this is the video OP is referring to btw, if anyone wants to watch it! its by Benn Jordan and it's really fascinating if you're a birder, an audiophile, or both!
I watched this video the other day (roughly a half hour runtime). while the title is kinda clickbaity, the science behind the complexity of birdsong that it discusses is fascinating.
the ability to replicate a drawn figure in a spectrogram via auditory mimicry is an incredible talent, and The Mouth (that's the name of that particular starling that has that skill) is amazing. whether or not this technique can be used upon other birds (or even other starlings) seems to still be up on the air (pun unintended), as The Mouth had a particular upbringing that guided its mimicry skills to favor domestic soundscapes. particularly "that camera shutter sound effect that certain iPhones make when you take a picture".
the back half of the video went over a bunch of stuff regarding specialized audio equipment and how to assemble your own to avoid having to pay a fortune, but imo I do not need another hobby.
overall though, this stuff is fascinating and it makes me wonder how spectrogram mimicry can be used and applied on later contexts.
The City of Atlanta Georgia has decided to demolish the research and conservation center of the Amphibian Foundation. This organization works tirelessly to conserve the Frogs, Toads, Salamanders, Newts, and other amphibians in the United States. In addition, they provide key education for herpetologists on the care, conservation, and preservation of reptiles and amphibians.
This emergency need is compounded by the government mass firing of conservation officials and the pulling of funds from many of the country's conservation organizations.
If you can help please donate here:
The building where AF is located will be demolished in June 2026.
Key points from the Amphibian Foundation.
Our building will be demolished in 2026, and we need to identify a new location (or locations) for 7 labs and over 1,000 animals, many of which are endangered and part of critical conservation programs.
We've identified a new location for most of AF, but not our research and conservation programs. We have an amazing lead, but it's not confirmed yet.
Our first fundraising project is the AF Emergency Fund as the minimum cost estimates to move this many labs and animals safely is $50,000. (It costs about 50 USD per animal to move them)
If you can't donate.. please share... here.. and everywhere else.
So today I spent about 45 minutes calling Visa & Paypal to complain about what they've done to Steam & Itch.io. In addition I wrote and mailed letters to my state's senators asking them to intercede on the issue. From what I understand momentum has slowed a little bit. Every call that takes up call center time for the payment processors is more money you've taken from the payment processors as punishment for their draconian policies.
If you've lost steam, or couldn't convince yourself to start, now is a great time to redouble your work! If we don't solve this now they're going to erode free speech further the next time.
If you're looking for examples of what calls to these processors can look like, I'd recommend watching Louis Rossman's videos (linked below) to see good examples! You can be polite to call center workers, and still waste the company's time and money! All it takes is your time and your willingness to dial a phone number.
imagine having to dox yourself because you made the mistake of watching a 4 hour mighty morphin power rangers retrospective and the ai decided you were 14 and not 42 like the actual demographic for those videos. sad
like this obviously sucks if you're an adult who enjoys watching animation or doll youtube videos but also i don't think youtube should be tracking 16 year olds because they're afraid of them hearing the word "fuck".
notice how all this censorship crap is happening at once? :)
ever since that right wing religious extremist organization Collective Shout targeted and manipulated payment processors (that are already run by right wing nutjobs) to go after steam and itchio, all this shit is starting to happen at the same time
it may be a tactical "overwhelm bomb" to make people feel powerless, and yeah it may not be that, but it's kinda strange that it's happening all at once
regardless, people need to start calling the shit out of mastercard and visa's phone lines even more
yall in the US need to start calling your representatives about KOSA especially
and people in the EU need to start calling whatever equivalent of a representative they have about all this bullshit as well
companies are now going to start trying to capitalize on invading privacy that has literally been protected for so goddamn long all because of these evil fuckwads that honestly need to get a nail put through their skulls
fucking make a fuss about it. complain the fuck out of shit and flood their goddamn call lines
The petition addressed that MasterCard and Visa must stop censoring legal fictional content that complies with the law and platform standard
UK paper covering the blow up today plus mentioning that the VICE article originally putting Collective Shout under fire was pulled on the orders of their parent company for controversial content, not journalistic quality objections.
things I would do if you're a nsfw/kink creative now because I've been eerily prescient about every single wave:
a) get a personal site with your own domain you own. now. not a carrd or third party squarespace. not next week. now. get it online with ugly-ass html but get your links there.
b) if you have the money: join one or multiple of eff.org / cbldf.org / freespeechcoalition.com
partly because they're actively fighting this, partly because they have members-only Lawyers You Might Need. Hint. Hint. Canary.
c) Write Down Those Lawyer Contact Numbers in meatspace. phone number of a real human being especially on paper, On You.
