...can The Lonely Take The Place Of You?

This is Maggie's worm collection

She loves her worms more than any other toy. She plays with them loads and carries them around the house

At night the worms have to go in a box so that she doesn't wake me up playing with them. So every evening before bed I gather up the worms, put them in their box and have Maggie say goodnight to them.

Night night worms!

In my own little 'I can help *this* one' scream into the universe, I've been de-stringing the feet of the pigeons that live in the park across from my office.

Pigeons (rock doves) are feral, and they live in our cities. With our rubbish. They get string (human hair, fishing line, threads, etc) wrapped around their feet when they do their little circling dance, or from their nests, and they can't get it off themselves. So they limp along as best they can, for as long as they can. They're pretty tough little guys! If you start to look, you'll probably notice a lot of them are missing toes or have strictures holding their feet in painful positions. Some even have both feet bound together.

But the good news is - it's actually SUPER easy to help them!

This little guy had thread around one foot, and wire and nylon line around the other. I removed it on my lunch break on Monday, and now he's already walking easier and won't be losing any more toes.

The photo is from the next day, because he came back to hang out again without hesitation. They're very friendly.

People really hate pigeons, which is a bit unfair considering we are the ones who brought them in to our cities in the first place. If you want to make a world of difference to some lives that don't get a lot of love any more, check out the below for everything you need to know.

Stringfoot Pigeon Help

What is stringfoot?

What is stringfoot? A brief overview.

Wall-E (the character) is a great demonstration of how being curious about the world echoes our level of care for it. And that caring can quite literally course-correct humanity His playful fascination with what humans left behind, his ability to find "new" on a dormant planet of waste refuse-- he continues to care and be amazed by and change things in a world that has not effectively changed for about 700 years. Wall-E commemorates artifacts of life by treasuring them on their own special shelves in his home. He lovingly makes sure The Plant is secured in a way that won't crush it as he's going home. He accidentally runs over his cockroach and worries about it. He tries to make an inactive Eve comfortable at his expense, not knowing when or if she will ever wake up again.

Wall-E has such an impact on Eve and other passengers on the Axiom because he invites them to care about small interactions they took for granted. They make meaningful connections and changes in their own directive because-- simply by being interested by them and what they're doing-- he offers a new perspective of looking at themselves. (Remember when he gives the elevator robot that little wave and it's so taken with that gesture it starts to copy it? It was seen and acknowledged when its role has always been to punch numbers.)

The spark that Wall-E shared with Eve, I think, is not only symbolic of his love for Eve (though it is clear he loves Eve more than anyone). It was that care. It has to be that same care. Because if his little acts of wonder and determination inspired every other character to break from their programming, who's to say it can't overcome a factory reset?

Oh, and "curiosity" and "care" have the same etymological root, apparently

Vox

Birds have co-opted our anti-bird weapons in a genius counterattack

Humans install spikes so birds will go away. Birds steal them and do this instead.

Humans are so cute. They think they can outsmart birds. They place nasty metal spikes on rooftops and ledges to prevent birds from nesting there.

It’s a classic human trick known in urban design as “evil architecture”: designing a place in a way that’s meant to deter others. Think of the city benches you see segmented by bars to stop homeless people sleeping there.

But birds are genius rebels. Not only are they undeterred by evil architecture, they actually use it to their advantage, according to a new Dutch study published in the journal Deinsea.

Crows and magpies, it turns out, are learning to rip strips of anti-bird spikes off of buildings and use them to build their nests. It’s an incredible addition to the growing body of evidence about the intelligence of birds, so wrongly maligned as stupid that “bird-brained” is still commonly used as an insult...

Magpies also use anti-bird spikes for their nests. In 2021, a hospital patient in Antwerp, Belgium, looked out the window and noticed a huge magpie’s nest in a tree in the courtyard. Biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra of Leiden-based Naturalis Biodiversity Center, one of the study’s authors, went to collect the nest and found that it was made out of 50 meters of anti-bird strips, containing no fewer than 1,500 metal spikes.

Hiemstra describes the magpie nest as “an impregnable fortress.”

Pictured: A huge magpie nest made out of 1,500 metal spikes.

Magpies are known to build roofs over their nests to prevent other birds from stealing their eggs and young. Usually, they scrounge around in nature for thorny plants or spiky branches to form the roof. But city birds don’t need to search for the perfect branch — they can just use the anti-bird spikes that humans have so kindly put at their disposal.

