elsbeth-salander

I told this story to a few guildies a while back and decided to archive it in a longer format; so here is the story of The Great Flamingo Uprising of 2010 as told to me by my favorite cousin who was a keeper at the time.

In addition to the aviary/jungle exhibit, our zoo has several species of birds that pretty much have the run of the place.  They started with a small flock of flamingos and some free-range peacocks that I’m almost certain came from my old piano teacher’s farm.  She preferred them to chickens.  At some point in time they also acquired a pair of white swans (Or as I call them, “hellbirds”) and some ornamental asian duckies to decorate the pond next to the picnic area.  Pigeons, crows, assorted ducks and a large number of opportunistic Canada geese moved in on their own. 

Now; the ponds that dot the zoo property (I don’t remember how many there are but the one by the picnic area is the only one with swans) were also full of ginormous koi fish, some of whom by now are at least three feet long.  Sensing an opportunity to cash in on the koi, the zoo put up little vending machines all over the place that dispense handfuls of food pellets.  I swear to god the fish can hear the crank turning, and will show up at the nearest railing, blooping expectantly at whoever happens to be standing there and doing their best to appear starving and desperate. 

Like this.^  And they weren’t the only ones who learned to associate the sound with the imminent arrival of food.  The Canada geese knew a good deal when they saw one, and had long since ceased to migrate anyway.  They formed roving gangs of thug-geese and staked out their turf around the vending machines, ready to mug anyone with pocket change.  Picture yourself as a small child squaring off with a bird fully prepared to strip search you while standing on your feet and yelling “HWAAAAAKK!!” in your face.  It’s traumatizing to you and deeply hilarious to your parents.

Anyway.

The flamingos had their spot near the zoo entrance and never seemed to mind the presence of the other birds, as they kept themselves to themselves and didn’t really like the taste of fish pellets.  The problem lay in that their shrimp pond was close to a vending machine.  Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been an issue at all, but eventually the goose population grew large enough that one of the gangs decided to annex it.  Being territorial little shits, they would harass the poor flamingos any time they strayed within ten feet of it.  The flamingos tolerated this for years until one day they snapped collectively.  Here’s a summary of the incident in chronological order.

1.) It was a hot day, so everyone in question both human and avian, were cranky by the time the zoo even opened. 2.) A few flamingos (let’s call them The Jets) strayed into the radius of the vending machine and were immediately confronted by the indignant hissing geese (The Sharks) 3.) Possibly due to heat and the simple fact that the geese had been giant douchebags for far too long, the flamingos decided fuck it, this time they were going to FIGHT BACK DAMMIT, and swarmed the geese en mass. 4.) Chaos ensued.  The geese were outnumbered 4 to 1 but had the advantage of being able to scream for back-up.  5.) Hearing the shrieking Canada geese and the bellowing of the enraged flamingos, the peacocks came to the conclusion that the apocalypse had come upon them and began to gather in the surrounding trees in droves and wail in despair.  Or cheer them on, whichever. 6.) NOISE 7.) Apparently one of the siege tactics employed by the geese is to shit explosively all over the sidewalks. Never in the grass.  8.) The geese, having secured reinforcements from all over the zoo, went berserk and proceeded to attack EVERYBODY who had come to watch be they human or otherwise. 9.) The flamingos were chasing/being chased by the geese through the crowd accompanied by cheers/wails from the peacocks in the box seats. 10.) Complete pandemonium when the zoo tram became stalled on the tracks by the flamingo pond due to battling birds.  The Jets, sensing these were somehow reinforcements on the side of the Sharks, charged the tram.  Adults were doing the duck and cover.  So were the ducks.  Small children were screaming, adding to the noise.  People were slipping on goose shit and hitting the ground in the fetal position, only to be stampeded by the rampaging flamingos. 11.) The koi continued to bloop hopefully for food. 12.) Two of the geese were cornered by a rival gang of their own and were chased into the swan pond.  Cue slow-motion. 13.) The swans detected an enemy presence in their territory and by god, SOMEBODY was going to PAY.  14.) The staff were having no luck in breaking up the fight and on the verge of giving up and just building another zoo elsewhere when the hellbirds stormed the battlefield, trumpeting battle-cries, to dispense feathered justice.  The staff promptly dropped their brooms and fled. 15.) The uprising was squashed in less than two minutes.  Number of casualties was unknown, feathers were flying everywhere and there was enough goose shit to build another bird.  One staff member had been knocked to the ground and was left with a melon sized bruise courtesy of one of the hellbirds.  Several children were traumatized, probably for life.  The zoo eventually removed the vending machine by the flamingos. 

"what do they mean by social media? does Roblox count? what about all the stuff I've built?"

"you'll be fine, doesn't your icloud say you're 34?"

Mark my words, Gen-Z/Alpha having saudades for the bygone Internet that existed decades before they did, coupled with the endlessly crafty ways that the youth manage to evade whatever the grown-ups try to do (in this case a social media ban), is going to bring about a renaissance of Usenet, BBSes, and CompuServe. Vibe-coded chatrooms everybody.

Get ready for the 14.4k modem to become the hottest trending item on dialup-friendly Tik Tok. Instead of Six-Seven, the "new" indecipherable slang expression in every classroom will be "V-dot-thirty-two-biss."

hey so. don’t do this.

