just-your-average-cryptid

[just-your-average-cryptid]

if you tell an indigenous trans man to cut his long hair so that he "passes better" then im tying you to an anchor and dropping you in the middle of the ocean

[just-your-average-cryptid]

are you ever about to put on a movie but you realize you don't really want to watch The Movie, you want to be eight years old on a rainy saturday, and under your favorite butterfly blanket, and mom made hot chocolate and popcorn with extra butter, and you're watching The Movie for the first time ever? what are you supposed to do then

[just-your-average-cryptid]

Small game idea I've had for a while:

You're taking a history exam. You haven't studied. The exam is about some completely fictional event in a fictional country. It's all multiple choice questions about this made-up history. Here's the trick, though: the exam is really poorly made, in that way where a lot of the questions (and the answers they give) inadvertently give hints to the answers of different questions.

So you'll get, for example, "who assassinated Chancellor Eurich?" and "who was the Chancellor in 1895" and "what event in early 1896 precipitated the Great Power Struggle" You have to determine from the test itself what the answers are and get as good a score as you can.

[just-your-average-cryptid]

If self abuse ever did any good you would have flourished many moons ago.

[just-your-average-cryptid]

hey. remember when i made a post about how annoyed i was that a guy called pirate software was against software piracy?

lmao

[just-your-average-cryptid]

>Be me

>Make bowl of panda express leftovers

>Chow down on 2/3rds of it before father calls you over to show you memes

>Leave bowl unattended

>Laugh about memes for a good ten minutes

>Return to room

>??Bat? In bowl? ?

>Don't have anything to grab bat with that are bite proof

>Offer bat the head of the Winston Churchill marble bust to climb onto

>Bat does so

>Slowly carry Churchill and the bat to the window

>Bat won't let go of Churchill

>Pry bat off of him with nearby plastic skeleton hand

>Bat sits on windowsill for a second before flying off into the night

[just-your-average-cryptid]

when i was a kid, in about 2014, my good friend and I wanted to make an RPG together. to test our dialogue system, he wrote a conversation about one of the characters filling a lawnmower with salsa and being unable to turn it off

in 2019, Toby Fox posted early dev documents of Deltarune, which had dialogue of Lancer filling a lawnmower with salsa and being unable to turn it off. these documents were dated. 2012

i need you to understand.

this has haunted me for years. is this a reference. or parallel thought. or something. how did two people who had never heard of each other happen to write the same weirdly specific joke about a side party member filling a lawnmower with salsa

if any of you know toby fox or knows someone who knows toby fox. please. i need to get in touch with him. i need to know how the fuck this happened

[just-your-average-cryptid]

i think everyone should program at least once just so you realise just how fucking stupid computers are. because theyre so fucking stupid. a computer wants to be told what to do and exactly that and if you make one typo or forget one detail it starts crying uncontrollably

[just-your-average-cryptid]

Merlin is great and I'm a nerd so let's talk spectrograms! aka how does it turn Sounds into Bird?

(image and info from their official page on the Sound ID function)

While you're recording, you'll see this ^ graph running on your phone. As your microphone picks up noise, it gets analyzed and processed onto this spectrogram, a visual graph of the sound you're picking up. The frequency of sounds is what makes those dark spots and lines; even if there's background noise or a car drives by - or multiple birds piping up at once - the frequencies can be separated and matched to their library of bird songs. Bird species have their own unique songs, sometimes varying across age or locations, but generally distinct from any other species. Unfortunately, human ears aren't great at pinpointing which sound belongs to which bird, or whether that chirping was high-pitched or low-pitched, and listening to recordings over and over probably won't help much (I've tried.)

Computers, however, are great at analyzing and distinguishing that kind of data, and Merlin's system has been trained on a very extensive collection of bird sounds examined and overseen by bird experts; this is also true of the photo ID function, just replacing audio analysis with visual. You may not remember what shades and patterns of brown were on that random bird at the park, but Merlin has thousands of photos to reference and conclude that yes, that is a house wren and is not a sparrow.

It does limit itself to birds that are supposed to be in your area/where you observed them, so it won't always catch someone out of their typical range, but it's very reliable otherwise. A lot of work went into making this a good, functional tool and not a half-right guessing game, and I really appreciate it when the best my ears and brain can produce is bwaaaa bwaaa bew-bew-bew (Northern Cardinal, btw - this transcription sucks, but once you hear it enough you'll recognize it pretty fast)

Feeling despair over the general state of things? Blorbo from your shows not enough to hold the horrors at bay? Need something healthier to be insane about? Need to go outside more?

Want to become a pokemon trainer like you dreamed of when you were ten?

MERLIN BIRD ID APP BY CORNELL UNIVERSITY

It's a fun little app that lets you use your phone to identify birds by song. You hear a song, open the app, let it listen for a moment and it tells you what the hell is making that noise (if it's a bird), and shows you a picture of the little feathery bastards, so you can squint at the surrounding shrubbery with a better idea of WHAT you're looking for.

After thinking "Man, I wish I had that app to ID that lovely bird song!" and then completely forgetting that I wanted to do that by the time I got back to WiFi approximately five million times, I have finally managed to install it.