I have been in contact with lawyers for a few months now as my doujin circle knows. this should be telling you Many Things.
d) www.ecrater.com is where i'm going to be tentatively testing a shop because i like the fact you can *not* have payment processes and order digital/physical products via purely mail order.
(... be prepared for this to fall through too in the next 1-6 months.)
e) friends and followers of nsfw artists who earn most of their income through it: now's the time to support them. they're going to need the grace and financial flexibility especially mental health wise. domain/shop transfer/refund/therapy bills ain't free.
check in on them, and often.
f) get a VPN, use it daily to acclimatize, have them on your hard drive, several VPN's preferable. this is for the age verification laws coming. Start reading up on secure, privacy-focused infrastructure (prioritize email > website > shop in that order).
eff.org has a *ton* of resources.
g) prepare for discord and tumblr to be hit in the next wave. have alternatives *and actively start using them* if they're mission critical platforms for you.
I've played with matrix though I quite fancy IRC. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I say these things not to fearmonger but to give yourself the maximum amount of time to prepare. the pendulum *will* swing back. it did with the 80's moral panic. it will for this too.
if you’re ever in the position to choose between giving up and accepting defeat, and actually trying to fight the ancient unkillable god that is about to peel apart reality like a string cheese, remember this: scientifically speaking, you might as well give it a shot!
1.there were trees at the beginning of the world! there were trees so long ago that they predate bacteria that causes wood to decay. when a tree fell, it would lie there in stasis and there wasn’t any way of breaking down wood xylem on a molecular level in that way.
2. it seems obvious to say, but wood eating bacteria are literally incapable of comprehending what they’re breaking down. It’s just not information conciously available to a microorganism. they don’t know what they’re deconstructing, where it came from, bacteria have no way to even fathom the existence of a tree as a concept.
3. Regardless of the facts above, the world we live in today is a world where wood inevitably decomposes
it is worth fighting the unkillable god no matter how pointless it seems. it is worth taking the risk even though youre trying to accomplish something impossible. the reality in which you live was also once reality in which trees didn’t rot. You live in a reality that allows for existence before the possibility of destruction. you live in a reality where uncomprehending microbes break down matter that is so far beyond the scope of their comprehension that it feels comical to specify something so obvious. you live in a reality that occasionally allows unshakeable physical truths to be altered with no warning.
It is worth fighting the unkillable god because trees are so old they predate the source of their destruction, and it still did not spare them. It is worth fighting the unkillable god because bacteria rots unthinkingly, because there is room in our cosmos for destruction without comprehension on the part of the destroyer. It is worth fighting the unkillable god because now and then reality retracts the promise of immortality without fanfare, and when that happens there is no mercy for the ancient. the unmaking is not softer for the desecrators ignorance. for all things, existence is endless until the exact point where it ends.
so you might as well try to kill the unkillable god. it doesn’t seem likely, but at the beginning of the world, trees didn’t rot. so you never know! you never know
Grave offerings and burying the dead with tools and goods is actually such a deeply human thing to do. It's not really even necessarily about how much you believe in a literal afterlife or them taking the tools with them. It's also just going Wait, I'm Not Done Taking Care Of You, let me make you one more pair of socks so your feet won't be cold when you go wherever it is where I can't follow.
the part where jimmy vents out his frustrations to anya about having to fix everything is so ironic because isn’t this what he wanted?
our first introduction to his character is through a conversation where he insists on being called ‘captain’ by the rest of the crew. jimmy enjoys control as he directly/indirectly states to curly pre-crash but fails to realise that control, responsibility and accountability are all in one. he’s only doing the duties of a leader in a time of crisis, so why complain about it when this is what he demanded be given to him?
a core trait of his/the central focus of the story is his inability and refusal to take responsibility (but rather placing them on others). not for the crash (which he does to ran away from his actions), not for the assault, not for the baby. in fact anya should have been months pregnant and yet through jimmy’s eyes, we see nothing of the sort.
in the end, one could argue that he still rejects responsibility by killing himself rather than truly sitting with the consequences of his actions and the effect they had on everything and everyone around him. instead he uses curly as a tool to absolve himself of guilt. believing even in the end that he has taken responsibility when truly, he had only ran from it.
as much as the concept of Jesus being a fairly normal lad has its charms, im personally very intrigued by the idea of him being just… extremely weird. not even in a mystical sense, just…….staggeringly BIZZARRE.
you go to the well to get some water, and here’s Miriam’s boy, staring at the sky, completely still. his expression is unreadable. you hazard a hello and ask how he’s doing, and he slowly, unblinkingly, lowers his gaze on you (he’s 8 and is missing his frontal teeth, not that this is making you any less uncomfortable) and says “I cannot speak of the state of my being, Nathan son of Saul, my brother, but rejoice for the water you shall take today will be as pure as the soul of the children of Heaven”
even funnier, the only person 100% on board with his Prophetic Kid Talk is his mother Miriam, an otherwise placid, absolutely normal woman around 25 or so
kid JC, coming home at twilight, a single white dove following him and chirping with weirdly human-like precision:
moth̫́er,̦͌ ̮̉i h͙̉av͔̽e ͓͗b̘̃r̞̓o̮͘u̲̒gh̟͒t̺́ you a do̗͐ṽ͙e̢͘ ͈̾m͒͢a͈̽dē̝ ỏ̘f ͈̓c̆͜l͔̂aỷ͇ aṋ̑d̳̿ g͢͞i̹̾fted̖͡ ̻͐it ͓͂w̖̿it̎͜h t̥̃h͙͒e ̨̒m̧̂i̡̍ŗ͒â̫cḷ̔è̤ ̛̻of̞̅ l̘̈i̛̦fè̳
Miriam: ! that’s my little boy :) now let’s go get ready for dinner :)
her husband Yosef, a carpenter who only marginally got signed up for this:
There's something to be said about Mouthwashing's weaponization of the video game medium. The game is very easily comparable to a movie, between its runtime and cinematic framing and focus on narrative, but the fact that it is a video game, that we play as Jimmy for much of it and take on his actions ourselves, is I think really effective in its usage.
You are the one given the all caps RESPONSIBILITY, the disproportionate power of the captain, and you are the one failing miserably to use it well. You have to scan the codes, you have to give Curly his medicine, the first action you're presented with is to turn the ship in the wrong direction. No other option available. The experience it gives you of realizing again and again that you, that Jimmy, is not doing the most sensible thing, that he's being stupid and cruel and spiteful, is really effective in forcing you to contend with the excellently written character study on a personal level.
Waking up in the middle of the night and hearing Curly groaning in pain, and then going to bother Anya about giving Curly his meds only for Jimmy to INSIST on doing it himself, I thought to myself "c'mon man why wouldn't you just give him the meds to begin with," only to realize over the rest of the game exactly why he didn't do that. By putting the player in the role of this character, carrying out his actions step by step without choice in the matter, the irrationality of his decisions is made personally exasperating. You notice the patterns.
Jimmy tries so hard to not let Anya haunt his narrative but she is his narrative and he hates that.
Everything loops back to what he did to her and every hallucination, action and choice he makes or does directly goes back to her and he deserves that strife. She persisted and spoke up and he hates her for it. He can erase her but not her presence over them and that’s the best type of ghost.
Thanks to noclip, i was able to check out the letter Curly gets from "up top" and it is exactly as i thought.
Curly wasn't fired. He was Promoted.
Thats apart of why Jimmy was so jealous, why he was so upset and why he was so destined to not only secure his place as a hero, but to also ruin Curly's chances of ever becoming anything greater.
Its canon that Jimmy has been endlessly climbing the ranks behind Curly, he wasn't automatically brought on as a co-pilot, so to finally reach a position in that career where he could be feasibly equal to Curly, he goes and finds out that he's about to be promoted, furthering their separation, and shoving Jimmy back down the ladder, all over again. And he twists it in a way at the Birthday party that explicitly makes Curly out to be like he wanted this, like he wanted everyone else to get fired and him to climb the ladder even higher.
And its adds so much more to this scene.
Jimmy was so obsessed with the aspect of being the hero of a story, that when he was directly being cut out of one, he immediately went to the suicide-murder route. Not even bothering to try and talk it out, to think rationally or even try and understand Curly's pleas and his hopelessness.
He was being left behind, essentially forgotten by his so called "friend" that the only way he knew how to stay apart of his life and remain a good co pilot, a hero was to destroy every and all opportunity of ever being not one.
Him crashing the ship wasn't just the avoid the responsibility of what he did to Anya (not that he ever gave a shit about her, only himself) but to also make sure he died as a co-pilot, the co-pilot of an amazing captain, and whats a better way of doing exactly that than framing it to look like Curly is the one that crashed the ship?
I think it's super interesting how Jimmy's fear of Anya and the baby manifests in his mind as the Pony Express mascot.
