Speaking in Tongues

Man, random thought but given birds are what survived from dinosaurs in the present day--I hope they do continue to evolve in their intelligence. I watch a ton of animal research vids. People have been decoding the language of songbirds, and the current stage of development for corvids, parrots, a bunch of great apes, and some octopi gets compared to our stone age periodically.

There's been research to see if there might have also been a similar stone age among dinosaurs when they were around. Their era lasted hundreds of millions of years after all. My impression is that if anything did exist, it hasn't been found preserved among fossils.

The dinosaurs were dominant for so long and only this one branch managed to survive the Cretaceous extinction event. Reason that happened was virtue of them being kickass generalist species able to survive on seeds and crap when everything else died + food scarcity got horrendous.

(Incidentally, reptiles got through because they could go dormant for a longass time without food until conditions improved.) (And also incidentally: generalist = highly adaptable, jack-of-all-trades species able to manage in a broad variety of conditions and environments. Specialist = highly specialized, can absolutely master a very specific set of conditions and surpass competition by tailoring itself to those conditions but is p. fucked if taken out of those conditions.)

Humans picked up the mantle as mammals/the descendants of synapsids (developed into mammals) when dinos were sauropsids (developed into reptiles/birds) fell. It would feel kinda poetic if there came a point where the lineages were able to really communicate back and forth with each other. Whatever the future holds for mammals, knowing there are other intelligent species from historically major lines of life continuing to develop is really cool.

Like damn. Octopi would be neat as fuck too if they can sort their lifespans out. Life started in the oceans after all so they're even more ancient. And we've already spotted that there are places octopi will straight up make war against each other. Chimps do too.

Have been following a situation lately that gives me a strong impression that there are a lot of teens and preteens in particular who are craving romance stories and/or otomes but don't have many options that are both quality and age-appropriate. I kind of want to ask audiences in that age range what they'd like to see. No bashing other audience members, no treating it like a competition. Just an open invitation to share what they'd like to see in love stories that would make them sincerely happy.

There are issues with shipping drama risks (worse when the demographic is dealing with bullshit hormones tbf), not being able to separate fiction and reality in healthy ways, plus ipad kids have their own share of issues. There are also risks because adults have different ideas about what is or isn't age appropriate. So like... I see how this lack of stories would've happened, but it seems like it is still a problem. Offering nothing just results in teens with no idea how to manage emotions on the subject acting out.

This feels like something that would be better asked with an anonymous answers option, but idk where or how.

And tbh it's also kind of a mess because there's a trend of adults barging in on stories for younger audiences at times and completely taking over their online presence in sketchy ways.