacks on a minority. They are steps to stripping everyone’s ability to live their own lives with independence and dignity.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/06/2025

Plenty of rituals are awful and destructive. But as long as your paricular ritual playing the show is enjoyable and beneficial, by all means continue! That's why we make it.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/06/2025

I think what you're noticing is ritual. It's not weird, it's just how people work. Rituals can be grounding, calming, clarifying, a way to reconnect people, or unwind, open yourself up, or let go. This is why we always end October with a Samhain. Life is so full of rituals.

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herder1013 @herder1013.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

When the actual behavior is harmless or beneficial, “slippery slope” and “gateway drug” arguments are used to invent a moral offense.

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herder1013 @herder1013.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

“The bill’s lead sponsor was already openly stating last year that her support for KOSA was about using it to censor LGBTQ content. And Democratic leadership is actively helping to build the machinery of censorship that will be used against their own constituents.” www.techdirt.com/2025/05/14/w...

techdirt.com

Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA?

The Trump administration is methodically implementing every element of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 censorship playbook, and Democratic leadership’s response is… to help them? Ear…

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Peter Singer @petersinger.info · 12/05/2025

One of the most powerful moments comes when Rutger names factory farming as today’s clearest moral failure and points out how hard it is to find anyone who will defend it publicly. You can read extracts from our conversation on my Substack here:

boldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com

New Podcast Release: Rutger Bregman

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to historian and author Rutger Bregman.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 18/04/2025

Look past the marketing sizzle for a minute. Sam and Theo connected with us a year ago to chat with the team about participating. We spoke for several hours constructively. Circumstances didn't line up in the end, but I'm hopeful this will be fair and faithful. www.amcnetworks.com/press-releas...

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

I hope this episode makes it easier for you to get started talking about KOSA and age verification from an informed position, but there's a lot more out there if you're willing. Check out the show notes for links.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

Go to 5calls.org or get their 5calls app. It's simple and tiny and makes it super easy to find your elected representatives, pick an issue, and you guessed it, make five calls. You can even organize call groups with friends and turn your 5 calls into dozens or hundreds. Do the thing!

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

Sloppy, uninformed legislative language is an existential threat to sites like e621 and even to normie sites like pornhub and reddit. You can fight these bills and win. Colorado just killed theirs for now.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

While Tarro, Mike, and I were combing through legalese and critical coverage from rights groups for this episode, e621.net dropped their April 1st prank, asking visitors to draw their ID for age verification. The result was a mountain of amazing little drawings, but to e621, it wasn't a joke.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

I'm not joking. A few dozen calls about something is considered a big response at a local and state level, and it's very low effort to make that happen.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

If you live in the United States, you aren't powerless to fight bad legislation. Your representatives answer to you, and their jobs are at risk if they don't. And they all know this. It does not take much feedback from YOU to change their mind about an issue!

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

Apple and Google both (reluctantly) offered very similar proposals that try to be simple, secure, and private by storing the least possible information about the fewest possible people. Neither is perfect, they are just the least bad solution we have, and probably good enough.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

Handwaving away the details for the nerds to figure out doesn't work either. Some of it is technically impossible, or ruins business models, or is so expensive to do right that the only rational option left is to ban the people and the content entirely.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

And that's before special interest groups get their hands (and money) on the bill to morph it into something that enables them to make their weird, hateful, sad hangups about queer people existing everybody else's problem, and giftwrapping it in "protect children" to make any criticism suspicious.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 17/04/2025

Now that we live online, it's inevitable that some form of strong age verification is coming to address real safety problems. But doing it in an inclusive way that doesn't exacerbate class divides, lock users into brands, protects free expression, and prevents censorship is very, very hard.

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Dark Violet @darkviolet.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

You are who you say you are.

A Painted Dog dripping in trans colours, with 'Stand Tall' underneath it.
Trans rights are human rights.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 14/01/2025

This episode is deeply important to me and I wish I had been able to contribute to it more, but time and personal circumstances kept me away. I'm happy with the result though, and I'll add more thoughts to this later 🦄

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 26/11/2024

This orb is a machine that converts bad vibes into baked goods and podcast episodes. Please continue; next season is coming along but my vegan snickerdoodles need work 🦄

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 26/11/2024

My dad works at nintendo energy

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 28/08/2024

I'm interested to see how bsky balances anti-harassment with fact correction, particularly with a community notes system. Twitter's notes were sometimes very low quality and harassment vectors

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

To clarify, I mean care about it everywhere instead of nowhere.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

We're paying for it, too. Even community standards of conduct are weaker and more difficult to uphold, nevermind champion, if we all agree consent is important and nod our heads in solumn agreement without checking ourselves from time to time. Lookin' at you, 3-letter rearguard and your imitators.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

I don't know the answer, and it's not really my decision. What I do know is that Taboo Science is just the beginning, there's at least one more major project on the horizon which will absolutely feature consent issues, and we're all skipping leg day on purpose.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

That means we're back to talking about it, or writing about it, or both. Which is better: a kind of living document that is updated, revised, and as thorough as possible, or an episode that breaks ZTT's founding concepts, and somehow written so that it is still for zoos, by zoos?

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

This is why I said, "we're kinda done with it." Among ourselves we absolutely are done with it. The rest of the world isn't. An "ideal zoo" could be totally consistent in their application of consent principles from dawn until dusk, and there's no way to demonstrate that to anybody.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

Then came the episode with @tabooscience.bsky.social, which was more friendly and casual and fair to us than we dared hope to get from anyone on the outside. Consent came up immediately, and because we don't talk about it on our own show, it was very hard to articulate. We don't have much practice.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

Just as annoying to me personally, are all the excellent texts and training methods and discussions which are consent based, but are either silent or hostile to extending that discussion to include sexual expression, and fall back on distract/discourage/ignore... or worse

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

Related to this is the idea that if someone only cares about consent in inter-species contact for pleasure, but ignores consent when such contact occurs thousands of times per second worldwide to produce meat and other animal products, then either they are naive or a scumbag and a hypocrite.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

Consent matters everywhere, all the time, and not just for sexual matters. If society only cares about non-human consent in a sexual context to justify hate and continue a decades long carceral approach to animal welfare, and ignores it everywhere else, then morally we should do the opposite.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

The show is for zoos, by zoos, and does not exist to defend zoosexuality to anyone. It began with the idea that endlessly talking about consent is boring and circular, so rather than get bogged down, just emphasize that consent is mandatory and that zoos can and should be consistent.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 27/06/2024

This account is tiny and was dead until today, so I might have to xpost on the birdpage, but I want to start here. I've been thinking about consent a lot for past month and what I should do with it. ZTT is in its 6th season and has resisted ever doing a consentisode.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 16/02/2024

I need to take my own advice and use this instead of birdsite.

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 22/09/2023

Fiiiiine. But I am still fluffy on the inside!

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aqua @aqua.zoo.wtf · 21/09/2023

Aqua was taken, so now I am fluffy 🦄

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