reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

thehausghosts:

Today I talked to a girl, a teenage girl old enough to drive and contribute to society with a job, who did not know what a house hippo is. She had no fucking clue. I tried to tell her how much they like the crumbs of peanut butter on toast but she didn’t understand. And in that moment I realized I was fucking old.

 

thehausghosts:

I realized this is such a Canada specific post omg. If you don’t know about the house hippo, please enjoy this one minute video that almost every Canadian alive in the 90s can recite verbatim.

 

etriva:

 

thewinterotter:

Okay I thought this was adorable and then I got to the end and it’s a commercial about… teaching people critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism and like… fact-checking? This is amazing. The House Hippo needs to come to America.

 

tzikeh:

Tumblr needs to adopt The House Hippo as its mascot. Instead of Snopes, we should just respond to bullshit posts with “PLEASE FEED YOUR HOUSE HIPPO. HOUSE HIPPO NEEDS FOOD BADLY!”

 

perfmisha:

I just want to say, as a kid I always saw this commercial and I was too busy flipping shit about a house hippo that I never payed attention to the last bit and I thought house hippos were real until I was like 8.

 

justice-turtle:

frankly until I scrolled down I thought house hippo was gonna be some Canadian term for a roomba

…90′s? I didn’t move to Canada until 2007 and I saw the house hippo commercial.

(Although I suppose the math still checks out, since if you haven’t seen the commercial since you were, like, eight, you might not remember it. Much like how the parents of a given generation are much better at making references to that generation’s children’s media than the kids are.)

Tags:

#our home and cherished land #house hippo #amnesia cw #(I know it bothers *me* when people wax nostalgic about things I technically experienced but no longer recall) #(there’s some shows and movies I can’t watch because it’s too painful to watch something #–as the Men in Black commercial I mentioned recently put it– #”again for the first time”) #(so you know) #(if you’re a young Canadian who can’t bear to watch this again for the first time) #(I understand) #(but if not I recommend it)

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{post I was replying to}}

justice-turtle:

Well, it’s not scientific, but I can think of maybe 2-3 people (including me) who started out fairly far to the right and are now pretty far to the left, and one person (you) who started out left a ways and has stayed there. The rest of the people I follow whose… political trajectories I’m aware of, which is maybe a dozen or so, seem to have started out sort of… mildly leftish-centrist and have moved further left with time. Like, there’s – I know there’s a norm of teenage rebellion and finding your own path, but my impression is that wide swings across the ideological center are fairly rare and may involve some kind of conversion/aversion experience.

(Bear in mind here that I’m very depressed, so this next part, I’m probably being more of a catty little bitch than is called for. But – like, I think we’ve discussed, you tend to run into a thing where people are like “Well, nobody is born feminist/whatever, we have to learn, go easy on us?” I genuinely don’t recall if that’s ever been me saying that, and like I say I could be totally wrong, but… like, my completely unsupported impression is, that kind of remark comes more from people who were born centrist, have liked to consider themselves quite left-wing progressive, and are just finding out that they’ve got a long fucking way to go and are feeling defensive about it? Like, pulling an example out of the air, somebody says “you know g*psy is a slur, right?”, and instead of “oh shit! no i didn’t know, sorry!”, they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!” it’s… like i say, i could be full of shit, but for me myself, that identity-thing of “don’t judge me, i didn’t know any better” got lost somewhere around the same time as “gayness is a SIN”. i mean, i still don’t like being seen as a fuckup, i imagine nobody does, but my mental image of people who say “nobody is born knowing whatever” is of kids who… still have that belief in their own Moral Rectitude, you know? who have never yet had to integrate into their identity the fact that they are A Person Who Can And Does Fuck Up. who feel like they need to defend the idea that they couldn’t have done any better, defend their… their honor, and that’s their go-to excuse because idk it fits their world paradigm or whatever.)

(sorry. i say “kids”. given that this conversation involves a discussion of authors younger than me having their shit together, and that you also are quite a lot younger than me, that’s probably a bad choice of words. but i’m failing to come up with a better one. :P)

again. large grain of salt. possibly a barrel of salt. or a very large crystal. a hunk of salt. i’m tired and depressed and pretty sure i’m not being terribly articulate. but that’s my impression: most people our age have started out pretty centrist, and i’d bet the ones who overgeneralize about “nobody grows up far-leftist” are included in that centrist-moving-leftward group.

Hmm. The thing is–and I know I often elide this–I don’t think I was exactly raised far-left per se. Like, there were groups (the ones that come to mind are black people and gay people) where people talked positively about them, but you never seemed to actually meet any. Trans people were mostly not on our radar, and when they were they were mostly viewed with vaguely benevolent confusion.

But I was raised left enough that when I did meet full-on social-justice folk, they didn’t feel foreign. I wasn’t exactly raised in SJ culture, but the place I was raised was…adjacent, somewhere close enough that SJ proper felt of-a-piece with it.

>>they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!”<<

For me, personally, while that reaction is correlated with childhood because I hang out on the Internet more as an adult, I think the main distinction is actually speech vs text. Offline!me’s* primary reaction to conflict is fight; Brin’s primary reaction is flight. My first emotion when called wrong is anger, but given a short time (usually short enough that textual communication will inherently give it to you) the anger is overwhelmed by fear. “If I crush the opposition they’ll stop hurting me!” becomes “As far as I can tell, I have never managed to successfully crush anyone, and I have no reason to think this will be the exception. Trying and failing to crush them will only prolong the fight and its associated pain. The only way of ending a fight that reliably works for me is complete and unconditional surrender, so that’s what I should do.” (Now that I’ve spent a lot of time in that frame of mind where my cowardice can shine through, I can even manage flight reactions in offline conflicts sometimes.)

(Apparently a lot of people are more the opposite? I mean, I guess they must be, or we wouldn’t have stuff along the lines of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. In a twisted sort of way, I suppose the existence of opposite people helped me; while I haven’t managed a 100% perfect record, I learned very fast that I could avoid a lot of fuckups by staying very quiet, observing, and letting other people make beginners’ mistakes for me.)

*My legal name would be less clunky, and I wouldn’t mind you knowing it, but I’m writing this publicly.

Tags:

#it’s not really Learning to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #as much as #Learning It Is In My Self-Interest to Pretend to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #(people who are not motivated primarily by self-interest confuse me and I am often tripped up by them) #(what do you mean you’re professing [insert political stance here] because you think it’s correct) #(and not because you fear social repercussions for not supporting it or because it would benefit you personally?) #(how does *that* work?) #reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

somnilogical:

brin-bellway:

somnilogical:

I like having long hair. I can see the ends vibrate with my pulse.

Wait, really?

*leans over arm of couch, watches waist-length hair dangle*

Huh. It does vibrate. Not sure whether it’s in time with my pulse.

My hair extends down to just below my shoulder blades. When I move it so that it cascades over my right shoulder, any tips that are not in contact with my body vibrate with my pulse. And (obviously) when I vibrate my head.

I think the ends were picking it up from blood flowing through my neck.

Depending on how you are leaning, I may be suprised. Is your hair in contact with your neck? Can you feel your pulse and see if the rates sync up?

Also. You have waist-length hair! I suddenly would like to braid your hair. And pet it and play with it.

[ Point of information: I am *human*. ]

The hair I was watching wasn’t in contact with my neck during the test. I had my hand pressed against my heart to check the pulse. Since I just washed my hair (after making the first post), and it’s now both lying flatter against my body and weighed down with water, I should probably wait before testing over-the-shoulder.

I’ve had hair going to slightly below my waist since before I even reached my adult height. There was a while in my pre- and early-teens where my hair length grew more or less proportionally to the rest of me, and it stabilised around the same time. (This is one of my favourite things about having long hair. The hair length of most short-haired people is always changing, and every so often they have to go out of their way to prevent it from going too far past their desired length. Mine just stays as it is, and has for over a decade. I like that stability.)

I am not in the San Francisco Gravitational Field (I’m in Ontario, and not the one in California), but if we’re ever together, there can probably be hair-playing.

(Mom–who has just-above-shoulder-length hair, and is the reason I thought to put a “most” qualifier on shorter-haired people not having stable hair length–asks to braid/play with my hair sometimes. I’m not sure what the big deal is, but I might just be spoiled by having access to long hair all the time.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #hair

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nihilsupernum:

@adzolotl says that “nj is in new england” is my worst opinion

what the hell is new england if not THE STATES THAT ARE CALLED “NEW” AND THEN A PLACE IN ENGLAND

I could go for Greater New England, but then I was raised in New Jersey by parents from Massachusetts, so I expect I have a stronger connection to New England than most New Jerseyans.

(Sometimes I go for “both part of the Northeastern Mega-City”, which may or may not be the same thing as Greater New England.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #home of the brave #my home away from home

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

As a matter of fact I mathed a while back and my transcribing speed on KUEC is well up to professional standards (I get through one minute of audio in about 6-7 minutes of work on average, last time I googled it said professionals vary from 4-10 minutes of work per minute of audio). I’m not sure how those figures would hold up when trying to transcribe people I haven’t already listened to literally hundreds of hours of, though, and if it had to have every “um, uh” and “I, I, I think” literal I’d definitely be slower. On KUEC transcriptions I cut out a lot of the verbal static that normal audio conversation has.

It’s worth looking into, though. What’s the pay like, what kind of material does one work on, what are the minimum/maximum productivity expectations, other questions like that? :-)

Background:

The company in question is called Rev. This is the job listing that brought it to Mom’s attention, which gives a short ad and a link to a bunch of generally positive reviews. (Mom, it turns out, is too hard of hearing: when they gave her a test recording to transcribe, she couldn’t even hear it well enough to finish the test, let alone pass. When she told me about this, after consoling her I said “Hey, I’m not hard of hearing, maybe I can do it.”)

—

Note that despite that being a Canadian job-hunting site, the listed pay is in U.S. dollars. (The company is based in San Francisco.) Money-wise, what you see is what you get, and what *I* see is a smaller number than what I get. (My currency-conversion app has been getting a little more use lately.)

“Average monthly earnings: $241, top monthly earning: $1,440″: in other words, theoretically possible to make a living off it*, but most people don’t. (Of course, I expect a lot of people are just supplementing and aren’t aiming for a living wage, and that would drag the average down.)

So far, I have completed two transcriptions, for a total transcription time of 13 minutes, a total real time of slightly over two hours, and a total money of USD$5.76. (That is, as the old joke goes, $7.72 in real money.) However, I am a newbie and speed comes with practice. Also, people who have logged less than an hour of transcription time don’t get paid as much: 20% of what would otherwise be their pay goes to an experienced transcriber who double-checks everything to catch any beginner’s mistakes, for a pay boost of 25% (because fractions) once you finish the probationary period.

So yeah, the bad news is that it’s not minimum wage until and unless you get pretty good at it, and no benefits. Good news things:

There are no minimum productivity requirements. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re claiming jobs from the pool and then not doing them, but if you don’t claim any jobs for a while there’s no penalty (unless you count the natural consequence of not earning anything). There’s no official maximum, although I’d guess there’s some number at which they go “this is suspiciously ridiculous”, because it’d be strange if there weren’t.

As long as you have an Internet-connected computer, a set of headphones, and a reasonably quiet environment, you can work. No commute, sit in whatever chair you want.

—

By default, “umms” and “ahhs” and such are skipped. Customers can request verbatim transcripts (my first transcript was verbatim), but they cost(/you get paid) extra (an extra dime per minute, I think).

Payment for each calendar week is sent to your Paypal the following Monday. So I’m told, anyway: I haven’t gotten there yet. (I don’t think it will feel quite real until I see the money in my account. Then, I will be Employed.)

Material varies. Interviews, medical records, instructional videos, sermons, I’m told podcasts but I haven’t seen any yet… Audio quality varies a lot, and there’s been some I haven’t understood, but you can hear a recording without claiming it, and there’s a one-hour grace period after claiming where you can bail on it without penalty. (Also they have audio filter options that apparently help somewhat with recorded background noise.)

—

All in all, may or may not be enough on its own, but at the very least a potentially helpful supplement. If you have a spare hour and a half or so at some point, you might want to try applying; fair warning, they brag to their customers about rejecting 90% of job applicants (”only the best 10% work on your recording!”). I mean, who knows how many of that 90% were blatantly incompetent, but if it seems like something you might be interested in, it might be best to find out whether or not they’ll take you before you get desperate.

—

I feel like I might be missing something, but it’s past my bedtime. Let me know if you have any other questions.

—

*According to the cost-of-living figures in my head, which are based on averaged per-person cost for a family of four in southern Ontario circa 2014. YMMV by quite a bit.

How long does it take to hear back about whether you’ve been hired? And what’s the application like – I mean, do you need an up-to-date resume, or a list of seven years’ addresses for a background check, or is it more just “prove you have these current skills”, or what?

