Oh- also- one of our best friends has been helping them with everything which I deeply appreciate

They’re making my favorite food but that’s about the extent of my knowledge

My love is INCREDIBLE at parties, dates, and gifts.

I’m waiting outside the apartment because they need more time to prep but I’m so excited and so hungry lol

I’m actually the one who suggested last year- for the benefit of people who were in the same situation I am now, in fact. I don’t believe in karma but that was pretty close. It sounds like it’ll be a yearly thing which I’m really grateful for.

Okay, party time, byee

This has been an incredibly long tangent- largely because aquariums are a special interest and a project I’m quite focused on right now. The other reason is because my love is throwing me a party soon and infodumping was the only way I could distract myself and get out of waiting mode.

I’ll still get assassin snails for the 36 but it’s a preventative measure rather than a treatment for an existing problem. Neither tank will be rid of the bladder snails, nor the Malaysian trumpets if I’m lucky. As I said, I’m just striving for a more balanced environment for my animals.

In my 36, which is packed with fast-growing plants, they’re a complete non-issue at the moment. The tank I’m having problems with is my 5.5 which has significantly fewer plants and a $30 light rather than a $300 one, which means it’s not growing at anywhere near the same pace.

All this being said, I don’t think “nuisance snails” like bladders and rams horns deserve nearly as much hate as they receive. I just want my tank to be more balanced and I am starting to notice holes in the leaves of my ludwigia and crypts.

Trumpet snails do burrow a lot meaning I probably have significantly more than I can actually see and I’m hoping they have as many egg clusters under the sand as my bladder snails do on the plants and glass.

To be clear, the problematic ones are the bladder snails (like the one in the picture). They’re hermaphroditic so any two can breed, unlike my trumpet snails which require a male and female. It’s causing the bladder snail population to really pop off in a way the trumpet snails can’t match.

Getting an assassin snail asap but I’m going to move some of my trumpet snails to another tank for safety. Every trumpet snail I have is a descendant of the original batch I got over ten years ago and I’m not trying to end the bloodline now.

Hope this isn’t insulting to anyone. I recognize that I’m speaking from the place of someone who is completely unfamiliar with this experience and would of course never insinuate that there’s a right or wrong way to approach it. This is just an unserious post about someone I think is really neat.

In fairness, I don’t know the story and it’s possible that the injury he received eliminates the possibility of getting a prosthetic. I just know him to be a cool, confident, well-dressed dude with a specific look and I would absolutely believe that he chose the objectively cooler option.

On a similar note, one of my neighbors lost an eye at some point and has an eyepatch rather than a prosthetic eye which is a level of commitment to aesthetics that I deeply respect.

Yo, do we have the same birthday??

The irony of him using the name of gaming’s most prolific nazi-killer is wild