Friends.

I am becoming a pokemon trainer.

This is very literally like the Pokemon anime where Ash would find some godforsaken beast in the shrubbery and immediately whip out his Pokedex to Identify it. I will be out walking the dogs and will hear... Something? And now I can find out what the hell it is! Curiosity immediately rewarded!

And that's one hell of a dopamine hit.

You can increase the immersion into the pokemon trainer by also having Dogs (TM) with you. It's like having a starter pokemon, if your starter refused to go in the ball and was less keen on battling wild pokemon so much as generally yelling at, attempting to micromanage, or just straight-up eating them.

My dogs (functionally an off-brand Houndoom and Yamper-if-it-was-a-psychic-type) are thrilled that they're getting this much walkies, if somewhat confused by my stopping on the trail at random intervals to wave my phone around. They're Very Excited by me taking new, circuitous routes around the lake to get closer to trees and bushes to pick up songs because my phone was old when the pandemic started and the mic sucks. I'm pretty sure it's a matter of time before one or both of them figure out that I'm following birdsong and then I'll really be up shit creek because they fucking LOVE going on a hunt for something, and know that if they alert at something correctly at least a few times, I'll believe them when they pretend to alert at something. Like say, pretending they hear another bird, no I promise it's real you're just a comparatively deaf-ass human no I'm not trying to extend walkies how could you say that-

FURTHERMORE, Merlin Bird ID will keep a life list for you.

That's right.

You can put Birds in your Pokedex to fill it out.

And boy fucking howdy does my autistic ass love collecting things/completing sets, and that "congratulations, new lifer!" Thing lights up my brain like nothing else. I saw a blue grosbeak for the first time ever last night because the app told me ITS BLUE LOOK FOR SOMETHING BLUE!! AND BEHOLD, IT WAS THE BLUEST OF BIRDS!! I sailed through breakfast with my in-laws, a normally harrowing experience, on that high and I'm still going.

Granted, once the Blue Grossbeak took off and I was released from its enchantment, I realized that Herschel was rolling in half of a dessicated fish carcass while Charleston was attempting to work down the other half at speed, but that's just the joy of pet ownership.

...what I need to do now is figure out how to enter birds I can see that are not making noise into the list. There's so many ducks here, and all of them shut the hell up whenever the hounds and I are near.

Anyway,

MERLIN BIRD ID APP BY CORNELL LABS!!

Go insane in a way that makes you go outside and touch grass!

[just-your-average-cryptid]

Over on bluesky they were advertising Make a Terrible Comic Day and I had exactly one idea that had been banging around my brain today.

[just-your-average-cryptid]

“it’s unrealistic for all the characters to be queer” maybe your reality is just fucking boring. literally my entire friend group is queer, we travel in packs

[just-your-average-cryptid]

I had a dream that unless the teacher told us class was over, we were forbidden from going out the door. Our teacher was very forgetful, and maybe even malicious. After being forced to stay past sunset many days, my class decided we were going to break out every night. Eventually our attempts led us to discovering rifts in space-time where we could warp. So we never used the door. Checkmate.

[just-your-average-cryptid]

[just-your-average-cryptid]

one hyperfixated tumblr mutual has the power of six hundred thousand ad campaigns

[just-your-average-cryptid]

HEEELPPP a six year old just came into the nature center and she had SO many questions. it's pouring rain and nobody else is here but her family so non-stop for an hour she had my full attention. by the end of it i had half my field guides open to various insects and mammals and birds and she just kept going.

she became extremely fixated on bigfoot and asked about the ways people try to prove its existence until I was explaining DNA to her, and she asked such thoughtful questions! she said, "what if someone found a skull they thought might be bigfoot, and there was hair left over. could we use DNA from hair to prove it's bigfoot?" but before i could answer, she said, "but if you don't have a living bigfoot that you KNOW is bigfoot, to take hair from, how could you know this hair from this dead bigfoot is really bigfoot hair?" !!!! what an awesome question!!

so this 6 year old and i started discussing control groups in scientific studies and she was so engaged!!

then the bigfoot talk led to discussions of extinction which led to dinosaurs, and she said, "what I don't understand is why people say dinosaurs are extinct, but they also say that dinosaurs became birds. how could they all be extinct if they became something else?"

she asked questions that really challenged me in that figuring out how to answer them on the fly in a way that's digestible wasn't totally straightforward.

a few minutes ago, the adult with her said it was time to go and get ice cream and she said, "can't you see I have 1,000 more questions to ask? i have to just bloooowwww them all out now so you don't have to answer them later."

I saw my younger self in her so much LOL. They said they're coming back tomorrow and I said, "I won't be here, but my colleague knows even more than I do!" And she said, "Well, I hope so. He's gonna need to."

[just-your-average-cryptid]

It turns out that actually standing by "men and women are not inherently very different" is a reliable way to bother absolutely everyone. Left or right, cis or trans, feminist or misogynist, all cling to the binary for dear life.

[just-your-average-cryptid]

the whole "lipstick on a pig" thing makes no sense because the second we gave a pig access to makeup she became god's cuntiest soldier