A blog of birds, nature, and other things.
Any original posts including a bird of prey refer to rescued raptors who are cared for by professionals. Raptors are not pets.
This is a very interesting article which highlights not only the existential threat that chytrid fungus poses to amphibians (it has wiped out 90 species already), but also the ethical dilemma around synthetic biology, in which organisms have genetic material introduced or deleted, for example in the hope of increasing disease resistance.
Also, I would be remiss if I did not say that there is an incredibly cute picture of two frogs sharing one of the ‘mini-saunas’, an intervention which has already helped Australian green and golden bell frogs face off the chytrid fungus threat.
These are art in themselves, in a some of them point out what lockdown was like for us, they’re expressed themselves in a really cool way. But I think these are going to be talked about in the future.
Eartha Kitt’s career is just so iconic because there’s no way you don’t know her even if you don’t know you know her. You like Christmas music ok well she’s Santa Baby. You like Disney animated movie ok well she’s Yzma. You like Disney Channel original movie ok well she’s Madame Zeroni. You like comic book ok well she is Cat Woman. She won.
You like making the racist wife of a war mongering president cry on national television? She did that
Some drawings from “Wild, Wonderful Tattoo Woodland Animals” - third book of temporary tattoos I had the pleasure to create in collaboration with Storey Publishing!
“No one remembered my birthday-” Well, but did YOU tell anyone it was coming up and you wanted to celebrate it with them?
“I wish someone would see through it when I tell people I’m fine-” Well, but have YOU considered not lying when people ask you how you’re doing?
“I am so resentful of my friend because they keep doing this thing that really bothers me-” Well, but have YOU directly communicated that the thing is bothering you?
“I am burning out because my friend keeps expecting me to help them with serious struggles-” Well, but have YOU tried to establish the boundaries you need to feel okay?
“No one ever asks me about this thing I really care about-” Well, but have YOU brought it up yourself?
“I miss my friend but they haven’t texted me-” Well, but have YOU been reaching out to them?
Sometimes people are mean, uncaring assholes, in which case you get to be mad. But sometimes you just need to communicate better. Try communication before you assume someone doesn’t care!
Having someone who knows you on such a deep level that they see past your mask, or sense you need a check in is such a deep satisfying fantasy. It’s up there with living in a cottagecore farm, or buying all your friends houses when you win the lottery. But you have to make peace with the fact that this is also a fantasy. It is unfair to expect people to “just know” when to respect your boundaries or to push them.
Being cared for is not a fantasy. But you have to let people know you need it. And you have to understand that sometimes they will let you down. Just like you totally could live in a cute farm, but you still have to shovel shit, and the crops sometimes die anyway. Or maybe you win the lottery, but you still have to manage your money and learn real estate law.
The fantasy isn’t the caring, the fantasy is not having to do the work. And it sucks. It’s embarrassing. But like the meme says, it’s not rotten if it’s YOU. So do it for yourself.
“The fantasy isn’t the caring, the fantasy is not having to do the work”! Thank you for that addition. Because it’s not a naive expectation to want someone to care to treat you right. But it requires communication and mutual effort to actually get there
update from the discord group courtesy of one of my mutuals;
do not trust that damned survey. change your discord password. utilize 2FA.
I use 2FA on every website I log into, and it didn’t ask for any details when I took the survey, but I still don’t trust that thing at all. One can never be too safe.
whoops I accidentally double reblogged but:
hi, i did some research on this but this link was not phishing and here’s why:
qualtrics is a legit website that companies pay to host data gathering surveys to collect metrics on various things. you can also create free surveys but from what i understand the survey results aren’t as in-depth as the paid versions get you.
it looks like the survey originates from a banner on the discord app and you click on it and it takes you to the site and you do the thing there. it was only rolled out to a certain amount of people (for the purposes to maybe only get people they thought would be pro-AI? who knows with Discord) but was then passed around everywhere because Fuck AI. And then Discord realized that things weren’t going the way they wanted and pulled the survery.
I did some further research on the URL itself:
From ESET link checker it rates it as safe, I also plugged it into a few others as well like Fortinet and Bitdefender and both of those came back safe too, here’s a screenshot of ESET:
info on the link itself from urlvoid:
the actual qualtrics site info from urlvoid as well to compare the age of the domain (usually phishing domains are very very young and/or brand new and not legitimate domains but these are both legitimate domains.)
and, inb4 people say “phishing attempts don’t always have to ask you to enter your login credentials to scrape your info”
no keyloggers or malware after I clicked on the link (it’s been 8 hours now and my discord account is fine).
hopefully, this will quell some panic about the discord thing, its always good practice to protect your account with MFA when it’s offered and to change your password when you suspect something may not be right, it’s better to err on the side of caution etc, but in this case, it’s alright and there’s no need to create any undue panic about a link to a survey. fuck AI and Discord should know better than to try and pull more wool over its userbases’ eyes because did they not learn from the NFT thing?
Sucks how many people were taught that “horses put their ears back when they’re mad” but then never taught the difference between “angry backwards ears,” “mildly annoyed backwards ears,” “pain backwards ears,” “concentrated backwards ears,” “sleepy backwards ears” and “just happens to be listening to something behind it.”
“Horses put their ears back when they’re mad” idk man i think it depends
These are all completely different expressions in completely different scenarios, and only two of them are decidedly negative.
Actually, I wanna talk about the third horse, the one putting its ears back in pain. Over the last 15 years veterinarians and animal scientists have worked out pain scales for most domestic animals by taking photos of the during routine procedures.
We know vaccines painful, and by comparing horses at rest with horses getting vaccinated, we’ve been able to determine how they express pain visually. By looking at horses with disorders like colic, broken bones, wounds, and so on, we can determine their facial expressions during more severe pain.
At zookeeper school we were drilled through the pain faces of the most common lab animals and livestock. Nowadays I believe this has become a routine lesson in all animal related fields, but the general public still doesn’t know that this is a thing that exists.
Here are all the pain face/grimace scales I’ve been able to find. Please study them if you interact with any of these animals on a regular basis:
