Adventures in Fishkeeping or A Fish Tale

fishorama said:
OK, some of us need a hint about "muds". I certainly didn't play that way at any time. Enlighten us old/new timers (sounds like rugby, lol). Not D & D, although I didn't play that either...You gamers, ha, do tell!
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they were an early multi-player game; you connected to them via telnet (or client that did similar). I think I mostly played from 89-95 and wrote a couple. The specific type (there were different types) was diku mud. Back in those days most of the players were grad students but sometime - i guess around 92 or 93 there was an increase of undergrads which changed the atmosphere (more pk'ing; more crappers and such).

The thing is that having mostly grad students is between adventures you could take time and talk about more academic things - i used to spend a lot of time helping a fellow with his thesis (not the actual research but the software he was writing to do his simulations - he was a biologist and i was in the cs program). Anyway the international crowd was pretty good - lots of scanavians like these games and denmark was an honary scanavian country for sort of obvious reasons ;)

The american muds were less international eccentric. A few still run like mume and arctic but most of the modern gaming is graphic eccentric - after all the younger crowd prefer to look at pictures than read text....
 
I played a few disk and then CD based games but none for any length of time besides Axis & Allies. Before gaming went online I played a Stealth bomber game. It was based on the Air force training program. It was not easy and one option involved landing on a carrier if you came back from the mission. I was never able to land successfully on a carrier and always ended up having to ditch as that cost fewer points than crashing on the carrier deck and dying.

A&A was a strategy game. It was more like playing chess online than what most think of as a game these days. The difference between the online and board versions as online games took less time, But they still typically took many hours. often games had to be saved part way through and resumed at a second and even a third multi-hour session.

There is nothing so full of itself as a teenager. This has been true for all of time since neanderthals were replaced by homo sapiens. It took me many years to understand that the longer I lived the less I actually knew. I did not become ignorant, I just learned how much I really did not know.
 
Hum. I think I'm a bit different; the older I get the more I know and the more I wish I knew less.
 
So, just went out to the fish space to work on the 2/6 tanks I did not get to yesterday. As I normally do, I did cave checks in all 3 breeding tanks.

1. RB line L236 tank had a trapping in progress. I would swear yesterday I saw a trapping in a different cave where today there is only a male and no eggs. it could be old age at work however. (Me not the fish.)

2. Super white L236 (imo also RB line) a dad on eggs in one gave and a trapping in another.

3. L173 TR breeders, a trapping in a thrid cave. The alpha and bate males were alone in their caves. As there are only 11 breeder size fish in the tank, this would mean 3 males for sure have now been involved with spawning behavior. Until I see eggs, I cannot say more.
 
I am really not wanting to do terrace tanks again. The terrace is as far from my fish supplies and water as possible in this house. I use 100 ft. of hose to fill the 32 and 2 x 20 gal cans plus 3 x 5 gal. buckets with changing water at temp. I had 190 gals worth of tanks which really only hold about 160 gals of water. It takes me some time to clean out the terrace, set up the equipment and the I have to cycle all the filters. And I still have my 20 regular tanks to do weeklies on as well.

Once the terrace is up I have increased my weekly work load by about 35% because the hoses etc. get brought out there and then get brought back in every week. I also move almost all the buckets and cans out and back in as well. I will be 74 by this summer. I really do not want to do this one more year :-(

It is my own fault. I got into the hobby too late in life. So I tried to make up for less time with more tanks. It worked for almost 20 years but it has caught up with me. I am putting together the plan to sell off 3 of my breeding groups this year. And that means I can shut down 4-6 tanks. Next year almost everything else left will go out.
 
Maybe you need to invest in some more hoses? Make your bro camp out on the terrace for the summer & take over his bedroom? Hire some help? LOL

You know it's going to be hard to stop. All your plecs will keep breeding & you know you'll want to raise the fry...Sell little babies? I bet not. Maybe sell off all adults of 2 or 3 species/strains so you have fewer kinds? Do you have a "favorite" species that will be last trios of to go? Or is it whatever the market is for them this year & next? I know there are limits in some ways for you & your fish but I also know you've thought about it long & hard.
 