(I haven’t the time to apply at this very moment, cos I’m tryna catch up on a bit more sleep before work, but I’m trying to figure out how much time to block out and what to prepare before I do.)

More just “Prove you have these current skills.”

The application asked for my name, my email address, my typing speed (linking to an online test to take if I wasn’t sure), and my level of previous experience with transcription (options: “none”, “some”, “professional”; I picked none). Then they gave me a short quiz on grammar and choosing the correct homophone for the context of a sentence. Then they asked me to write a thing of one to three paragraphs on a provided topic. (600 word maximum, I think mine was about 250 – 300; since they expect the entire application to take an hour*, they’re clearly not expecting a highly polished essay, just something that shows competence with English.) Then they gave me their Style Guide to read, and a clip about 2.5 minutes long to transcribe in their text editor and according to their style standards. I saw in the background on one of their instructional videos–which was filmed on an older version of the interface–that there used to be an optional resume upload at the end, but now they don’t even give you the option.

Oh, and a Terms and a Privacy Policy to agree to. I did actually read them; it was pretty much what I expected, the usual “to the greatest extent possible, nothing is ever legally our fault” that most companies do with most things, and a warning that I was a freelancer and not technically an employee, and therefore not eligible for things like employee benefits. (I did hear on their forum that if you’re a freelancer and you need an official paper proving you work somewhere, Rev will give you one. I haven’t looked into it yet as I haven’t needed such a paper, so I can’t promise that.) (Also, you know, make sure to read it yourself and not rely on my summary, just in case that needs to be said.)

Email, November 21st, 10:46 PM Eastern: “Most likely you will hear back from us within one to two days. In particularly high volume times, it can take as long as three days to get through all of the applications.“

Email, November 21st, 11:21 PM Eastern: “Good news, your Rev account is now activated and you are ready to start working and earning money!

To get started, click here to complete your account registration.“

So they reserve the right to take a couple days, but mine was less than an hour. I can only guess that the application queue was deserted and somebody had nothing better to do than review my application immediately. (I was particular surprised given that I didn’t even submit within Pacific business hours.)

“Completing my account registration“ involved my home address, phone number, and the name and email of the Paypal I wanted them to send my payments to. (Which were the same as the name and email I’d given them previously, but the fact that they’re separate fields implies the option of having them be different.) They gave me a tutorial where they showed me around the employee freelancer-only sections of the site, gave me a few short sample audios (optional but recommended) that I could try to transcribe and/or watch a video of an experienced person explaining how to deal with the clip’s particular issues.

After that, I could start right away, and that evening I took a short (6-minute) clip that I could manage before bedtime (and I could, but only just). (I woke up to find that just after I’d turned off my computer for the night, a grader had checked my work. They said I’d done very well; the only flaw was one word that they had managed to hear but I had marked inaudible. The other word I had marked inaudible didn’t count as a flaw because the grader couldn’t hear it either.)

—

Things I thought of after finishing the last message:

I can’t be sure, and it’s probably still best to look into it sooner rather than later, but I suspect the 90% rejection rate isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. It’s in their interest to hire as many competent people as they can get their hands on: the larger the pool of freelancers, the more and/or faster transcripts they can complete, the more attractive their service will be to customers. (I saw quite a few positive customer reviews along the lines of “They told me to expect my transcript within 24 hours, but it came back in only 3!”.) Like I said in the footnote, quantity is good as long as it doesn’t compromise quality.

It’s not 100% true that there’s never a penalty for not working. They don’t fire you or dock pay for work you completed or anything, but people who are prolific enough while maintaining good grades are rewarded with first pick of new audios and the option to apply to become a grader, and if you don’t maintain your prolific-ness you drop down to regular transcriber.

Working in transcription would probably directly help with the feeling of your work requiring you to be mean to disabled people. In my last job, I made an instructional video more accessible. (Speaking of, Rev also has freelance captioning, but I haven’t applied to that and don’t know much about it. Rumour on the forum has it that it is more difficult than transcribing but higher pay.)

—

*Mine was more like an hour and a half, and so was Mom’s from when she started to when she gave up. I do tend to be slow and cautious and triple-check everything on tests, though, especially tests without strict time limits. (Or, in other words, I’ve demonstrated a willingness to take a significant cut to my own hourly wage to ensure a higher quality for their product. I don’t know if they’ve noticed, but they might think it’s a good sign if they did. Quantity is good all else equal, but only if it doesn’t compromise quality.)

