Author | Lightnews

Mel (they/them)🐀

@kupgup.bsky.social

180 followers 120 following 760 posts

Neurospicy, queer. Feral goblin hermit since 2020. I knit (mostly socks) and hang out with my pet rats and sometimes bake bread and stuff. Sometimes I am sighted at post-apocalyptic preenactment events.

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Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 4h

Lol I feel like such a dinosaur. It's only been a year or so since I started tapping my CARD to pay for stuff. At this rate I'll adopt phone and watch payments about when everyone is switching to, like, eyeblinks for payments.

Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 1d

Poor doggo 🥺

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Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 1d

IMPORTANT BREAKING NEWS

Old man El Chikitin has found a piece of cereal and wants you to admire his foraging skills. His nose is still sharp after almost 2.5 years!

#PetRats

El Chikitin, an elderly gray and white rat with dumbo ears, stands on the sofa with nose raised high, proudly showing off the snack he found.

2 10 59

Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 6d

I love the zoo animals that don't BELONG TO the zoo, they're just AT the zoo.

This bold as brass squirrel stared at me as they ate, for a solid 5 minutes before I left to follow my party. I did not know squirrels had that much attention span.

A gray squirrel lounges atop a sandstone-looking ledge, back legs outstretched, eating food with his lil hands.

Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 10d

Lol yes. Chiki is reigning champion these days!

Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 10d

His litermate was Raliberto! The were/are my favorites from their cohort. Such friendly calm potatoes!

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Will BOO-rows 🖖🍞🥀 @reforest-kelley.bsky.social · 10d

At this point I don't want an AI assistant even if they did make it sound like Majel Barrett

6 9 58

Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 11d

(His old-man buddies say hi too! Their 2.5-year birthdays are coming up in November!)

The pale scraggly looking head of El Chikitin sticks out of a box to lick a dish of whipped cream.

We can't see into the box, and Chiki is not moving a millimeter farther than he must, so the head looks festively disembodied. Spooky!! 👻

Nico, a rat with a charcoal hood, stands in his cage eating whipped cream from a little white dish. His dish secretly has medicine in it for his sneezes. 🤫

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Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 11d

Happy half birthday to Filiberto! He's an impressive 2.5 years old!

#PetRats 🐀

Filiberto, a black colored rat, leans out of a hide to eat birthday whipped cream from a small white dish. He has spattered some small droplets of the cream onto his whiskers.

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Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 13d

yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket

Thomas Lecaque @tlecaque.bsky.social · 13d

Christopher Columbus was dragged back to Spain in chains by a crusading knight, convicted of tyranny and immeasurable cruelty, pardoned by Isabella but banned from returning to Hispaniola.

Fuck Columbus.

88 2.3K 7.9K

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Jess O'Thomson @jessothomson.co.uk · 17d

It cannot be made clearer.

If you continue to support the Harry Potter franchise in any way, you are directly funding the removal of trans people's human rights in the UK.

JK Rowling pledges to keep up fight against SNP trans policies

Author vows to bankroll campaigners after Scottish government fails to pay group's legal fees in Supreme Court equality case

110 6.7K 13K

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

emily moonlight @threnody.bsky.social · 17d

just watched a dozen people ask microsoft copilot experts their most pressing questions and those questions were 90% “how do i turn it off?” and “when i turn it off, is it really off or is it spying on me?”

9 1.1K 4.8K

Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 17d

Biggest things I learned from doing a master's while working full time:

* Done is way way way better than perfect

* Procrastinating strategically so I can go to bed

* Assorted technical skills and knowledge I probably could've learned on my own, but I never got around to because no deadlines

Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 17d

During my master's I was 15 yr older, and only a little less feckless. Buuuuuut I needed my sleep a lot more.

So I started drafting most papers TWO evenings before they were due, and got more efficient at bullshitting.

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Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 17d

Yeahhhhhh! Go, slug, go!!

