doe @exiliaex@masto.anarch.cc

there are so many deer in this town its so cute its like a family reunion

i let worthless discourses rot my brain for so long i feel so stupid about it

also i watched Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - if i get some time i wanna write about that tomorrow.

didnt finish this - holy shit this movie is bad

i got halfway through it thinking "oh wow this movie is way better than people gave it credit for"

but it follows up on nothing it established. our main character has concerns about whether journalism does anything at all, her driver literally gets hard from war zones and is friends with crazies.

the only halfway interesting discourse is the young girl who sees our main character as an idol. the discourse generated between the two is genuinely interesting — for half the movie. theres even a scene where she manipulates the main character into wearing a dress and smiling for a picture, twice. but theres no followup on that.

taking it either in the direction of "oh shit journalism doesnt do what we want it to but genuine human connection might" - *or* in the direction of "holy shit journalists are crazy psychos" wouldve been interesting but nooooooooooo we're not allowed to have fun here.

took a break to get snacks. current thoughts: war journalism takes its toll. but also, it seems like its asking does journalism do anything?

watching that A24 civil war movie rn

gonna be heading to WA's west coast for the first time soon

just some notes on the article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/how-scientists-started-to-decode-birdsong

okay it starts by working to establish sociality among animals, notions of "elaborate social structures" with some examples and then quoting a researcher (Kleindorfer) who tells us about the information stored in a call between geese

oh god, hearing this researcher talk about their experience is painful
"Early in her education, as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she was taught that “male songbirds sing, females don’t, and if females do sing it’s an error.”"
academia's notion of animals has been so fucked for so long it's nice to see someone breaking out of that.

ooooh Kleindorfer presents distinct responses to different warning calls by warbler chicks to adult warblers.
""If I put a snake nearby, the parental alarm call made the chicks in the nest jump... If I put a marsh harrier”—a hawklike predatory bird—“nearby, the response to the parental alarm call was that the chicks would duck.” The chicks were responding appropriately to different alarm calls—a satisfying finding."

then she reports that they have findings of fairy wrens singing to their eggs! (incubation calls) and says that the babies' "begging calls" matched an element from the mother's calls, which they use to say that birds learn their "mother tongue" while still in ovo.

the article suddenly references an "MIT Computational Linguist" who is just like "no they're not talking like we talk" which is really weird for the article but the narration seems to go back to "we've tried to separate ourselves from non-human animals... we should see what the birds have to say about that" so i'm at least thankful for that.

now we shift, Mythology, stories, and the ways birds show up in them, their "divine" or "perfect" language transmitting things to gods. they denigrate imitation here as "not understanding" - all i can think of are the birds who have been taught to describe things (most notably the bird Apollo)

--------

i've run out of space here, moving on to a second post

ah, i see, a newyorker article was published yesterday, that's what that post was referring to

a while back i was trying to collect certain published articles on animal intelligence and animal speech but i stopped. i should really pick that back up again. i just came across someone talking about articles published recently about decoding animal language.

yearning for local-only posts

let me talk to my peeps on here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm just saying the refrain of "i'm against religion because i'm against all false realities" really falls flat when you examine "religion" as a category at all

i wonder how the Brent Nongbri book "Before Religion" would be received

i think i'd like to do a religion thread on here some time. a way to whet my writing, which i've put off for too long. i'd want it to be opening up some of the repetitions i see in the discourses of ostensibly left critics (like anarchists)

now name change is gonna be a painnn

picking a gender mark where i live is so easy holy shit

y'all motherfuckers want a key change?

i have figured out the secret to mastodon engagement

desperate for local only posts

if you're an academic who doesnt make their papers widely accessible for free you can not complain about your fellow citizens "not following the science"