Unlike every other character, Anya ISN'T in Jimmy's guilt/regret hallucinations near the end. He sees Daisuke walk towards the dark, he sees Swansea chase him through a cemetery, he sees Curly on fire in front of him but ANYA? Anya isn't given that kind of treatment. No, instead, we see a hallucination of the baby, a tiny horse in a womb that has no face attached to it (Anya's face specifically, all he sees is the womb), turning into a deformed monster that hunts him down the moment it's born.
Polle (the baby) is seen as a danger in Jimmy's head in the beginning of the game too, after he walks out of the cockpit. The more he walks, the louder the baby noises get and the more deformed Polle looks when he runs into it!
Jimmy doesn't give a damn about Anya, nor does he regret anything he did to her, but he is scared of that baby and what it means. The living proof of what he did to Anya, manifesting as a monster that hunts him down throughout the game.
Every day I am in the trenches fighting for my life defending this poor man. He was going through so much and people online demonize him and say he's as bad as his abuser
(I've got a lot of thoughts about this so I'll make sure to separate things to make it easier to look at lol)
Curly is a victim of abuse. Jimmy is his abuser. This is something that I feel a lot of people tend to brush over or don't acknowledge it often.
And I'm not just talking about post-crash. Jimmy's abuse of Curly is there pre-crash too. The party scene where the crew learns about the company going under is a huge example of this. Jimmy verbally abuses him, he gaslights him, he blames him for their (his) misfortune. Jimmy accuses Curly of thinking he's better than everyone (better than him), that he doesn't care about them (about him). That he's going leave them (leave him). Which is not true. Curly tries to explain himself but Jimmy shuts him down and he just takes it.
The fact that he just allows this to happen makes it seem like he's used to this... That this kind of behavior is a recurring thing with Jimmy. And the fact that nobody else tries to defend him or stands up to Jimmy just normalizes it for him. When Anya tells Curly what Jimmy did it catches him off guard. Bc he genuinely didn't think that his friend was capable of that. It wasn't something that was obvious to him. There were absolutely many red flags in the past but they were subtle enough for him to not see them bc he cares for Jimmy, he trusts him. Jimmy's the only one he feels he can open up to, who he can let his guard down with. Jimmy's his home. That's how close they are.
Because of this deep love for his friend and the subtlety of Jimmy's cruelty, he doesn't see the constant verbal and emotional abuse as what it is: abuse. Which is why he finds Jimmy's abuse towards Anya so shocking and jarring.
He isn't a man covering for his rapist friend bc of the 'bro code'. It does look like that from a certain angle and it's understandable why people see it that way but that's not what his character is really about as much as it makes sense otherwise.
He's essentially a battered housewife who's still in love with her husband but is realizing for the first time that the man she loves is a monster. That the man she loves and devoted her life to has been hurting her this whole time and she didn't even realize it. That the man she loves and spent so much of her life caring for has gone and hurt someone else. That he's most likely hurt others before and she's been utterly unaware of it the entire time she defended him and made excuses for him when he wasn't the best or the fairest or the most responsible or when he screwed up yet again solely bc of how much she loved and cared for him.
And Curly barely had any time to process ANY of that before Jimmy decided to try and kill them all to avoid the consequences of his actions. It was ultimately a selfish act even if he thought he wasn't just doing it for himself. Jimmy is selfish and needs to be in control or he loses it. He cares for Curly. He loves him. Curly's done so much for him. Curly's the only one who understands him, who doesn't hate him. Curly's his home. He resents how 'successful' he is but that's only bc he thinks so highly of him. He constantly puts himself down and put Curly on a pedestal and worships him while simultaneously mistreating him.
He treats his best friend like shit, he's awful to him. But he's not aware that this is the case or maybe he's in denial about it. He can't or just refuses to see how he's doing all of what he does for himself in the end. He justifies his attempt to kill them all (to himself and to Curly) by claiming he's doing this for them both. That if they were to get back to earth it would all be Curly's fault, that it'll ruin his life and career... despite the fact he had basically nothing to do with Anya's abuse. Jimmy's shifting the blame on him while acting like he cares for him. Well, he does genuinely care for him but clearly not nearly enough to not mistreat him or use him as a scapegoat for his own guilt.
Jimmy is the rapist, Jimmy is the one who does all of these horrible things. And yet it's highly likely that Curly would just blame all of it on himself bc that's exactly what Jimmy did to him. He's in so deep he can't see the facts of the situation.
It takes abuse victims so long to come to terms with their abuse. It takes time and reflection to see things with an unbiased and healthy perspective. Abuse (especially years of it) isn't just something you can just escape. It consumes you and can twist your reality. Curly had about a week or less to process all of it and then take action in a way that protected his crew and abided by Pony Express' guidelines. Dealing with something this serious in a setting that makes resolving it extremely difficult in a practical sense is already hard.