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 17d

Yeah everything SUCKS but humans are still silly wonderful beautiful creatures who collaborate with slugs to make videos like this. So. All is not lost.

Amy @lolennui.bsky.social · 17d

oh hell yeah youtu.be/nGZOFyLrCwk?...

Slug Eating Spaghetti Time Lapse (With Stopwatch Timer)

YouTube video by Nature's Fantastic

youtu.be

10 130 500

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 17d

As an instructor, I'd rather see your fever dream, No Doze-fueled 4AM essays written at an IHOP rather than anything generated by an LLM.

Hope this helps

Dane of the Dead 🔜 LightBox Expo 313 @monkeyminion.com · 17d

I wrote a 15 page report on heraldic symbolism in medieval armor and weapon design for my art history class the night before it was due (8am class). Made up 90% of it (only found one book for reference) and got an A. GenAI could fucking never.

wrote 20 pages on Faulkner's The Bear four hours before final papers were due on trucker pills and coffee and cigarettes and got an A, fuck you.
You people couldn't hang with real slackers.
finn
wokeupchic • 4d
It's fuck Al till your homework due in 25 minutes

40 440 1.9K

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Esther Schindler @estherschindler.bsky.social · 19d

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

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Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 18d

Here's Bucket! He's ready if you need someone to bite the drama.

(I'm not sure how one bites drama, but if anyone can find a way, it'll be Bucket.)

Bucket, a brown rat, perches on his human's shoulder and glares into the camera.

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Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 18d

OMG!!

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Effect Not Affect @effectnotaffect.bsky.social · 21d

So, at this point you may well have seen an article like this one: movieweb.com/neil-gaiman-..., and I really want to talk about what it actually means from a legal perspective. Just to establish bona fides here, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a guy who went to law school, got out, and learned he hated law

Neil Gaiman Assault Lawsuit Comes to an Abrupt End

The civil court case against author Neil Gaiman has come to an abrupt end after being dismissed by the judge.

movieweb.com

2 48 90

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

weeder @weeder.bsky.social · 25d

People always say "stop doomscrolling," nobody ever says "stop the Doom"

Doesn't even cross their minds.

37 300 1.5K

Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25d

Literally one person in the world asked for this: #botober art prompts!

Generated by a tiny neural net, not running on a huge datacenter but on a single laptop, and not trained on the wealth of the internet but on 800 reader-submitted vintage jello recipes.
www.aiweirdness.com/tiny-jello/

Botober 2025, Art prompts created by a tiny and cursed language model
1. noodle juice
2. Pinetanabous Mold
3. crock up
4. crushed cold water
5. heated baking rings
6. sozerfrapple
7. Behold onion.
8. ground mayonnaise
9. small sweet pipes
10. 1/4 can cool soup
11. catsian spinach
12. lemuffir
13. pickled cubiwery
14. Lightly spather
15. bear spice
16. 1 medium clothed bell
17. drained bread crusts
18. baking stalks
19. grated pan
20. 1 smorbs
21. cucumteragus
22. Spoonfur Pie
23. rub the bog
24. Leanwhile
25. 6 slices soup
26. pepper towels
27. 1 cup sliced dish
28. 1 teaspoon flup
29. small calling cheese
30. add blender. Shell.
31. Orenge Gelatin Hourse

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Reposted by Mel (they/them)🐀

Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 27d

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

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Mel (they/them)🐀 @kupgup.bsky.social · 29d

Raliberto
4/15/23 - 9/24/25

Such a good-natured potato. He was mellow enough I could balance Cheerios on him, as long as I left some for eating.

He almost made it to 2.5 years, which is a good long rat lifespan. Still feels too soon.

Raliberto, a chonky black rat with dumbo ears, sits in a yellow hide and eats a snack with his little hands.

Raliberto, focused on eating a snack. There is a line of five cheerios running along his spine from head to rump.

(His pal Churro stands beside him also enjoying the snack, but is much too wiggly for such a stunt.)

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