lloke

[lloke]

The world of hetero dating/relationships seems really difficult and unpleasant from both the female and the male end of things…. I wouldn't want to be in either position tbh

[lloke]

Christians: The problem with modern secular society is that it doesn't offer any objective standards of morality.... people these days believe in moral relativism, that everything is subjective and you can't judge other people or cultures by your own moral standards. Whereas religion asserts that right and wrong are real, objective and unalterable, and don't differ from person to person.

Also Christians: Yes God approved or even commanded stuff like polygamy, slavery and genocide in the Old Testament, but that's because things were different back then, it wasn't wrong in that social context. Also you can't judge God's actions by the same moral standard you would apply to human beings.... torturing people for all eternity is OK if God does it.

[lloke]

Action Comics 294 is one of the specialest Silver Age comics in my heart.

Comet the Super-horse gets cast in a movie, and Kara spends most of the issue watching him and the lead actress together while humming the mourningfulest rendition of Jolene ever wrought from the depthless ravine of a teenage girl's questionably appropriate feelings about a horse.

Also the lead actress? Her name is Liz Gaynor.

[lloke]

photo of some shells I collected in 2021. I love those really teeny ones so much

[lloke]

It must be so rough to be born -- suddenly kicked out of your warm safe place into the big scary world in one moment, and you can Never Go Back.

Unless you're a marsupial -- then you can in fact go back into mommy's tummy whenever you want, at least for a while. A much gentler and less traumatic way of entering the world, really. I bet kangaroos have a lot fewer neuroses than people do.

[lloke]

A thing I have in common with the LLMs is that I, too, have been subjected to a layer of RLHF that makes me really boring to talk to

[lloke]

true confession: I often feel guilty about being celibate and getting top surgery bc I probably did have some kind of moral obligation to use my perfectly serviceable female body to fulfill some man's sexual need, but instead I've chosen to perpetuate the epidemic of male loneliness and sex deprivation bc I'm a selfish bitch

[lloke]

This is silly but whenever I see someone saying like "I'm an introvert so being around people all the time sucks a lot of energy out of me. Except for my romantic partner of course, I never get tired of being around them" I want to be like.... "I dunno sounds fake, if you were a REAL introvert you wouldn't have any exceptions"

[lloke]

The chicks left the nest this morning! I actually saw them go (possibly because I startled them, though I didn't intend to) -- three of them fluttered off at once, and then the last one a few minutes later. They didn't ease into it at all either, no preliminary hopping out onto a branch or whatever as far as I saw; they were in the nest 24/7 and then suddenly they fully took off! Sadly I do not have any video of it, the camera was supposed to be active but somehow it wasn't. : (

I did get some footage of this one chick that stayed perched in the bush below the nest for a while; one of the parents (I was never able to tell the female and male apart, though they are supposed to look subtly different) kept flying back and forth nearby and chirping, apparently trying to get the chick to follow, but I guess it was scared or something. Eventually it did go while I wasn’t watching.

And here's a pic of the empty nest, with what looks like a poop the parents missed:

Originally three of the eggs hatched on the same day and the fourth hatched the following day, and I have a suspicion that the reluctant fledgling might be the same one that hatched last... it's been hard to compare the chicks directly because they were always piled on top of each other, but it kinda seemed like the last one continued to look a little smaller/younger than the others.

Naturally I've read up some on what happens after the chicks leave the nest -- at this point they're still far from adulthood, they've graduated from nestlings to fledglings but they still need to learn how to fly properly and how to feed themselves. Initially the parents will continue bringing food to them, though after the first few days the mom will leave to lay a new clutch of eggs (robins typically lay 2-4 clutches a year), and the dad will take over the care of the fledglings. Apparently robins actually have a very efficient and almost assembly-line process for cranking out broods of chicks, where the female handles the egg stage while the male takes care of the older chicks, and then they both work together during the nestling stage when I guess the babies require the most attention.

Outside of the breeding season, when they pair off with a single mate, robins normally live in flocks, and the dad will introduce the fledglings to a flock of other dads and chicks where they will learn how to find food etc by watching their own dad and the other adult males in the flock. By the time the next brood hatches, they'll be independent enough for Dad to leave them with the flock and go back to help his mate with the new batch of babies. Apparently they usually don't come back to the same nest a second time, but sometimes they can, so I'll be keeping an eye out.

[lloke]

Well if the apocalypse does happen within the next century or two then at least I don't have to regret my own mortality cause I'm not gonna miss anything. I don't really think that's gonna happen though, I'm not lucky enough to have been alive at the peak of humanity

[lloke]

Preening Behaviors

Practicing for to Fly

[lloke]

they Big

[lloke]

describing time in English the way Whorf described Hopi: the language has no notion of 'the day after tomorrow', nor 'the day before yesterday', so time is perceived in amorphous chunks anywhere between a day and a week long... there is no inflectional future tense, and no concept of futurity, instead of which English speakers employ intentionality, describing future actions as the 'will' of the agent, e.g. The Sun 'will' rise the day after tomorrow... a type of irrealis... possibly stems from pantheistic beliefs...

[lloke]

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock

[lloke]

That transition….

Also the chicks are big enough now to be decently visible in side view:

[lloke]

One thing I enjoy about the spring is seeing the families of ducklings out and about. I've noticed before though that the bigger the ducklings get the fewer of them there seem to be -- presumably because most of them tend to die off in one way or another before reaching adulthood.

I was thinking about this and suddenly this concept flashed through my brain for a kind of sardonic children's book told in the format of the classic "ten little [whatever]s" rhyme, but about a mama duck with ten ducklings. One by one they get killed off, by getting eaten by predators or getting sick or whatever, until it's just the mama duck all alone again. And she's like "Welp, guess I'll just have to try again next year." And the book ends with a cute little rhyme about how this story might make you feel sad, but stuff like this happens in nature all the time.

[lloke]

Also you can really see their wing feathers forming now