“The magpies appear to be using the pins exactly the same way we do: to keep other birds away from their nest,” Hiemstra said.

Another urban magpie nest, this one from Scotland, really shows off the roof-building tactic:

Pictured: A nest from Scotland shows how urban magpies are using anti-bird spikes to construct a roof meant to protect their young and eggs from predators.

Birds had already been spotted using upward-pointing anti-bird spikes as foundations for nests. In 2016, the so-called Parkdale Pigeon became Twitter-famous for refusing to give up when humans removed her first nest and installed spikes on her chosen nesting site, the top of an LCD monitor on a subway platform in Melbourne. The avian architect rebelled and built an even better home there, using the spikes as a foundation to hold her nest more securely in place.

...Hiemstra’s study is the first to show that birds, adapting to city life, are learning to seek out and use our anti-bird spikes as their nesting material. Pretty badass, right?

The genius of birds — and other animals we underestimate

It’s a well-established fact that many bird species are highly intelligent. Members of the corvid family, which includes crows and magpies, are especially renowned for their smarts. Crows can solve complex puzzles, while magpies can pass the “mirror test” — the classic test that scientists use to determine if a species is self-aware.

Studies show that some birds have evolved cognitive skills similar to our own: They have amazing memories, remembering for months the thousands of different hiding places where they’ve stashed seeds, and they use their own experiences to predict the behavior of other birds, suggesting they’ve got some theory of mind.

And, as author Jennifer Ackerman details in The Genius of Birds, birds are brilliant at using tools. Black palm cockatoos use twigs as drumsticks, tapping out a beat on a tree trunk to get a female’s attention. Jays use sticks as spears to attack other birds...

Birds have also been known to use human tools to their advantage. When carrion crows want to crack a walnut, for example, they position the nut on a busy road, wait for a passing car to crush the shell, then swoop down to collect the nut and eat it. This behavior has been recorded several times in Japanese crows.

But what’s unique about Hiemstra’s study is that it shows birds using human tools, specifically designed to thwart birds’ plans, in order to thwart our plans instead. We humans try to keep birds away with spikes, and the birds — ingenious rebels that they are — retort: Thanks, humans!

-via Vox, July 26, 2023

Putting my animation diploma to some real use for once and animating my girls

Definitely had some challenges with this one as it's a fairly technical shot, but I'm proud of where it ended up!

After making a 10 minute ethnographic documentary on the “cropped mgs meme” for an anthropology course I kinda fell in love with them and wanted to make Kingdom Hearts versions

Credit to @gummi-ships for many of the background screencaps, and to Cropped mgs memes on Twitter for the memes which inspired these

are MMD redraws normal? does anyone actually hyperfixate on watching MMDs enough to make fanart of them?

'cause I watched @britishmindslave's MMD of the Destiny trio flashdancing to Heroes Tonight for a full week back in November and it inspired me to make this. Please go watch the original video on their YT you won't regret it

X-I-O-N

Many excellent dragons in this thread, and I much approve of the Spyros, but we are missing the edge of Cynder yet!

Go my menacing female black dragons.

Yes I cheated and added Maleficent because she's S tier, and, it just occurred to me as of writing this that Cynder is like bargain bin Maleficent designed by Kingdom Hearts (lovingly).

Smaug is of course the definitive dragon though--- can't dethrone the king under the mountain

🗡️🔥 This is the dragon tax. Show me your favorite dragon and you will be allowed to live

I will start 🥰

(Tagging some people but anyone else feel free to join also. Fill my notifs with dragons hehehe) @certifieddragonenjoyer @rottenpumpkin13 @salternateunreality2 @izunias-meme-hole @luneandbarbecue @heraldofcrow @decadentblazewolf @wowa-bublord @stargazing-zani @raven15x @berabare

Speaking of @foreststarflaime and dragons, I made this pixel art of their character Foreststar while we were at the library together. (I make pixel art sometimes) They can tell you all about her if they wish, and correct any of my errors-- my cursory recollection is that she's like a storybook god-dragon who is the patron of protagonism, and reincarnates as many different people and creatures to pursue the depths of kindness, wisdom and wonder.

Where every star on her wing represents a different story, it fuels her breath of blue fire with the intensity and brilliance of a life lived nobly.