Tags:

#I’ve been aiming for a transcript every school evening #(probably aim for more on non-schooldays) #but I ended up skipping yesterday because Thanksgiving was too tiring and I couldn’t focus enough #reply via reblog #in which Brin has a job #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

justice-turtle:

As a matter of fact I mathed a while back and my transcribing speed on KUEC is well up to professional standards (I get through one minute of audio in about 6-7 minutes of work on average, last time I googled it said professionals vary from 4-10 minutes of work per minute of audio). I’m not sure how those figures would hold up when trying to transcribe people I haven’t already listened to literally hundreds of hours of, though, and if it had to have every “um, uh” and “I, I, I think” literal I’d definitely be slower. On KUEC transcriptions I cut out a lot of the verbal static that normal audio conversation has.

It’s worth looking into, though. What’s the pay like, what kind of material does one work on, what are the minimum/maximum productivity expectations, other questions like that? :-)

Background:

The company in question is called Rev. This is the job listing that brought it to Mom’s attention, which gives a short ad and a link to a bunch of generally positive reviews. (Mom, it turns out, is too hard of hearing: when they gave her a test recording to transcribe, she couldn’t even hear it well enough to finish the test, let alone pass. When she told me about this, after consoling her I said “Hey, I’m not hard of hearing, maybe I can do it.”)

—

Note that despite that being a Canadian job-hunting site, the listed pay is in U.S. dollars. (The company is based in San Francisco.) Money-wise, what you see is what you get, and what *I* see is a smaller number than what I get. (My currency-conversion app has been getting a little more use lately.)

“Average monthly earnings: $241, top monthly earning: $1,440″: in other words, theoretically possible to make a living off it*, but most people don’t. (Of course, I expect a lot of people are just supplementing and aren’t aiming for a living wage, and that would drag the average down.)

So far, I have completed two transcriptions, for a total transcription time of 13 minutes, a total real time of slightly over two hours, and a total money of USD$5.76. (That is, as the old joke goes, $7.72 in real money.) However, I am a newbie and speed comes with practice. Also, people who have logged less than an hour of transcription time don’t get paid as much: 20% of what would otherwise be their pay goes to an experienced transcriber who double-checks everything to catch any beginner’s mistakes, for a pay boost of 25% (because fractions) once you finish the probationary period.

So yeah, the bad news is that it’s not minimum wage until and unless you get pretty good at it, and no benefits. Good news things:

There are no minimum productivity requirements. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re claiming jobs from the pool and then not doing them, but if you don’t claim any jobs for a while there’s no penalty (unless you count the natural consequence of not earning anything). There’s no official maximum, although I’d guess there’s some number at which they go “this is suspiciously ridiculous”, because it’d be strange if there weren’t.

As long as you have an Internet-connected computer, a set of headphones, and a reasonably quiet environment, you can work. No commute, sit in whatever chair you want.

—

By default, “umms” and “ahhs” and such are skipped. Customers can
request verbatim transcripts (my first transcript was verbatim), but
they cost(/you get paid) extra (an extra dime per minute, I think).

Payment for each calendar week is sent to your Paypal the following Monday. So I’m told, anyway: I haven’t gotten there yet. (I don’t think it will feel quite real until I see the money in my account. Then, I will be Employed.)

Material varies. Interviews, medical records, instructional videos, sermons, I’m told podcasts but I haven’t seen any yet… Audio quality varies a lot, and there’s been some I haven’t understood, but you can hear a recording without claiming it, and there’s a one-hour grace period after claiming where you can bail on it without penalty. (Also they have audio filter options that apparently help somewhat with recorded background noise.)

—

All in all, may or may not be enough on its own, but at the very least a potentially helpful supplement. If you have a spare hour and a half or so at some point, you might want to try applying; fair warning, they brag to their customers about rejecting 90% of job applicants (”only the best 10% work on your recording!”). I mean, who knows how many of that 90% were blatantly incompetent, but if it seems like something you might be interested in, it might be best to find out whether or not they’ll take you before you get desperate.

—

I feel like I might be missing something, but it’s past my bedtime. Let me know if you have any other questions.

—

*According to the cost-of-living figures in my head, which are based on averaged per-person cost for a family of four in southern Ontario circa 2014. YMMV by quite a bit.