The biggest concern is the money. You might have to sit down before I told you what I paid for my last two groups. I could buy a really nice used car for it. Then there are all the costs of keeping and raising them. I do not need to make a lot of money but I for sure want to get my investments back. I have not even begun to sell any of the super white 236 yet. I have barely sold any of my TR 173 group and I still need to sell a few more F! 173s to break even.

Normally to maintain the tanks I need to spend about 5 hours on Thursdays and then 6-7 on Sat. and Sun. If I have the terrace going that is another 6 hours or so. Then there is feeding. Mostly I feed frozen and Repashy. This takes about 1/2 hour every evening. If I had a basement and a fish room the times would likely be about 1/3 less.

I was also screwed by Jorge Garcia of Nation Wide Aquatics. He essentially stole $15k from me. 1/2 in cash and the rest on fish. I looked into suing of filing a criminal complaint, but my oldest friend is a high powered attorney and he said the criminal would be an issue since it was related to business and I would likely be told to sue. But to sue would cost me more than was taken. This is the one time I am sorry I am not on social media. I was told there was a facebook page dedicated to outing crooks in the hobby like Garcia.
 
It has been a while since I posted in this thread. Life has been hectic.

Last week I sent out all 39 Budrovcan line L236 in the grow tank. This allowed me to dedicate that tank to something else. In addition I sent a few l173 to the same person. She had bought them from the Jason's Plecos and Cichlids who has the sole right to sell them aside from me. And he sets the price for the most part. But this meant I had to break down and rearrange two 173 grow tanks as well.

I finally decided to use the empty tank for growing out super white 236. I moved 49 fish from 1/2 inch to 2.25 inches ito their owns grow tank. I need to move some of the poop from the mature fish into that grow tank tomorrow when I do weeklies on the breeder tank.

I am also resigned to having to do one more season of summer tanks outdoors. I need to sell 3 groups of my brreders and all their offspring this year. The rest will go out next year. To sell things I have to segregate them and that means more space. I am too old for this stuff,

On an interesting note, out of the blue Jorge sent me $5k of what was owed since the end of summer 2020. I was surprised as heck. I never expected to see any of that money or the fish again. Well 1/3 is better than 0.

One another note I have jumped forward into the world of Windows 10. I hate it but too many sites were balking at Windows 7. I am paying a pro for help building my new box and getting set-up. When I got Win 7 in 2013 I made it look very similar to XP. So I preferred that 10 looked and worked as close to 7 as we could get it. So far so good. the next part of the digital plan relates directly to fish.

I have always avoided registering an most sites. I have 0 interest in social media so I am not on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. etc. I always managed to sell my fish on fish forums. The I went to letting others do the retail part for me. But I now have to much to sell and I need to be on some social media. So I worked out a plan for doing so while keeping most of my life out of it.

All the important things will be done on my new Win 10 box- brokerage, personal email, shopping, banking etc. All the things I want most to keep private. I store no cookies and no history and always operate in private browsing mode. I do other things as well to further this.

So how I can I get onto social media but keep everything else safe? I am getting a laptop for that. Nothing personal not involving fish will never be done on this laptop. It will use a different ISP than my win 10 box. it will use a separate email account (encrypted) than my main one. In two years when all the fish are gone, the hard drive will be wiped, I will cease using the social media sites and close the email account and the only information out there will relate to selling fish in the past.

I have been invited to appear in YouTube vids related to fish and with the species with which I work. The problem is I have no video camera nor microphone on my PC and I do not own a smart phone. So no me on YT. Well not really, you can hear my voice in the background of a couple of vids shot of my tanks and fish years ago.
 
So I send out 44 fish and what to I get?

WC 173 tiny fry all over the tank older that fry as well.
TR 173 fry all over the tank as well as many bigger and one dad on eggs and another about to release free swimmer.
RB 236 fry all over and dad on wiggler.
Basic 236 likely one dad on something- many caved and some wont let me see in well enough.
New zebra fry and youngsters spotted in the TR parent tank.

And Covid still has many events going digital. The NEC did so and I do not sell that way.

Soon the real me will be online selling fish for the next 20 months or so. I will do so from a dedicated device not connected to my main box. The setup is designed to keep my non-fish life off of the net.

Last night I saw upon the stair
The little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Damn I wish he'd go away.
 
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