One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

children of any species are very good at being annoying and very cute while doing that

a sphinx child based on this post

So I started listing all the birds I’ve tried and didn’t like going, “Chicken, turkey, duck, squab, pheasant, Cornish game hen, I didn’t like any of them.”

“What about ptarmigan?” the guy asked.

I kinda thought he was joking since that’s such a random bird but I shook my head no.

The woman though went, “What the hell is that?”

“Oh,” I said, “They’re a little ground bird, kinda bigger than a pigeon? They make a really cute call, you should look it up.” I refrained from saying that their tracks confuse people in the snow because they look like massacred rabbits.

I realized the man was staring at me and the woman was fully just lost.

“You didn’t expect me to know what a ptarmigan is, did you?” I laughed.

“I really didn’t,” he admitted. “I’m from up in Alaska so I’ve had them in stew, but no one knows what the hell they are.”

“I really like birds.”

“Oh. Sorry for eating them.”

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

Hear ye, hear ye!! New Aravae and Rienmar art, courtesy of the amazing @memaidraws !! This is an interpretation of Frank Dicksee's 'Romeo and Juliet' and you can feel the delicious yearning from the two of them!

This is from their original novel story that I am working on. They are parted for a very long time and he leaves her his cloak, as he had nothing else of value to give to her. She is naturally going to snuggle with it every night and bring it with her as she goes off to war.

I haven't seen anyone talking about this and just wanted to make a quick post on here.

Akihiro Miwa recently passed away peacefully june 20th, and was not only a drag queen and a queer icon, but also the japanese voice of Arceus in the movie Arceus and the jewel of life, as well as the witch from Howl's moving castle and Moro from Princess Mononoke.