“coming from a place of respect” there is nothing respectful about a comment like this. this is exactly why I say witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

I am not saying “you’re an asshole if you think a fic is ai”. I have come across fics that I believe were ai-generated. but instead of asking (accusing) the authors, I make my own decisions whether I’ll continue reading for the benefit of the doubt or quietly exit the fics and look for something else to read.

because with every accusation like this, there’s always a chance of a genuine, innocent writer getting wrongly accused.

last but not least, fanfic writers do NOT owe you anything. they write for themselves and their own enjoyment. their ao3 accounts are their houses and they were kind enough to let you in their houses. for free. (you get to read things for free.) you don’t go into other people’s houses and tell them “actually I think the way you decorate your room is sus. did you actually do it yourself or did you ask a robot to do it for you?”. THEY 👏🏻 DON’T 👏🏻 OWE 👏🏻 YOU 👏🏻 ANYTHING. and I say this as someone who is not a fan of ai fics. if you don’t like what you’re seeing, quietly leave.

Apparently the fandom for that Canadian hockey series has gone off the rails. I've never seen the show, but this kind of behavior would seem to go against everything that the author would have wanted.

One must take care not to stare into the abyss and fall into it. To deprive people of their humanity as a "necessary evil" for "defending humanity" is at best unproductive and at worst, outright sadistic.

The sad irony is, the all-too-human tendency toward cruelty is only going to make manufactured substitutions more appealing.

To borrow from Mark Twain: "The more I see of people, the more I love that goddamn talking paperclip." Well, if humans don't learn to be kinder to each other, online and offline, then we will have become the paperclip maximizers that so many claim to abhor.

Yes, I was tearing through books constantly, and talking to this teacher at least weekly. Because even though I always loved reading as a kid, literature was always a very weak subject for me in terms of a teaching-to-standardized-test school setting (I just do awful on "what color were the curtains" type multiple choice questions. Those details don't stick in my memory THEY JUST DON'T). But that didn't matter for this class. I could just read my way out of any bad test score. I have always had fond memories of how I "fudged" my way through that class and "abused' the extra credit policy.

EVEN THOUGH I DONATED THE OTHER TWO PIZZA VOUCHERS TO CHARITY. THAT'S RIGHT I DIDN'T EVEN EAT THE EXTRA PIZZA. I GAVE IT TO THE HUNGRY. AND I WASN'T "SHOWING OFF" WITH VIRTUE SIGNALING EITHER. I JUST LIKED PIZZA AND BOOKS OK.

I also got referred to a child psychiatrist for objecting, who gave me "differential diagnoses" of ADHD and what at the time was called Asperger syndrome. Apparently "hyperlexia" is a symptom of a mental illness, immediately identified as such by (checks notes) bad teachers who go out of their way to discourage their students from reading. It wasn't long after that, I was actually expelled from the Catholic school because "clinical judgment" determined that I had a "contagious illness" that could adversely impact the other students. (What? Bibliophilia?)

I guess I forgot, Bible 101 lesson is that Eve gets banished for eating the teacher's apple and acquiring knowledge of how the sausage is made. I jest, but what was actually going on was the nascent beginnings of "diagnosis fear panic" that has since metastasized into a full blown pandemic in and of itself. (And is causing old pandemics to resurface.) All you had to say was the magic word autism and watch the primitive base amygdala response unfold in real time. Anatomy of a witch hunt.

The irony is that one of the books I read was Matilda. Two years later, it became a movie that millions of people came to know and love.

I can't help but think maybe there wouldn't be such a literacy crisis in "kids these days" if the USA hadn't spent the past 30 years sending them to A.B.A. in part to rid them of this troublesome hyperfixation and make them more "sociable." (And also if the USA didn't put such a premium on extroverted "sociability" as a dealbreaker for survival.)

Yes, I'm aware of what an asshole Connie Smith was (in L&O:CI 3x08 "Sound Bodies") and what he did with what he "learned" from his books, but a smug (fictional) teenager exploiting his precociousness to manifest an identity as senior-class Charles Manson is in no way the same as a curious 8-year-old girl in 1994 having her "ass busted because she reads books" and being told she needs to cool her jets on the whole "reading" thing because she's making bad teachers look bad and they're redirecting that insecurity to "you're making your other classmates feel bad and you too should feel bad."

I did feel bad, though, and I do still feel bad, not because I was making the other classmates feel bad (I wasn't, they just thought it was cool that I was smart and got rewarded with more pizza for being smart), but because I was also smart enough to know what a mental illness was even at a tender age, that it's a "thing you go to the doctor for" that leads other people to make you feel bad for having it, in a way they don't when you have the flu or mono or a skinned knee.

I also found out as an adult that this particular "thing you go to the doctor for" scares so many people that they would rather their kids get (even die from) measles or polio than to have this "thing you go to the doctor for" because they (have been led to) believe that the medicine that prevents you from having measles or polio (the vaccine) is what causes the other "thing you go to the doctor for."

I also know for a fact that this "thing you go to the doctor for" is why I always felt a kinship with Matilda and with Bobby Goren (and.... considering Criminal Intent debuted right as I got to high school, needless to say I felt a lot more than just "kinship" for that man). I also know it's not even necessarily a Scientology thing to feel that the DSM might in fact be the most destructive book ever unleashed onto mankind. (Maybe tied with Dianetics itself, ironically at that.)

Anyway. This is a rant about what good teachers can do, what bad teachers can do, why Americans probably cooked themselves doubly by letting AuDHD-phobia contribute to a simultaneous collapse in literacy and a multiply-comorbid outbreak of biblical plagues, and why I'll always have a soft spot for people who might be a little "touched" under clinical criteria but that it's also because of that status why they may love books and don't really care if it makes stupid people feel bad.

goren sayin stuff like "the twisted tango of brotherly love" seems so normal in the early seasons n then we see his actual relationship with his brother n it's like.. u would know wouldnt u

Same thing with him being able to get some usable info outta the delirious homeless guy.. ofc u have practice vro have u seen that family