There were no locks on any of the doors except for medical and the cockpit. They couldn't just kill him. There was nowhere they could detain Jimmy that wouldn't involve corporate potentially penalizing the entire group. They could have used the cryopods but then there'd only be three available for any actual emergency and there were already five crew members and four pods in total. Also, I doubt corporate would be 'okay' with them using the cryopods for anything other than their intended purpose. Hell, even if they were able to make it back to earth without any incidents there's a good chance that corporate would consider the situation 'poor team synergy' and collectively punish the entire crew for Jimmy's actions.
So on top of having to deal with an already difficult situation, Curly has to grapple with the realization that Jimmy a: abused Anya, b: has been abusing him as well (for a very long time too), and c: has probably abused others before Anya and he had no idea about it. He needed to act but he didn't and it doomed all of them.
But it's so unrealistic (maybe even cruel) to put that much pressure on someone, force them through an utterly earth-shattering realization, and then expect them to do the correct/right/responsible thing in that moment. It's a little ironic how people vilify him for that when other characters do the same thing that nobody blames for it.
Anya is the ship's nurse. Curly is the ship's captain. They both have duties and responsibilities on board the Tulpar. She has to keep the crew healthy and safe and is the only one with enough medical knowledge to do so. He has to make sure that everything goes well and goes according to procedure. He's responsible for the crew, the cargo, and even the ship itself. Both positions are integral and require a lot of responsibility to do properly
They're both put through distressing and traumatic situations where due to them being human people with emotions and fears that make them essentially avoid their responsibility/doing what's required of them.
Curly has a freeze response and doesn't act when he should have when it was crucial to have done so. Anya has a fawn response and essentially puts her patient in danger and harm's way. She knew full well what Jimmy was capable of. She experienced it herself and she witnessed it happening to Curly as well. And yet she allows Jimmy to be alone with Curly while being fully aware of how dangerous he is. Which she shouldn't have, that wasn't the 'right' thing to do. Keeping him safe was her responsibility.
But Anya's human. She's going through a lot at the moment. She's terrified of Jimmy and she's trying to appease him so he doesn't hurt her again. It's a natural very understandable thing to do even if it's not the 'right' or 'responsible' thing. They failed each other when they needed each other most and I think that's the most tragic part of it. If anything, all of them failed each other in some way, shape, or form.
So it's incredibly frustrating to see people give Anya so much sympathy and grace for doing something so human yet still 'wrong' but then turn around and give Curly none of that for doing essentially the same thing she does.
I don't know for sure if it's actually because Curly is a man or if it's only part of it or maybe some people just lack that sense of awareness but it's depressing and frustrating as fuck as a male victim of sexual violence and abuse to see this kind of behavior and this much victim blaming towards a character who is undeniably a victim of abuse like I am.
I genuinely think Mouthwashing fandom is a good example on how real life misogyny is very wired on people brains and influenced how they engage with fictional misogyny.
You have a story about a woman being assaulted and telling a man he trusted but being dismissed because he is friends with the attacker, and people fixate on shipping her with either of those men.
You have a story about how men that downplay their male friends violence, assume neutrality is the safer option, unintentionally help create an environment that's unsafe to vulnerable people, at a risk becoming a victim themselves. And people make it about toxic yaoi.
You have a character kill herself because she didn't want birth the child of her abuser. And people make AUs where she happily keep the baby.
Misogyny isn't just "I hate this women", it's also downplaying their trauma, defending those who caused it, and reducing them to mothers or wives against their wished under this idea of what womanhood is about.
I don't think we can separate fandom misogyny from it's real world influence, not yet.
Okay but it's very interesting how Curly and Anya work as parallels in their relationship to Jimmy. Even BEFORE Curly's accident. Because even before such, he was defenseless against Jimmy. Because he wanted to protect his crew and that lead him to inaction that breeds doom (as per my last post).
But it's interesting... Bc they can also work as parallels to him. After all, from his point of view, Curly is this perfect capable responsible captain, someone who has reached the top he is righting to reach too but knows he will never. He's a strong capable man. He's all he wants to be but never will. Anya, on the other hand, is a coward. She's weak she's scared she's defenseless and can't even rely on herself. She's all Jimmy wishes he wasn't, what he PRETENDS he isn't.
And he harms them both equally. He ruins everyone on that ship. But when Anya dies, he doesn't even react to her corpse, like she wasn't even a part of the crew, like she was nothing, and yet he "sacrifices" himself in order to save Curly, who most likely Didn't, want to be saved.
What a pretty planet.... @kayehteaspells - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