Tags:

#in which Brin has a job #(even if it doesn’t quite feel real yet) #reply via reblog #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

{{next post in sequence}}

thenkeepgoing asked: Why are kayaks Incredibly Rude to swans? I’m asking because we have a lot of wild turkeys on my college campus and they HATE cars. They will block you from opening car doors, circle you in your car like a shark, jump on top of cars and snap at tires.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

comparativelysuperlative:

elodieunderglass:

       2/2 so I was wondering if large birds just hate human transportation or something haha. Thanks for your post, very interesting.

(In reference to a comment I made about kayaks being incredibly rude in Swan Culture)

I’ve been looking at my inbox like “I am not some kind of ECCENTRIC BIRD WHISPERER,” but I actually know the answer to this one, and it’s hilarious.

Large birds don’t have a particular hateboner for human transportation, but wild turkeys have two unique properties that make them behave ridiculously when they collide with human populations. For those who aren’t familiar with them, wild turkeys are large, boisterous birds that tend to interact with humans most frequently around the autumn which is convenient for Thanksgiving and mating season in early spring. Most of the time, they live peaceable lives in the woods, but around November they run around in flocks bothering innocent citizens and picking fights with vending machines, and then they usually go away again.

The toms, or dominant males, can stand up to 4 feet tall and weigh up to 24 pounds. They’re the ones that do the fancy displays:

Turkey Whispering 1

The First Unique Turkey Property: Now, wild turkeys are a little bit like betta fish, in that they perceive any shiny/reflective surface that shows them a reflection as actually containing Another Turkey, and they react accordingly. When they react to the Other Turkey – usually by posturing aggressively and flaring their fins feathers majestically – the Other Turkey ESCALATES THE SITUATION by posturing as well. At some point the real turkey loses its temper and attacks, pecking and scratching and trying to take the fucker apart, only to find that the Other Turkey has protected itself with some kind of force field.

So to a wild turkey that has encountered enough autumnal car-related psychic battles, the completely logical conclusion to take away from them is that cars contain demonic spirits that must be subdued. Other examples of things that wild turkeys are compelled to vanquish include… well, other reflective things.

To address this, cover reflective things (you can rub soap on your car to make it less reflective) and frighten off the turkey if it’s keeping you from leaving your car.

The Second Unique Turkey Property: This is a little bit embarrassing for all concerned, but you have to think about it like a turkey would. You see, humans are oddly compelling creatures to a hormonal turkey. We have bare faces with interestingly positioned lumps of flesh, we gobble our speech in a way that almost sounds like Turkey, we strut about on two feet showing off our long sexy legs, we strut about in family groups, we often have access to really good food, our clothing is big and bright and colorful. Turkey faces change color with their mood; human faces are all kinds of fascinating colors, plus additional fantastic decorations. To wild turkeys, humans are a type of turkey, and further: many humans are either Intimidating Sexual Threats, or Exciting Sexual Beings. 

Now, I am very sorry about this, but not only can wild turkeys be kind of reverse furries, they also have unexpected ideas about gender and sexuality. So to some female turkeys, “male” humans are excitingly sexy and they will follow one around for embarrassingly long periods of time, cooing attractively – meanwhile, the tom turkey and the subordinate males will be OUTRAGED by the COMPETITION presented by the interloper, and will attempt to subdue “him.” And “female” humans are likewise at risk of being passionately seduced by the dominant toms, or quietly propositioned by subordinate males – or the females may attempt to recruit you into their existing social system – as a junior member, of course. They have a strict pecking order.

Unfortunately for humans, your preferred gender may not necessarily actually translate to the gender that turkeys decide you are. And some turkeys may decide you’re “male” while others will decide that you’re “female,” so that will be confusing, and some dominant female turkeys have “male” sexual traits – like beards and tail fans – anyway. They recognize and remember humans, so if you had a particularly exciting encounter with a specific turkey, it will probably remember you.

Also unfortunately for humans, the fine distinctions between Turkey Seduction, Turkey Competition, and Turkey Networking are usually a little bit lost, and all of this behavior seems to be the same thing – it mostly consists of a large dinosaur-like bird trotting at you, possibly screaming and pecking and flapping, and can be worrying. If you are in the car and the turkey can see you, and it wishes to continue a previous encounter, it may well insist upon this in a frightening way.

Turkeys don’t give a shit about human “gender” and “authority,” as the many available videos on the internet of turkeys attacking police officers, reporters and mailmen will assure you. They just make logical decisions that are perfectly natural and reasonable to turkeys, and humans react by running away.

Turkey Whispering 2

So what do you do about this? Well, DO NOT RUN AWAY, this means you that you are a Submissive Turkey and their behavior will escalate. Turkeys can learn the meaning of “no,” and you don’t have to be bullied by them.

The Humane Society has some tips to establish Dominance over wild turkeys, which will lead them to see you as a Strong Independent Turkey Who Don’t Need No Man. This will reduce their attacking and nuisance behaviors, but it may make you look like a fool.

And the Massachusetts Fish and Game website has a huge resource explaining all the subtleties of wild turkey behavior and how to combat the nuisances. Essentially, you must not attempt to make friends with them or attract them; once they arrive, you must “be bold” and establish Dominance, and encourage everyone to do the same.

If the turkeys are aggressive around children and the elderly, all sources agree that if they become a danger, you can contact the relevant authorities and have the turkeys removed or destroyed.

Anyway, that’s why turkeys attack cars. The take-home message is: the cars are too shiny and you are possibly a sexy turkey.

I don’t know what you want to make of that

Wait.

You’re saying turkeys a) have a strict pecking order, b) have confusing-looking behaviors that are well-understood by the right people, and c) sometimes view humans as participating in that behavioral communication whether the human means to or not.

What do I have to do before I get to utter the sentence “band of wild turkeys that accepted me as their leader”?

# other than mess with English grammar until that counts as a sentence  # obviously

While it might not be a sentence in the strictest sense, it works perfectly in, for example, the following exchange:

”What is that?!”

”Band of wild turkeys that accepted me as their leader.”

Tags:

#turkey #reply via reblog

Anonymous asked: brin-bellway

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

comparativelysuperlative:

You might like to know that this afternoon I spent like thirty seconds cackling in causeless happiness at the word “meridian.”

…oh right, I did technically reblog that post, didn’t I. Anon, get thee too a church of your choosing at whatever frequency suits you.

(please stand by)

I had actually forgotten I’d told you that, though I remembered telling my readership in general that.

(Yay cackling in causeless happiness!)

Tags:

#…who’s giving my name to ship memes? #and why? #it’s not that I mind I’m just confused #I mean at least Adam has vaguely compatible kinks so that kind of made sense #I have no idea where me/Nate comes from #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

redbeardace:

Remember:  Do not move to Canada in response to this election.

Move to Florida.  To Ohio.  To Pennsylvania.  We need you there for Warren/Booker 2020.

Here is a fact that it seems like a lot of people don’t know, and which is relevant to the decision: in America, you do not lose your vote if you move out of the country. Even if your move is permanent. Even if you were a minor when you moved away. Unless you renounce your citizenship–note that most countries will let you hold up to three citizenships simultaneously, and Canada in particular is perfectly happy to let you keep your American citizenship while becoming a Canadian citizen (if you don’t already have three, and if you do it presumably doesn’t have to be the American one you give up in exchange)–you retain voting rights indefinitely. Jurisdiction-wise, you vote as if you still lived in your most recent American residence.

(People who are American citizens only through their parents and have never actually lived in the country may be able to vote depending on where their parents lived: states vary. Check out the website linked above for details.)

I don’t know what happens if you move to a swing state just to establish it as your voting jurisdiction, then move to Canada. I don’t know if there are any consequences if the government catches you at it, and I don’t know how likely they are to catch you. Anyone interested in doing that should look into it further. But at the very least, if you already live in a swing state, you don’t have to choose between voting there and leaving the country. You can do both.

I mean, you do lose going door-to-door canvassing and whatnot, I suppose. But people planning on moving to Canada because of Trump who wouldn’t have done it anyway are probably doing it because they expect to be in danger if they stay. Staying in a dangerous situation in order to go canvassing is…well, if you want to do that, you do you, but it seems above and beyond the call of duty to me.

Tags:

#home of the brave #election 2016 #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog #this is the third post I saw on Tuesday which #appeared to be written under the assumption that People Like Me do not exist #I’m responding directly to this one because its People Like Me #is ”people whose relationship with the American government is like mine” #and our existence is an external fact that I can point to #the others were ”people whose minds work like mine” #which is much harder to prove and much likelier to lead to goalpost-moving #”we totally believe you exist! we were just using universal language for rhetorical effect! stop derailing!” #and for all I know maybe they’d mean it when they’d claim they were being rhetorical by pretending I don’t exist #let’s just say I’ve been feeling that authoritarianism post again lately