#craftycatdad

Having said that, Andy is giving some incredibly bad advice here.

[REDACTED]

[REDACTED]

That WWII-era CIA manual that Andy linked, while still relevant and useful, says absolutely nothing about poisoning anyone because the whole point of it is right in the name: Simple Sabotage. Not direct attack, which is what Andy is advising here. Direct attack by civilians, at this stage, is extremely unadvisable and will only get a person arrested, at best--at worst, disappeared.

It's really easy for Andy to suggest this stupid and dangerous course of action while he sits at home. Just saying.

Now, all four of the Hobbit actors will be at FanExpo in Portland next month on my birthday weekend. And while we're not poor, we also can't afford the $799 it will cost to attend their panel, get a photo with all four actors and their autographs. It would be amazing and fitting and feels so meant to be. But I simply can't afford it.

In the over twenty years since Bit of Earth exploded, I've never asked for anything. But this would be some really nice closure - kind of a capstone on getting out and getting sane.

I'm only asking for the price of "An Evening with the Hobbits: In Celebration of 25 Years" Backstage Pass, plus about 5% to mitigate the fees from GoFundMe. I can get myself to FanExpo; I just can't afford the whole casserole.

It would mean a lot to me, and if you've enjoyed my writing over the years and want to throw something my way, I deeply appreciate it. I might even wear my Project Elanor T-shirt in the picture - talk about living well!

And if nothing else, it would probably chap Thanfiction's ass if I pulled this off.

Thanks ❤️

i had no idea, i will delete the post, thanks for letting me know.

Yes, his allegedly deep connection with sparrows has been getting weird for quite a while. He says he can understand some of their language, enough to relay things that the flock outside his house is talking about and things that Nuggie communicates to him. On top of that, Andy has written about things like Nuggie watching movies and musicals and following every emotional beat, to the point of showing the characters his malformed feet to offer encouragement when they're lacking confidence. Andy is anthropomorphizing the hell out of that little bird. Meanwhile, his followers praise him for knowing sparrows better than ornithologists do.

I've lived with a parrot before, for many years, and I bonded very closely with him. I agree that birds are much smarter and more emotionally complex than most people realize. But they're not humans. Their thoughts and feelings are not exactly like ours and we have no way to know exactly what's going on in their heads. Projecting onto them can lead to misunderstandings of their behavior and needs. Andy seems to be taking good care of Nuggie, from what I can tell--bearing in mind that we only have his word for it--but that doesn't mean he's right about everything.

Here's the thread you mentioned:

Here's Andy in November, writing about Nuggie's "phone flock":

Here's a thread from October, featuring Andy's musings on sparrow language. Friendly reminder that he is neither an ornithologist nor a linguist.

Note that at the end, he specifies that he's not Dr. Doolittle and doesn't speak or 100% understand sparrows' language...but he's still claiming a level of understanding that no one else has.

And here's Andy in August, wishing that he could communicate effectively with Nuggie and then having an actual conversation with him:

Those are some awfully complex ideas for a member of a non-human species to understand and respond to appropriately.

I mean, Andy isn't wrong when he says that birds have language. I never said he was. But he is wrong about how language works, let alone animal linguistics, and I still believe that he's projecting onto Nuggie and the flock outside his window to a significant extent.

Now is as good a time as any to post an update about this whole thing, I guess.

Here are a few older posts of Andy's that I haven't previously shared.

From August 26, 2024:

This was about a month and a half before his huge thread about sparrow language.

Do I believe that birds can understand human language on a basic level and that they have their own languages? Yes. Do I believe that they have a sense of humor? Also yes. As I've said before, I lived with a parrot for many years and we were very close. I was far and away his favorite person. He could use a certain number of English words and phrases appropriately in context (as well as at random when he wanted attention or was talking to himself); he clearly displayed a wide range of emotions (and seemed to be able to interpret and respond to ours); and he also made a lot of sounds that, even after more than twenty years, I never learned to interpret beyond two distinct ones that seemed to mean "I want attention" and something like "Fuck, shit, help plz". I am very well acquainted with how well birds can communicate with us and how intelligent and emotionally complex they are. But that's where Andy and I part ways.

January 8, 2025:

Apparently sparrows employ adjectives and emotion words, and Andy can understand those, too.

January 15, 2025:

Again, Andy understands sparrow emotion words. He can have meaningful conversations with Nuggie about his feelings.

February 12, 2025:

I touched on this in my post five days after this pair of tweets, but yeah, Andy has repeatedly talked about Nuggie's ability to follow the plots of movies and to relate to the characters.

March 3, 2025:

This was shortly after my first post about Andy the Bird Whisperer. Note the change in tone.

May 2, 2025:

This isn't about sparrow language or Andy's anthropomorphizing Nuggie, but given his past, I didn't like it at all. Fortunately, only a couple of people asked for tarot pulls and Andy lost interest.

October 20, 2025:

Yes, that's a big gap--Andy slowed down a lot on the bird-whisperer-posting. Anyway, here, the head of the flock outside Andy's window has died and they seem to be trying to pick his replacement. He's trying really hard to cover his ass, but even as he mentions how small his sparrow vocabulary is, he still seems to assume that the sounds Nuggie has used to train him are valid and meaningful "words" in sparrow language. And please note that he has not always emphasized that he's not an ornithologist. "I'm not Dr. Doolittle" was as close as he got in the midst of that thread about sparrow linguistics in 2024.

He posted this the next day:

Again, he's covering his ass. Because he is reminding us not to project onto sparrows, surely that means Andy isn't projecting onto them himself, right?

January 11, 2026:

Here is a link to that video (and part two).

And here are a few articles by the scientist profiled in the video, Toshitaka Suzuki, mainly because I think he and his work are really cool:

Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls (2016)

Wild Birds Use an Ordering Rule to Decode Novel Call Sequences (2017)

The syntax–semantics interface in animal vocal communication (2019)

Animal linguistics: Exploring referentiality and compositionality in bird calls (2021)

Experimental evidence for core-Merge in the vocal communication system of a wild passerine (2022)

Note the amount of observation and especially experimentation Suzuki does before he concludes that sound X corresponds to thing or concept Y. It took him four years, according to the first video, to establish conclusively that a specific sound made by Japanese tits means "snake".

I'm not sure what you mean about language being divided by species. The videos linked above talk about how Suzuki's research shows that other bird species--and even some prey animals other than birds--can at least recognize predator alarm calls by Japanese tits. I don't know whether bird languages have been studied enough yet to tell how similar they are across different species, aside from what's covered in the second video.

Fear not, anon! Here it is: